> The statute requires that a person knowingly circulate a false report. Combs says she was repeating what people told her. Gregory says she should have verified it with the hospitals first
It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual. The State Health Services or TCEQ would need to conduct that investigation and ask those questions. Both of those are state level agencies and would require significant momentum for a small town like Trinidad to trigger their attention. Ironically, it sounds like her social media post and the Streisand effect around it have triggered a TCEQ boil water notice and (likely) an investigation.
It is absolutely bizarre for a municipal or county law enforcement agency to take interest in this kind of thing. Texas Rangers and federal authorities should be looking at what triggered her arrest and whatever investigation came before it. That's assuming Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick, or Ken Paxton haven't totally compromised them at this point.
xp84 16 hours ago [-]
HIPAA or not, I assume the hospital wouldn’t tell a private citizen anything concerning anyone else, just on general principles. There’s no FOIA or something like that to force them to.
alsetmusic 8 hours ago [-]
But they don't have to disclose identifying information to say, "yeah, we've had more XYZ cases," or some other statistic. I'm not saying she should have to contact the hospital to exercise her right to free speech. I'm just saying that HIPAA doesn't mean healthcare institutions are a black box. I find that idea strange because I can immediately see how to ask questions to work around it while still protecting individuals.
themafia 22 hours ago [-]
> It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual.
If multiple people told her they were hospitalized then you could ask and answer about that in a general way without violating HIPPA. "Were the multiple cases of hospitalization due to water quality issues in the recent month?" As long as individual data isn't revealed then there is no violation. Which is obvious when you think about any generalized health statistics.
Which isn't to defend the Trinidad Police department, but to point out, if their concern was community awareness, then they could have asked any news outlet to do this same reporting as a matter of public interest.
Instead the police decide that it's better to use their limited resources to take a citizen into custody over factually ambiguous statements. We live in disappointing times so it's not hard to imagine a friend or colleague pressured the police into violating this woman's civil rights in an effort to shut everyone up about the sorry state of their infrastructure.
sbochins 19 hours ago [-]
Texas is a quasi fascist state at this point. I wouldn’t hold your breath about Greg Abbott coming to the rescue. This type of interaction with their constituents is common now.
iririririr 19 hours ago [-]
hippa is not that. well, it more than one person was involved.
it only prevents personably identifiable information to be shared with institutions that are not hippa compliant. nothing else.
Vaslo 22 hours ago [-]
Why would those politicians have compromised them? I wish my state had more politicians like Abbott.
margalabargala 22 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? Abbott and politicians like him are well known for disregarding the law for their own advancement/benefit. There's a long list of court cases they've lost if you want to look this up.
Your desire that more politicians behave this way doesn't make them not corrupt.
throwaway902984 22 hours ago [-]
Didn't greg abbot spend a lot of time trying to make political hay out of persecuting a Muslim charity? Not from the state, so correct me if I am wrong.
mcphage 22 hours ago [-]
You wish your state had more politicians that disregarded the constitution?
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
I assume she will get a settlement, the city (the taxpayer) will pay for it and nothing else changes. There will be even less money for infrastructure repair and people will keep voting for the same people.
ryandrake 24 hours ago [-]
The point of the arrest was not to win. The point was to inconvenience the whistleblower, cause her grief, and maybe as a bonus make her spend a night or two in jail. Nobody doing this remotely believed that they wouldn't have to settle. They did it to show that if you speak out against them, they'll arrest and inconvenience you. So the next person who gets a thought to speak out might decide not to bother.
Same for the guy in TN who got arrested for posting that anti-conservative meme. Nobody thought they would win, but they want to make everyone else think twice about criticizing a particular political side.
john_strinlai 24 hours ago [-]
>They did it to show that if you speak out against them, they'll arrest and inconvenience you. So the next person who gets a thought to speak out might decide not to bother.
some of my students have expressed that they wish they could get arrested for a meme and walk away with a couple hundred grand.
i, of course, have told them that they would be playing with fire. but they are still viewing it as a potentially life-changing payday. so, for some subset of people, they might be having to opposite of the desired chilling effect.
ryandrake 24 hours ago [-]
Yea, an arrest on your record, even if you're acquitted and/or get a settlement for police wrongdoing, can still mess you up. There are employers and landlords who will ask you / check whether you were ever arrested, regardless of the outcome of the arrest. Mere involvement with Law Enforcement puts a permanent black mark on your record and can interfere with basic things for the rest of your life.
vitally3643 23 hours ago [-]
You must not have ever been poor because the idea of several thousand dollars right now completely obliterates any notion of "maybe less money later, possibly"
Particularly if you're young and poor.
Humans don't really work the way you're implying from your armchair.
borski 23 hours ago [-]
I was poor (as in, well below FPL), the son of two immigrants, for many years.
That’s precisely how I thought - getting involved with a “get money now” scheme was not worth the “no money ever again” it often came with. I watched friends do things like this and face consequences later.
Not to discourage anyone from protesting, but not all poor people think alike.
NikolaNovak 19 hours ago [-]
I was a poor refugee, but different people take such situations differently. For my family, it was a stern adherence to law and rules, an extreme low risk approach. For others, granted, it was dismissal of law and rules. Certainly, being poor and hungry made us even more averse to conflicts with the law / police / society / system. Again, others drew opposite lessons and approaches.
alsetmusic 8 hours ago [-]
> stern adherence to law and rules, an extreme low risk approach.
Were any of the people who took risks also subject to deportation upon arrest? I expect they were all USA citizens with less to lose. Genuinely interested if this is not the case, because this seems very explainable if that aspect is different between you and them.
rolandhvar 23 hours ago [-]
There's poor and stupid, and then there's poor and smart
lmaoguy 20 hours ago [-]
I can tell you which one is significantly more common
esseph 13 hours ago [-]
Ironically some of the smartest people I know aren't at all wealthy.
fc417fc802 23 hours ago [-]
How would being arrested for memeing be a black mark? It would be a hilarious talking point that I would be more than happy to chat with a landlord, employer, or literally anyone else about. Anyone who would hold that against you is pretty much a textbook example of a bad person (banal evil or some such).
dgoldstein0 23 hours ago [-]
Some won't ask for details and just reject. Which of course sucks but they may view it as less risky than trying to evaluate the details and make a judgement call.
That said if you do go into circumstances - "I did it to get arrested and get a payout" could also be viewed as a red flag - says "may screw you/the company for money". Probably not the employee / tenant / etc you might want.
pibaker 20 hours ago [-]
I think you are underestimating how anal the entire job and rental application process has become. You won't have the chance of talking to anyone. An automated system runs your name against a database before any human is involved in the process. And why would any human bother talking to someone with an arrest history when there are probably tens, if not hundreds, of applicants who are just as competent as you?
justech 23 hours ago [-]
In a perfect world, sure. But realistically, people don't dig into the context. They see an arrest on your record and move to the next guy. Either that or, some automated system sees you checked 'yes I was arrested before' and filters you out automatically.
tardedmeme 22 hours ago [-]
You don't even get a chance to explain it. Their background check software sees that you were arrested once, and discards your résumé.
cebert 23 hours ago [-]
I could see firms doing background checks not caring about those nuances or taking the time to consider why the individual was arrested.
daheza 22 hours ago [-]
Especially if it’s just an AI review
Ekaros 21 hours ago [-]
I could see less savoury companies(which is nearly all of them) to see potential whistle-blower like this as a risk in future. Most people are bad people after all. Especially those in hiring roles.
borski 23 hours ago [-]
You’d be more than happy to chat. They often won’t give you that chance.
michaelmrose 21 hours ago [-]
For low level jobs the biggest risk is being automatically filtered out early in the job application process then dying in a cardboard shelter on the sidewalk
buzzerbetrayed 23 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t rent my house to someone who has been arrested for memeing. It’s an unnecessary risk with absolutely no upside for me. What happens when they decide to meme on their landlord?
john_strinlai 23 hours ago [-]
>What happens when they decide to meme on their landlord
nothing? maybe a laugh? it’s a meme not a murder
LocalH 22 hours ago [-]
Then you're part of the problem.
Convicted, sure. Merely arrested, with no conviction? Then you'd be an asshole
fc417fc802 21 hours ago [-]
> Convicted, sure.
Convicted ... for memeing? I think that would still be absurd. I don't think landlords should be denying tenants for obviously unrelated matters.
xp84 16 hours ago [-]
When you’re basically trusting a multi hundred thousand dollar asset to someone basically on faith, you basically are looking for a zero drama situation, so I can see why a lot of “out of the ordinary” activities would raise a red flag for potential landlords. I would not have an appetite to even be a landlord because people suck and will destroy things just to spite you. And in the tenant situation, good luck suing the tenant for it, they don’t have any money to pay. You’re lucky in some states if you can evict them within a year for not paying rent. So yeah, it’s not a surprise that landlords are interested in choosing VERY boring tenants to rent to, not activists.
esseph 13 hours ago [-]
If your house became a meme house, you might actually make more money off renting it.
pavel_lishin 5 hours ago [-]
I have an arrest on my record. It has never, to this day, impacted my life negatively. (Aside from the actual experience, including paying legal fees - I certainly didn't get a settlement out of it.)
dylan604 23 hours ago [-]
Then make part of the settlement having the arrest expunged.
throawayonthe 4 hours ago [-]
to clarify, is this a 'record' in the abstract sense of 'something that can be known about your past' (someone googles your name and a news article mentions arrest) or some kind of literal record with arrest records etc accessible (publicly? by employers?) in the US?
alexanderh 22 hours ago [-]
This is really far from true, unless you're talking about federal security clearances.
worik 22 hours ago [-]
> Yea, an arrest on your record
What an awful data environment
The fact that you were arrested, charged even, if not convicted should not be discoverable by third parties
Uncivilised
jMyles 22 hours ago [-]
> The fact that you were arrested, charged even, if not convicted should not be discoverable by third parties
That's how people get disappeared in failed states.
It's perfectly fine to force the state to clearly declare whom they have detained and their reasons for doing so. We also need to recognize that arrests are very often preposterous (or worse, retaliatory) and not hold it (absent other information or further proceedings) against people.
FireBeyond 19 hours ago [-]
... subsequent to release.
The fact that someone is in custody should be always available. But it should not be up to Joe Random to pay $11 to my State Patrol to find out why I was arrested last week, especially if I wasn't charged.
jMyles 19 hours ago [-]
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the nature of information propagation in the universe, but how do you propose to require the state to declare whom it has detained one week, and then to make that information unavailable the following week?
(and even if you were able to change the nature of reality as you suggest, why accommodate the state's desire to deny such an action after-the-fact?)
A1kmm 13 hours ago [-]
I think regulating the retention and processing of information is entirely feasible even in circumstances where the information is initially available for a different purpose. This is in fact the legal status quo in Europe as well as many non-EU countries.
Now there is no absolute guarantee that, if someone has the information, and they are legally required to delete it or not use it, that they don't break the law. But it works in the case of balancing the need to avoid people being disappeared against preventing dragnet misuse of arrest data by employers and landlords. Maybe organised crime employers would systematically break the law if maintaining a database illegal, but they also probably don't mind people with arrest records.
beepbooptheory 24 hours ago [-]
As someone who lives this reality (arrest but no conviction), it's in practice not really so bad. It's never come up with a landlord. The last time it came up was after being accepted to grad school and I had to fill out a form about it. You do just carry with you the knowledge that if you ever get pulled over the cop can pull it up about you and have reason to hassle you more.
raddan 6 hours ago [-]
Given that you’re posting on HN and went to grad school, I wonder whether you’ve worked a minimum wage job. Most of those applications ask whether you’ve ever been arrested. It’s been a long time since I worked one of those jobs, but I remember that all of the applications I filled out back then asked me. Thankfully the answer was no.
