>> ^imstellar28:
^therealblankman,
A person should be convicted on the evidence against them, not on the prejudice of the jurors. Whether that prejudice is based on race, gender, religion, clothes, profession, fame, or appearance. Many jurors, for example, would probably be biased if they saw a defendant who had tattoos, was unshaven, and looked pretty mean. A persons appearance (age, gender, style, race, etc.) should have no bearing on the trial, so why even include it as a variable?
Likewise for the name of the accused. Who you are should have nothing to do with your guilt or innocence. In this case, OJ is associated with murder, and no matter how impartial a juror tries to be, that prejudice is going to exist. If the defended was obscured from view and his name hidden, jurors would be forced to consider only the evidence and not whatever personal biases they may have.
When a juror doesn't know if they are convicting an old grandma, a 19 year old minority, an NFL football player, or a middle aged white guy, they would be forced to consider the evidence more carefully.
Also: when I said "not really how the justice system is supposed to work" I meant people shouldn't be punished more harshly because the juror thinks they "got away with" a previous crime.


It is kind of hard to orginize a public trial with all those conditions

I am a fan of justice, but perfect justice can never be had, just have to get as close as we can.

^therealblankman,

A person should be convicted on the evidence against them, not on the prejudice of the jurors. Whether that prejudice is based on race, gender, religion, clothes, profession, fame, or appearance. Many jurors, for example, would probably be biased if they saw a defendant who had tattoos, was unshaven, and looked pretty mean. A persons appearance (age, gender, style, race, etc.) should have no bearing on the trial, so why even include it as a variable?

Likewise for the name of the accused. Who you are should have nothing to do with your guilt or innocence. In this case, OJ is associated with murder, and no matter how impartial a juror tries to be, that prejudice is going to exist. If the defended was obscured from view and his name hidden, jurors would be forced to consider only the evidence and not whatever personal biases they may have.

When a juror doesn't know if they are convicting an old grandma, a 19 year old minority, an NFL football player, or a middle aged white guy, they would be forced to consider the evidence more carefully.

Also: when I said "not really how the justice system is supposed to work" I meant people shouldn't be punished more harshly because the juror thinks they "got away with" a previous crime.

Both hero and villain, purveyor of pornography and tireless civil rights advocate, the always controversial publisher of Hustler magazine Larry Flynt is the subject of Joan Brooker-Marks new tell-all documentary Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone.

In a timely response to a current political situation where the fundamental civil rights of Americans are being challenged, the film offers an eye-opening and authoritative overview of Flynt’s long-standing struggles to expand the parameters of free speech and expose the hypocrisy of this country’s elected leaders. Featuring rarely seen documentary and television footage, as well as in-depth interviews with Flynt himself, the documentary focuses on the self-confessed smut peddler’s usually contentious entanglements with politics – from his precedent-setting Supreme Court case against evangelist and adulterer Jerry Falwell, to his prison sentence for refusing to name his source for the tapes documenting the FBI’s entrapment of John DeLorean, to his campaign runs for both California governor and President.

Brooker-Marks also profiles Flynt’s confrontation of the current administration of George W. Bush on the issues of civil liberties and government transparency. Flynt exposed the administration’s staged rescue of Army Private Jessica Lynch – choosing not to publish naked photographs taken of the 19-year-old, which Flynt felt, would add to her victimization. Additionally, he successfully sued Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon for press access to the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Delving beyond Flynt’s political career, the documentary offers an intimate glimpse of the publisher’s personal life, including the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed and his first wife’s battle with AIDS. Ultimately, Brooker-Marks delivers the full, unvarnished story of one of America’s most unlikely defenders of civil liberties.

[Contains mature content. Viewer discretion advised.]

In reply to this comment by NordlichReiter:
Do you have any more info on the Larry Flynt video?

Cinderella had grown to be a withered and poor old lady, as her husband the prince had died many years ago. All she had now for companionship was her cat and a filthy manger to live in.

One day she was cleaning a rusty pot and suddenly out flew a genie. "Thank you for freeing me after oh so many years", the genie said,"to thank you I will grant you three wishes!".

Cinderella thought about this for a few seconds, before she proudly rose and said, "For my first wish I want this manger to be made into a large and beautiful castle, like the one I once lived in!". And the genie made it so.

"For my second wish", Cinderella said, "I want you to make me young and beautiful again!" And the genie made the old Cinderella into a 19-year old, more beautiful than ever, dressed as a queen with fantastic dresses and royal jewelry.

