If you read the article, it refers to using a long discredited restriction on free speech from WW1. This refers to the law used by President Wilson to put people arguing against the war into jail. That this kind of law has survived this long without being overturned by the US Supreme Court is itself a terrible crime. Qualified Immunity imho is just the latest way to give the police unlimited power to abuse civil rights.
How did the police find out about the joke? Was Waylon facebook friends with the sheriff? Did facebook proactively alert the police and forward them this user's information or was this the police leveraging their own system installed or pointed at facebook to catch anyone who dared to make fun of them?
Interestingly at least in the case stage I found qualified immunity wasn’t granted for the song lyrics. This also has a ton of context elided in the news article, like what were the lyrics.
I think that in the song lyrics case the police could have easily justified having an officer (or a mental health professional) pop by to ask some questions and make sure the guy wasn't a threat. That entire issue could have been resolved with a simple conversation.
In Waylon's case I can't imagine how the joke (which was: “SHARE SHARE SHARE ! ! ! ! JUST IN: RAPIDES PARISH SHERIFFS OFFICE HAVE ISSUED THE ORDER, IF DEPUTIES COME INTO CONTACT WITH ‘THE INFECTED’ SHOOT ON SIGHT….Lord have mercy on us all. #Covid9teen #weneedyoubradpitt”) could have even justified police knocking on his door at all.
Yea if you read it they actually did come visit him and ascertained it was nothing. But a school cop unilaterally decided to ignore that evidence and arrested him and made no mention in charging him that they had visited him, he had cooperated, that it was lyrics, that he assured them he had no malice, and that everyone had agreed it was nothing. That’s the premise of why qualified immunity was denied - the officer knew all these facts because he was there, along with several other officers, yet willfully ignored that and omitted it in charging him. I couldn’t find any details about the ultimate resolution of the case, just the judges denial of qualified immunity.
The extent of qualified immunity is a stain on this country, a corruption created by the judiciary. For it to be legal for the rule of law to not apply to a privileged class is to eat the rule of law from within. An authority that exempts itself from its own rules bleeds away its legitimacy.
> If a President wanted to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, maybe they should deputize themselves first.
QI has nothing to do with being “deputized”, it has to do no with being a public official. It was first articulated in a suit over government cobtracts against White House, non-law-enforcement, officials.
> The extent of qualified immunity is a stain on this country...
Agreed, and that is why we fought so hard in CO to over-turn it [0] during the BLM riots, which really should have been called overt police abuse riots akin to those in LA in the 90s during the Rodeny King arrest. Which I saw happen in real-time as a child.
The fact that the rest of the US didn't follow suit was an immense tragedy, as that was likely the ONLY time that this would have been possible due to COVID and the shutdown slowing down the economy enough for people to realize how far we had fallen and get politically active in their community.
Instead it's been a tragic reality come to life rife with more authoritarian encroachment on civil liberties both on and offline. All of this while we see what authoritarian nations like Russia and China do serving as a stark reality of how quickly bad things can get.
See, this is the hard part about living in a Republic: you have to place a great deal of faith in the populace to be just as active and as well informed as oneself for it to sustain itself if it's to remain a Republic wherein the Citizen's rights are upheld and the State is suppressed to it's enumerated and outlined duties.
I personally never wanted to be an activist, it's incredibly difficult and often sad thing to do because of the harsh realities of Life it exposes you and the emotional and mental toll that it takes, but I realized that without it we can lose what so many fought for to get us to this point in order to advance Society and Civilization as a whole--as flawed as the West may be it is still orders of magnitude better than perhaps any of it's predecessors to date in most capacities, and it's worth fighting for.
I fear that that the American experiment placed the most value on this since it's inception, but that much like Rome because of overt corruption and nepotism it's populace became more and more disenfranchised and apathetic as time went on and it devolved into just another imperial plutocracy.
I still think the US is remarkable in many ways, but if it's own populace cannot or will not resist against this than what was thought to be an ongoing experiment in self-governance might have ended in my Lifetime.
> It’s amazing watching American politics talk about how not even the President is above the law but then watch news stories about Qualified Immunity.
That's just a platitude and I don't think that was ever anything but a fabrication to tell children and the feeble minded alike to give the illusion of how skewed the Law really is the closer you get to it's source of power (State): Bush et al are all War Criminals [1]. It's worth noting that this all happened when I was a child and I soon realized what a farce this was then, too. Hence the need to get involved in activism.
> In recent weeks, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and others have been formulating defenses against possible prosecutions for war crimes and are pressuring Republican members of Congress to pass new laws to protect them.
>> As long as George Bush is president and controls the Department of Justice, there will no prosecutions for war crimes, but after Bush is gone, anything could happen and hundreds of Americans could be charged with war crimes.
> it's populace became more and more disenfranchised and apathetic as time went on
You see claims like this all the time but they are so blatantly ahistorical its fascinating.
