Rov_Scam
2mo ago
One example: A guy and two women attempted to enter a bar but were denied admission because the guy had an expired ID. As they were walking away the man was approached by a man who had been in a relationship with one of the women several years earlier. The other man started yelling at the first man and cornered him in a doorway. The first man claims that the other man threatened to kill him and it looked like he was carrying a concealed weapon in his sweatshirt. So the first man shot him with a licensed gun that he was carrying legally. It seems like a fairly anodyne story when told that way, but when the news starts out with a story like "23-year-old Javonte Diggs was arrested outside the Pause nightclub after an apparent dispute with 22-year-old Martavius Allen", the online right doesn't start making the guy a martyr of self-defense and concealed carry.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Oh, it's totally strawmanning. But in court I'm not giving you the benefit of the doubt in any argument; if you say something, I'm going to run with it. Unfortunately you won't get to point out my illogic to the jury because you've already taken your turn, and I doubt your client will take too much comfort in the fact that his guilty verdict may rest on a fallacious argument.
It seems to me that you're simply arguing a policy position; namely, that lethal force is an appropriate response to any attack. And while that's a perfectly fine position to take from a policy perspective, it doesn't get around the fact that the state criminal statutes are pretty clear that this isn't the case — lethal force is an appropriate response to some attacks but not to others. If you don't like this then what you're looking for is a political solution, not jury nullification.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
No, not really. As I said in another comment, the legal standard is whether there's a reasonable likelihood of death or serious bodily injury, not the worst-case scenario. If the person is carrying a concealed weapon, and there's no evidence that the attacker either knows or has reason to know that his victim is armed, there's no way the victim could form a reasonable belief that the attacker is going to take his weapon and shoot him with it. Especially consider that the vast majority of fights, even one sided fights, don't result in death or permanent disability.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Go ahead and make that point at trial... and prepare to get destroyed on closing. Seriously, if I'm the prosecutor in this case, I can pretty much ignore whatever other arguments you've made (or just hit on them briefly) and run that point to the end of its tether. "Is someone acting crazy? Who knows what they're crazy enough to do; better shoot them before anything bad happens. The defendant wants to convince you that this is a reasonable course of action." I'd then go on to describe a series of examples of "crazy" behavior and suggest that your argument would require them to view any shooting or the perpetrator as justifiable self-defense, and the examples would get progressively more absurd. I'd characterize the entire defense as "people should be able to shoot anyone who looks suspicious", and by the end there's the possibility that the jury would forget that the defendant had even been attacked. If this is "the point", then it's not a very good one.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Maybe we should be advocating policies that place a greater proportional tax burden on those who society caters to already: corporations and white-collar PMCs?
There's already a much easier way to do this: Increase marginal rates on higher earners. This comes with the added benefit of actually increasing government revenue and not decreasing it.
Sorry, I was on mobile yesterday and while I was trying to give the general principle I wasn't sufficiently clear as to the details. It's highly fact dependent. The general principle is that you're allowed to defend yourself, but the degree of force has to be proportionate to the threat. So if someone attacks with fists, I'm allowed to respond with fists. In the scenario you describe, where someone is being pummeled with fists while defenseless, then yes, I do believe that a self-defense justification would be appropriate. But that's not most attacks or scuffles, and it's not what happened here.
Every single punch to the head is a spin of the roulette wheel.
Exactly. Remember, the standard isn't that death or serious bodily injury is a mere possibility, but a reasonable likelihood. A roulette spin is not a good analogy for something that is reasonably likely to happen. Getting shot or stabbed is not a mere "spin of the roulette wheel" as to whether you could die or be seriously injured.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
If you had statistics suggesting that tackling onto concrete presented a risk of serious bodily injury or death comparable to being shot or stabbed, then you could call someone like an epidemiologist at trial to testify to that effect. And it would be a fairly strong defense, if tempered by the fact that the prosecution would call their own expert reaching the opposite conclusion. That's not relevant here, though, because Hayes shot the guy after he was tackled. You're only privileged to defend yourself out of apprehension of an imminent threat, not out of a response to a past threat. Once Hayes was on the ground he wasn't getting tackled again, and any argument about the supposed dangers of being tackled on concrete is moot.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The standard is only concerned with what is reasonably likely to happen, not with worst case scenarios. The likelihood of an attack with fists or tackling isn't reasonably likely to result in death or serious injury, absent some aggravating factor that isn't present here. That's pretty much black letter law in any jurisdiction.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
If you read my recent post on the South Side, you'd remember that I mentioned a spare of shootings in 2021 and 2022. I didn't get into it then, but almost everyone they arrested pled self defense. These were all groups of black kids who got into altercations outside of nightclubs, and their claims of self defense were much stronger than this guy's. Sometimes they were the result of scuffles similar to the one described here. By your logic, these shooters weren't threats to public safety, but a legitimate response to dangerous situations.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The defense has to be proportional to the threat; deadly force can only be used if the perpetrator has a reasonable threat of death or serious bodily injury (serious usually meaning permanent disability, not a black eye). Based on the information available, if he hadn't been shot and were arrested instead, the charge would have probably been something like misdemeanor battery, which wouldn't usually even merit jail time. If the facts come out that the guy were being wailed on, he may have a good defense, but if it's a mere scuffle as described in the article, it's a long shot that should get pled down. This may seem unfair, but for public policy reasons the state prefers that scuffles don't escalate to shootings.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
This is the thing that people who complain about Adobe's effective monopoly on creative software don't understand. Ignore the fact that most Adobe products have advanced features that the competition can't keep up with; it's not important. What is important is that, for all its complexity, Photoshop is easy to use for someone who has never used it before. The basic functions are intuitive. And if you learn how to do something more advanced, the program is structured in a way that you also learn the underlying logic behind how it's set up so that the next time you try to do something similar it will be easy to understand what you're doing.
