This article is a very good example of why current media is terrible.

This article is a summary of someone else’s work. It does not contain any news. Literally. It contains no new information, no original reporting, and adds nothing to the understanding of the situation in Florida one may glean from reading the CNN article the New Republic is ripping off. What is does is take the reporting done by CNN, which was far more even-keeled, and dresses it up in more incendiary language to outrage media consumers who want information that is consistent with what they already believe.

If you didn’t read the CNN article, this is what it did: A reporter at CNN interviewed several lawyers who had cases before Cannon. Those lawyers were asked what they thought about the judge and offered the following opinions:

1. She is very detail oriented
2. She is rigid and provincial when it comes to procedure and local rules.
3. She is indecisive.
4. She sometimes seems overwhelmed.
5. She focuses on abstract issues, or otherwise obsesses over elements of the case that seem irrelevant to trial lawyers rather than making decisions about factual questions.
6. She is not going to defer to the prosecutor automatically, even in situations where the defense and prosecutor agree.
7. One lawyer felt she was harsh towards defendants in general but was less harsh towards Trump in this particular case.

The CNN article suggests that a a combination of some or all of factors 1-7 have made it easy for the defense in the Trump case to gum up the works and slow the progress of the trial down.

Most of these opinions are fairly anodyne. Many of them could describe almost any federal judge. Some of them even seem like good characteristics for a federal judge. (I think it is good, for example, that a federal judge requires prosecutors to back up their assertions and motions with specificity, rather than try to justify motions with generic claims.) Whats more is that none of these opinions would be particularly surprising to anyone who has been following the news surrounding Trump’s Florida trial. Nothing in the CNN reporting is particularly “damning” as the New Republic characterizes the report. The New Republic focuses on the strongest criticism of Cannon, but that criticism is the opinion of a single lawyer, and only represented a small portion of the overall report offered by CNN. If you only read the New Republic’s version, you would be forgiven for thinking that was the focus of the CNN article. In that case you would have an inaccurate view of the article, which is itself mostly a summary of opinions. I will also note that, when the New Republic was copying CNN’s homework, they ignored the praise defense lawyers had for Cannon. But I suppose if they had included the praise it would have been harder to call the article “damning”.

To put it plainly, the New Republic article is trash. It is a summary of someone else’s reporting that hypes up the most negative opinion about a federal judge, while ignoring the bulk of the same reporting.

Unhelpful Linux User Archetypes:

The Configurator: All problems are configuration problems. The fact that a user has a problem means they configured their machine incorrectly. All help requests are an opportunity to lecture others about configuration files.

The lumberjack: Insists on logs no matter how simple or basic the question. “How do I get the working directory in the terminal?” -Sorry, I can’t help you unless you post your log. “What does the -r flag do?” -You need to post a log for me to answer that question. “Is there a way to make this service start at boot?” -We have no way of knowing unless you post your log. When a user posts their log, the lumberjack’s work is done. No need to reply to the thread any further.

The Anacdata Troubleshooter: Failed to develop a theory of mind during childhood. Thinks their machine is representative of all machines. If they don’t have an issue, the user is lying about the issue.

The Jargon Master: Uses as much jargon as possible in forum posts. If a user doesn’t know each and every term, that’s on them. If you did not commit to mastering every aspect of a piece of software before asking for help, were you even trying to solve the problem?

The Hobby Horse Jockey: All problems are caused by whatever thing the contributor does not like. Graphics driver issue? Snaps. Computer won’t post? Obviously, Snaps. Machine getting too hot? Snaps. Command ‘flatpack’ not found? Oh you better believe snaps did that.

The Pedantfile: Gets mad because everyone asks their questions the wrong way. Writes a message letting the user know they asked their question wrong. Message usually appears within a minute or two of someone providing a solution to the user.

Carnap’s statement is false, humans find all sorts of non-verifiable beliefs and experiences cognitively meaningful.

I think Carnap’s conception of “meaningful” differs from the “cognitively meaningful” term you use here. Which from context, I gather means something like “personally fulfilling” or “socially important”. Carnap along with the other logical positivists were trying to develop a philosophy of science that didn’t depend on metaphysical claims and was ultimately grounded in empiricism. Carnap’s use of the term “meaningful” is more akin to saying that a concept can be connected to the empirical world. Meaningless claims, then are the opposite, they cannot be connected to the empirical world.

Imagine for example that you and a friend were the victims of an attempted mugging turned violent, but to you and the mugger’s surprise you discovered that you were impervious to attacks with lead pipes and laser guns. As you are searching for an explanation for these newfound powers your friend suggests that the reason you have these powers is that you both, without your knowledge, are wearing magical rings that give you super powers, but the rings are invisible and cannot be felt by the wearers. Carnap would say that is meaningless because the ring explanation cannot be connected to the empirical world. The explanation requires an imperceptible entity.

