Often, yeah. Some of these people are just straight-up liberals that refuse to read but have a compulsion to confidently share opinions and pick fights in spite of this. I think this is actually the most common form of Western "Marxist" that one encounters irl. The person that thinks their contribution to the leftist cause is to join a space and share their half-baked opinion. Usually a white cis dude and I don't think that's a coincidence lol. They're brought up in that culture.

Buy yeah there are definitely ultras as well. I dunno I have had decent luck in pulling them away from that tendency. My sample is biased because, among other things, it draws from people attempting to do real organizing work and who are somewhat realistic about it, so they are more open to some "campism" like, "sure we can internally criticize China, but externally we must understand that we would only be feeding into imperialist propaganda domestically". I have had noticeably less luck trying that with MLMs that are basically just a reading group that occasionally joins (and picks fights with lol) coalitions.

Honestly, in my experience the people with the best natural instincts for this are those doing principled anti-imperialist work. They are open to mutual learning, political education, and constructive self-criticism as a means for org development. I have had better luck with anarchists in such orgs than with self-proclaimed communists doing labor or electoral work.

Wait is Dracula a predator of the sun or is the sun a predator of Dracula

No, you've tried, but all you've got is acab.

Please do your best to act in good faith. I have, obviously, laid out several lines of thought and my rationale is not a slogan. It's important to be honest even if you disagree with someone. I would say it is even more important than otherwise, as that is when you will be most tempted to check out.

And remember, your thesis here is that OP was being misleading. Do you see the hypocrisy?

Certainly, cops do sometimes lie, no question.

Cops lie systemically and for reasons with root causes. Students of criminal justice know that cop testimony is among the least reliable information in any case.

In a country with millions of police officers, though, the anecdotal accounts your media is likely flooded with are insufficient [...]

Just straw man after straw man. I have already replied, at length, with my own positions. Ask yourself why you are making up positions and actions on my behalf while ignoring what I said. Do you think that is a moral thing for you to be doing?

If you'd like to criticize being skeptical of cop testimony, you should either educate yourself on what people actually say about this or ask me and I might, generously, take some time to explain despite this bad faith behavior.

This skews your perceptions.

You have invented a fiction of what I do and are now drawing conclusions from it like a gotcha, lmao.

You're also neglecting that this individual had previous convictions and had just been in a bar fight.

The felony was for possession of an illegal weapon.

Clearly a violent man.

If you applied this poor logic consistly you would be a very racist person.

I do dispute the characterization that he should still be presumed innocent.

I will remind you that Harris used a technicality on timing rather than actually arguing against the merits of overturning the conviction. There is a reason for that. Think critically.

Could the additional two witnesses have swayed the decision? Maybe. That's the best we have.

No, I have already laid out a series of points that, together, show how absurd this conclusion is. You are just ignoring them.

To presume they would have is inappropriate though, and there is valid reason to keep him behind bars while the process plays out.

To presume they would not have is literally the outcome sought in the appeal decision. The one stymied by technicalities. "The process", lmao. The process is damning for your pro-cop guesswork.

I clearly disagree that we should automatically be biased against police testimony.

Which is the same as saying you are unfamiliar with the criminal justice system and how cops behave. You keep repeating this claim and I have acknowledged and criticized it at least 3 times, to no response. How would you describe someone that acted like that?

All witness testimony should be considered with a certain measure of doubt, but I would need some harder data to convince me police testimony is false a statistically significant amount of the time.

Well luckily we have things like research papers and political organizations and the ability to ask questions so you can go figure this out. All it requires is curiosity. Unfortunately you seem to think your ignorance is better than my knowledge.

You've now listed a long string of arguments, but you didn't earlier, you're mischaracterizing.

No, I did.I counted them, you know. It did not take me long to list arguments I've made about how it is reasonable to say OP's statement that was wrongly convicted match works cited. Two ways the process was flawed (incompetent defense lawyer and shutting down appeals in technicalities), three arguments about witnesses (cops are unreliable, other witnesses disagreed but were not brought forward, one contradicting witness is a cop), one argument about the presumption of guilt and evidentiary onuses, one argument about an article literally saying what OP said verbatim. There are probably more, these just come to mind immediately.

The problem is that you are not directly responding to what I am saying but choose to dance around these things and deal in straw men. Don't blame me when you can't remember the list of conveniently-ignored arguments, let alone synthesize it into a larger case.