Then look at an atrocity like Gimp. It's ugly, the basic stuff is intuitive enough but try to do anything beyond that and it's like pulling teeth. It owes its existence to an army of volunteers whose lone motivation is that they think software should be free. And that's pretty much where it ends; as long as they can make a product that looks enough like Photoshop to fool people who don't actually use Photoshop for anything serious, they'll always have an army of Linux fanboys who will whinge about Microsoft's OS dominance and point to Gimp as a perfectly acceptable alternative. And if you dare point out its shortcomings (which indeed are many), then you'll get scolded for not understanding that they don't have Adobe money and who cares what it looks like as long as it works and if it doesn't work then did you really need that feature enough to pay $10/month for it?
What they don't understand is that Adobe doesn't make its money on selling software to people who use it to make internet memes. Its customer base is people who actually use it for a living, and have to stare at the thing all day and don't have the time to deal with a janky workflow. I'm not even one of those people but even as a hobbyist I don't want to spend my leisure time dealing with the frustrations of crappy software. If you want your product to gain market share you have to give people a reason to use it, and "It's free" isn't a reason for people to use it if they're using it for business purposes — the up-front cost might be zero, but that doesn't account for the additional time spent using it and the loss in quality. Doing nothing is also technically free.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
is mostly a choice. No one has to pull the pin.
Exactly. Which is why if you make a conscious effort to take care of yourself, you don't have to worry about being past-ripe. You can't do anything about the receding hairline, but as a balding guy, that's honestly not a big deal. I look much better with a #1 buzz than I ever did with hair, and the upkeep is much simpler. Not exactly a "make hay" story but there was this girl who turned me down in middle school who I hadn't paid much attention to in high school and completely lost contact with afterward. When I was about 24 I was in my local neighborhood dive bar and I hear my name and turn to face an unfamiliar blimp. She said her name and I was completely speechless. She looked like a shipping hazard. She told me I looked different (I had long-ish hair at the time) and I was tempted to say "speak for yourself" but wisely held my tongue. Not that a middle school girlfriend would have turned into a lifelong steady, or that 24 is the age when this happens, but man, the possibility is always there, and I felt like I had somehow dodged a bullet a decade earlier.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I can only comment about the Pittsburgh beer scene, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that it's similar to elsewhere, though the brewpub craze started a little earlier here than it did elsewhere. In 2005 there were only 4 breweries in Pittsburgh. One was Iron City, which is the local mass-market beer that competes with Miller, etc. One was Penn, which is larger than most micros and is terrible. There was Church Brew Works, which had the novelty of being in a church and also made terrible beer, and East End, which was relatively new but only slightly less terrible than the other 2 micros. In the 2010s a lot more micros started popping up, and most of them, like Hitchhiker and Voodoo, were heavy on the IPAs. The reason for this is that good beer is expensive to make and IPAs are the most forgiving; if something goes wrong there's less likelihood of having to deep six the whole batch. Now there are something like 78 breweries in the Pittsburgh area and while most are terrible, there are actually a few decent ones. Towards the latter part of the 2010s and into the 2020s, somebody realized that a lot of beer drinkers simply don't like IPAs and if they could make a decent lager or kolsch then somebody would drink it. Also, if your area is at a point of brewpub saturation then you can't get business by simply being the only game in town. As a result of this, most places, both here and elsewhere, seem to have diversified their offerings to a point that I wouldn't say there's any particular trend right now.