Working minimum wage jobs is demoralizing on multiple levels. The jobs are often physically exhausting (I unloaded trucks and stocked shelves among other things). But the worst part is that the entire system treats you with disdain. You walk away with the strong feeling that nobody gives a shit. I knew that I wanted and could have better things but many of my coworkers internalized a different message.
theendisney 22 hours ago [-]
Not sure, would you (as a cop) help them with content creation?
zephen 23 hours ago [-]
"I'm going to hassle you because my brethren have hassled you before."
Yup, sounds about right.
antonvs 21 hours ago [-]
They don't call it a brotherhood for nothing.
zephen 19 hours ago [-]
My choice of wording was not an accident.
22 hours ago [-]
cybercatgurrl 20 hours ago [-]
this is gonna have chilling effects on free speech in america. people are gonna be thinking twice about criticising authorities after a pattern of this happening on a national level is established
alsetmusic 8 hours ago [-]
If you let them make you think twice before posting, you're letting them win.
I'm not saying that I don't think twice about how to word things or that I'm some sort of free speech warrior. I'm saying that when I make concessions, I feel bad about it. Try to be brave and keep speaking openly about your contempt for the people in charge.
tamimio 21 hours ago [-]
Which is why I believe criminal records should only be kept for serious crimes (killing, etc.), anything less, the record gets deleted after few months completely. Otherwise, just as you said, the black mark on the records are worse than serving a whole year in prison, and can be used to exploit others.
FireBeyond 19 hours ago [-]
While there are a few other ways it can happen, my state likes to say that certain criminal records are available for expungement.
One of the criteria: "The person has reached 120 years of age."
Cool.
kimixa 23 hours ago [-]
And the ones who get the "payday" are just the ones we've heard of.
How many people didn't get media attention, don't have the ability (time/money) to sue, lost that case, and those where the intimidation and "punishment" was successful?
At some level the people doing this intimidation believe it'll be successful. Is that from experience?
borski 23 hours ago [-]
Yes; it works. That’s why they do it.
alsetmusic 8 hours ago [-]
> some of my students
When I was young, I might have thought this way for sure. I didn't expect to have a future anyway and this would have potentially been a cool level-up that I'd seize.
Responding to someone in another comment that happened after the parent, when I was young and had no real prospects (despite coming from a well-off but not super wealthy family), I had a lot of mental health issues and emotional issues that didn't seem possible to resolve and it wasn't realistic to think I'd finish a college degree or start a career. Imagine being a well-educated white male in the USA who expects to be trapped working retail forever while peers get white-collar jobs and you can see the appeal. Fortunately, decades of hard work and treatment can make a world of difference, but that's not anything you can bet on when you're young and desperate.
ponector 24 hours ago [-]
Students are young and often have nothing to lose, aside from missing opportunities.
borski 23 hours ago [-]
Opportunity cost is a real cost.
robocat 22 hours ago [-]
I have some alternative timeline SpaceX shares available - they are very valuable.
Are you interested in buying some from me using your money on this timeline?
NoMoreNicksLeft 22 hours ago [-]
>so, for some subset of people, they might be having to opposite of the desired chilling effect.
Those ones are the easiest though, are they not? Someone going into it with convictions (or even chickening out because they are aware of the consequences) have consolation and inner reserves. Some kid angry that he can't get a six figure salary at age 22 fresh out of college might regret it as soon as they're in the clink, but if that doesn't get them... the 6-10 years of lawyer-wrangling and stress certainly will. All for the payday to not even go half as far as they think... it'll pay down some bills, there won't be any sports cars.
cybercatgurrl 19 hours ago [-]
not with that attitude there won’t! straight into investments, don’t touch for a few decades and she’ll be right. then again most people desperate for money don’t think like that unfortunately
obsidianbases1 24 hours ago [-]
Mostly this
> They did it to show that if you speak out against them, they'll arrest and inconvenience you. So the next person who gets a thought to speak out might decide not to bother.
That needs reiterating because an uncomfortable amount of people think this sort of thing simply doesn't affect them.
cortesoft 23 hours ago [-]
This is why the saying “you can beat the rap but you can’t beat the ride” exists.
They know the charges won’t stick, they are using the process of fighting the charges itself as the punishment.
efitz 23 hours ago [-]
The process is the punishment.
eduction 24 hours ago [-]
Much like peter thiel’s lawsuits against Gawker, which included funding a guy who dubiously claimed to have invented email and sued Gawker for pointing out this was absurd.
That's not a fair assumption in the current political environment.
Those who have lots of money will get fair hearings under the court, but those with less power might not. There's a reason people like Elon Musk write into agreements that they must be settled in particular Texas courts.
aliasxneo 1 days ago [-]
I don't think that's the full picture. Activist judges have been a problem for awhile now, and it seems to be mostly influenced by ideology rather than purely money.
majormajor 23 hours ago [-]
It's certainly obviously true that one political party used "we will find judges who will overturn one particular court case" as a fundamental part of their campaigning for decades...
alsetmusic 8 hours ago [-]
People are disagreeing, but I think they're seeing the word "activist" and assuming a different meaning than what I think OP meant. I suggest reframing as "politically motivated" judges. I don't think it's difficult to deny OP's comment using those terms.
epistasis 24 hours ago [-]
You can't really venue shop for an "activist" judge but you can for one who will side with the powerful over the weak. Your comparison is itself not a full picture.
24 hours ago [-]
cjkaminski 24 hours ago [-]
That's quite a claim. You need to cite your sources for this one, if you want to be taken seriously.
aliasxneo 24 hours ago [-]
I'm not sitting on a precompiled list I can just drop into a comment. But I do have a pretty hard rule about investing more effort than someone else already has. So this would be an unequal trade for me to go spend the rest of my Saturday building a list for someone who wrote two sentences on the internet.
To add slightly more flavoring, I think its a pretty reasonable view to assume that the massive fracturing happening in the American political scene is most likely affecting the judicial branch. Perhaps you disagree. Take it as an opinion. Don't take it seriously. Whatever floats your boat.
antonvs 21 hours ago [-]
How about this: what's an example of an activist judge, according to you?
Bonus question: do you enjoy watching Fox?
zephen 19 hours ago [-]
I'm not OP, but Matthew Kacsmaryk is definitely an activist judge, no matter what the fuck Fox news thinks of him.
stirfish 22 hours ago [-]
I read somewhere that aliasxneo eats turds with a fork and knife. I'm not sitting on a precompiled list of sources, and it would be unfair to ask me to spend my Saturday building a list for someone whom I read eats turds with a fork and knife.
I won't say what aliasxneo does to add slightly more flavoring, but I think it's a pretty reasonable to assume it's gross and lazy.
aliasxneo 20 hours ago [-]
Kudos for taking the time to type all of that out lol. I clearly hit a nerve.
alsetmusic 8 hours ago [-]
OP said (in a sibling comment) that they aren't out to educate you by doing work for you. I'll give you quick examples: the judge in Texas who made the morning-after pill illegal. The supreme court (not worthy of proper noun anymore) overturning Roe vs Wade. Those two should be enough to detect a pattern and then easily verify whether that's a trend or not.
Actually, just checking out newsworthy rulings in Texas might take care of everything. The corruption there is astounding.
zephen 23 hours ago [-]
Anybody paying attention would know that there are several activist judges in Texas, feeding into the activist 5th circuit -- the only appeals court that has been very often overturned by the current supreme court for being too conservative.
Just in case you're being honest about your own ignorance on this matter, you can start here:
What’s an activist judge? Do you believe a judge can just rule whatever they want outside the framework of law?
zephen 19 hours ago [-]
So many do, starting with the supreme court lately.
snazypaparazzi 1 days ago [-]
I think everything is consistent with the perspective Texas represents toward the united states. It's fine if Texas doesn't implement reforms and fails. (There are 49 other states and may the ones that invent or adopt the best practices survive.)
smt88 1 days ago [-]
What do you think “fails” means exactly? How does Texas fail in a way that doesn’t harm innocent people in both Texas and the rest of the country/world?
Texas is larger (in both population and economy) than most countries in the world.
snazypaparazzi 1 days ago [-]
The Federal government enforces a few rules and then leaves things to the state and people. Obviously that means the state and people have no nanny to protect them from consequences of their decisions. If they drain their budgets fighting the civil rights of their population instead of fixing a problem then they might look like a lot of bankrupt municipalities. The US is obligated to let that happen.
1659447091 22 hours ago [-]
> If they drain their budgets
If Texas seceded from the US (which there is an actual movement here that gets loud with Democrat presidents) it would be the 8th or 9th largest economy in the world. The oil propping up the US while the US admin is/was grifting large paychecks for friends and family with the Iran thing -- comes from Texas. No one posting words online then getting payouts is going to bankrupt them.
snazypaparazzi 11 hours ago [-]
This kind of private income is not necessarily going to result in much improvement in municipality income, it can be used to reduce municipality income i.e. by political contributions to bills like California Prop 13.
I would be a bit skeptical that civil rights violations over the web would be enough to bankrupt many municipalities but I think it is the larger point of no State laws or system of accountability for any of the things an official may do.. Some officials choose liquid investments or select large civil projects, etc.
I'm very happy with the possibility of Texas leaving the union. Anyone who isn't Texan should focus on leaving Texas to its rights with acceptance of as little liability for Texas as possible. Texas can fix itself or not, not my problem.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
Not really. The federal government bails Texas out of the messes they get themselves into all the time (like their shitty power grid). Historically, Texas has often received more in federal funding than it contributes in federal taxes.
snazypaparazzi 1 days ago [-]
Sure, most of the South is in a hypocritical position of claiming to want the federal system I described, I want them to get it..
girvo 22 hours ago [-]
People are arguing with you as if you’re not making the same point they are, amusing
1659447091 21 hours ago [-]
> The federal government bails Texas out of the messes they get themselves into all the time (like their shitty power grid)
What (federal) bailout did Texas receive for the power grid? Unless something changed, Texas refuses fed help for the power grid because it wants to stay independent. Texas bailed itself out of the 2021 power grid failure with a couple/few billion dollars that Texas pays for. And while not great, Texas refused hundreds of millions in federal money to shore up flood protections, which came to light last year. Texas is not your typical southern state that takes and does nothing for itself.
Did you read those sources? The $60 million is not bail out type money specifically designed for getting Texas out of its "own messes", it's a grant from the Infrastructure bill [0].
Those links are a country wide program that benefits the whole of the US, which Texas is sill a part of. Even with a very generous acceptance of your proof, 60 million is nothing compared to the 2.5 billion Texas funded themselves to shore up their independent grid. They won't take bail out type money because they refuse to accept federal oversight that comes with it.
Yes. Both are shitty, but CA is at least shared with the national grid.
johnny22 23 hours ago [-]
it's that texas has it's own power grid. Other states tend to share grids.
alsetmusic 7 hours ago [-]
> Texas is larger (in both population and economy) than most countries in the world.
Californian here, we're bigger than Texas, laughed at the plight of ordinary people who voted for the terrible outcome they got when there was a massive winter storm and no electricity in 2021. Of course, I want good things for all people and I don't want anyone to suffer (this extends to my political enemies unless you're at the top making decisions that cause harm and then I'm flexible).
