Barrel Cactaur posted:

As far as the linked in profile thing, its really weak.
…
I don't think its a strong indicator, and I don't think we're ever likely to get decently credible confirmation about it.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The police chief also said that based on their writings "resentment about being sent to this school" may have played a role in it being chosen as one of their targets.

Mellow Seas posted:

“Our sources within the police department inform us that the shooter identified as a porpoise, and that the lack of a gender-specific pronoun there was in no way intended as sexism.”

I AM GRANDO posted:

Anybody recognize the symbols drawn onto those guns? I remember that nazbol shooter a few years ago did something similar. The taped-on vinyl sticker and Kirby decal on the car say we’re dealing with a pathetic nerd. That x with the circle around it looks like christian identity poo poo, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about there.

Celexi posted:

Back in the 90s there was a crazy theory that letting your kids skateboard would make them join a gang

Celexi posted:

Back in the 90s there was a crazy theory that letting your kids skateboard would make them join a gang

TheDisreputableDog posted:

Yeah, like some people still think Pulse was an anti-gay attack. We should try not to form narratives until the facts are confirmed.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Back in the 90s they thought letting your kids go outside and do anything would make them join a gang.

Kalit posted:

Jaxyon posted:

It was an anti-gay attack.

quote:

What really happened that night at Pulse

The attack on the nightclub has long been seen as a hate crime directed at the LGBTQ community. But all evidence says the gunman chose it at random.

quote:

But during the trial of Omar Mateen’s widow, Noor Salman, all forensic evidence suggested that up until the moment he turned into the Pulse parking lot, Mateen had been considering other venues, rejecting them because they were more heavily guarded. In their closing statement, government prosecutors admitted that there was no evidence to suggest that Mateen knew that Pulse was a gay club.

quote:

The case leaned heavily on forensic cellphone evidence and security camera footage.

On the night of June 11, 2016, Omar Mateen googled and visited Disney Springs, a popular Orlando outdoor shopping and recreation area. Then, just after midnight, he googled “Disney World,” and his cellphone placed him near towers around Epcot, another Disney-owned theme park, according to The Orlando Sentinel. But it wasn’t until he was near Epcot that Mateen googled “downtown Orlando nightclubs,” which delivered Eve Orlando and Pulse as top results. Mateen then drove to Eve, where he stayed for six minutes before driving away. Eve Orlando, in a busy downtown nightclub district, is in an area with heavy police presence, Swift said.

After 1 a.m. on June 12, the night of the attack, Mateen performed one final Google search for “downtown Orlando nightclubs” and began to drive to Pulse. He hesitated, turned back toward Eve, then turned around again and headed back to Pulse. “Finally, around 2 a.m., Mateen fired the first shots in the Pulse nightclub,” a motion filed by the defense read. There was no cellular evidence that he had ever been there before that night.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

I think he is referring to the fact that the investigation and trial subsequently introduced evidence that he picked the club at random.

- He originally was looking at Disneyworld.
- The night of the shooting, he googled "downtown Orlando nightclubs" and started driving towards a different club that was the #1 result.
- Then, he waited outside that club for a while before driving away because there was too much security.
- He googled "downtown Orlando nightclubs" again and went to Pulse, which was the #2 result.





https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/what-really-happened-night-pulse-n882571

quote:

Donziger was asked by Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (FDA) to help win compensation for the pollution and health effects caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field, a region that became known as the "Amazon Chernobyl".[17] He visited Ecuador in 1993, where he says he saw "what honestly looked like an apocalyptic disaster," including children walking barefoot down oil-covered roads and jungle lakes filled with oil.[12] In 1993, after he visited Ecuador, Donziger and other attorneys brought a class-action lawsuit in New York against Texaco on behalf of over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people from the Amazon region. Since the plaintiffs had no money, Donziger, with FDA support, funded the case by selling shares to investors, offering a small part of any eventual settlement.[17] The lawyers chose to file in New York because at the time Texaco's headquarters were in New York. The lawsuit charged that Texaco's oil drilling in the Amazon had resulted in massive contamination. Chevron bought Texaco in 2001 and argued that Texaco had cleaned up its area of operations and that its partner, Petroecuador, was responsible for any remaining pollution.[12][19][16] Chevron requested that the case be tried in Ecuador and, in 2002, the US court dismissed the plaintiffs case based on forum non conveniens and ruled that Ecuador had jurisdiction. The US court exacted a promise from Chevron that it would accept the decision of the Ecuadorian courts.[21][22]

When the case moved to Ecuador, Donziger conducted a public relations campaign to inform Ecuadoreans about the pollution of the Amazon. He said that "the indigenous people would never get a fair trial in Ecuador if they did not illuminate what had happened to them and get public support". Donziger appeared in the 2009 documentary film Crude which explored a two-year period in the case.[16][12] A provincial Ecuadorean court found Chevron guilty in 2011 and awarded the plaintiffs $18 billion in damages. The decision was affirmed by three appellate courts including Ecuador's highest court, the National Court of Justice, although the damages were reduced to $9.5 billion.[21][19][16]

