I like to think that my dynamic personality captures as a gestalt, the zeitgeist of boingboing. So in that sense, you were totally dead-on.
You’re the one comparing someone who doesn’t support Manning to someone who wouldn’t support protesting against blatant racism, Mindy. Or did I miss your point?
No, that was not my point. My point was that breaking the law is a tactic people have successfully employed. There was no need to be insulting. How about asking next time if you’re unsure.
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Your argument seems to be that if a tactic is honorable in one situation, it is honorable in all situations. This has nothing to do with how one feels about Manning specifically btw, I just think it’s an argument that makes absolutely no sense on any level. I also think a totally fair takeaway from your post was that it was passive aggressive, and I kind of think you meant it to be. So let’s just call this one over.
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Okay. Whatever you say.
Sure.
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Law schmaw. You appear to conflate “law” with justice. Every nation has laws, even totalitarian ones. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Hans and Sophie Scholl broke the law and paid with their lives. Mahatma perfected the art of breaking the law. The U.S. broke International Law when it invaded Iraq unilaterally and pre-emptively. How did that turn out? Manning is a hero in the same league as Daniel Ellsberg, who if memory serves also broke the “law” over another foolhardy jingoistic American war.
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Civil disobedience on a mass scale, as in a general strike might work. Cynicism and apathy probably won’t.
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Right…but why should somone blindly agree with the law if it contradicts your ethics?
I do think that there or core principles that humanity should follow, but the fringes of the law in a given country aren’t guaranteed to be ethical.
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If you were following, Manning states that her objection is not the Grand Jury itself, but the ‘in camera’ aspect. I suppose we can assume she would agree to testify in public. I am not a lawyer but I am familiar with a long-standing common law legal principal behind public trials. I’m sure you are aware that authoritarian and totalitarian states use/d private ‘show trials’ for propagandistic and coercive purposes. Besides, all this secrecy is unwarranted and undermines the public’s already diminished faith in the American justice system. The public deserves to know, and not just because they are paying the tab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_court_principle
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…but I don’t have a problem virtue signalling it if I think it will help shore up my argument…
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This would be the same Canadian government that arrests Chinese citizens and extradites them to the US?
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I would read Matt Taibbi’s “I Can’t Breathe” on this subject.
The group of peer citizens is the ultimate captive audience. Grand juries are the ones that declined to prosecute police officers despite glaringly obvious evidence of criminal assault. The trick, the book shows, is to flood the grand jury with great amounts of information. If I had done to you what cops did to Eric Garner, the grand jury would have had the prosecution approved in 15 minutes. But the Staten Island prosecutor, a good friend of the cops, as prosecutors have to be, went on and on for days with conflicting reports, testimonials about what great cops they were, inquiries into Garner’s every misdeed, etc. Nine weeks, fifty witnesses, sixty exhibits. This was used to paint the Garner grand jury as very thorough, but a number of former prosecutors and some defense lawyers pulled together a different conclusion: it was big to muddy the waters as much as possible. They found past grand juries that never indicted a cop in the killings of James Powell, and Ernest Sayon decades before. Always with a huge inquiry that got more and more complicated.
Bottom line, a grand jury is really very much under the control of the prosecutors, because they control the information. They can make a clear-cut case of choking a man to death on camera look non-prosecutable, and a guy selling $1/month cable channels in Brooklyn look like he’s providing material support to terrorists. It’s the executive branch unrestrained by any judge in the room.
I am so glad that Canada doesn’t have them.
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“arrests Chinese citizens”…your post is highly misleading since the case you are referring to involves a single individual and fairly misses the point, since the arrest of Meng Wanzhou was carried out after a request from the U.S., is not supported by the majority of Canadians, and appears to be a relatively isolated incident. Furthermore she has not been extradited but is fighting extradition while under house arrest in a $13 million mansion.
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It’s also hard to make a run for Britain … unless of course you’ve got a waterproof bicycle.
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I don’t think you can pose as moderators, but as BBS Captains you CAN marry people. I bet its a good side hussle.
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This is literally the logic every single criminal follows. The “why” is called “civil society.”
I think what some of the tone in this thread exhibits is that a lot of people these days don’t actually believe in “democracy.” I think it’s been long enough where we take some things for granted, and we forget what happens when you just give up on civil society, and why we have laws at all. I would submit what you get when this starts to occur is the rise of people like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.
No, just a little real-world context for the presumptive folks who love to castigate anyone who isn’t a Manning-worshipper as a foolhardy authoritarian.
So what you’re saying is, you’re glad in Canada the prosecutor’s office can unilaterally decide not to charge, say, the police officers who kill someone in a situation like Garner’s? Because isn’t that how it works, if you don’t have Grand Juries?
As a general rule this strategy only serves to undermine an argument, not provide “context”. That and it’s a logical fallacy: Appeal to accomplishment - Wikipedia
Accusing those you disagree with as “…worshippers” or “…fans” is likewise a logical fallacy and a propaganda technique. It’s also dishonest and not a good look.
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As a general principle, I object to grand juries.
Prosecutors run grand juries behind closed doors and in secret, without a judge present.
I had never noticed how much grand juries are like Star Chambers that were inquisitorial instead of prosecutorial.
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Blaming Chelsea Manning, whistleblowers, and civil disobedience activists for Trump and McConnell is the essence of concern trolling. “Everything you hate is your own fault” is a basic troll meme. It works everywhere. It offends everyone. It’s almost never true.
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