I honestly could see the hilarity of that disaster while still having compassion for the people on the ground. They voted based on social disagreements rather than competency and reaped the rewards. That said, there are very few actual competent leaders in USA government regardless of professed party. It's just that Texas keeps re-electing grifters who are nakedly corrupt (Ken Paxton and Ted Abbot come to mind). The citizens of the state are so blind as to punch themselves in the face when they vote.
"Ted Cruz says leaving Texas during winter disaster was 'obviously a mistake' as he returns from Cancún"[0]
This is true, but Texans as a whole keep enabling these outcomes by both voting and supporting politicians that create it, as well as the state as a whole generally refusing aid.
It's one of the (many) reasons why I immediately moved out of the state when I had a chance. There's only so much that can be done when a lot of the states politics and environment is wholly self-destructive.
luxuryballs 24 hours ago [-]
fine for who? Texans? this is a silly mentality, no need to compare any other location, Texas as a standalone entity and the many stakeholders wouldn’t reasonably think it’s fine
snazypaparazzi 23 hours ago [-]
I'm supposed to force social darwinists to do what's best for them and make sure all policies prevent them from failing even if their goal is to invalidate those policies. Texas can make laws in its state legislature to prevent municipalities from creating liabilities. If they are good other states can adopt them. If they don't they can get bent which is also good for other states that make better choices to see benefit in making better choices. As the old curse goes, may they get everything they want.
rami3l 1 days ago [-]
I was immediately reminded of this old piece on water quality issues and local politics...
> An Enemy of the People [..] is an 1882 play [..] that [..] centers on Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who discovers a serious contamination issue in his town's new spas, endangering public health. His courageous decision to expose this truth brings severe backlash from local leaders [..]
This is the sort of comment that really enriches my life. Not only would I not have known about this author (I'm an english-only speaker), but I clicked onto another work ("Ghosts" in english, possibly more accurate as "Again Walkers" per the wiki), and this quickly grabs my interest:
"Because of its subject matter, which includes religion, venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, it immediately generated strong controversy and adverse criticism."
This author wrote stuff that broke norms with taboo. That alone doesn't make the work meaningful, but the accolades mentioned in the article make me think of him as a P.T. Anderson of his time. Thanks for the reference and link!
nnutter 24 hours ago [-]
It seems suspicious to me that they do not include the "offending" Facebook post. It seems like this is it, and it seems completely in the realm of journalism,
It's facebook post. Firefox's "copy text from image" gives this unformatted blob:
> Southern Belle Watch • 1h • 2 Author We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state. We are aware that not all areas of Trinidad are experiencing these issues. However, if your water is affected, your information could help identify patterns and ensure the problem is addressed properly. Please include: • Your area or neighborhood (no exact address needed • Photos or videos of the water (if available) • Dates and times the issue occurred • Any notices you may have received • Any health concerns you're willing to share Your information can help bring attention to the issue and support efforts to improve water quality for everyone. If you have information or your water looks like this, please send us a message Reply
jolmg 24 hours ago [-]
The domain only has an IPv6 address, so the link doesn't work on IPv4.
SV_BubbleTime 23 hours ago [-]
Seems like someone is aiming for the future.
tardedmeme 22 hours ago [-]
IPv6 is the present. IPv4 is the past. IPv8 is the future.
_zoltan_ 21 hours ago [-]
I disable v6 on all my networks.
tardedmeme 14 hours ago [-]
Many people are stuck in the past.
fc417fc802 23 hours ago [-]
To make matters worse, some of us filter fbcdn (among other domains).
sidewndr46 17 hours ago [-]
wouldn't they be guilty of the same crime?
infinite_spin 1 days ago [-]
I'm not a lawyer, but I think qualified immunity should not apply to constitutional violations. Giving an opt-out for those violations is antithetical to the very substance of our (US) constitution.
cortesoft 23 hours ago [-]
It literally is not supposed to. The ruling that is currently used for the precedent is Harlow v Fitzgerald, which states:
> The Court held that "government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known."
It seems to me that a reasonable person would know this violates constitutional rights if you arrest people that criticize the government.
It's weird to me that courts don't at-least attempt to review if the conduct was in good faith and plausibly reasonable given the facts know at the time.
The idea that officials aren't personally liable for mistakes made in good faith isn't bad.
But somehow the US tends to produce a lot of cases where good faith requires a lot of faith :)
Gibbon1 22 hours ago [-]
You would think using your office to file false charges against someone would be corruption just like using your office to embezzle money.
jazzypants 1 days ago [-]
Qualified Immunity should not apply ever. Period. No one should be above the law for any reason ever.
pdpi 1 days ago [-]
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Qualified immunity, as a concept, makes perfect sense. Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
The issue isn't qualified immunity itself, but rather the maximalist interpretation that seems pervasive in the US justice system, and the overwhelmingly broad definition of "honest mistake" that seemingly applies to the police, and the police alone.
jazzypants 1 days ago [-]
I think you would find that they would make far fewer illegal mistakes if they actually had to deal with the consequences of those mistakes.
Qualified Immunity didn't exist as a concept until the 1960s, and it was put in place to shield policemen enacting racist policies and corrupt cronies of Nixon.
I think we would see far fewer actions at all for fear of being sued.
jazzypants 1 days ago [-]
They could just buy insurance. You know, like doctors, lawyers, and a wide variety of other professionals that deal with liabilities in their field.
Regardless, the police get sued all the time anyways. It's just that the burden currently falls on the taxpayers.
drbscl 23 hours ago [-]
> They could just buy insurance.
> the police get sued all the time anyways. It's just that the burden currently falls on the taxpayers.
I fail to see how this would change anything other than increasing taxpayer costs further in the form of insurance profit margin.
infinite_spin 23 hours ago [-]
Malpractice insurance might increase the cost of policing, but I'd wager the malpractice itself is costing tax payers even more.
JuniperMesos 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring something like malpractice insurance for being a cop, but I'm genuinely not sure how that would affect the cost of policing compared to the status quo (and I'd be skeptical of any research attempt to estimate it without actually trying it). But I'm also not necessarily opposed to spending more taxpayer money on policing in return for better policing.
vajrabum 23 hours ago [-]
Make the police officer like the Doctor pay for their own insurance.
NoMoreNicksLeft 22 hours ago [-]
The doctor's own fees just rise. You, the patient pays for it. There's this 10-20% of revenue parasite on the entire industry, and you're paying that while complaining that prices are too high.
Now you'll do the same thing with police, as if police wages and salaries won't increase proportionally, but 20 years from now you'll wonder why that costs so much. It's bizarre how economically imperceptive everyone is.
jazzypants 22 hours ago [-]
No, the people who can't afford their insurance wouldn't be able to work as policemen. Ideally, they would also eventually lose a license of some sort-- just like the doctors who commit malpractice.
We are already paying increased taxes to deal with all the lawsuits we already incur because these people know they are above the law and they think it isn't their problem.
NoMoreNicksLeft 22 hours ago [-]
I explained the problem in very simple terms. But your rebuttal is "nuh uh, here are all the details that irrelevant that I think are really cool".
The people still pay for it. They pay for all the settlements, plus they pay another big slice on top for the insurance industry (since they do nothing for free). Then cops do the same thing, and lobbyists push on the insurance industry to allow them to keep breaking heads because "you can't do this job without breaking heads once in awhile". And nothing changes, except to get worse.
I'm sure the idea seems really clever to you. I mean, you invented it. Or maybe just read a blurb about it on reddit once.
In the medical world, insurance premiums have never forced an incompetent quack out of the field. They have their licenses pulled by the board (but only after some small number of tragedies). And you can't use that model on police either, because there's a big difference between a professional/academic who must study and train over a decade to even be able to operate independently, and grunts that you need in large numbers to go insert themselves into fights, troubles, and disputes. It's very likely that if there is a sophisticated, intelligent solution to our problems with police you wouldn't even like the proposal upon hearing it. I will search the rest of this thread for things you criticize, since that might be a good signal that it's worth reading.
canyaread 5 hours ago [-]
The parent poster is suggesting the cop needs to pay for the insurance. Cop salaries aren't going to rise to meet the most uninsurable person, eventually a cop will be unable to afford their insurance based on their salary.
You, in fact, argue in support of their idea -- there's lots of people who want to be cops. That keeps salaries lower, making a ballooning insurance cost impossible for a bad cop to continue to pay.
switchbak 23 hours ago [-]
Change the incentives, you change the behaviour. Granted, this might have lots of unintended consequences, many of them bad.
array_key_first 23 hours ago [-]
As it currently stands the police already do almost nothing. Any kind of push back or critique of the police leads to inaction by the union. Meaning, police twiddle their thumbs and take your tax money because they can. It's a very effective technique from them to get what they want, because ultimately we need them and we can't actually force them to work.
voidfunc 23 hours ago [-]
Good. The police do too much as it is.
Every interaction with the police is a dice roll to see if someone lives or dies.
switchbak 23 hours ago [-]
Hey I have plenty of reasons to distrust the police - more than most, but this statement is a bit over the top.
kortex 22 hours ago [-]
I agree with voidfunc. A lot of what police do could be offloaded to other occupations. A lot of needless deaths could be prevented if there were more rungs on the escalation ladder between "do nothing" and "folks with guns show up". Like the same vibe as firefighters and EMS but just like for mild social disruption.
1 days ago [-]
wvenable 24 hours ago [-]
"Doctors and nurses will make mistakes in performing medicine. Making those doctors and nurses personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive."
How many other jobs can we apply this to?
ceejayoz 24 hours ago [-]
And does it apply to, say, my tax returns?
Terr_ 23 hours ago [-]
AFAIK the IRS has historically been more, er, disinterestedly nitpicky as opposed to disproportionately vindictive.
More "you say X we say Y here's your options you are Z days over with a W% rate", rather than "Ah hah! $50 dollars error, time to make an example outta this poor bastard."
jshier 23 hours ago [-]
Generally, yes. If you make a mistake in your return, the IRS is perfectly happy to accept an amended return, and you pay (or get paid) the difference (perhaps with a penalty fee). They usually only go after you criminally if they think you committed fraud.
wildzzz 22 hours ago [-]
Where I work, we follow quality management systems to ensure mistakes don't happen. Of course they do, people are human, but the point is to find why something happened and enact a corrective action to ensure it doesn't happen again. Is it a personnel problem that requires more training? Do procedures need to be updated to cover something new? Do we need new tools? Sometimes it really does boil down to a personnel issue where someone has been instructed, trained, and given all of the tools they need yet they still error. That's when management steps in and either transfers or fires them. That same system needs to be applied to police. When camera phones came out, suddenly cops were faced with people recording them. We have had many lawsuits where the cops have been told that people are allowed to film them and there are plenty of department manuals that state the same. At this point, a cop should never have the excuse of qualified immunity for violating someone's right to film because how much it's been harped on and any that do should be personally liable.
isityettime 24 hours ago [-]
> Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
Or maybe police training should be longer than a coding bootcamp... in some countries, police work is an undergraduate major and the programs are quite competitive. Similarly, there are countries without qualified immunity as a policy, and it doesn't seem to fundamentally undermine policework there.
girvo 22 hours ago [-]
Other jobs don’t require this kind of shield. Instead, they require insurance.
Qualified immunity isn’t qualified, and it’s a horrific distorting function on your society, as officers get to act with impunity.
