Defending parody: the most important amicus brief yet | Hacker News Reader

Defending parody: the most important amicus brief yet

theatlantic.com

93 pointssamizdis22 comments

Here's the actual brief that was filed, which is indeed a fun and worthwhile read:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

Is it legal to parodise in an official document (?) to the US Supreme Court like this?

Absolutely, it's a submission to state a position and in theory anyone can submit whatever position they wish for consideration.

The better question is whether it is wise, and in this particular cae I suspect it may well play to their favour - it's a rare latin nerd that fails to chuckle at a bad latin quip or three.

After all, it's not like they led with Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō from Catullus 16.

Why would such a thing be illegal? At worst the justices would ignore it.

It is illegal in many countries. Lèse-majesté is a real thing.

But not in the US.

[I believe the GP is from outside the US]

Someone somewhere in the justice department must have thought parody was not legal, otherwise, this lawsuit would have been quashed and this specific amicus brief would not be necessary. So if this specific brief was presented to those other courts that allowed this to continue, the reception might be different enough to make one thing this might just not be legal.

> this lawsuit would have been quashed

What gave you the truly outrageous idea that justice department has the capability to "quash" lawsuits such that they can't be appealed?

yeah sorry. totally meant judicial branch, not justice dept as in FBI and AG. typed fast, not enough caffeine, yadda yadda blah blah

The US Justice Department could have done diddly squat to affect the outcome of the case to date.

If you actually read the questions presented in the petition for writ of certiorari (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/238740/2022...), it's more anodyne:

> The questions presented are:

> 1. Whether an officer is entitled to qualified immunity for arresting an individual based solely on speech parodying the government, so long as no case has previously held the particular speech is protected.

> 2. Whether the Court should reconsider the doctrine of qualified immunity.

So, yay, it's basically a qualified immunity case, where the infringement in question is an unhappy local government office patently violating someone's First Amendment rights. (Sadly, not the first or last time this is going to happen.)

The guy who submitted a brief in comic book form for a DOJ price fixing case [1] is doing just fine. So I'm guessing this parody would also be fine.

[1] https://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/09/all-briefs-should-now...

It is beautifully written. The capacity of the authors to effectively use parody within the brief to defend parody while keeping the serious parts of the brief serious shows the quality of the Onions.

And was posted to HN last week, though only garnered a few comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072030

There were two submissions for the topic at around the same time; this one got more activity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33080052

With the normalization of crazy in the U.S. it is getting more difficult to discern parody from things that people actually say or do. Poe's Law and reddit /r/atetheonion are things for a reason.

>The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a former president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.2

This is amazing writing :-D

I feel this is a direct result of safe zones and everything "woke". People have lost the ability evidently to handle criticism, other people's ideas, and even egalitarianism. You have a new take on what is society? Quit looking for a safe zone and stuff it down people's throats and tell them to fucking deal with it, but don't demand others give you a safe zone (barring violence, which is never okay, and you should go to jail for that). I guess I just came out of the punk/gen-x generation, but holy shit are people too sensitive.

"Police arrest man for parodying police is the fault of wokeness gone mad" is certainly A Take.

i heard recently that one country attacked another one out of fear that the latter would adhere to an alliance defending it from being attacked by the former

Reminds me of this related take: https://ibb.co/zVFw2C2

your statement has way too many relative references, you speak of the latter, and the former, and the alliances between the opposition of the former against the alleged plans of the latter in a scenario where one invades a soon to be allied 3rd party

my point being is that in trying to sound serious and formal you've imposed on your reader an extra layer of unacking your point which you also had to needlessly pack so you'd sound like I already said (see: I did it again, put in a reference instead of repeating cuz it makes me sound more serious and 'deep')

This is why natural language should add support for defining named variables.

Can we get that in the next edition of the standard?

Unless I'm completely missing an extra layer of satire here (which would be topical), I think that they were doing it deliberately.

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