• BluJay320English
    166·
    5 days ago

    Also 50, 70, and 100 year sentences for people who were protesting against ICE in Texas

    • D_C@sh.itjust.works
      42·
      5 days ago

      What are the chances that these people will get pardoned, etc, when(if) normality returns?

      Also what’s the chances that the judge who handed down these long and unfair sentences will get any repercussions for being so obviously corrupt?

      • ReHomed@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        45·
        5 days ago

        Honestly 50/50

        You can’t really bounce back from the bullshit that has just ensued immediately, it’s also kinda apparent to your average leftist that the democratic party is kind spineless as fuck when it comes to the right, so to have judges IN TEXAS MIND YOU bounce back from their previous decisions? Not gonna be too easy

        • Maeve@kbin.earth
          6·
          5 days ago

          it’s also kinda apparent to your average leftist that the democratic party is kind spineless complicit as fuck when it comes to the right, so to have judges IN TEXAS MIND YOU bounce back from their previous decisions? Not gonna be too easy

      • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
        13·
        5 days ago

        Sanders joined ABC News’s “This Week,” where host Jonathan Karl asked if there was anything Trump has done right.

        “I think cracking down on fentanyl, making sure our borders are stronger,” Sanders replied. “Look, nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate, and I happen to think we need comprehensive immigration reform, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for people to be coming across the border illegally.”

        While the senator agreed with Trump on strengthening the country’s borders to protect citizens, he disagreed with the president’s mass deportation plan.

        “He wants to deport 20 million people who are in this country who are undocumented,” Sanders said. “Well, you do that, you destroy the entire country.”

        “Because I got news for you, Trump’s billionaire friends are not going to pick the crops in California that feed us. They’re not going to work in meatpacking houses,” he continued. “That’s what undocumented people are doing.”

        Given that this is as far left as US politicians get, I’d say unlikely.

      • sobchak@programming.dev
        11·
        5 days ago

        Unlikely. The US executes people when there’s so much new evidence after sentencing pointing toward them not being guilty that the original prosecutors plead for them to not execute. The Dem establishment’s complaints against ICE are mostly just procedural; they just argue for things like more transparency for these detention centers, not their abolishment.

        • prole
          4·
          5 days ago

          The last time that a Democratic president was in office for a federal execution was Lyndon Johnson.

      • gmtom@lemmy.world
        5·
        5 days ago

        A full pardon? Maybe for some of them, especially the zine guy, but the guy who actually shot the cop, unlikely. No democrat would want the optics of that.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
          10·
          5 days ago

          Cop shot first. The guy who shot him did so in community defense.

          In fact that cop may have given the shooter’s attorneys an argument to revisit Harlow v Fitzgerald, and hand the SCOTUS the full text of §1983. They were given, unknowingly, an illegally edited text in 1982 when Harlow v Fitzgerald established Qualified Immunity, which is illegal according to the full statute as recorded in the 1871 Congressional Record.

      • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
        36·
        5 days ago

        The US has more prisoners than any country to ever exist. You’ve been worse than the soviet union for basically all of your history in those regards.

        Edit: Plus it’s baked into your constitution that those prisoners are perfect for slavery. You never stopped using slave labor in the entire 250 year history of America.

      • prole
        10·
        5 days ago

        At least Soviet Russia wasn’t run by a handful of billionaires

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
      6·
      5 days ago

      I mean to give full context, that protest did end with a cop getting shot.

      But the sentences are still wildly excessive including 30 years to someone for carrying a box of magazines.

      • prole
        19·
        5 days ago

        First off, the shooter claims that the cop was about to murder an unarmed protestor.

        But more importantly, it was just one person who shot. Collective punishment is literally against the Geneva Convention.

        Imagine getting a 50 year prison sentence because you were peacefully protesting at a place where someone else shot a cop. By the same logic, every cop that was present when Alex Pretti was executed should have 50+ year prison sentences.

        • gmtom@lemmy.world
          4·
          5 days ago

          I know reading comprehension is not great on this site, but I’m in no way shape or form making an argument the protestors were in the wrong. Literally just providing context.

          • prole
            9·
            5 days ago

            It’s cool that you were able to get that snarky remark in, but I was not necessarily disagreeing or arguing with you.

            However, reading your comment again, it still comes across as cop apologetics. It’s the “the protest did end with a cop being shot”. It’s a justification. Maybe you didn’t intend that, but that’s the implication.

            Did I comprehend ok?

            • gmtom@lemmy.world
              3·
              5 days ago

              It’s not in any way a justification. In fact the language is deliberately neutral as not to imply the protestors did anything wrong (which they didn’t) a protest happened and a cop was shot. Just stating objective fact, because that is a crucial detail the the other commentary left out, which makes their comment sound like they arrested and sentenced these people purely for protesting. (Which they kind of did, and the cop being shot was just their justification, but that’s besides the point)

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48·
    5 days ago

    We live in a fascist country now.

