How black drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.
washingtonmonthly.com
washingtonmonthly.com
Seriously: if I said "The science faculty includes two Nobel Laureates", would you really think that there were only two professors on staff?
It's a nonsensical argument at best-- and when folks attempt to use it to argue against common sense (like stating that the United States does not include the 50 States), reason is left whimpering in the corner.
The unmitigated contempt the author has for posse comitatus is a little disturbing. He can't even entertain the idea that perhaps there are good reasons the federal military should be barred from domestic law enforcement?
The judge said "you're throwing your life away" and "you're commiting suicide in broad daylight" on numerous occasions. Do words like these really work on people who will almost certainly be killed anyway? Why doesn't the judge say "sit down and shut up" instead? It's a bit harsh and certainly destroys the illusion that the judge is there to help, but at least it's honest. And prosecutors using nonsense legal defense against the defendant, as if it were in itself a crime serious enough deserve a few years in prison? This smells like a rat.
I actually hope that this becomes a trend during trials for the death penalty or life sentences. Taking someone's life like this is a barbaric custom, but in today's legal system it seems almost legitemate. It's a good thing that "defendants" that have nothing to lose refuse to go peacefully. If all defendants have to be barred from the courtroom, it removes the illusion of a fair proceeding. Sentencing someone to death or fifty years of pain can almost never be justified.
If you think something is offtopic, flag it. It gets boring when people use the comment threads to complain about stuff they think is offtopic, just like it's boring when people complain about being downmodded.
IANAL, but I'm surprised this worked. I assume a significant factor is the degree of rigor needed for death penalty cases.
The rule I use: If an article isn't interesting to me (user guidelines), then I don't upvote it or write a comment on it since both actions increase the attention other users would pay to it. Soon enough it will either pass out of sight or it will be interesting to other users. Even then, it will soon fade to the background archive.
For a flag: If it looks like spam - useless product link - and the user has no karma built up, I flag. Otherwise, I leave it alone.
If I knew what was and wasn't off-topic, I would. in this case there was something that smelled faintly of hacking the justice system, so I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that this was inappropriate. But OTOH, it did seem irrelevant to hacking computers and starting businesses.
That's why I asked the question instead of simply ignoring it. HN is an evolving site, and many things that would have seem very out of place six months ago are on the front page today.
I'm not interested in retarding progress, I'm just trying to understand where we are going so I can play well with others.
If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Except I substitute "me" for "one's". If it gratifies my intellectual curiosity then maybe it will other users' as well. That said, I think it's personally important to use votes as community feedback for my future posts.
If anything, I worry about a community that becomes too homogeneous because interestingness involves variability. All I can do here is submit links. Whether it's interesting to the community is up to the community to decide (expressed in votes and comments). For instance, I'm often provoked by David Brooks (NY Times columnist). But he doesn't ever really talk about computers or business. Initially, I was skeptical about posting one of his columns. But it was received well and so I posted more.
This article was borderline for me. But what's the worst that can happen? It doesn't get votes? So I'd rather shade toward posting than not while still keeping the guidelines firmly in mind. I've often been surprised that the community appreciates some links that don't "belong" on a superficial analysis. Similarly, I've enjoyed science, law, art, and even political articles linked here (the last in small doses). I think that's a good thing. A uniform community is a boring one.
We don't want to learn about law, but we are just as interested in how people apply systems knowledge to bypass the security mechanisms of the system.
You dig, dawg?
In any case, I'm happy for them, because I'm very strongly against the death sentence in ALL cases.