Sours and goses have certainly gained market share (I first had one at Allegheny City Brewing in 2016), but, much like IPAs, they're polarizing. I think part of the IPA trend has to do with the fact that most mass-market beers are under-hopped and people felt superior saying they liked something that was totally in the opposite direction, even if it was so bitter it blew out your taste buds to the point that you couldn't taste anything else. I would also note that there seemed to be a trend in wheat beers starting around 2006. Anyway, one trend I've noticed in recent years is the Hazy IPA (also called a New England IPA, though I was in Vermont last year and didn't see it on any menus). It gets its name because it's unfiltered and looks cloudier than most beers. It's similar to an IPA but has a lower alcohol content and is much less bitter, and has fruity, usually citrusy, undertones. But that's just one example. Any brewpub that's small enough that the to-go options are limited will usually have something that's a sort of house specialty and a few other things that are worth trying. It's usually a good idea to go when they aren't that busy; the bartenders in these places love beer and are very helpful about pointing you in the direction of something you'll like.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
As a resident of the same state as @FiveHourMarathon, I'm going to have to semi-agree on gambling. As a resident of the western part of the state, though, I might be able to add some additional perspective. In 2001 West Virginia legalized traditional slot and video poker machines at racetracks. "Video lottery machines" had been legal at racetracks for some time, but they weren't particularly popular. Now that they had traditional slot machines, these tracks began constructing large casinos around them. 2 of the 4 racetracks in the state happen to be in the Northern Panhandle, practically an exurb of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania had been talking about legalizing gambling for a while, most notably through various riverboat gambling proposals in the '90s, but these never went anywhere. It soon became obvious that everyone was simply driving to West Virginia to play slots, and local news outlets regularly did stories where they'd go to Mountaineer or Wheeling Island and point to all the PA plates in the parking lot and interview the owners, who invariably said that they'd go to casinos in their home state if they were only legal. Whatever their objections were before, state lawmakers couldn't ignore the amount of money that PA residents were taking to West Virginia, and the push was renewed.
One thing lawmakers were initially cautious about, however, was that they didn't want to actually become West Virginia. Once slots were legalized, a number of sketchy "hot spots" started opening up around the state. These were usually bars, tobacco shops, and the like that had a room with 4 or 5 slot machines. Gambling wasn't merely legal there, but unavoidable, and Pennsylvania didn't want the state to have casinos popping up everywhere. So gaming licenses were initially limited to existing racetracks and four stand-alone casinos, one of which had to go in Pittsburgh and two of which had to go in Philadelphia. (It should be noted that at the time, Pittsburgh was effectively getting two casinos, as The Meadows racetrack is less than an hour south, and there was no comparable facility in the Philadelphia area at the time.) The gaming commission was also going through a comprehensive review process to ensure that only the best candidates were awarded licenses. They also announced that the casinos would have table games, at which point the same news stations went back to West Virginia and interviewed their resident casino patrons, who invariably said that they would drive to Pittsburgh (or The Meadows) to play them. West Virginia soon amended their law accordingly.
The system actually worked pretty well for about a decade. Then, the US Supreme Court ruled that sports betting could be legalized in any state. PA legislators rushed back to Harrisburg in the wake of the decision. But while they were there they did a couple of other things. They also legalized online gaming, removed restrictions on resort licenses (around a while but always a minor player), and created a new category of "mini-casinos". I was always in favor of legalized gambling, but this just seems like a bridge too far. I know that going to a casino is no real barrier for a true gambling addict, but there's something disconcerting about the idea that you can blow your life's savings while lying in bed. As another user noted, legalized sports betting has made sports media even more unbearable than it already was.
I play in a couple fantasy football leagues, but I've always found fantasy sports programming useless at best and agonizing at worst (I can only care so much about the fantasy performance of players who aren't on my team, and there's nothing more annoying than watching a game for one guy). Now we've added betting programming to that, and it's become almost completely impossible. Does anybody watch sports purely for pleasure anymore? Some people's lives are apparently so boring that they need to gamble on games they wouldn't otherwise care about to make watching them more interesting. I have a slightly different perspective. Last Friday, I found myself watching the Eagles Packers game with two guys who had parlayed the spread with a bunch of prop bets. Normally I wouldn't care who won, but after listening to the vocal commentary about every play, ref call, etc. that had any impact on their wager, I became very invested in these guys losing their shirts.