"And for my third and final wish," Cinderella said, "I want you to make my cat into a young, handsome prince that I can marry!". And the genie once again delivered, turning the tired old cat into a beatiful young prince. Having fulfilled his promise, the genie disappeared forever, leaving the young couple alone together. Cinderella threw herself around the neck of her prince, thinking life had never been this good. The prince however, merely whispered into her ear: "I bet you're sorry you had my balls removed now!"

>> ^nibiyabi:
"Speaking to my emotions I don't mind giving child rapists a long drop from a short rope, but I wonder if there could be ramifications of allowing the death penalty...like encouraging rapists to just kill their victims."
. . . or violating the Constitution, not to mention eventually executing some 19-year-old for having a 17-year-old girlfriend.


Taking it a bit far maybe? They are talking about the rape of children under 12 years, not some kid held back a grade who is still dating his high school sweetheart. Seems like a lot of places have "Romeo and Juliet" laws for that sort of thing. As far as the constitution, do you mean the cruel and unusual punishment thing? As in the punishment should fit the crime? One could argue that someone who rapes a 5 year old takes away their childhood and causes irreparable harm that can damage all future relationships...isn't that kind of cruel and unusual?

"Speaking to my emotions I don't mind giving child rapists a long drop from a short rope, but I wonder if there could be ramifications of allowing the death penalty...like encouraging rapists to just kill their victims."

. . . or violating the Constitution, not to mention eventually executing some 19-year-old for having a 17-year-old girlfriend.

Innsbruck? My cousin's family is from Mayrhofen. I spent some time there a few years ago--passed through Innsbruck proper a few times. Great country. Why do you want to go there?

In reply to this comment by LittleRed:
My name is Brianna. The screen name was prompted by my short stature and red hair.

I am a reformed sorority alcoholic. (Moved out and dropped back down to a size 2.) I'm 19 years old and a senior in college, but I haven't stayed anywhere long enough to be remotely close to graduating. Born in Escondido, CA, my parents decided to relocate the family to the frozen north when I was two. I've been in Anchorage ever since, with the exception of a few college stints "Outside."

I started my college career at 16 with majors in Electrical Engineering and Music History, with minors in Dance, Math, and German. I was feeling ambitious. Now I'm a Bioengineering major, with minors in Math and German.

My dream job is to practice medicine in Innsbruck, Austria.

I'm moving to Tempe in August to attend school. If anyone has any ideas on how to finance an education in that area without having a job, suggestions would be much appreciated.

My name is Brianna. The screen name was prompted by my short stature and red hair.

I am a reformed sorority alcoholic. (Moved out and dropped back down to a size 2.) I'm 19 years old and a senior in college, but I haven't stayed anywhere long enough to be remotely close to graduating. Born in Escondido, CA, my parents decided to relocate the family to the frozen north when I was two. I've been in Anchorage ever since, with the exception of a few college stints "Outside."

I started my college career at 16 with majors in Electrical Engineering and Music History, with minors in Dance, Math, and German. I was feeling ambitious. Now I'm a Bioengineering major, with minors in Math and German.

My dream job is to practice medicine in Innsbruck, Austria.

I'm moving to Tempe in August to attend school. If anyone has any ideas on how to finance an education in that area without having a job, suggestions would be much appreciated.

>> ^schmawy:
There's plenty of Swedes 'round these parts. Perhaps they can offer some kind of explanation. That's some hot bazooka action right there, though. Sorta reminds me of KP's old avatar.


Unfortunatly there's very little explanation to be had on this topic. This film created quite the stir in sweden when it was first shown a few years ago. A few conscripts decided to goof off at the firing range and film it, and thier officer apprenetly allowed it. Ofcourse the video was spread, ended up with the press and created somewhat of a PR faux pas for the swedish army.

You get a bunch of 19 year old guys together for 10-15 months things like this sometimes happen, lack of good judgement for sure, but even more so for the officer that didnt stop it.

I also heard rumours that they changed regulations on account of this incident to require soldiers to wear clothes when firing weapons (apperently because, as you can see, they got burned when they did not wear them ). Formly the regulations apperently only mentioned helmets (which they are wearing). Most of this was also mentioned in swedish in the clip.

Tags for this video have been changed from '19 years old, pulls a gun on mafia guys' to '19 years old, mafia, mob, italian, balls, comic' - edited by rottenseed

Yes, DEFINITELY *lies. I was going to say * wtf instead of worldaffairs in the submission I was about to put up, but otherwise, you got it.

