The Small Rants Thread IX: Leaping into the Well of Darkness

[Frogman55]

...the grand jury was given all the evidence with persuasive arguments form both sides and 12 people somehow had to come together agree on something some how came up with their answer...

While I agree with a large chunk of the post (i.e. people are stupid), this is meaningless. Grand juries do exactly what the prosecutor wants them to. The mere fact that 'all' the evidence was given is just evidence that the prosecutor did not want an indictment to go forward. The prosecutor doesn't have to give all the evidence at all, they almost never do, and he certainly wouldn't have if a black man had shot a white man, never mind that the black man was afraid for his life at the time.

That is partly a matter of prosecutorial discretion. The prosecutor has the privilege to show however much evidence he feels like the situation needs, and the burden doesn't really need to look at exculpatory evidence. The burden of proof that a grand jury looks at is ridiculously low - all they need is a reasonable chance that there could be evidence of a crime. That's all. Not evidence that the man is innocent, not evidence that a crime was committed, just a good probability that some evidence exists somewhere.

[dman11235]

The 538 blog made a post about this.  Statistically, prosecutors ALWAYS get an indictment.  it was something like 5 times out of 100000 that they didn't.  With one exception: when police are on the block.  When they're trying to get an indictment on an officer, they almost always DON'T get the indictment.  And note: indictments are NOT convictions.  They are whether or not there is any evidence at all basically.  Juries decide if there's enough evidence that there's a plausible chance that there's evidence beyond reasonable doubt that there's a crime.  They decide if there was a crime, not if anyone's guilty.

[Amechra]

Post-racial?

Heh. There's nothing more American than hating the other guy.

[Kuroimaken]

My only contribution to this discussion, is that i think we need to start holding media more responsible for this kind of shit. I'm just saying, if the media didn't spin the yarn as black v. white, people wouldn't have reacted so strongly.

I couldn't agree more. Our media is especially guilty of obfuscation, too.

Remember the Isabella Nardoni case? That smokescreen was so effective I can't even remember what it was used to cover up at the time.

[linklord231]

The 538 blog made a post about this.  Statistically, prosecutors ALWAYS get an indictment.  it was something like 5 times out of 100000 that they didn't.  With one exception: when police are on the block.  When they're trying to get an indictment on an officer, they almost always DON'T get the indictment.  And note: indictments are NOT convictions.  They are whether or not there is any evidence at all basically.  Juries decide if there's enough evidence that there's a plausible chance that there's evidence beyond reasonable doubt that there's a crime.  They decide if there was a crime, not if anyone's guilty.

I think it played out this way largely because the prosecutor just wanted to "get this over with," for multiple reasons.  He basically did the whole trial in the grand jury phase because he knew that even if he got an indictment, there was an extremely small chance to for Wilson to be convicted.  So if he got an indictment, the trial would drag on for months, and the whole time there would be more protests and possibly riots going on.  And at the end, if he was found innocent, it would explode all over again.  Perhaps doubly so, because it would mean Wilson could likely keep his job at the police department because it's extremely hard to bring meaningful disciplinary action for something that the courts decided was legal.  At least this way it's over quickly. 

[bhu]

That or he needed the cops.  One of the reasons mentioned for cops being allowed to testify on their own behalf or introduce exculpatory evidence (which is unlike any grand jury case involving civilians) is that the prosecutors need the cooperation of the police force to do their job.  If he goes after cops, they don't help him, his work suffers, and he doesn't get re-elected/re-appointed.

[dman11235]

The 538 blog mentioned that bhu.  And a couple other factors.  I don't have the link, but it shouldn't be too hard to find.  And I have class now so I can't search.

EDIT: linky

[awaken_D_M_golem]

I forgot my reading glasses.

example:  Bhu looks Blue or Blur or Bro or 8no, now I can't even tell that much ...

My apologies for the wall of text.