    “But there’s no mass graves.”

    Not yet. And it doesn’t matter. There isn’t just one flavor of fascism. There isn’t just extreme fascism or no fascism.

    This is a facist nation because it is behaving like a fascist nation. And it’s not going to get better unless voters start being more responsible. And it might even be too late for that.

  • Waterpumpee@lemmus.orgEnglish
    181·
    6 days ago

    In the defense of the North Korea outrage, they lobotomised the kid and sent the dying body back to US.

  • topperharlie@lemmy.world
    59·
    5 days ago

    I want to add (without prison sentences… for now) all the push of Europe to do the internet surveillance China style, after we have criticized it so much.

    Is so sad how “autocratic government surveillance” suddenly becomes “protecting the children”…

    Fuck politicians, hope they all die a terrible death. They deserve all the hate in the world and then a bit more.

    • prole
      28·
      5 days ago

      Is so sad how “autocratic government surveillance” suddenly becomes “protecting the children”…

      The saddest part about it is how well it works. People are still falling for this shit. We never learn anything.

    • HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub
      8·
      5 days ago

      to be fair, when EU adds firewall and blocks all traffic from USA, they will have like 99% less advertisements

    • brownsugga@lemmy.world
      4·
      5 days ago

      It hasn’t “suddenly” become that- every single internet censorship bill ever proposed is named some flavor of “save children”

      I’m all for burning Epsteins list at the stake at Super Bowl halftime; but the right to privacy is sacred and should be revered

    • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
      3·
      5 days ago

      The Chinese firewall isn’t surveillance, lol. It’s to keep American surveillance from surveilling Chinese citizens. I’m sure your familiar with Snowden and Assange?

        • Maeve@kbin.earth
          7·
          5 days ago

          What are CCTV, Ring, smart phones, smart homes, smart cars, and the Patriot Act for the daily double?

            • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
              3·
              5 days ago

              Surely there’s proof of the Chinese government surveilling the rest of the world, more so than the 5 eyes countries, otherwise the original statement of the EU doing surveillance “China style” is just xenophobia.

              • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                5·
                5 days ago

                I didn’t mean “in relation to the Chinese government” when I mentioned “Chinese surveillance”, I meant “surveillance of Chinese origin”. If you check ad and tracking blocklists, by far most popular ones are either in the US or China. For me that’s equally as bad as government sponsored. Although “government sponsored” usually implies “of big(ger) scale”, it’s not necessary.

                There are more than just 5 eyes.

                I am going to refrain from arguing, for I have taken note of your instance being “lemmy.ml”. As much as I hate discriminating by instance, I have to do what I have to do.

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      5 days ago

      A life sentence for protesting.

      This is America.

      Our Constitution is effectively over and a frightening percentage of Americans aren’t even aware, or don’t even care.

      Personally, I’m crossing my fingers for Balkanization. Staying chained to this sinking ship is not wise.

    • Nouvellalia@lemmy.world
      19·
      5 days ago

      Two people who weren’t even there, who never discussed the illegal acts, who were only in a group chat where people discussed attending a legal protest, were sentenced to 50 years.

      But they were trans women in Texas. So the jury had no problem sending them to a men’s prison without any crimes being committed.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    25·
    5 days ago

    This is in extremely poor taste considering what happened to the kid in the picture. That’s what is terrifying, not a vandalism arrest.

    We should oppose fascism without belittling its victims, regardless of which state they’re under.

    • Bassman1805@lemmy.world
      16·
      5 days ago

      I don’t think this is belittling the kid at all. Just pointing out that we’re now doing approximately the same thing at home.

    • iocase@lemmy.zip
      6·
      5 days ago

      The only actual evidence was a blurry video which probably wasn’t even him. He was just a convenient political tool. I remember reading a very detailed breakdown of how the suspect in the video was the wrong height and walked differently.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    63·
    6 days ago

    a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster

    The full story of this kid was far crazier than the post implies. (https://archive.is/kyR8h)

    Firstly, he wasn’t in jail for years. He was in jail for 17 months, largely due to the chill relations between the Obama government and North Korea during that time. It is common for US expats to receive special release with a bit of glad handing and brown nosing from a US diplomat, and the fact that Bill Richardson wasn’t able to secure Otto’s release was the exception rather than the rule.

    But secondly, and much more curiously, the story spun up after his release looked more and more like a fabrication the deeper journalists probed.

    The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto’s body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.

    It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto’s death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don’t believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea’s cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”

    Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts’ doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten. However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God’s sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.