Anyway, the situation in PA got even worse after various courts ruled that certain games that I don't entirely understand are actually skill games and thus exempt from gaming laws. I doubt these games involve skill to the extent that one can get good enough at them to win consistently, but they've been popping up in seedy convenience stores all over the state. There are also these virtual horse racing and football game things that I've seen in family friendly bar/restaurant type places, but I don't really understand these either. In 20 years we've gone from the lottery, illegal slots in dive bars, and the small stakes stuff that's allowed in private clubs to gambling seemingly being everywhere. You can't get through a news broadcast now without them playing an annoying ad for Rivers online where a jingle that sounds suspiciously like the diarrhea song from elementary school literally boasts that their app allows you to gamble while lying in bed.
The other thing @FiveHourMarathon mentioned that I might as well address while I'm here is aging. I'm a few years older than him and, honestly, make hay while the sun shines is bad advice. Most women who age terribly tend to do so in their late 20s or maybe early 30s. If they make it any longer they're usually stable for the long haul. I'd rather pick one up on the safe side of the divide than marry a girl right out of college without knowing that this nubile cutie has a ticking time bomb hidden away, that all of the sudden she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The em dash is probably one of the most misunderstood punctuation marks. It works well when a comma is too weak but a colon or set of parentheses is too strong. It puts a nice pause in the text — and it is underused in professional writing.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
the relevant category he belongs to is “black wide receivers in NFL” — before I look it up, would you kindly tell me if you think this category commits more crimes or fewer crimes than the average American?
Well, did you look it up? I'm not going to go through the criminal history of every black NFL wide receiver, but back in 2010 SI did a roundup of wide receivers with legal problems, and identified 6 (plus Chad Johnson, who didn't have any legal issues at the time other than being a diva, and Plaxico Burress, who wasn't in the league, and Marvin Harrison, who was investigated but never charged). Antonio Bryant wasn't on the list but I know he had legal problems while at Pitt so I'll include him, too. There were 178 receivers in the NFL in 2009. I didn't tease out the white receivers but there were so few of them that they didn't make a statistical difference. That gets us to a ballpark estimate of 4% of NFL receivers who have been arrested, at least in 2009. Considering the estimates of all Americans with a criminal record range from 30%–40%, I'd say that NFL receivers commit significantly fewer crimes than the average American. I'm sure there were receivers in 2009 with criminal records I didn't know about, but I doubt it's 10 times more. If you actually have statistics on this, I'm all ears.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
During the video it sounds like the cop says 6 over at one point, and according to an article I read Hill admitted to doing 55 in a 40 zone, which seems bad but is really only the bare minimum to attract attention, especially considering that he was on a 4 lane road. To put this into context, on I-78 outside of Pittsburgh state police will regularly do "crackdowns" where they're only pulling over people doing at least 80 in a 55. Either way, he wasn't charged with speeding, but Careless Driving, which is code for he was weaving in and out of traffic and probably going a little too fast. I got one of these myself once for making an abrupt lane change when I realized I was about to head up the wrong exit ramp. Not exactly something they normally impound the car over.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
There's a video on Youtube somewhere of Steven Pinker giving a lecture in the UK while on a book tour and during the Q&A one guy in the audience used the limited amount of time to tell Mr. Pinker how well-received his writing was. One can only assume that this guy's writing was complete shit.
I wasn't suggesting they'd ever consider benching Hurts for Pickett. The way he was playing made it look like he was eventually going to get injured.
Edit - If you think having a black QB is bad, try having a black coach. Tomlin haters not only call for his firing on an annual basis, regardless of what the team does, but also refuse to give him credit for his successes which include winning a Super Bowl. This is discounted because it was allegedly done "with Cowher's players", as though there's no GM or front office involved. Never mind that the team was 8–8 Cowher's last year. Never mind that literally every coach who won a Stanley Cup with the Penguins had less time with the team than Tomlin. This is logically contradictory with the other criticism they have, which is that the teams with Bell and AB should have done more. Isn't that admitting that the guy can put a team together? So either he's a bad team assembler or he's a bad game day coach. I could excuse this as just general sports fan stupidity but, in person, they always have to bring up that he was only hired so Dan Rooney could "walk the walk" when it came to his rule. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they think the Steelers would have been better had they hired the other leading candidate, Russ Grimm, who, as far as I know, was never considered for a head coaching position after that.
The other thing they like to bring up is that winning seasons don't matter if you don't go anywhere in the playoffs. They may have a point, but I suspect this is influenced by how long it's been since we've seen a truly dreadful season. If we were to start going 6–11 every year they'd long for the days when Tomlin was coach and there was at least a reason to watch. A couple years ago I actually did an analysis where I looked at every NFL head coach since Tomlin was hired and, giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt, graded every one as either better, the same, or clearly worse. 7 were arguably better, 10 were about the same, and 80 were unarguably worse. Some of those guys were obvious mistakes, but most of them were guys with good resumes who fans were excited about. Suggesting Tomlin should be fired after a winning season is one of the stupidest sports takes out there, and at least half of the people making the argument don't even pretend that it isn't because he's black.