Your previous comment can be summed up entirely with four words: You don't trust cops.

Instead of providing inaccurate summaries, please reply directly to what I say.

This is fine, but I have higher standards.

As I already explained, you have lower standards. You claim to appreciate nuance and then argue for ignoring context and systemic problems.

I neither trust nor distrust them by default, I sit between the two.

I've already addressed this. Instead of repeating yourself, please reply directly to what I have already said in response.

Oh dear?

Yes, oh dear. I'm rolling my eyes at the unearned condescension.

When I get around to reading news articles again, likely tomorrow morning, I'll provide you a few more and we can resume this.

I won't hold my breath.

I'm not interested in a systemic discussion with you, is what that means.

Then you are unqualified to discuss this topic at all, which I'd inherently about the criminal justice system, how it functions, and Harris' role in it re: this case. Your aversion to discussing or acknowledging the actual realities of the system so that you can imagine the system actually works a different way encapsulates the fundamental flaw in your ad-hoc rationales.

Though the largest issue is an unwillingness to acknowledge or engage with what I've said, such as, for the fourth time now, the fact that one of the articles has a verbatim repetition of the claim you say is different from the articles' contents. That one point makes everything you have said moot. No wonder you have fully avoided talking about it.

I know full well we'd be going back and forth for quite some time, given the strength of your beliefs.

If it followed the current pattern, the length would be due to you repeating yourself and ignoring what I say.

Given that I do not think a systems-basef view captures even most of the necessary information, I would find the exercise rather pointless.

This is not a good faith characterization of what I have said when I have pointed to a series of specific case factors and you have ignored most of them.

You certainly like your pithy comebacks

My responses are anything but pithy.

but I prefer a more rigorous and colder logic.

Like cherry picking, straw men, and lauding the ignoring of context? lmao

Ultimately, the man was a danger, and this was an appropriate exercise of prosecutorial power.

There's that pro-cop bias.

I think it would be useful to compile talking points resources at different levels of complexity and thoroughness, kind of like Wikipedia vs. Simplified Wikipedia. The stuff I'm saying is a well-established analysis, of course, and something we could all curate for use in discussions. Obviously there is ProleWiki, but I think a denser web with different levels of complexity / scope would be pretty useful.

In this case, a short overview of the contradictions in the maintenance of a precarious immigrant labor force would be useful. And I didn't even mention immigrants that are documented but still precarious (like H1-B holders) and how they still serve the same type of role and face similar contradictions, just usually at a higher level of pay. Etc etc I could go on but should't, ha.

And yeah liberals have a tendency to be racist at the same time as they are trying to position themselves as anti-racist (not talking about parent, but your comment on the paradox). It is kind of fascinating.

Please do your best to act in good faith and not inventively insult.

Many of these are about a case of a man supposedly throwing a knife under a car, for instance.

So far as I can tell, a single bullet point is about this, just with multiple links.

"A crime he didn't commit" is inaccurate, it remained very much in question.

It's a claim straight from one of the links and I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that a conviction based solely on cop testimony, later contradicted by other witnesses, with an incompetent defending lawyer that was later disbarred, is plenty enough to make that claim.

Really, I recommend reading through any that strike your interest, and not simply trusting the one-shot summaries provided by a random person on the internet.

Sure, but read them critically and not with a pro-cop bias.

You should organize against genocide, not support its perpetrators.

Such as?

Never a bad time for anti-genocide direct action

I recommend using pen and paper and then digitizing later, assuming this is for notes. It will help you internalize the lecture or reading better in the moment and the act of digitizing your notes will reinforce your knowledge and provide you with better material for tests.

I think the only digital option that could come close to this would be an e-ink tablet but those kind of suck. Better to spend $50 on paper and pens than $500 on a tablet that isn't as good for the purpose.

The West created/supported the humanitarian crises in the first place as well. The bombing out of Lebanon, the War on Iraq, starving Yemen, couping Libya, and supplying, training, and working with various anti-government groups in Syria, including Daesh.

It is a reasonable red line: if US personnel are explicitly entering the war, Russia and the US are now explicitly at war. Being at war means the US becomes a target, that Russia could, say, blow up THAAD in Israel and destroy the "secret" US base and Daesh training grounds in Jordan and Syria. At some point, nukes become relevant.

Do you think war between Russia and the US is a good thing?