They’re given more and more power, and less and less responsibility.
mpalmer 1 days ago [-]
Qualified immunity, as a concept, makes perfect sense. Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
Your own usage of "honest mistake" is overwhelmingly broad, so it's not at all clear what alternative definition of qualified immunity you are advocating.
Nasrudith 20 hours ago [-]
We should have the exact opposite of qualified immunity - committing a crime under the color of authority as a serious felony in itself.
joquarky 16 hours ago [-]
Require them to get liability insurance like other important professions.
balderdash 1 days ago [-]
yup, i think a majority of people would agree with you, so why hasn't it happened? I think the answer is that elected representatives are more beholden to public sector unions than their constituents.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Texas: Famously pro-union
balderdash 24 hours ago [-]
yeah texas is definitely not pro-union - except that the only public sector unions that are allowed are for police and firemen... with Texas police unions contributing the the 3rd highest amount to politicians (behind CA and NY) - so its a real thing.
The problem with that is sometimes it's not clear if something is a constitutional violation. Here, it was clear, but in general you don't want to do that.
Something that should be exempt from qualified immunity are actions that go against court orders.
Good on the grand jury for not indicting this ham sandwich.
cortesoft 23 hours ago [-]
They always knew the charges wouldn’t stick. The punishment they were handing out was she had to spend a night in jail and spend money on a lawyer.
They already dished out the punishment, so they don’t care that it was dismissed.
sidewndr46 16 hours ago [-]
Bonus points if they can ransack the person's car or house searching for evidence of the crime. They could also seize all weapons and cash they find since those were used in the commission of a crime.
gblargg 23 hours ago [-]
"The punishment is the process."
odie5533 23 hours ago [-]
The common saying is "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride".
cindyllm 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pfdietz 1 days ago [-]
That town now has not just a bad water problem, but a large free speech lawsuit problem.
Maybe they could dock the Chief's retirement account?
conductr 24 hours ago [-]
Should be a “cut and dry” decision just like how he described the arrest
p_j_w 1 days ago [-]
The chief of police stands proudly by his decision. This will happen again.
nkrisc 1 days ago [-]
Yikes, they’ll have to arrest most of the current federal administration if they ever set foot in Texas if that post meets the criteria for that particular law. That’s going to cause problems.
dpe82 1 days ago [-]
Oh don't worry, the enforcement is extremely selective.
kibwen 1 days ago [-]
Never heard of Ken Paxton, I suppose?
dylan604 23 hours ago [-]
ahem, that's senator paxton /s
skrebbel 1 days ago [-]
who?
skrebbel 12 hours ago [-]
C’mon folks, I can’t really be the only one on HN who’s never heard of this Paxton chap. If you’re going to namedrop someone at least add some context.
LocalH 22 hours ago [-]
"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law."
EchoReflection 20 hours ago [-]
I predict it won't stand.
“We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state.”
that is pretty solidly "free speech", not defamation, not allegations of anything, not "libel"‡
‡libel
noun
1. a published false statement that is damaging to a person's reputation; a written defamation
Example: he was found guilty of a libel on a Liverpool inspector of taxes
-defamation
-defamation of character
-character assassination
2. (in admiralty and ecclesiastical law) a plaintiff's written declaration
verb
1. defame (someone) by publishing a libel
Example: the jury found that he was libelled by a newspaper
----
But law can be complex and "injustices" happen all the time, so we'll see...
thekingshorses 1 days ago [-]
This week, there was two different settlement close to $800K related to someone posting and getting arrested about what charlie kirk said.
This woman shouldn't settle for anything less.
p_j_w 1 days ago [-]
Do you have information on this? I’m curious to see.
Everything is an accident, an anecdote, only trust the state with your authoritative quantitative data! There's surely no philosophical issues with that! There's no issues with definitional authority!
LocalH 22 hours ago [-]
All arrests that don't result in a conviction should be completely expunged.
wbshaw 6 hours ago [-]
"We have received reports..." Is factually true and plausible given the accompanying photo and statements from city officials.
vsgherzi 1 days ago [-]
This is dumb af. There should be an extremely small subset of things you can say online that get you arrested. This is definitely not one of them. I hope she she’s and it’s sets a precedent for cases after. I’d hate to see a ruling like the UK. While is vervently disagree with some of the awful things they post they shouldn’t be arrested for it.
marsxr360 12 hours ago [-]
I would love to hire myself as legal professional in cases like this.
In fact I've already started collecting evidence on a no-win-no-fee basis.
Ready for action
yowo 8 hours ago [-]
Wow, many dictatorships wouldn't mind this level of speech.
24 hours ago [-]
xtiansimon 22 hours ago [-]
> "[Chief Charles] Gregory says she should have verified it with the hospitals first."
What is a hospital going to tell a member of the public with HIPPA laws? As police chief he has a great deal of deferred power. Officials will talk to him. Private citizen making an inquiry is going to get crickets. Heck--have you ever been walking down the street or walked outside your home and found a police or fire department cordon? Asked what's going on and the fire department won't respond to your questions and the police department will tell you to go back in your house or move along.
One point of Devil's Advocate. Social media, YouTube and mobile phone video has created a very difficult situation. People who are untrained in reporting are making wild statements. And Evil People are undermining good faith everywhere (news, politics, public safety, health, citizenship, the rule of law).
I've never ever seen so many legal cases taking this strong line against free speech in my lifetime. These are extraordinary times.
metalman 24 hours ago [-]
I once stated to one of my fathers aqaintences in the local town council that I was considering refuseing to pay my water bill on the grounds that water is defined as a coulorless, odourless liquid, and what comes out of my tap is niether, his imediate request was "can I use that?"
and so, not too long after we got a significant upgrade to the towns water, which is now of a much better quality, withmore upgrades all the time.
rimeice 21 hours ago [-]
All the criticism the UK and European countries get from American tech billionaires for censorship…then…this. No one anywhere could argue this post is some sort of hate speech to even mildly cover their arses.
dudul 21 hours ago [-]
The difference with Europe may be that in this case the charges have already been dropped. Not saying it's great, but at least it was stopped, and she may sue for reparations. I don't think the "hateful posts" cases in the UK or Germany end up like this.
jdjdndj2838ejd 12 hours ago [-]
Looks to me like a pre-emptive fence electrification
“Don’t share concern about water quality online, or else”
worik 22 hours ago [-]
> The city’s mayor, Dennis Haws, told reporters the pipes date back to the 1950s
How long should water pipes remain useful? Am I outrageously naive to think more than 75 years?
Perhaps they have been doing no maintenance....
mvdtnz 1 days ago [-]
How does a town in the richest nation in the history of the planet not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?
beAbU 1 days ago [-]
Presumably because they are spending their money prosecuting people complaining about bad water.
Money does not grow on trees, you know!
umvi 1 days ago [-]
Water is handled at the city level, not the federal level. If you have incompetent local leadership, this can happen. Incompetent local leaders can (and have!) bankrupted their cities.
azinman2 1 days ago [-]
Texas also is all about no/low taxes.
array_key_first 23 hours ago [-]
Theoretically. In practice, the total tax burden in Texas is above average for US states.
SJMG 1 days ago [-]
You must not own property in Texas
nxm 1 days ago [-]
Meanwhile in Flint Michigan…
frankharv 8 hours ago [-]
Thankfully most cities were not stupid enough to buy lead lined pipes.....
owenversteeg 23 hours ago [-]
The US is a huge country. In general it has excellent water; the US averages better than the EU. The Environmental Performance Index is a report that measures many things, and they have a handy section where they measure DALYs lost from sanitation and drinking water. For this section the US scores 96, within a few points of Switzerland (100), Sweden (97), Austria (96), Denmark (94), Belgium (93) and comfortably above the Netherlands (91), France (88), Poland (80), Czechia (79) and Japan (78.)
There are isolated incidents of poor water quality in each of those countries, and especially in small towns of eight hundred people in rural areas, but generally speaking, clear drinking water that is free of bacteria is standard.
lysace 23 hours ago [-]
On the other hand the US often relies on relatively crude chlorination to reach those levels, which those 'top' European countries don't. They instead put a strong emphasis on protecting the source water and then treating it via ozone, UV, biofiltration and slow sand filtration.
The taste of chlorinated water generally isn't tolerated.
owenversteeg 22 hours ago [-]
The US isn't a monolith and neither is Europe. Overall, yes, the US uses more chlorine than Europe, but Spain and France both have _minimum_ water chlorination levels (about 0.2-0.3 mg/L depending on the regional situation) and France has no cap on max chlorine, which is very different from the US, where you can drink completely unchlorinated water in countless places around the country and there is a nationwide cap of 4 mg/L. For example NYC (average 0.5 mg/L and many places with zero.)
lysace 21 hours ago [-]
Oh, but you were comparing the US to the top-ranking European countries: "For this section the US scores 96, within a few points of Switzerland (100), Sweden (97)"
Also: It's a bit of a culture shock to be served soft drinks made from very obviously chlorinated water in e.g. California (one of the richest regions in the world). Is it a taste that people just learn to live with? I don't understand how this is tolerated.
JuniperMesos 16 hours ago [-]
Where in California? Where I am in the bay area, we have quite good tap water. San Francisco famously built the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite national park in the early 20th century, which delivers excellent water from the granite Sierra Nevadas to supply the city and a substantial fraction of the water supply in other parts of the bay area. Hetch Hetchy water needs minimal treatment.
On the other hand, I remember being shocked as a small child visiting Disneyland by how nasty the water from the water fountains there tasted, and in general the tap water in the dryer southern part of the state isn't as good (LA also has its own famous systems for getting drinking water from parts further east).
lysace 4 hours ago [-]
My most recent such experience was in San Diego.
1659447091 21 hours ago [-]
> How does a town in the richest nation [...] not have the resources to get clear drinking water
It's a large country. Texas is a very large state, larger in size than France.
Texas recently voted to approve a $20 billion investment in water.
>How can X in the richest nation in the history of the planet be...
I've honestly grown absolutely sick of this type of comment as I get older. If you're not from the states, it's maybe understandable, but throughout my life most of the folks with me on the left that make these statements are completely ignorant of how their own government works and just assume "shit should be taken care of" without actually having to put any work in. It drives me crazy.
The vast majority of our electorate doesn't pay attention to politics, and then votes for feel-good measures (often very expensive), and almost universally avoid actual long-term net positive investments, like urban density and avoiding bond issuances wherever they are impractical.
As you see small towns welcoming -- even courting -- data centers while everyone in the town hates and protests them... yea, it's almost certainly because the town is broke, and the only folks who realize it are the city officials.
>How does a town ... not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?
Many, many, many, towns in America are functionally insolvent! The amount of cost it takes to maintain our road/sewer/water/refuse/emergency/energy systems is very often more than the tax revenue that the town can bring in. This is literally the entire point of the Strong Towns organization: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt...
Rebuilding a water system is one of the most significant municipal finance events that a city will have to deal with, and more and more cities across the nation are requiring federal bailouts; e.g., the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi,_water_cr....
It's just so frustrating as someone who cares about municipal finances that American cities' sustainability that most people think that it's just supposed to work itself out when cities are just lighting money on fires... often to the cheers of the electorate who voted for it.
mvdtnz 20 hours ago [-]
Well I'm not from the states and I stopped reading at that point. If you're "absolutely sick" of this conversation don't participate in it, but if you're going to you should do so politely and in good faith, not starting with a tirade like that.
scoofy 19 hours ago [-]
If my tone is off-putting, I apologize. I'm currently in San Francisco, living through a combine federal, state, and local politics budgetary nightmare. Here, even the most politically passionate folks seem to struggle with basic civics (especially who has the authority to impose taxes and how) and most don't understand municipal finance, which has real world consequences. The "how can San Francisco not afford X with all the tech/ai money here" sentiment is prevalent. Currently, it is the potential collapse of the Bay Area public transit system.