To avoid paying the damages awarded by the court in Ecuador, Chevron moved its assets out of the country,[19] leading the plaintiffs to seek enforcement actions in Canada, Brazil, and Argentina for confiscation of Chevron's assets.[12]

quote:

In 2011, Chevron filed a civil RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) suit against Donziger in New York City, accusing him of bribing an Ecuadorean judge, ghostwriting the damages judgment against it, and "fixing" scientific studies.[32][19][23] Chevron's civil suit initially sought $60 billion in damages which would have required a trial by jury. Chevron removed the request for damages two weeks prior to trial, allowing the case to be tried by judge alone. Chevron stated that it wanted to focus "the RICO case on obtaining injunctive relief against the furtherance of Donziger's extortionate scheme against the company". US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan was assigned as the judge.[19]

quote:

The case relied in large part on the testimony of Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadorean judge whom Chevron had moved to the United States from Ecuador in 2013 for safety reasons. Chevron paid for immigration lawyers for Guerra and his family and provided him with a monthly salary of $12,000 for housing and living expenses.

PT6A posted:

It's not morally acceptable for the victim of a religious school to commit an act like this, of course. But it's understandable.

Judgy Fucker posted:

Gorsuch continuing to have an interesting streak of pro-Indigenous rights votes, though.

cat botherer posted:

https://twitter.com/SDonziger/status/1640428641762054144

In other bad news, Chevron's private prosecution of environmental/human rights lawyer Steve Donzinger has been allowed to stand. Only Gorsuch and Kavanaugh dissented. This is really disappointing and kind of scary for the future of activism.

Fart Amplifier posted:

Murdering innocent kids is really not understandable

Byzantine posted:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, blessed is he who repays you as you have done to us. Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

I AM GRANDO posted:

Anybody recognize the symbols drawn onto those guns? I remember that nazbol shooter a few years ago did something similar. The taped-on vinyl sticker and Kirby decal on the car say we’re dealing with a pathetic nerd. That x with the circle around it looks like christian identity poo poo, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about there.

Byzantine posted:

Wait, so...two Trump judges, one of which is dissented. That should mean it was struck down, because surely the three liberals didn't approve this, and 3+2 is 5 and thus a majority.

Fart Amplifier posted:

Can you be clear about what you are trying to say?

PT6A posted:

It's not morally acceptable for the victim of a religious school to commit an act like this, of course. But it's understandable.

Young Freud posted:

The problem with liberal judges is that they're LIBERAL judges and not leftist justices.

Byzantine posted:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, blessed is he who repays you as you have done to us. Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Byzantine posted:

Wait, so...two Trump judges, one of which is dissented. That should mean it was struck down, because surely the three liberals didn't approve this, and 3+2 is 5 and thus a majority.

quote:

The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year concluded that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan possessed the authority to appoint the prosecutors, who nonetheless remained subject to supervision by the U.S. attorney general.

Fart Amplifier posted:

Can you be clear about what you are trying to say?

quote:

The Minneapolis DFL Executive Committee voted unanimously Monday night not to accept 358 out of 514 delegate signups for council candidate Victor Martinez in Ward 5 because a campaign volunteer signed them all up using the same IP address, and was unable to validate them with paper signup forms, saying they’d been thrown out.

Questions have arisen about other wards, too.

Victor Martinez, an Assembly of God pastor who opposes abortion rights and was endorsed by the Minneapolis police union, seemed like an unlikely choice for the heavily DFL Ward 5 in north Minneapolis. But he was just four votes shy of getting the endorsement two years ago, and this time around he signed up an unusually high number of delegates: 514.

The ward’s progressive City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison won the endorsement in 2017 with far fewer delegates, 143.

Martinez said in a statement that the precinct location for about 200 delegates was accidentally entered incorrectly into the DFL database, and now the executive committee is going to disenfranchise those people — mostly people of color, recent immigrants and low-income people — from the endorsing process.

quote:

The party saw “very similar” anomalies in Wards 5, 6 and 10, according to a DFL source with knowledge of the situation who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media: “It seems like there was a strategy to exploit some of the weakness in the caucus process.”

A newcomer who announced a day before the deadline signed up more delegates than City Council Member Aisha Chughtai in Ward 10.

In Ward 6, Tiger Worku signed up the most delegates, while incumbent Jamal Osman finished third. Another candidate in the Ward 6 race, Kayseh Magan, a former investigator with the Attorney General’s Office, said he noticed over 180 delegates listed emails through an email service called Proton. All but two were delegates for Worku. Magan said he contacted some of the delegates, and none of them said they use that email provider.

