The pedants have raided this thread.
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… he says as he asks the trollish author to justify himself.
You must be new here if you’re just realizing this.
Indeed you might say a refrigerator’s very raison d’être is to be raided. The Jezebel.
But then the question here is ‘is a local law enforcement office analogous to a fridge’?
We demand cops in cardigans.
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I’ll just leave this here in case there’s an pedant about.
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I’ll just leave this here in case there’s an pedant about.
I’ll just leave this here in case there’s an a pedant about.
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See the following usage as provided by the OED (i.e. the definitive source for English language usage):
raid, n.
3. In extended use.
a. A sudden or vigorous attack or descent upon something for the purpose of appropriation, suppression, or destruction; [emphasis added]
The OED provides contemporary examples of this usage (which, by the way, is the only point in the entry that refers specifically to usage in the context of police activity), as have several other commenters in the thread. Even the ACLU press release on the matter uses this same language, which Cory quotes in his summary:
“We’ve seen our fair share of federal government attempts to keep records about stingrays secret, but we’ve never seen an actual physical raid on state records in order to conceal them from public view.”
When the ACLU uses the word ‘raid’ in their press release, they adopt the common usage to suggest that U.S. Marshals suddenly descended on the Sarasota Police Department for the purpose of appropriation and suppression of the documents the ACLU requested.
‘Raid’ is in fact the most appropriate word to use in this context, as it succinctly refers to what actually happened. Your strenuous disagreement is unjustified.
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Give it time. Soon you’ll be able to say “I don’t have the right to swear words for this!”
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So a bunch of you think my criticism is pedantic - fair enough. Personally I think the inability to recognize a news-style report as intentionally distorted is foolish, but I guess we just differ on that.
This morning I notice Cory describes a school’s punishment, making a young woman write out a “think sheet” on why it was wrong to violate their dress code by wearing leggings, a “Cultural Revolution-style” punishment. Conservative estimates would say that one and a half million people died in the Cultural Revolution.
Why stop there? I mean, these guys are obviously Nazis, right?
This kind of language drives a crude us-good them-bad mentality which is, at root, the idealization of one’s self and one’s own perspectives, and demonization of people with whom one disagrees.
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The school in question obviously did not dole out “Cultural Revolution-magnitude” punishment, but then, nobody said they did. So where’s the problem?
While you are all nitpicking… let me point out a detail that’s actually of some import. The US Marshall’s answer to the Supreme Court. You basically have the Supreme court acting to cover up gross violations of the constitution. Which in effect is doing EXACTLY NOT their job. Basically it’s a complete violation of their oathes of office. Now maybe the marshalls are operating independently, or the president issues orders to the marshalls and we’re facing a potential constitutional crisis… kinda like back in the 1860s when Lincoln ordered the Marshall’s to arrest the chief justice of the supreme court in what can best be described as an attempted coup d’tat. But, I prefer the simple answer here. The supreme court has gone from failing utterly in their mandate to outright working against it.
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Not completely, because I haven’t chimed in until just now!
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Thank you for saying that!
So many of the contributors to this thread are busy being “right” about Cory’s choice of words, that the actual subject of the thread is becoming lost in the noise.
According to Wikipedia the United States Marshals Service
Except for the bit about “effective operation of the judiciary” they seem, in this case to be completely outside their mandate. And it’s only by taking a rather jaundiced interpretation of “effective operation” that I can squeeze that phrase into my understanding of what’s going on here.
If “effective operation of the judiciary” depends upon not releasing records of surveillance in cases where the constitutionality of the practice is directly in question, then we have a real problem.
I don’t know who the actor is, but whoever they are, protecting the details of their SIGINT methods is apparently much more important than upholding some silly oath about supporting and defending the constitution.
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So, lets say we replace raid with something like “suddenly seize records”. (And lets also remember that the original article uses the word raid)
Now that were focusing on what happened and not derailing the argument into a semantics discussion. Whats your opinion on these actions?
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They left out an ‘L’ also.
raid 10 ?? 10 + ?? 11 ?? anyway , striped and mirrored multiple times across un-even disk sizes !! with dual fast ethernet !! and kevlar !! and built in lawyers !! and unicorn stickers !! and a ups !! encrypted and mirrored to multiple clouds !! with multiple dead person switches !! and streaming psk with hamming code for ort cloud bounce for time lapse recovery !! { /end rant }
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No I think its bullshit. The term raid was used in the article. The article describes what a reasonable person would call a raid.
I think the inability to recognise a whole website that contains nothing but op ed is borderline delusional.
Its a blog. The bloggers can use whatever hyperbole they want, its a casual conversation, and absolutely not cast in any way as serious journalism.
Its probably a comment on the decline and fall of serious journalism that people are now trying to demand higher journalistic integrity from sources such as Boing Boing. If you visit Boing Boing, you should have some idea how it is pitched, and frankly if you want to start comparing it to ‘legitimate’ news outlets who have a real, binding mandate to present current affairs accurately you’ll find many don’t even come close to the level of integrity shown here. Yes I’m talking about Fox, just for starters.
So yeah, I think your point is both technically and philosophically dead wrong, and you should probably stop digging. But hey, have at it.
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This of course is 100% correct and I apologise for helping Gendun successfully derail the thread. My problem is I’ve got very little to say about the actual article, except something along the lines of ‘Wow, America’s descent into naked fascism: Now 90% complete!’
Basically, I think @William_Holz pretty much won the thread with post 2:
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I was thinking about raiding this thread, but certain commenters have convinced me that the word “raid” is so much more important than the subject of the article…
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Good luck trying to register dissent dude. It’s not gonna work here. Either you dance with the über liberal mass and tow this party’s line, or you head yourself on over to somewherelse.com.
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