It can all be exasperating. If you're curious about why a nerd like me can be so exasperated and scared by all this, I'd suggest a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast: https://youtu.be/OXKAfcgl7eU
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
We have more than enough resources, but a lot of people don't want to pay taxes to clean it or restrain corporations from polluting our water supply inn the first place. I'm guessing that plenty of people in this woman's own town were cheering Trump's slashing of the EPA's budget and deregulating clean air and water. Just this week the administration announced plans to kill off or delay limits in the amount of PFAS in the drinking water. They argue it's too expensive to limit or filter the poison but then give no-bid contracts out to their unqualified friends for tens of millions of dollars and spend a trillion bombing other countries for no reason so it's pretty clear where the priorities are and it isn't with us.
stevepotter 24 hours ago [-]
You are mixing local and federal politics. This is a town issue and would likely have happened regardless of who occupied the Oval Office
jyounker 23 hours ago [-]
The poster was pointing out the irony that the town's residents support pro-water pollution policies at the national level.
[Given that Henderson county went for Trump by 30 points, the probably also support pro-pollution policies at both the local and state level too.]
balderdash 1 days ago [-]
complete and utter incompetence by local elected officials. If one of the richest towns in America (average home price of >$2m) can do it - just imagine how bad it can be in "average" towns...
Cuz all that wealth belongs to about 14 people and everyone else gets police harassment and poison water
stefantalpalaru 24 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dfxm12 1 days ago [-]
The country is the richest, but the money is not distributed equally. One factor to keep in mind is that the state would rather give the richest man in the world tax breaks rather than make sure everyone has safe drinking water.
sirsinsalot 23 hours ago [-]
Because the US is a third world country cosplaying as a developed nation. Much like their president is a corrupt and morally bankrupt fool cosplaying as a politician.
It doesn't matter in the US. Just pretend.
ninjahawk1 21 hours ago [-]
I see so many shitpost twitter and facebook pages that claim actually harmful misinformation, absolutely disgusting levels of picking one and ignoring the other. Especially when given the evidence now, she was sharing legitimate information.
userbinator 24 hours ago [-]
Apparently people here will also censor speech that doesn't align with their narratives, but will complain loudly when speech that does is censored.
jimt1234 21 hours ago [-]
> [The mayor] acknowledged discussions about forming a committee to address the issue.
Sounds like concepts of a plan. So, they ain't doin' shit, except arresting people who speak up.
jmyeet 23 hours ago [-]
If you look at the legal system through the lens of "what benefits the wealthy or powerful?" you will more accurately guess what is going to happen and this goes from local issues such as this one all the way to the Supreme Court.
We just had the Broadview 6 case dismissed (with prejudice) this week. The Broadview 6 included former Chicago Congressional primary contender, Kat Abugazaleh. It was a bullshit set of charges for daring to protest an ICE facility. It was always going away but what was more disturbing is the prosecutorial misconduct [1]. The level of misconduct should rise to the level of disbarment. It will get referred to the bar and it'll probably be some slap-on-the-wrist sanctions however.
Prosecutors hold a lot of power and can make your life hell. They need to be held to a very high standard and any whiff of this kind of misconduct should forever bar you from being a prosecutor or a judge.
In this case the prosecutor basically engaged in witness tampering (effectively) with the grand jury proceedings and then tried to cover it up by redacting those parts of the grand jury transcripts. Those redactions basically amount to committing perjury, making false filings to the court under oath.
That's the lengths prosecutors will go to to crush protests. This goes equally for exposing incompetence, negligence or corruption by the town for mismanaging the water supply. This kind of overreach and misconduct is all too common.
Not surprised. Tarrant County told the US Marshals my styrofoam cooler with vomit in it was a “bomb threat” and charged me with use of a DEADLY WEAPON. Honestly. If my public defender hadn’t colluded with the Prosecution it wouldn’t be on my record today.
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better in the US. I’m a nonviolent cripple. Meanwhile a pardoned Jan 6 rioter just told a City Counsel “they should be strung up” and isn’t even being charged. Totally depends what team you’re on right now.
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
"Meanwhile a pardoned Jan 6 rioter just told a City Counsel “they should be strung up” and isn’t even being charged."
A great candidate to get some money from the lawfare fund.
Duwensatzaj 22 hours ago [-]
Is this from 2024? The news article mentioned a threatening note. Curious what it said.
6stringmerc 20 hours ago [-]
It said they were covering up abuse by a Deputy and that they should clean house old school out front of their HQ. There was a drawing of a noose on it. At no point did the note say anything about action being planned or threatened against them, only that they should do it themselves. I’ve got a copy of it if you’re interested to see the real thing. that.sam.cliff via the mail service of the company under alphabet.
Even my public defender read it line by line with me and admitted “there’s no threat here” but he’s a fat drunk dependent on them giving him work. He even told me about his “chats” with the Prosecution attorney to “negotiate” the plea deal. Totally rotten. Turned my life around since then but by no means was justice served…I keep my squeaky clean self out of the County as much as possible.
FWIW 70 inmates have died in custody in the past 5 years. Place is understaffed by 100+ officers.
computersuck 23 hours ago [-]
so much for democracy
dylan604 23 hours ago [-]
you forgot to date that properly, 20 January, 2025
goofy_lemur 17 hours ago [-]
100% of all law enforcement is criminal. Nobody makes laws except criminals
justsid 14 hours ago [-]
I don’t agree with the arrest and definitely not every law either, but this has got to be rage bait. I’m quite happy to live in a society with laws
varispeed 20 hours ago [-]
Where is JD Vance preaching about free speech like he did in the UK. Twat.
dudul 20 hours ago [-]
I got to admit, whoever at the town hall or whatever sent the cop to this woman's door really has some balls considering the color of the water. I feel like when this is the water your citizens get out of the faucet you should be busy doing something else instead of trying to jail people who complain about it.
nadermx 1 days ago [-]
Imagine the town of flynt getting arrested for having your government fail you.
22 hours ago [-]
jimnotgym 23 hours ago [-]
Saving this one for the next time an American says, 'In your stupid European country you can get arrested for simply saying something online'
dylan604 23 hours ago [-]
You left out the word legally. You can legally be arrested for simply saying something online. This was not a legal arrest. Small difference
wokkel 22 hours ago [-]
Semantics. The result is the same. The cause: no repercussions for missing the system that is in place is a bigger fallacy imho
dylan604 22 hours ago [-]
How is it semantics? If someone posts something in a land that has laws preventing it, then they know the possible repercussions. Someone posting something where it is legal gets arrested, they have recourse for the violations done to them.
It's so not the same, I'm straining to understand what you think the point you are making is.
geekone 20 hours ago [-]
I'd guess the semantics is along the lines of she was still arrested, and any legal recourse she may have will take time and money with likely zero repercussions to the police dept.
gib444 21 hours ago [-]
Doesn't 'legal arrest' have a specific legal meaning? How have you ascertained it was an illegal arrest? And what made it illegal?
SilverElfin 1 days ago [-]
The craziest part is the police defending this action as a “cut and dry” case. Meanwhile the lawsuit this woman just filed will hurt taxpayers and not the corrupt city officials and police that caused this. We need to ban all forms of immunity - none for cops, politicians, or judges. They need to be personally liable for their actions.
thot_experiment 1 days ago [-]
It's absolutely not the slightest bit crazy if you've paid attention to how cops behave at any point in the last history of the country. 100% agree about personal responsibility. You must understand that when the cops says that oversight means they can't do their job, that means they view their job as bullying, harassing and killing citizens, so yea, we should put a stop to that. 1312
ggoo 1 days ago [-]
> It's absolutely not the slightest bit crazy
Imo, speaking like this normalizes their behavior - it was crazy then and it's crazy now.
p_j_w 24 hours ago [-]
GP isn’t entirely wrong, our governing apparatus has made this something to be expected.
Bender 1 days ago [-]
I will not put the blame on the bobbies, that's too convenient. Someone had to order them to do this. That's who needs to be permanently ousted from all levels of government and their voting rights rescinded.
abofh 1 days ago [-]
Nobody has to order people to do anything if it's in their self interest. Yes corruption flows downhill, but until they flip, just following orders isn't a defense.
Bender 1 days ago [-]
Just following orders of course does not excuse anyone but I would rather not play whack-a-mole. That is how they expect us to play "The Game" by throwing one of their tools under the bus.
I prefer to work my way up the chain of command first and find the head(s) of the snake. Sure, punish the cops but don't let their corrupt chain of command play The Game otherwise we all just lost and the problem just repeats with new tools.
thot_experiment 23 hours ago [-]
Sure, I definitely agree that the highest impact work would be to shine the light on the corruption among the leadership and hold them to account, in all cases. However in the institution of American police the corruption is endemic.
queenkjuul 1 days ago [-]
Lmao no this is just American police chiefs doing what they love to do, guarantee this whole thing starts and ends in that PD
Bender 1 days ago [-]
From the PDF looks like Trinidad City Councilwoman Marie Bannister and Trinidad Police Chief Charles W. Gregory, may have started this. The Texas governor [1] needs to start pruning both up and down from there. Actually the governor should take full control of that county, oust everyone and fix the water problems.
[redacted] all police but don't pretend it isn't crazy. Not every country is like this.
Bilal_io 1 days ago [-]
I hear you, but there has to be some balance between full immunity and no immunity at all. The one thing that comes to mind is rich and powerful people, because they have unlimited resources to sue and ruin the lives of cops, judges and politicians, which would lead to these officials avoiding to hold rich and powerful individuals accountable even when they have committed crimes.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
I'm not a lawyer, but what you're describing sounds to me like an example of strategic lawsuits against public participation, just where the targeted "public" isn't a member of the general public but a public servant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
jghn 1 days ago [-]
These lawsuits need to be charged against the police pension funds, not the city coffers
Bilal_io 1 days ago [-]
I agree with you
mcdonje 1 days ago [-]
"would"? There is currently a disparity in how rich and poor people are policed.
I get the point that there should be some limited immunity so they can do their jobs. Debatable, but worth the debate.
The argument about the repercussions of eliminating immunity is logical. It just seems like one of those things where there are multiple factors contributing to undesirable outcomes, and that makes it necessary to talk to experts.
thot_experiment 1 days ago [-]
You're so close! Instead of patching the issue maybe let's solve the root problem of spiky power distribution among humans. We don't need to make sure cops have immunity to prosecute powerful people. We need to not have powerful people.
(though realistically speaking yes there's probably some level of procedural immunity that probably makes sense, similarly with business bankruptcies not ruining the people who start the business)
Ar-Curunir 1 days ago [-]
I agree with you, but most people aren’t ready to engage with basic anarchist arguments
thot_experiment 1 days ago [-]
I don't know if anarchy helps in this situation, I actually think you need robust social systems with buy in from citizens to prevent the natural accumulation of power. The fundamental problem is that there's a diminishing cost to acquiring power as you acquire power, this relationship should be inverted. The more powerful you are the harder it should be to get more powerful.