One final dumb criticism that's always brought up is his lack of a coaching tree, as though this matters. The only one of his assistants this even applies to is Matt Canada — he inherited Bruce Arians and Dick LeBeau, Todd Haley had been a head coach previously, Keith Butler retired (and was in the organization longer than Tomlin), and Randy Fichtner would have stayed with the team if they hadn't been mesmerized by Canada. And if Arthur Smith coaches elsewhere he won't count as part of Tomlin's tree, either. It's a dumb argument anyway.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
She's not a crank herself, but she has the reputation of one among normie suburbanites who only hear about her media heel turn. The people I know who supported her in 2020 were all the kind of lefties who expressed support for Ron Paul in 2008. Fair or not, that's the reputation she has, and I don't think her endorsement of Trump moves the needle very much, if at all, considering those same lefty supporters I was referring to tend to despise Trump.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
They were snubbed for a reason. Trump getting their endorsement may get them part of the crank vote, but at the same time it labels them the party of cranks. If you look at the numbers, Biden won Pennsylvania in 2016 by winning over a lot of Democratic "legacy voters", mostly white working and lower class voters in rural areas, particularly in the western part of the state. Trump actually did even better among these voters in 2020, but he lost the state anyway, as his antics alienated suburbanites who typically voted Republican; Biden gained 80,000 votes in Allegheny and Montgomery counties alone, which is more or less the margin of victory. An endorsement from Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Jr. does nothing to get you these voters, and, if anything it turns them off even more. Especially in light of the fact that a guy like RFK is well left of the Democrats on most matters, but is given a pass by Republicans because he hopped on their anti-vaccine bandwagon. Acting like this does anything to move the needle is acting similarly about Harris getting Dick Cheney's endorsement.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Also, false alarm, the eagles are undefeated, despite their best efforts.
They are, but good God, if Hurts is going to play like that then you guys better get used to the idea of Kenny Pickett starting.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The entire state’s elections wouldn’t vanish overnight because the non-severability provision would also apply to the part of the comprehensive election reform law that repealed the prior election law.
I specifically said that they repealed it in a separate bill.
The statement that courts ignore severability is also absolutely wild, considering severability questions have been a major part of many Supreme Court cases (which is relevant, considering your example related to Congress). I’m not going to go trawling for more, but off the top of my head, this was the case for the NFIB case upholding Obamacare and the Reno case that effectively created the modern Internet by invalidating almost all of the Communications Decency Act.
I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but Stilip v. Commonwealth (905 A.2d 918, 970) goes into an extensive analysis of why courts aren't required to strictly interpret clauses relating to severability. It basically boils down to a separation of powers issue: The legislature can't dictate to courts how they will analyze a case. They can provide such statements to demonstrate intent, but that's as far as it goes. The US Supreme Court ruled similarly, IIRC, in a case where the statute said that the court would use strict scrutiny as the standard of review, and the court basically said that you can't legislate the standard of review. The cases you reference are just examples where the court applied severability provisions. There's no conclusive ruling stating that courts are strictly bound by that language when deciding severability questions.
The fact that it's an affidavit is suspicious in and of itself, as the right has, in recent years, acted as though anything in an affidavit must be The Truth (see all of the Sidney Powell affidavits). The most common use of affidavits is in litigation. If I want to depose someone, standard practice is to execute an affidavit that gives an outline of their testimony and the points I want to make. I'll submit that to opposing counsel, and if they have no objections, the affidavit will be admitted in lieu of the deposition. In this case, they're simply a tool for greater efficiency. Even if opposing counsel always wants a deposition (so they don't waive their right to cross examine), they're still useful in at least we have a concise outline of the major points counsel is trying to make.
They have other uses, mostly in property law where someone will execute an affidavit as to the property's history or something like that to make it easier for title researchers to get a picture of the land in the absence of formal recorded documents. Again, they're a tool, but since they aren't deeds, etc., they aren't dispositive and can be challenged in court.
I don't know what purpose an affidavit like this serves. Is there pending litigation? Even still, affidavits only attest to facts, not opinions. ABC is allowed to be biased. It may be a political scandal but there's no legal cause of action here. Even if this is completely legitimate I don't see the purpose for it; it's not like Trump can sue ABC for being biased. And even if they could, and this guy was their star witness, I wouldn't execute the affidavit like this. It draws conclusions rather than simply state facts. I doubt this is real, because no lawyer would draft this.
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