A word of advice for blogger and commenter alike
“If you’re arguing on the internet, you’ve already lost.”
Ah, if only it were so easy…
by Elias Isquith · August 27, 2011
“If you’re arguing on the internet, you’ve already lost.”
Ah, if only it were so easy…
Elias Isquith
Elias Isquith is a freelance journalist and blogger. He considers Bob Dylan and Walter Sobchak to be the two great Jewish thinkers of our time; he thinks Kafka was half-right when he said there was hope, "but not for us"; and he can be reached through the twitter via @eliasisquith or via email. The opinions he expresses on the blog and throughout the interwebs are exclusively his own.
December 10, 2018
November 14, 2018
[caption id="attachment_361266" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screengrab from WIVB Buffalo Channel 4 News[/caption]
Still a developing story, but what we know so far points to an utterly depraved act of violence at a Buffalo supermarket.
Comment →Ten people were killed and three others suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were transported to local hospitals after a mass shooting at a supermarket on Buffalo’s East Side Saturday afternoon.
The shooter was an 18-year-old white male who was heavily armed with tactical gear and was live-streaming during the mass shooting, officials said. City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the shooter is not from Buffalo and traveled “hours” from outside the area.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”
The shooter was identified in court Saturday evening as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles southeast of Buffalo.
Gendron was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder without bail.
The 18-year-old will be back in court on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for a felony hearing.
When Gendron exited his vehicle at the supermarket, authorities said, he shot four people in the parking lot. Three of them died and one is in the hospital. The shooter entered the store and opened fire on customers.
Twitch deletes shooter’s live-stream video of Buffalo mass shooting
A retired Buffalo Police officer, Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard, shot Gendron but he was unharmed because he was wearing armor, Gramaglia said. The retired officer was shot and killed.A law enforcement source told CBS News that the gunman had a racial slur written on his weapon. The attack is being treated as a hate crime.
Erie County District Attorney John Flynn will not confirm the existence of the shooter’s manifesto. He said they believe there was a “racial component” to the attack but won’t say more.
This attack is being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime and as violent extremism.
Police officers could frame people, file bogus charges, conjure evidence out of thin air—and, in most of the U.S., they would still be immune from facing any sort of civil accountability for that malicious prosecution. Until yesterday.
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Yesterday, the highest court in the country struck that requirement down, ruling that Thompson should indeed have a right to sue the officers at the center of his case. "A plaintiff such as Thompson must demonstrate, among other things, that he obtained a favorable termination of the underlying criminal prosecution," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. "We hold that a Fourth Amendment claim…for malicious prosecution does not require the plaintiff to show that the criminal prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence."
From THOMPSON v. CLARK ET AL.:
Held: To demonstrate a favorable termination of a criminal prosecution for purposes of the Fourth Amendment claim under §1983 for malicious prosecution, a plaintiff need not show that the criminal prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence. A plaintiff need only show that his prosecution ended without a conviction.
Thompson has satisfied that requirement here.
Thompson v. Clark was decided 6-3. (Alito wrote the dissent, with Thomas and Gorsuch joining.)
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Recently comments that included the strings "zed" or "doug" were sent immediately to trash. This should be fixed now.
Maybe it’s the Libra in me but I have these arguments all the time within myself. Well, what about this? Well, what about *THIS*? Well, what about *THIS* AND THEN *THIS*? WELL WAHT ABOUT HITLER???
And so on.
When I come to the internet to talk about things, sometimes I encounter new arguments that I’ve never considered and that’s awesome. Sometimes I encounter counter-arguments with which I am already familiar and then can give my counter-counter-arguments. Sometimes those give counter-counter-arguments that I’ve never considered.
And that’s awesome.Report
I agree. Arguing on the internet – if you’re arguing with the intent of understanding the other person’s position and not just proving yourself right, and if the person’s position is one that it’s worth understanding [understanding someone’s arguments for believing Obama was born in Kenya is valueless] – is an excellent way of learning about other political positions. It’s harder to learn about them through real-life discussions, since most people don’t discuss their political opinions at the drop of a hat in real life (and those who do tend to be rather annoying).Report
It’s harder to learn about them through real-life discussions, since most people don’t discuss their political opinions at the drop of a hat in real life
Co-sign this. The value of the internet is primarily in that you can engage with people and not learn their factz, or knowledges, but their view of things. You learn stuff all the time. Especially – at least in my view – that rational, thinking folks hold about 92% of the same moral, political, institutional beliefs. Then there is the ideology that creeps in. And you start trolling.Report
Katherine – I agree.
Arguing with certain people, however, just pisses me off. Elias’s advice comes at an opportune moment for me.Report
The value of a site like this is that so much of the discussion is rational, intelligent, and worthwhile. It’s a vast wasteland out there: even Balloon Juice is well above average, and LOOG is a complete anomaly. Being asynchronous and impersonal helps too: when you get pissed off, you can just step away from a conversation for anywhere between a few minutes and forever. That lets us discuss with some civility topics that in real life would turn into screaming matches or fistfights.Report
Remember: This is a corner of something else entirely. If it’s representative of anything, it’s representative of someplace entirely non-representative.Report
I thought I’d acknowledged that by saying “complete anomaly”.Report
Yeah, I was building on that.
I was also drinkin’.Report
Kate, Barry is an Hawaiian-Kenyan-Marxist. We decided this some time ago. I consider ‘annoying’ an art form.Report
Who’s this we you’re talking about, kemosabe?Report
Bob and I and the other Elders of Zion.Report
So what would one say about folks who argue about fantasy novels on the internet?Report
lonely!Report
Nah, *before* the internet they might’ve been lonely, but now they have an abundance of people to argue about fantasy novels with.Report