This is basic engineering, you don't want runaway feedback loops, the underlying system is unstable so we need a control system.
p1esk 1 days ago [-]
We need to not have powerful people
What does this even mean?
thot_experiment 1 days ago [-]
It's very easy to get started on this, you tax the shit out of people who have a lot of money because the old adage is true.
p1esk 23 hours ago [-]
Even if you could achieve that, there would still be rich people. Musk would still be a billionaire even if he had to pay 90% tax.
Plus, many powerful people in government are not that rich.
mcdonje 8 hours ago [-]
His ability to use his wealth to influence the government and the populous would be significantly reduced. There's a big difference between "rich" and "rich enough circumvent democracy."
queenkjuul 1 days ago [-]
Make currently powerful people less powerful and currently powerless people more powerful.
C'mon, HN users forgot how to think? Forgot to ask Claude?
p1esk 24 hours ago [-]
To do that you first need to become more powerful than those powerful people, right?
BrenBarn 23 hours ago [-]
Well, no, you just a need a coalition that collectively is more powerful.
p1esk 11 hours ago [-]
We already have two such coalitions within Congress: Republicans and Democrats.
How is that working out?
mcdonje 9 hours ago [-]
They got captured
BrenBarn 23 hours ago [-]
Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. You're spot on.
rightbyte 1 days ago [-]
Exactly which types of politicians, judges etc would be targeted by liability do you think? The unrighteous politicians? The judges in favour of those in power?
SilverElfin 24 hours ago [-]
I mean that when someone files a lawsuit to defend their civil/constitutional rights and wins, the penalty must be paid by the offenders and not taxpayers. For example the police who made the arrest and their supervisors.
nozzlegear 1 days ago [-]
In my experience (I sued my town for violating my first amendment rights), the city will have insurance that will cover any damages or settlement they have to pay. Their premiums will likely go up, but the impact to taxpayers is probably minimal.
sirsinsalot 23 hours ago [-]
Perhaps in the first order, but when premiums go up and go up across all policies due to the acceptability of litigation... Everyone pays eventually.
Its a bit like saying driving dangerously is OK because you have insurance. Until everyone drives dangerously and insurance is sky high for all.
That said, they should be sued.
crnkofe 24 hours ago [-]
This entire debacle weirds me out. Surely the police is aware of the water issues. They drink from the same tap as the locals do. What would a sane person call arresting people that publicly call out that your water supply is obviously contaminated?
georgeecollins 23 hours ago [-]
That would not necessarily be the case in my town. We have police who don't live in the county and fireman who don't live in the state. (Los Angeles)
casey2 1 days ago [-]
Even making them pay their own lawsuit insurance premiums would be enough to stop 90% of abuse.
No change will happen until cities stop using police revenue for discretionary spending.
z3c0 1 days ago [-]
Nazi Germany wasn't chaos, just a lot of people following "cut-and-dry" protocol.
thinkingtoilet 1 days ago [-]
Just more actions from free speech loving Republicans. Exactly like that guy in Tennessee who got $800k.
thiht 23 hours ago [-]
Is America great yet?
gigatexal 21 hours ago [-]
I hope she sues the city and everyone involved personally for tens of millions. This is insane. The water is brown. Do not drink it. Instead boil it. Posts that it’s bad. Get jailed. Wtf?
joshuafuller 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
breck 1 days ago [-]
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cboyardee 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
userbinator 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
stouset 1 days ago [-]
I would imagine it’s hard to be reminded of things that didn’t actually occur.
userbinator 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
stouset 1 days ago [-]
Indeed the brainwashing is still alive and well.
It’s been five years since multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been widely available and administered worldwide, and just about the worst common side effects have been a small risk of mild, self-resolving myocarditis in mRNA vaccines and an increased risk of clotting for adenoviral vector vaccines which have been either discontinued or fallen out of use.
Past those, there have been rare (~5 per million doses) cases of Guillain-Barré or anaphylaxis, but those are broadly in line with risk profiles for other vaccines.
Despite repeated insistence from chronically-online nutjobs, the sky has not fallen, and the well-known, well-published, and well-studied risks of these vaccines remain drastically lower than the risks of actually contracting the disease they inhibit. Which is the whole goddamn point.
userbinator 14 hours ago [-]
~5 per million doses
Now multiply that by how many people got it, and you see the number is not small at all.
Note: I have been vaxed myself.
1 days ago [-]
galangalalgol 1 days ago [-]
To make it more explicit. Censorship is always bad. There is no censorship for the good of the people. If fewer people had gotten vaccines because we didn't censor claims it was dangerous, maybe more people would have died. Maybe hospitals would have shut down from crowding. We can't know for sure. But because that was censored, amongst other things, the trust in government dropped even lower. This in turn is allowing populists from both parties to win and local state and national levels. Populists always hurt the economy and damage individual freedoms. There is no substitute for trust, and it is a generational project to rebuild it. Censorship of any speech errodes it and harms all of us more than letting people who are probably wrong speak.
thinkingtoilet 1 days ago [-]
Provide proof of someone getting arrested for a social media post.
userbinator 1 days ago [-]
Did the ones posting about the water provide "proof" also?
queenkjuul 1 days ago [-]
Rtfa
nilslindemann 1 days ago [-]
Lying is not free speech.
GaryBluto 1 days ago [-]
It very much is.
nilslindemann 1 days ago [-]
It may be a necessary mechanism to prevent harm, but it is not free speech. Whenever you are lying you are not a free being, because you need to invest a part of your energy to uphold the lie.
BowBun 21 hours ago [-]
what the..? This sounds like Facebook mumbo jumbo. Free speech has nothing to do with your state of freedom (i.e. being a 'free being'). Being 'free' also literally means choosing on what to spend your energy. Complete nonsense!
breck 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
gdulli 1 days ago [-]
We should call this obsession "longest Covid". Certain people will be on this until they die.
charcircuit 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gblargg 23 hours ago [-]
When not being arrested is your only singular concern, this is a good approach.
ShinyLeftPad 22 hours ago [-]
Someone is speedrunning getting a thread to comparison with you know who's Germany in you know what years...
samrus 23 hours ago [-]
This country got where it did because people refused to follow the bullshit your peddling
johnea 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
userbinator 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
opengrass 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pstuart 1 days ago [-]
This is a textbook free speech issue, versus not being able to post your conspiracy theory on some web site which has nothing to do with free speech.
Lionga 1 days ago [-]
Who decideds what is free speech and what is a conspiracy theory?
For a long time saying tabaco creates lung cancers was basically a conspiracy theory and saying it is healthy was free speech.
jyounker 24 hours ago [-]
Since at least the 70s everyone knew that it caused lung cancer. It's just that industry spending prevented anyone from doing something about it, in the exactly the same way that we've been seeing with global warming.
pstuart 19 hours ago [-]
Again, free speech as commonly used, is about Constitutional protection from the government trying to curtail and/or punish individual's speech.
Prior to the internet, the "free speech" you're thinking of was down to whoever owned the printing press of interest.
The OP was about the governmentpunishing a woman for criticizing their public utility.
markoman 1 days ago [-]
This type of treatment of citizenry by the State of Texas, and its various (and especially red) localities should be all one needs to see of where conservatives (and Christian Naitonalism) will take our country in the future -- should they get their way. Republicans hope to enable just such a future by scaring Americans with made-up visions of transsexuals 'grooming' their children, yet they cleverly hide what awaits behind the curtain. The is the same curtain that hides why Israel is supposed to be so very, very important to the U.S. but not so much that we make them state #51. This is the magical (read: Biblical) rationale that the U.S. makes excuses for Israel's attack on its own USS Liberty in 1967.
Saying nothing of the future of abortion & contraception, U.S. conservatives base their worldview on sexuality & reproduction and seek to burden it with fixtures that we have already spent hundreds of year to free ourselves from. At the same time, they take their eye off the ball of keeping our country competitive in the world. How embarrassing it is now to have the Chinese president suggest that the U.S. is in decline and that it shouldn't get caught in a Thucydides Trap.
Yet, that is where Trump has put us indeed.
dlubarov 23 hours ago [-]
> the U.S. makes excuses for Israel's attack on its own USS Liberty in 1967.
It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.
markoman 22 hours ago [-]
Except they don't happen all the time, because this incident killed 34 Americans & wounded 171. Is that not remarkable enough for a 'blue-ribbon' commission of investigation? If one of our European allies had done this, wouldn't a commission be held to review all the evidence and make a determination as to cause?
One needn't dig too deep to see there isn't too much wiggle room for mere misunderstanding. The nearly defenseless ship suffered 2 hours of withering attack by both waves of jets and torpedo boats; this with an American flag and its hull number in open display as it operated in international waters. The context was that this ship was an intelligence ship bristling with antennas and recording everything it could from the combatants in the ongoing six-day-war in 1967.
If there's any conspiracy, its how for years afterward whenever a congressman sought an investigation as requested by one of the family of those killed, the effort was silently killed despite its impact, over and over.
There are a lot of details involved and many actions to be assessed on both sides, but it should merit more than a Navy Court of Inquiry. When the captain of the ship received his Medal of Honor for saving his ship while injured, it was awarded to him by the Secretary of the Navy quietly at the Washington Navy Yard. The usual procedure is that the MoH be presented by the president in the White House in a ceremony. So, there's that.
dlubarov 15 hours ago [-]
> this with an American flag and its hull number in open display
Soldiers have uniforms with distinguishing colors/marks in open display, yet millions of soldiers have died by friendly fire. Lots of friendly planes have been shot down too despite IFF. No system for identifying friendly (or neutral) assets is foolproof.
samrus 23 hours ago [-]
The conspiracy theory is that it wasnt just friendly fire but an attempted false flag. Make if that what you will
jyounker 24 hours ago [-]
Well said.
pessimizer 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bfkwlfkjf 1 days ago [-]
Land of the free
nozzlegear 1 days ago [-]
This is newsworthy because it's a clear and flagrant violation of her rights.
Source: I was threatened with a lawsuit by my own town for criticizing them online, but the ACLU helped me counter sue and win a settlement for violating my first amendment rights.
poly2it 1 days ago [-]
Was the comment you are replying to edited?
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
I assume you mean "Land of the fee"
nxm 1 days ago [-]
Yea compared to Europe where you get arrested for memes
1 days ago [-]
markoman 1 days ago [-]
'Equal Justice Under Law'
6stringmerc 1 days ago [-]
World Cup Tourists about to get some “civic lessons” if they buy that too much, mmmhmmm.
snvzz 15 hours ago [-]
In Europe, this sort of thing is routine and doesn't make the news.
1 days ago [-]
rolph 1 days ago [-]
upon inspection of images pertaining to water at the point of usage, i declare said water to be Alaskan well water.
use a 5micron, and 1micron particulate filter in series, and it looks like it came from a bottle.
you would be well advised to test for heavy metals, esp. arsenic
most people here dont use softening or reverse osmosis
arjie 23 hours ago [-]
These small towns are often just armed HOAs and the law is usually secondary to administration whim. One would imagine that state and federal police are the weapons to bring to bear on them.
Rendered at 19:49:46 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual. The State Health Services or TCEQ would need to conduct that investigation and ask those questions. Both of those are state level agencies and would require significant momentum for a small town like Trinidad to trigger their attention. Ironically, it sounds like her social media post and the Streisand effect around it have triggered a TCEQ boil water notice and (likely) an investigation.
It is absolutely bizarre for a municipal or county law enforcement agency to take interest in this kind of thing. Texas Rangers and federal authorities should be looking at what triggered her arrest and whatever investigation came before it. That's assuming Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick, or Ken Paxton haven't totally compromised them at this point.