Got my glasses today, like I ought to.
(reads)

Hey no need for an apology.
Although I should explain I wasn't being ironic or humorous or aDMg stupid.
I really did forget my glasses, and was ranting (and surprisingly didn't mispell annything).
So ...  ... you look like Bhu today.

[awaken_D_M_golem]

Hey old white english speaking Americans
like to blow their Tax dollars on police nonsense,
that old white english speaking Australia Britain and Canada
would never be stupid enough to blow their Tax dollars on.

_{(they do blow their tax dollars on other things, stupidly)}

[Raineh Daze]

Day 1: got laptop, screen cable disconnected. Sent it back. They fixed it, returned the thing to me.

Day 7 of use post-fixing: screen cable out of place/disconnected.

What the fuck. How do you have this happen twice in less than a month, on the same laptop, after it's been manually fixed?

[Jackinthegreen]

Sounds like it wasn't secured properly, assuming you're not handling the laptop so roughly that it'd have issues.

[Raineh Daze]

Sounds like it wasn't secured properly, assuming you're not handling the laptop so roughly that it'd have issues.

Given that it was glued into position, and this laptop had spent the past week sat on a desk: there's no rough handling involved. Unless it's melting the glue, in which case there are serious issues, I have no clue.

[Kuroimaken]

I am taking SATs to get into college. For the fourth time.

This is me reading questions on high school-level Physics.

[Raineh Daze]

I don't know if my physics knowledge would be up to that spec, but I somehow got an A in it without revising the stuff... @_@

I think the lack of too much theoretical physics in the course helped.

[Kuroimaken]

I am also under the distinct impression they introduced more stuff to the general high school Physics curriculum after I graduated.

There were questions about electricity and electromagnetism that I could only for the life of me guess at.

EDIT: Biology questions also focused a lot more on biological diversity than pretty much anything else I ever studied, which includes the production of ATP within cells (used to be that was one of the go-to questions in Biology SATs).

[SolEiji]

Remember, the correct answer to all these questions is a picture of Eiji with a hat, and shooting lightning from a lightning gun.  This will get you an A+ every time.

[trappedslider]

I think the lack of too much theoretical physics in the course helped.

[dman11235]

As a physics teacher, physics is easy if you remember the units.  At least, the equations are.  Everything in (high school and mostly college+) physics is intuitively relative to units.  Remember that force is in N which are kgm/s^2?  Boom, you know that it's mass times acceleration (kg times m/s/s).  The tricky part is remembering the theory, but that's simply logic.  Acceleration: it's how fast something changes how fast it's going, right?  So....v=at.  Velocity is acceleration times the time you're accelerating over.  You can do this with pretty much any physics theory.  Some of the high level (re: modern, so 1800's+) theories are like this, but only if you know how to think about them differently (like quantum physics and relativity).

[Raineh Daze]

As a physics teacher, physics is easy if you remember the units.  At least, the equations are.  Everything in (high school and mostly college+) physics is intuitively relative to units.  Remember that force is in N which are kgm/s^2?  Boom, you know that it's mass times acceleration (kg times m/s/s).  The tricky part is remembering the theory, but that's simply logic.  Acceleration: it's how fast something changes how fast it's going, right?  So....v=at.  Velocity is acceleration times the time you're accelerating over.  You can do this with pretty much any physics theory.  Some of the high level (re: modern, so 1800's+) theories are like this, but only if you know how to think about them differently (like quantum physics and relativity).

It's a great way to check answers; not so helpful for working out "what's the verbal answer to why this is so?" Word problems.

[dman11235]

It's very useful.  You can usually figure out the equations from the units.  You usually can't figure out the constants from it (like energy is 1/2 mv^2, units don't tell you that 1/2), but often you can figure those out in the calculus based physics (the 1/2 comes from the fact that energy is an integral, which ends up being 1/2mv^2.  And it's even MORE useful for word problems!  You read the problem saying "here's what I have, I need to get to these units, how do I get to those units?"