    So you had a US expat detained for an extended period, only to be released into US custody as an attempt by the NK government to curry favor with Trump. But in the process of being released, Otto falls into a vegetative state with no evidence of physical violence perpetrated against him. The poor state of his health is conveyed to the Trump administration and immediately poisons relations with the new administration.

    And over the next several months, Trump begins to ratchet tensions with North Korea as a potential prelude to war.

    How did this happen? Who did it benefit?

    • TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website
      17·
      6 days ago

      I have a friend who work at the time for a company that offer tour in weird places, the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ». After a wile the hotel staff had to call the police

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        6 days ago

        the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ».

        Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. Not unusual for someone to come into the country on a tourist visa and commit a nasty taboo.

        It helps to remember that this is a country we are still functionally at war with. Imagine a Ukrainian taking a vacation in Moscow. Or a Palestinian touring Tel Aviv. That’s what these Americans are undertaking.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
      13·
      5 days ago

      Regardless of whether any beatings occurred, when someone is imprisoned in your country, they are under your care, and you are responsible for them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s malnutrition, beatings, or if he just smacked his head against the wall on his own accord really hard: it is the responsibility of the custodian to ensure the good and proper health of those in their custody. That is the position of international human rights law. It doesn’t even matter if a prisoner decides to kill themselves, a death in custody is always the responsibility of the custodian and in that case it’d still be the custodian’s fault for allowing the creation of circumstances that allows prisoners to kill themselves.

      It is not usual for a person to suddenly become comatose while in custody. And even if that did happen, it was North Korea’s positive responsibility to notify consular officials and the family of that, and deliver proper medical care to them.

    • 666dollarfootlong@lemmy.world
      4·
      5 days ago

      Also worth mentioning is that he “allegedly” stole that poster in the first place, so he probably didn’t even do any crimes, he was just picked as a political tool

  • nullspace@lemmy.world
    44·
    5 days ago

    Those floating paint chips are worth thousands of dollars! Or rather, that’s what the administration paid for them.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    44·
    6 days ago

    We’ve had plenty of examples of what happens when you let autocrats take power. It’s not like Trump didn’t tell us who he was. For that matter, it’s not like the Republican Party hasn’t been obvious about who they are since Reagan.

    And yet we keep electing them.

    Maybe we do so because it’s macho, and voting for anyone else is effeminate. Or we do so to punish the Democrats when they’re wishy-washy. Or we do so to own the libs (and in 2026, to return non-whites and women to non-citizen status.)

    It’s a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and I’m unsure we can’t get ourselves out without a whole lot of people suffering and dying.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      20·
      5 days ago

      People are gling to suffer and die no matter what at this point, so we’d might as well go down swinging.

      I’m gonna see what happens in November, but history tells us that violent dictatorships are rarely brought down by peaceful means.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
        17·
        5 days ago

        Oh, there are peaceful movements that work. But then the autocrats can sometimes be eager to fire the first shots. Take January 6th, 2021 for example.

        As Nelson Mandela put it, A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.

  • auzy1@lemmy.world
    33·
    6 days ago

    Here in Australia our racist nutbag pollie is pretending a poster that was dropped behind her could have been a bomb… and now wants police protection

    • michaelalf@lemmy.world
      12·
      5 days ago

      And people keep listening to her as if she’s a champion for the working class. Fuck off Pauline you vapid cunt, people with more than 2 brain cells can see through your facade.

      • auzy1@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 days ago

        You haven’t heard? She’s absolutely interested in uniting the nation into one.

        Which is why she openly hates woke people, greenies, lefties, first nation ceremonies (and therefore traditional first nations), people who don’t speak english (also some of our first nations), trans people and migrants. She definitely tries to unite suspected war criminals too.

        In her defence, she does spend 1 day a year trying to unite everyone… Australia day. Everyone MUST unite on that day, including first nations who were invaded that day at one time.

        And, she at least waited until the day after Australia day to release her “anti-woke” video and song which started openly attacking Aussies she deems are “unacceptable”

  • Kaligalis@lemmy.world
    4·
    4 days ago

    North Korea would likely not be a worse place than China or the US if their economy wasn’t shit. And a lot of that is literally just The Great US Empire (and its vassals) restricting global trade by gunboat politics since the war. Cuba has the same problem: Immense evolutionary pressure to harden their government against US-caused regime change followed by total exploitation combined with reduced trade options.

    • StinkySocialist@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I got news from you on their economy straight from the western media.

      https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/north-korea-economy-success-e80f7062

      Ita hard to know anything about North Korea for certain but it seems to me the terrible economic conditions we hear about outside of North Korea were mainly during the 90s. Seems like after that the narrative was continued as a propaganda effort but it’s hard to know. There is alot of North Korean South Korean and CIA propaganda floating around and it’s hard to know what’s what.