If multiple people told her they were hospitalized then you could ask and answer about that in a general way without violating HIPPA. "Were the multiple cases of hospitalization due to water quality issues in the recent month?" As long as individual data isn't revealed then there is no violation. Which is obvious when you think about any generalized health statistics.
Which isn't to defend the Trinidad Police department, but to point out, if their concern was community awareness, then they could have asked any news outlet to do this same reporting as a matter of public interest.
Instead the police decide that it's better to use their limited resources to take a citizen into custody over factually ambiguous statements. We live in disappointing times so it's not hard to imagine a friend or colleague pressured the police into violating this woman's civil rights in an effort to shut everyone up about the sorry state of their infrastructure.
it only prevents personably identifiable information to be shared with institutions that are not hippa compliant. nothing else.
Your desire that more politicians behave this way doesn't make them not corrupt.
Same for the guy in TN who got arrested for posting that anti-conservative meme. Nobody thought they would win, but they want to make everyone else think twice about criticizing a particular political side.
some of my students have expressed that they wish they could get arrested for a meme and walk away with a couple hundred grand.
i, of course, have told them that they would be playing with fire. but they are still viewing it as a potentially life-changing payday. so, for some subset of people, they might be having to opposite of the desired chilling effect.
Particularly if you're young and poor.
Humans don't really work the way you're implying from your armchair.
That’s precisely how I thought - getting involved with a “get money now” scheme was not worth the “no money ever again” it often came with. I watched friends do things like this and face consequences later.
Not to discourage anyone from protesting, but not all poor people think alike.
Were any of the people who took risks also subject to deportation upon arrest? I expect they were all USA citizens with less to lose. Genuinely interested if this is not the case, because this seems very explainable if that aspect is different between you and them.
That said if you do go into circumstances - "I did it to get arrested and get a payout" could also be viewed as a red flag - says "may screw you/the company for money". Probably not the employee / tenant / etc you might want.
nothing? maybe a laugh? it’s a meme not a murder
Convicted, sure. Merely arrested, with no conviction? Then you'd be an asshole
Convicted ... for memeing? I think that would still be absurd. I don't think landlords should be denying tenants for obviously unrelated matters.
What an awful data environment
The fact that you were arrested, charged even, if not convicted should not be discoverable by third parties
Uncivilised
That's how people get disappeared in failed states.
It's perfectly fine to force the state to clearly declare whom they have detained and their reasons for doing so. We also need to recognize that arrests are very often preposterous (or worse, retaliatory) and not hold it (absent other information or further proceedings) against people.
The fact that someone is in custody should be always available. But it should not be up to Joe Random to pay $11 to my State Patrol to find out why I was arrested last week, especially if I wasn't charged.
(and even if you were able to change the nature of reality as you suggest, why accommodate the state's desire to deny such an action after-the-fact?)
Now there is no absolute guarantee that, if someone has the information, and they are legally required to delete it or not use it, that they don't break the law. But it works in the case of balancing the need to avoid people being disappeared against preventing dragnet misuse of arrest data by employers and landlords. Maybe organised crime employers would systematically break the law if maintaining a database illegal, but they also probably don't mind people with arrest records.
Working minimum wage jobs is demoralizing on multiple levels. The jobs are often physically exhausting (I unloaded trucks and stocked shelves among other things). But the worst part is that the entire system treats you with disdain. You walk away with the strong feeling that nobody gives a shit. I knew that I wanted and could have better things but many of my coworkers internalized a different message.
Yup, sounds about right.
I'm not saying that I don't think twice about how to word things or that I'm some sort of free speech warrior. I'm saying that when I make concessions, I feel bad about it. Try to be brave and keep speaking openly about your contempt for the people in charge.
One of the criteria: "The person has reached 120 years of age."
Cool.
How many people didn't get media attention, don't have the ability (time/money) to sue, lost that case, and those where the intimidation and "punishment" was successful?
At some level the people doing this intimidation believe it'll be successful. Is that from experience?
When I was young, I might have thought this way for sure. I didn't expect to have a future anyway and this would have potentially been a cool level-up that I'd seize.
Responding to someone in another comment that happened after the parent, when I was young and had no real prospects (despite coming from a well-off but not super wealthy family), I had a lot of mental health issues and emotional issues that didn't seem possible to resolve and it wasn't realistic to think I'd finish a college degree or start a career. Imagine being a well-educated white male in the USA who expects to be trapped working retail forever while peers get white-collar jobs and you can see the appeal. Fortunately, decades of hard work and treatment can make a world of difference, but that's not anything you can bet on when you're young and desperate.
Are you interested in buying some from me using your money on this timeline?
Those ones are the easiest though, are they not? Someone going into it with convictions (or even chickening out because they are aware of the consequences) have consolation and inner reserves. Some kid angry that he can't get a six figure salary at age 22 fresh out of college might regret it as soon as they're in the clink, but if that doesn't get them... the 6-10 years of lawyer-wrangling and stress certainly will. All for the payday to not even go half as far as they think... it'll pay down some bills, there won't be any sports cars.
> They did it to show that if you speak out against them, they'll arrest and inconvenience you. So the next person who gets a thought to speak out might decide not to bother.
That needs reiterating because an uncomfortable amount of people think this sort of thing simply doesn't affect them.
They know the charges won’t stick, they are using the process of fighting the charges itself as the punishment.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peter-thiel-email-inventor_n_...
YC and its founders worship him like a hero.
Those who have lots of money will get fair hearings under the court, but those with less power might not. There's a reason people like Elon Musk write into agreements that they must be settled in particular Texas courts.
To add slightly more flavoring, I think its a pretty reasonable view to assume that the massive fracturing happening in the American political scene is most likely affecting the judicial branch. Perhaps you disagree. Take it as an opinion. Don't take it seriously. Whatever floats your boat.
Bonus question: do you enjoy watching Fox?
I won't say what aliasxneo does to add slightly more flavoring, but I think it's a pretty reasonable to assume it's gross and lazy.
Actually, just checking out newsworthy rulings in Texas might take care of everything. The corruption there is astounding.
Just in case you're being honest about your own ignorance on this matter, you can start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Kacsmaryk
Texas is larger (in both population and economy) than most countries in the world.
If Texas seceded from the US (which there is an actual movement here that gets loud with Democrat presidents) it would be the 8th or 9th largest economy in the world. The oil propping up the US while the US admin is/was grifting large paychecks for friends and family with the Iran thing -- comes from Texas. No one posting words online then getting payouts is going to bankrupt them.
I would be a bit skeptical that civil rights violations over the web would be enough to bankrupt many municipalities but I think it is the larger point of no State laws or system of accountability for any of the things an official may do.. Some officials choose liquid investments or select large civil projects, etc.
I'm very happy with the possibility of Texas leaving the union. Anyone who isn't Texan should focus on leaving Texas to its rights with acceptance of as little liability for Texas as possible. Texas can fix itself or not, not my problem.
What (federal) bailout did Texas receive for the power grid? Unless something changed, Texas refuses fed help for the power grid because it wants to stay independent. Texas bailed itself out of the 2021 power grid failure with a couple/few billion dollars that Texas pays for. And while not great, Texas refused hundreds of millions in federal money to shore up flood protections, which came to light last year. Texas is not your typical southern state that takes and does nothing for itself.
https://casar.house.gov/media/press-releases/news-federal-go...
Those links are a country wide program that benefits the whole of the US, which Texas is sill a part of. Even with a very generous acceptance of your proof, 60 million is nothing compared to the 2.5 billion Texas funded themselves to shore up their independent grid. They won't take bail out type money because they refuse to accept federal oversight that comes with it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...
Californian here, we're bigger than Texas, laughed at the plight of ordinary people who voted for the terrible outcome they got when there was a massive winter storm and no electricity in 2021. Of course, I want good things for all people and I don't want anyone to suffer (this extends to my political enemies unless you're at the top making decisions that cause harm and then I'm flexible).
I honestly could see the hilarity of that disaster while still having compassion for the people on the ground. They voted based on social disagreements rather than competency and reaped the rewards. That said, there are very few actual competent leaders in USA government regardless of professed party. It's just that Texas keeps re-electing grifters who are nakedly corrupt (Ken Paxton and Ted Abbot come to mind). The citizens of the state are so blind as to punch themselves in the face when they vote.
"Ted Cruz says leaving Texas during winter disaster was 'obviously a mistake' as he returns from Cancún"[0]
0. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/ted-cruz-cancun-powe...
It's one of the (many) reasons why I immediately moved out of the state when I had a chance. There's only so much that can be done when a lot of the states politics and environment is wholly self-destructive.
> An Enemy of the People [..] is an 1882 play [..] that [..] centers on Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who discovers a serious contamination issue in his town's new spas, endangering public health. His courageous decision to expose this truth brings severe backlash from local leaders [..]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Enemy_of_the_People
"Because of its subject matter, which includes religion, venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, it immediately generated strong controversy and adverse criticism."
This author wrote stuff that broke norms with taboo. That alone doesn't make the work meaningful, but the accolades mentioned in the article make me think of him as a P.T. Anderson of his time. Thanks for the reference and link!
https://scontent.fcps4-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/6654022...
https://media.reclaimthenet.org/2026/05/N35Bezr1GdxG.jpg
It's facebook post. Firefox's "copy text from image" gives this unformatted blob:
> Southern Belle Watch • 1h • 2 Author We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state. We are aware that not all areas of Trinidad are experiencing these issues. However, if your water is affected, your information could help identify patterns and ensure the problem is addressed properly. Please include: • Your area or neighborhood (no exact address needed • Photos or videos of the water (if available) • Dates and times the issue occurred • Any notices you may have received • Any health concerns you're willing to share Your information can help bring attention to the issue and support efforts to improve water quality for everyone. If you have information or your water looks like this, please send us a message Reply
> The Court held that "government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known."
It seems to me that a reasonable person would know this violates constitutional rights if you arrest people that criticize the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlow_v._Fitzgerald
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-imm...
The idea that officials aren't personally liable for mistakes made in good faith isn't bad. But somehow the US tends to produce a lot of cases where good faith requires a lot of faith :)
Qualified immunity, as a concept, makes perfect sense. Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
The issue isn't qualified immunity itself, but rather the maximalist interpretation that seems pervasive in the US justice system, and the overwhelmingly broad definition of "honest mistake" that seemingly applies to the police, and the police alone.
Qualified Immunity didn't exist as a concept until the 1960s, and it was put in place to shield policemen enacting racist policies and corrupt cronies of Nixon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
Regardless, the police get sued all the time anyways. It's just that the burden currently falls on the taxpayers.
I fail to see how this would change anything other than increasing taxpayer costs further in the form of insurance profit margin.
Now you'll do the same thing with police, as if police wages and salaries won't increase proportionally, but 20 years from now you'll wonder why that costs so much. It's bizarre how economically imperceptive everyone is.
We are already paying increased taxes to deal with all the lawsuits we already incur because these people know they are above the law and they think it isn't their problem.
The people still pay for it. They pay for all the settlements, plus they pay another big slice on top for the insurance industry (since they do nothing for free). Then cops do the same thing, and lobbyists push on the insurance industry to allow them to keep breaking heads because "you can't do this job without breaking heads once in awhile". And nothing changes, except to get worse.
I'm sure the idea seems really clever to you. I mean, you invented it. Or maybe just read a blurb about it on reddit once.