No one but white men could vote in the U.S. until the early 1900s when women were given the right to vote.
And pretty much only white people were allowed to vote until 1965 when black people, Asians, etc were given the right to vote.
The U.S. may call itself the oldest democracy but there are only a handful of democracies that so heavily disenfranchised such significant parts of their population as recently as the US did.
It’s been a little more than 50 years where millions of people were not legally disenfranchised, so by any measure the US population has become more enfranchised.
Further, as the chart in the Wikipedia page below show, voter turnout has been constantly increasing in the US (at least for Presidential elections)
> You see claims like this all the time but they are so blatantly ahistorical its fascinating.
> No one but white men could vote in the U.S. until the early 1900s when women were given the right to vote.
Talk about blatantly ahistorical; nonwhites and nonmen could vote in some individual states before federally protected, and race was federally made invalid as a basis for denying voting rights with the 15th Amendment in 1870, 50 years before the same was done for sex by the 19th.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is not what gave racial minorities voting rights, though it did address mechanisms by which states attempted to limit the effect of those rights. (As did the 24th Amendment, in 1964.)
That is technically true, but literacy tests, poll taxes and other voter suppression methods were legal until 1965. They had the right on paper, but not in practice.
> That is technically true, but literacy tests, poll taxes and other voter suppression methods were legal until 1965. They had the right on paper, but not in practice.
That's making my point for me, all those imbeciles in Qanon were so detached from reality after being propagandized on Facebook by the CCP, Cambridge Analytica et al into thinking that they should vote for Trump or the World would fall apart, only to be left to question their false reality when the results didn't favour their outcome so they did what all disfranchised do when they feel the system is not on their side (which has historically favoured whites in the US), riot.
My point stands, and that is that things have gotten past a melting point because no one wants to exit their insulated echo chambers they've resided and then were forced into during COVID rather than get involved and do the heavy lifting that it takes make actual progress.
Political means is just one way by which effective change occurs at the local level, I didn't vote in the primary despite being told the red wave was imminent (which means nothing to me as I think it's a false dichotomy): but I have residence in a blue state and instead I took the time to volunteer locally and hand out food for those in need instead. It was a better use of my time and helped lessen misery, if only for a sort period, by feeding people.
Moreover, do you know he actual voter participation rate in the US presidential election in 2016/2020? Do you know the demographics, and how few below 40 are actually voting? You speak about race and gender, when you really should be looking at how few non-boomers are involved in politics at all to see how alarming it really is.
> My point stands, and that is that things have gotten past a melting point because no one wants to exit their insulated echo chambers
including you because your descriptions are not at all why people voted for Trump.
The guy publicly stood in front of a bunch of businessmen who were planning on taking more manufacturing overseas and told them if they did so he was going to tax the shit out of their imports.
In the late 90's people started ordering drugs from Canada, websites started popping up allowing it. Until it was made illegal to do because these Canadian drugs weren't approved by the FDA (just by the Canadian version of it).
Trump got rid of that law. None of the democratic presidents, including Obama, were willing to do it.
Everyone always thinks their bubble is the non-bubble.
> Everyone always thinks their bubble is the non-bubble.
His tariffs were a joke, I remember the one's he was threatening to put on wine, cheese and meats from EU and that still wouldn't have been enough to offset the immense national debt because the US simply doesn't have the the QC/QA to compete with some of their goods. And he gave concessions to large corps who subsequently were using illegal labour in the US--this was clear during COVID when all the migrant workers were getting sick and meat packing plants and with seasonal farm hands during harvest as he threatened to stop migration, which still affects people who have been here already to this day in the H1-N process.
But I concede that their were more factors to it than those, no including the grift and Q-Anon BS, but honestly it's not worth the time.
And just to be crystal clear, because this often gets lost in the angst of racism, Native Americans got the ability to vote after blacks did.
While Native American children went to boarding school where they would be punished for speaking their own language, and punished here means things like getting whipped while in the shower and being made to spend the night outside during the winter.
I point this out because many people don't fully realize just how badly Native Americans have been treated in this country. It's not a competition, but sometimes it's good to remind people.
Your dates are wrong. And did you know that Switzerland the basting of direct democracy did't give women the right right to vote until 1971. Yeah you read that right 1971... what is even crazier is Liechtenstein was 1984...
I agree that BLM missed their chance to agitate about government immunity. It could have been about controlling the police and government paper-jockeys. It turned into defund the police which immediately repulsed about 1/2 the voters.
> I agree that BLM missed their chance to agitate about government immunity.
BLM had good reason for not principally being concerned about limitations on civil liability for government agents, given that, when it comes to accountability, its primary focus is on the most serious of crimes, and not exclusively when committed by government agents.
Does anyone have experience and a specific recommendation for privacy-oriented servers (VPS) hosting providers beyond the reach of US feds? In places like Iceland or Sweden.
