alyaza

at least for this specific wording change: we can get around to this eventually, but it's on the backburner for now

there is a comment on the article to this effect, for what that's worth:

Angel

Hello Kris,

A lovely idea, but I won’t be visiting any public bathhouse any time soon. For many of us, the pandemic isn’t over. It’s contagious, airborne, and still killing and disabling people (including healthy people who have previously been infected and been ok) every day. Some ways to address the transmission of covid in bath houses can include rigorous HEPA filtration; required testing (using LAMP tests, for example, which are €10/test once you have the machine to read the results (another few hundred euro), and you can pool several people in one test); and maybe masks (I’ve read that they don’t work if they get wet, but I also read an article where someone tested several and went swimming with them. From memory, a regular Aura (~€1) worked nearly as long as an intentionally waterproof model). None of these are cheap by my standards. Not sure what you do about warts, foot fungus, and many other common bath house diseases.

Thanks, Angel

yeah, chiming in to say i think this is an acceptable case of US news in the World News section. obviously don't go overboard with edge cases, but there's really no dilution of World News from stories like this which do have some multinational significance.

this thread is a disaster from front to back, so it's being locked.

If you’re feeling that announced regret while reading this tame banter, then I apologize - but I would loved to have seen you in some of the larger forums I’ve moderated in the past - and they weren’t even about politics. The users there would have eaten you alive on the first day.

i'm... sorry that we generally like to treat our userbase as adults capable of basic introspection when they do something wrong or sanctionable, instead of immediately telling them to fuck off? but again this is way besides the point--which is, don't relitigate this, and stop going into every thread even remotely adjacent to Israel/Palestine and causing problems. your opinions are simply not important enough (or, in my opinion, well reasoned enough) to hear them out for an additional ten months beyond the ten months you've already been an issue.

i'm very uninterested in relitigating your temporary silencing for getting into aimless slapfights with people on here on this subject. don't bother bringing it up again. strictly speaking the silencing should probably also apply to this thread and just result in me deleting your comments without even responding to them like i am now--but i'm being generous in not doing that here and just calling them a cringe opinion you have the right to express. please do not make me regret that and start enforcing your temporary silencing elsewhere too.

one that very much isn’t as unambiguous as you’re trying to portray it as or have been led to believe through your little filter bubble (at least according to my little filter bubble - opinions, opinions, opinions).

no, it's pretty unambiguous both internationally (where Israel has been rebuked time and time again for its apartheid system and systemic discrimination and abuse against Palestinians) and morally (Israel's current conduct toward people in the West Bank in Gaza is almost one-to-one analogous to Jim Crow and apartheid, even ignoring Zionism and its contribution to the subject)--most people just don't care that much about a foreign conflict that doesn't affect them and a foreign ethnic group they can't directly do much to alleviate the plight of.

fundamentally, though, this is an "i can see discrimination with my own eyes, and settlers from Israel will literally admit to doing the discrimination in casual interviews" and an "i don't think 40,000 Palestinians[^1] are all Hamas militants who should be annihilated with indiscriminate bombing that has leveled the vast majority of Gaza's already crippled infrastructure, i think that is very obviously morally wrong" thing.

[^1]: or many more. some of the more extreme estimates now have the death toll potentially as high as 300,000

It would have been much wiser of him to support his cause elsewhere instead of at and against the institution that he relies on for his degree and visa.

personally i think people should be allowed to exercise basic freedom of speech (especially for unambiguously morally correct causes) without being violently deported over it, but you have what i would consider consistently bad takes on this subject so i'm not surprised you've taken another bad line here.

this appears to be the first time anything like this has happened or been tried; unsurprisingly, students have been mobilizing against it and it's been condemned by dozens of student groups. it's also probably union busting, as Taal is a member of the Cornell Graduate Student Union and they have a memorandum with Cornell that any suspensions like this have to be mediated with the union--which of course was not done here.

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone--what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don't respect your "no" and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be "just give up the phone and start complying with the cop" even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they're a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it's not strictly legal) if you don't comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they're supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don't even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it's not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that's being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.

The MyColorado FAQ explicitly states that an officer cannot take your phone, even if they think your digital ID is fraudulent. This whole article is a ton of fear mongering.

no offense but: even if you were to grant the notion that this is an exaggerated problem--cops are not well known for their rigorous adherence to the law or proper legal procedure. they routinely fuck up and violate civil liberties, up to and including murdering people for arbitrary reasons. and unless police are held accountable (which they almost never are for a variety of systemic reasons), what a state says they cannot do is effectively meaningless. it's just words on a screen, really.

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court unanimously held that police need a warrant to search through cell phones, even during otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand over your unlocked phone to a police officer and offer to show them something, “it becomes this complicated factual question about what consent you’ve granted for a search and what the limits of that are,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, told The Verge. “There have been cases where people give consent to do one thing, the cops then take the whole phone, copy the whole phone, find other evidence on the phone, and the legal question that comes up in court is: did that violate the scope of consent?”

If police do have a warrant to search your phone, numerous courts have said they can require you to provide biometric login access via your face or finger. (It’s still an unsettled legal question since other courts have ruled they can’t.) The Fifth Amendment typically protects giving up passcodes as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometrics often isn’t considered protected “testimonial” evidence. In the words of one federal appeals court decision, it requires “no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

it's unbelievable that there is a distinction in US caselaw between giving up your biometrics and giving up your password, and your essentially unchangeable biometrics are somehow the one you're probably obliged to give to the cops if they ask. just an incredibly goofy system