Canadian_watcher wrote:compared2what? wrote:Canadian_watcher wrote:
I shouldn't have said "arrested" I should have said detained / brought in for questioning.
I guess they might, if they had other grounds. But there would then be (a) other grounds; and (b) a chance for that person to answer the questioning and go home without further consequences or permanent injury to his reputation, if innocent.
This is a good point. Why don't any of these people ever defend themselves? I'm not being faceitous - I don't remember ever seeing anyone ever come out and say, look here's me in college, here's me three weeks ago. I went to this high school and here's my yearbook or whatever.
Maybe they feel that people who do stuff like maliciously add their names to the metadata on photographs in order to incite hundreds of thousands of people to feel extreme, unreasoning hostility toward them aren't interested in proof.
Or maybe they want and need to protect the private process of grieving for their dead children and comforting their surviving ones from the intrusive emotional demands of a clamorous horde of angry strangers whose hearts and minds are evidently too completely consumed by their own ill-defined grievances to be aware of anything or anybody else.
Or maybe they just feel that the responsibility for an unjustified outpouring of ugly emotion starts at its home.
But I don't really know. And I'm not sure I even understand your question.
Why do you feel entitled to an explanation? Meaning, literally, what did Robbie Parker or Gene Rosen do that requires a public defense? What did they do to you, or to anyone else, or to the public, exactly? And what did you or anyone else do that merits their offering you one?
however, see this happening when it's the other way around - take for example Tamerlan's/Dzokar's mother in the Boston incident. She's desperately trying to prove that the family isn't the family the press says it is. It's curious to me.
I feel for her, and for the whole family. But that's not equivalent. Once the state files an affidavit purporting to be able to make a detailed and specific case for guilt, they're accountable for making it. And if they fail to make it in good faith, there are potentially serious consequences for them as well as compensation for the accused, who isn't defenseless apart from his own resources.
That's frequently a joke when the defendant is indigent, unsupported and unknown. But that's not the case for Dzhokhar. So moot point.***
On the other hand:
Robbie Parker and Gene Rosen are being tried and convicted for being complicit in some vaguely defined and conceived conspiracy of evil on the basis of unsupported suspicons that wouldn't amount to more than implicit guilt by multiply remote association with other unproven bad acts even if it was valid and justified. By nameless and entirely unaccountable people who don't appear to be particularly qualified to judge other people by anything besides their facility for viewing all events through the lens of their pre-existing beliefs and assumptions about the world and the government.
Speaking of which, how'd that whole they-did-this-so-they-could-pass-restrictive-gun-laws thing that was the only justification anyone could offer for those shootings being a hoax pan out as an indicator of reliability and judicious assessment, anyway?.
I think we'd all like Gene Rosen, say, to prove he's not a spook.
Not me. I just want him to prove when he stopped beating his wife. I mean, first things first.
Seriously, Canadian_watcher. What entitles you or anybody to proof? That someone deceptively and anonymously added his name to a photograph in order to make the otherwise totally unsupported accusations against him appear legitimate? What does he have to prove? What?.
And it also wasn't about asking questions but about making claims. Without acknowledging that there might be other explanations. Or showing any sign of thinking about it. Or trying to check the accuracy of the allegation. Or....I don't know. Or anything. It wasn't questioning. In short.
I don't agree - i think that people introduced that subject because they thought about it, and I think that people resisted because they didn't want to.
And you base that on...?
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***ON EDIT: I'm not really that sanguine about the system. But my point is still good: Accountability exists and the means of enforcing it are made available to the accused when the charges are, at some minimal standard, in one case. And not in the other. Because once again, even though we're talking about the state, what you're defending/advocating for does less. .