I found it via RPS:

"The shooting has thrown everyone - even more than any terrible killing in a high school - because Steven Kazmierczak doesn’t fit into any of the easy stereotypes for those who might usually perform such a crime. From the scraps of information we have, it seems he had recently stopped taking psych meds, and taking into account his actions, would indicate paranoid schizophrenia. Obviously this is speculation. But intriguingly, it’s speculation based on facts, rather than randomly attributing a cause de jour in order to propogate someone’s personal agenda.

The opening question (once we get past the entertaining moment of the anchor accidentally sharing everyone’s wishes):

“What does it tell you about this guy, the suspect, that he’s twenty-seven years old - he’d already graduated - not an 18 year-old, a 17, 18, 19 year-old student currently enrolled?”

Thompson’s reply:

“Well, we find from brain scan studies out of Harvard that if you get started, for example, playing violent video games you can, er, more likely copycat the behaviours in the games.”

The rest of his speech is the usual nonsense and undemonstrable claims about a connection between previous high school shootings and video games, but it’s this first sentence that merits the most attention.

Thompson’s a lawyer, so I’m not going to say he’s lying. But I will say what he says makes no sense in any possible way. Even if there were these “brain scan studies”, how exactly would a functional MRI demonstrate the likelihood of a “copycat” shooting? Is there an animated picture of a little pixel gunman firing a weapon on the scans? It’s gibberish. It’s the sort of woo-woo nonsense you expect to hear from someone trying to explain how their crystals prevent cats from being afraid of ghosts. “Harvard you say?! Gosh, that sounds scientific!” It’s embarrassing.

The most frustrating thing about this man’s escapades is it obfuscates what might be a very serious subject. What if violent videogames could have a negative correlative effect on young people? This is something we would surely like to know, and see studied rationally. People like Thompson (who encourages far greater feelings of violence in me than any “training simulator” like, er, Counter-Strike: Half-Life ever has) stifle this discussion through their sensationalist bullshit.

To conclude, I’d like to transcribe his last sentence.

“One of the things personally disturbing for me dist, including the fact that we have a community now of survivors and victims’ families all across the country like at Perduco who go through the trauma of these type events with the families who are, uh, most immediately hit in this way most recently because they themselves have endured these type situations is the, um… err, the… uh, fact that, you’ve got, um, uhhh, uh, I wrote a, I’m sorry I lost my train of thought, because, uh, but, uh, I wrote a book called Out Of Harm’s Way for a Chicago publisher in which, the, the only chapter they deleted was a fictionalised of, of one of these incidents in which I I said that a kid should walk onto a stage in an audatorium and open fire with a shotgun and they dist they deleted it because it was too disturbing.”

“Campus shooting expert” indeed."

Two words about the movie :

As she comes back from holiday, Lili, 19 years-old, learns from her parent that Loic, her twin brother, left the house after a violent argument with her father. As he doesn't give news from him, Lili thinks he's in trouble and try to find out where he is.

I won't tell the rest of the story (as i've not seen it yet , haha I'll get the DVD soon). I know what you'll say : "another crappy french movie about feelings etc etc ..."

Fuck that. She doesn't have to plead anything. It's not like she owed him anything. Yeah, she's a fucking gold digger. What 19 year old girl that dates a geriatric isn't? But that doesn't mean she was required to sleep with him. The court is going to laugh in his face.

messenger! you are 200% correct, as a college student i have friends from foreign countries who are extremely intelligent. but they have the most difficult times in english courses because of this.. i mean come on .. give a 5 page essay on a "the sound and the fury" to a 19 year old japanese girl .. i was born and raised here and i still struggle to convey ...or simply interpret .. what faulkner tries to depict in his novels.. i don't know what the assignment was for this particular paper but we have to understand that being a foreign student (this person probably thai) can be a very daunting in a university.

Some background in case someone is as interested as I was, the suspect currently on trial is named Shepherd in the following quote:

"Police have said a fistfight preceded the 4 a.m. shooting after Shepherd confronted a 19-year-old man who made a comment about Shepherd's younger sister.

Shepherd, who police said was punched and knocked down in the scuffle, is accused of retrieving a gun from a vehicle, returning to the lobby and opening fire at Terrance Aubry, who police say made the comment.

Aubry was not wounded, but Vance Davis, 20, was shot in the arm and Markael Ballou, 23, was wounded in the leg. Both were treated at a Las Vegas hospital and released.

Police have characterized Davis and Ballou as bystanders with no ties to Aubry."