In the medical world, insurance premiums have never forced an incompetent quack out of the field. They have their licenses pulled by the board (but only after some small number of tragedies). And you can't use that model on police either, because there's a big difference between a professional/academic who must study and train over a decade to even be able to operate independently, and grunts that you need in large numbers to go insert themselves into fights, troubles, and disputes. It's very likely that if there is a sophisticated, intelligent solution to our problems with police you wouldn't even like the proposal upon hearing it. I will search the rest of this thread for things you criticize, since that might be a good signal that it's worth reading.
You, in fact, argue in support of their idea -- there's lots of people who want to be cops. That keeps salaries lower, making a ballooning insurance cost impossible for a bad cop to continue to pay.
Every interaction with the police is a dice roll to see if someone lives or dies.
How many other jobs can we apply this to?
More "you say X we say Y here's your options you are Z days over with a W% rate", rather than "Ah hah! $50 dollars error, time to make an example outta this poor bastard."
Or maybe police training should be longer than a coding bootcamp... in some countries, police work is an undergraduate major and the programs are quite competitive. Similarly, there are countries without qualified immunity as a policy, and it doesn't seem to fundamentally undermine policework there.
Qualified immunity isn’t qualified, and it’s a horrific distorting function on your society, as officers get to act with impunity.
They’re given more and more power, and less and less responsibility.
https://www.pelrb.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Public-S...
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend...
Something that should be exempt from qualified immunity are actions that go against court orders.
Good on the grand jury for not indicting this ham sandwich.
They already dished out the punishment, so they don’t care that it was dismissed.
Maybe they could dock the Chief's retirement account?
“We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state.”
that is pretty solidly "free speech", not defamation, not allegations of anything, not "libel"‡
‡libel noun 1. a published false statement that is damaging to a person's reputation; a written defamation
Example: he was found guilty of a libel on a Liverpool inspector of taxes
-defamation -defamation of character -character assassination
2. (in admiralty and ecclesiastical law) a plaintiff's written declaration
verb 1. defame (someone) by publishing a libel
Example: the jury found that he was libelled by a newspaper
---- But law can be complex and "injustices" happen all the time, so we'll see...
This woman shouldn't settle for anything less.
Everything is an accident, an anecdote, only trust the state with your authoritative quantitative data! There's surely no philosophical issues with that! There's no issues with definitional authority!
In fact I've already started collecting evidence on a no-win-no-fee basis.
Ready for action
What is a hospital going to tell a member of the public with HIPPA laws? As police chief he has a great deal of deferred power. Officials will talk to him. Private citizen making an inquiry is going to get crickets. Heck--have you ever been walking down the street or walked outside your home and found a police or fire department cordon? Asked what's going on and the fire department won't respond to your questions and the police department will tell you to go back in your house or move along.
One point of Devil's Advocate. Social media, YouTube and mobile phone video has created a very difficult situation. People who are untrained in reporting are making wild statements. And Evil People are undermining good faith everywhere (news, politics, public safety, health, citizenship, the rule of law).
I've never ever seen so many legal cases taking this strong line against free speech in my lifetime. These are extraordinary times.
“Don’t share concern about water quality online, or else”
How long should water pipes remain useful? Am I outrageously naive to think more than 75 years?
Perhaps they have been doing no maintenance....
Money does not grow on trees, you know!
There are isolated incidents of poor water quality in each of those countries, and especially in small towns of eight hundred people in rural areas, but generally speaking, clear drinking water that is free of bacteria is standard.
The taste of chlorinated water generally isn't tolerated.
Also: It's a bit of a culture shock to be served soft drinks made from very obviously chlorinated water in e.g. California (one of the richest regions in the world). Is it a taste that people just learn to live with? I don't understand how this is tolerated.
On the other hand, I remember being shocked as a small child visiting Disneyland by how nasty the water from the water fountains there tasted, and in general the tap water in the dryer southern part of the state isn't as good (LA also has its own famous systems for getting drinking water from parts further east).
It's a large country. Texas is a very large state, larger in size than France.
Texas recently voted to approve a $20 billion investment in water.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/11/04/texas-elections-2025...
I've honestly grown absolutely sick of this type of comment as I get older. If you're not from the states, it's maybe understandable, but throughout my life most of the folks with me on the left that make these statements are completely ignorant of how their own government works and just assume "shit should be taken care of" without actually having to put any work in. It drives me crazy.
The vast majority of our electorate doesn't pay attention to politics, and then votes for feel-good measures (often very expensive), and almost universally avoid actual long-term net positive investments, like urban density and avoiding bond issuances wherever they are impractical.
As you see small towns welcoming -- even courting -- data centers while everyone in the town hates and protests them... yea, it's almost certainly because the town is broke, and the only folks who realize it are the city officials.
>How does a town ... not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?
Many, many, many, towns in America are functionally insolvent! The amount of cost it takes to maintain our road/sewer/water/refuse/emergency/energy systems is very often more than the tax revenue that the town can bring in. This is literally the entire point of the Strong Towns organization: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt...
Rebuilding a water system is one of the most significant municipal finance events that a city will have to deal with, and more and more cities across the nation are requiring federal bailouts; e.g., the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi,_water_cr....
It's just so frustrating as someone who cares about municipal finances that American cities' sustainability that most people think that it's just supposed to work itself out when cities are just lighting money on fires... often to the cheers of the electorate who voted for it.
It can all be exasperating. If you're curious about why a nerd like me can be so exasperated and scared by all this, I'd suggest a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast: https://youtu.be/OXKAfcgl7eU
[Given that Henderson county went for Trump by 30 points, the probably also support pro-pollution policies at both the local and state level too.]
https://observer.com/2010/07/the-collapse-of-east-hampton-ho...
It doesn't matter in the US. Just pretend.
Sounds like concepts of a plan. So, they ain't doin' shit, except arresting people who speak up.
We just had the Broadview 6 case dismissed (with prejudice) this week. The Broadview 6 included former Chicago Congressional primary contender, Kat Abugazaleh. It was a bullshit set of charges for daring to protest an ICE facility. It was always going away but what was more disturbing is the prosecutorial misconduct [1]. The level of misconduct should rise to the level of disbarment. It will get referred to the bar and it'll probably be some slap-on-the-wrist sanctions however.
Prosecutors hold a lot of power and can make your life hell. They need to be held to a very high standard and any whiff of this kind of misconduct should forever bar you from being a prosecutor or a judge.
In this case the prosecutor basically engaged in witness tampering (effectively) with the grand jury proceedings and then tried to cover it up by redacting those parts of the grand jury transcripts. Those redactions basically amount to committing perjury, making false filings to the court under oath.
That's the lengths prosecutors will go to to crush protests. This goes equally for exposing incompetence, negligence or corruption by the town for mismanaging the water supply. This kind of overreach and misconduct is all too common.
[1]:https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/broadview-6-trial-cance...
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better in the US. I’m a nonviolent cripple. Meanwhile a pardoned Jan 6 rioter just told a City Counsel “they should be strung up” and isn’t even being charged. Totally depends what team you’re on right now.
A great candidate to get some money from the lawfare fund.
Even my public defender read it line by line with me and admitted “there’s no threat here” but he’s a fat drunk dependent on them giving him work. He even told me about his “chats” with the Prosecution attorney to “negotiate” the plea deal. Totally rotten. Turned my life around since then but by no means was justice served…I keep my squeaky clean self out of the County as much as possible.
FWIW 70 inmates have died in custody in the past 5 years. Place is understaffed by 100+ officers.
It's so not the same, I'm straining to understand what you think the point you are making is.
Imo, speaking like this normalizes their behavior - it was crazy then and it's crazy now.
I prefer to work my way up the chain of command first and find the head(s) of the snake. Sure, punish the cops but don't let their corrupt chain of command play The Game otherwise we all just lost and the problem just repeats with new tools.
[1] - https://gov.texas.gov/
I get the point that there should be some limited immunity so they can do their jobs. Debatable, but worth the debate.
The argument about the repercussions of eliminating immunity is logical. It just seems like one of those things where there are multiple factors contributing to undesirable outcomes, and that makes it necessary to talk to experts.
(though realistically speaking yes there's probably some level of procedural immunity that probably makes sense, similarly with business bankruptcies not ruining the people who start the business)
This is basic engineering, you don't want runaway feedback loops, the underlying system is unstable so we need a control system.
What does this even mean?
Plus, many powerful people in government are not that rich.
C'mon, HN users forgot how to think? Forgot to ask Claude?
How is that working out?
Its a bit like saying driving dangerously is OK because you have insurance. Until everyone drives dangerously and insurance is sky high for all.
That said, they should be sued.
No change will happen until cities stop using police revenue for discretionary spending.
It’s been five years since multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been widely available and administered worldwide, and just about the worst common side effects have been a small risk of mild, self-resolving myocarditis in mRNA vaccines and an increased risk of clotting for adenoviral vector vaccines which have been either discontinued or fallen out of use.
Past those, there have been rare (~5 per million doses) cases of Guillain-Barré or anaphylaxis, but those are broadly in line with risk profiles for other vaccines.
Despite repeated insistence from chronically-online nutjobs, the sky has not fallen, and the well-known, well-published, and well-studied risks of these vaccines remain drastically lower than the risks of actually contracting the disease they inhibit. Which is the whole goddamn point.
Now multiply that by how many people got it, and you see the number is not small at all.
Note: I have been vaxed myself.
For a long time saying tabaco creates lung cancers was basically a conspiracy theory and saying it is healthy was free speech.
Prior to the internet, the "free speech" you're thinking of was down to whoever owned the printing press of interest.
The OP was about the government punishing a woman for criticizing their public utility.
Saying nothing of the future of abortion & contraception, U.S. conservatives base their worldview on sexuality & reproduction and seek to burden it with fixtures that we have already spent hundreds of year to free ourselves from. At the same time, they take their eye off the ball of keeping our country competitive in the world. How embarrassing it is now to have the Chinese president suggest that the U.S. is in decline and that it shouldn't get caught in a Thucydides Trap.
Yet, that is where Trump has put us indeed.
It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.
One needn't dig too deep to see there isn't too much wiggle room for mere misunderstanding. The nearly defenseless ship suffered 2 hours of withering attack by both waves of jets and torpedo boats; this with an American flag and its hull number in open display as it operated in international waters. The context was that this ship was an intelligence ship bristling with antennas and recording everything it could from the combatants in the ongoing six-day-war in 1967.
If there's any conspiracy, its how for years afterward whenever a congressman sought an investigation as requested by one of the family of those killed, the effort was silently killed despite its impact, over and over.
There are a lot of details involved and many actions to be assessed on both sides, but it should merit more than a Navy Court of Inquiry. When the captain of the ship received his Medal of Honor for saving his ship while injured, it was awarded to him by the Secretary of the Navy quietly at the Washington Navy Yard. The usual procedure is that the MoH be presented by the president in the White House in a ceremony. So, there's that.
Soldiers have uniforms with distinguishing colors/marks in open display, yet millions of soldiers have died by friendly fire. Lots of friendly planes have been shot down too despite IFF. No system for identifying friendly (or neutral) assets is foolproof.
Source: I was threatened with a lawsuit by my own town for criticizing them online, but the ACLU helped me counter sue and win a settlement for violating my first amendment rights.
use a 5micron, and 1micron particulate filter in series, and it looks like it came from a bottle.
you would be well advised to test for heavy metals, esp. arsenic
most people here dont use softening or reverse osmosis