Some of the caucuses were done digitally this year, others in person. So rather than go to a school to sign up, for example, in these wards people signed up on paper to be a delegate. Magan said many people didn’t sign the form; some people’s phone numbers were crossed out (he suspects to make it more difficult for other candidates to reach them); and some delegates’ names were misspelled. So he began contacting the delegates, and he said some told him they didn’t sign up to be a delegate for Worku.

quote:

On Monday, Magan took the Reformer to a senior apartment building where nearly two dozen Worku delegates live — even though a different address was listed on their delegate forms. Some of their names were misspelled on the signup forms and email addresses. Two said they didn’t sign any form and the rest couldn’t remember who they agreed to be a delegate for. One resident, Gerald Lattery, said he remembers seeing Worku in the lobby of the building and said he’d consider voting for him but never agreed to be a delegate. In fact, he’s a staunch conservative Republican.

“I’ve never been associated with the Democratic Party,” Lattery told the Reformer.

Young Freud posted:

Just some old fashioned Christian forgiveness from the holy Bible.

PT6A posted:

It's not morally acceptable for the victim of a religious school to commit an act like this, of course. But it's understandable.

quote:

The New York Times has left no stone unturned in its quest to crack down on staffers who signed an open letter last month criticizing the paper’s trans coverage.

After weeks of hauling staffers who signed it into meetings with high-level editors Carolyn Ryan and Marc Lacey—meetings described to Confider as intimidating “tongue-lashing” sessions—management sent written warnings to around 20 staffers, accusing them of conspiring against the paper and endangering their co-workers.

“Your colleagues whose work was criticized in the letter, some by name, have carried out their work in a fair-minded, sensitive, and journalistically sound fashion,” Ryan and Lacey wrote in the letters sent earlier this month, according to a copy obtained and reviewed by Confider. “They have endured attacks and threats as a result of the letter. By signing, you have not only amplified that campaign but endorsed it, too. That is harmful to them personally and to our reputation for providing quality, independent journalism.”

The warning memos, which were put on March 9 into each employee’s personnel file, came after hundreds of Times staffers and contributors claimed in their open letter that the paper “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language.” The open letter was a point of contention within the staff union itself, as dozens of reporters signed a separate letter lashing their colleagues’ “fundamental misunderstanding of our responsibilities as journalists.”

In its letter earlier this month, management further warned staffers that should they engage in anything similar in the future, they could be subject to further punishment. “This letter serves as a reminder of the expectations for your conduct generally, as well as under company policies and guidelines,” read the note from Ryan and Lacey.

The stark warning has rankled some Times staffers, who have floated new responses including filing an official grievance through the Times Guild or, eventually, departing the Times altogether. Such a drastic measure, should it occur, could result in a “queer brain drain” at the paper, one staffer told Confider.

Another point of frustration among staffers has been management’s urging for “internal discussion and debate” in their letter despite there having been multiple past attempts to raise concerns about the Times’ trans coverage through internal means prior to the public open letter. Confider previously reported on such efforts, including an ultimately fruitless October 2021 meeting involving Ryan and then-executive editor Dean Baquet.

Other staffers questioned to Confider why those who signed the trans coverage letter have been subject to such scrutiny while those who publicly denounced Sen. Tom Cotton’s infamous June 2020 op-ed calling for troops to quell riots walked away without discipline.

Reps for the Times and the NewsGuild both declined to comment.

Ershalim posted:

I think what they're saying is that, as Christianity is the vehicle by which the bad people validate their intense hatred and civil/social/literal destruction of us (in this case we're the Jews, I guess), it's understandable (or good) that the manner of vengeance perpetrated against them is having their children murdered.

Old Testament God was pretty happy when people did genocides on people he didn't like.

But it's entirely possible that I'm missing another reading from the story about killing Persian children being good because their ancestors occupied Jerusalem.

Kalli posted:

Dailybeast has a writeup on the disciplinary measures, threats and coercion the NY Times is using against employees that tried to push back against their TERF agenda: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ny-times-fires-off-warning-to-staffers-after-trans-coverage-brouhaha

cat botherer posted:

Such a weird hill for the NYT to die on. It's damaging to their reputation and obviously causing severe morale problems. What's the motivation? Do these articles get that many more clicks, or is it actually some kind of direct animus against trans people beyond indifference? I guess this sort of thing is historically on-brand, but still.

I AM GRANDO posted:

The taped-on vinyl sticker and Kirby decal on the car say we’re dealing with a pathetic nerd.

Rodenthar Drothman posted:

But my main point is - I will not let this Kirby slander stand! Kirby is adorable and the games are fun. Are you really still saying “games are for pathetic nerds” in 2023? Or is it just games you don’t like/didn’t play?
Tl;Dr - don’t jump to conclusions, and maybe play a Kirby game.

cat botherer posted:

Such a weird hill for the NYT to die on. It's damaging to their reputation and obviously causing severe morale problems. What's the motivation? Do these articles get that many more clicks, or is it actually some kind of direct animus against trans people beyond indifference? I guess this sort of thing is historically on-brand, but still.

C2C - 2.0 posted:

Whelp!

https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/1640747078941908994