Trying to draw a bright line between empiricism and metaphysics is not scientism, in the pejorative sense that you mean here. I think to qualify as such Carnap would need to dismiss all meaningless (in Carnap’s sense of the term) propositions as totally lacking in personal value. I don’t know his writing well enough to say whether or not he holds that view, ( a brief reading of his entry in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy suggests, no he did not hold those views) but I don’t think that conclusion is a particularly charitable reading of Carnap’s criticisms of metaphysics.

The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.

They are similar from the perspective of violence, which is to say they generally feature violence in public areas by a small number of agents often armed with automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Rampage shooters also target people in a way that is broadly indiscriminate, targeting a class of person rather than specific individuals. The two other forms of violence are more often personal or instrumental. Rampage shootings are rarely done for reasons of material gain. They often lack even an interpersonal conflict as a motivation. Which is to say that rampage shootings are not purely the result of someone wishing to harm a specific person with which they have a preexisting conflict.

These distinctions will not be dispositive of every single act of violence involving a firearm, people often have complex motivations for their actions, but they are certainly clearer than the definition of mass shootings used to justify the headline. Whats more, is they make the development of coherent policy easier. For example, laws that restrict people with domestic abuse records from firearm ownership are unlikely to have an impact on rampage shootings, but there is a chance they could impact domestic violence. Laws restricting magazine capacity for rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge are unlikely to impact domestic violence, but there is a chance they could impact rampage shootings. If you want policy to combat these different types of violence, you have to understand the different ways these violent acts are caused and carried out. The two problems are clearly different so why conflate them?

What if an advocate for gun control got a law passed that actually did reduce the number of rampage shootings? Would they want to use this definition to defend the effectiveness of their law? By this definition, we could eliminate rampage shootings entirely and still have a serious problem with mass shootings. Should we then conclude that a gun control law that eliminated rampage shootings was ineffective? If the purpose of the law was to reduce mass shootings, by this definition it was ineffective. It would barely make a dent! How much do you want to bet that anyone who found themselves having to defend a law that ended rampage shootings would quickly discover the problems with conflating rampage shootings with other forms of firearm violence? What’s more is that you have a definition that is obviously misleading in an environment that requires you to win the trust and support of the public. I don’t believe for a second that the people who wrote that headline thought that the average reader would understand that “mass shooting” would include cases of domestic or gang violence. Most people do not think of those things as being the same as “mass shootings” and plenty of people–as this very thread demonstrates-- react to the esoteric definition being used to tout the “second worst year on record” by concluding that the people making the claim are dishonest. That is a problem if you want to persuade people.

From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.

This is an extremely uncharitable reading of what I have written. My point was that the definition of mass shootings fails to make distinctions between different types of violence. Those distinctions are critical to designing, and more importantly defending, policy. Further, my point was that the definition of mass shooting under consideration is misleading, because most people who hear the term “mass shooting” are going to think about shootings akin to the rampage shootings, not to things like domestic violence. The effect of which is to make supporters of this definition and the headlines it generates seem disingenuous. Almost as if they do not care about the actual state of violence in the US and are simply trying to characterize it as negatively as possible. A state of affairs that renders advocates of gun control less persuasive.

You cannot argue from what I have written (and perhaps this is just confusion because I am posting in a comment chain that includes other people replying to you) that I am drawing a moral distinction between the different types of violence I have so far described.

If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong.

No. My argument is that the definition used to justify the headline is misleading because it is unlike what most people think when they hear the term “mass shooting” while at the same time it fails to make important distinctions between drastically different types of violence which ultimately require different policy approaches. I did not say the definition was wrong. Definitions are not right or wrong, they can be useful, they can be consistent with other ideas, they can be internally inconsistent, they can be vague, but it is meaningless to say a definition is wrong. Which is why I didn’t argue that this definition was wrong, the argument I made against the definition was that it is bad if you want to address the problems of firearm violence. Firstly because such problems require us to tailor solutions to the characteristics of the violence in question and secondly because if you want to be persuasive, you need people to trust you and misleading people is a surefire way to get people to not trust you.

You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.

This would be more persuasive if there were not people in this very thread making the assumption that the article is about school shootings. I don’t know what “formal way” or “viable standard” is supposed to mean, but I have made very clear arguments for why the definition is bad in the context of policy design and persuasion. And it is of course totally reasonable to try to figure out lexical definitions for terms within specific populations. I sincerely doubt anyone involved in this discussion anticipates the definition of mass shooting commonly held by the public to be the specific one used to justify the headline’s claims. Clearly, as reactions in this very thread show, people don’t have the esoteric definition used to justify the articles headline in mind when they think about mass shootings. What? Are we just going to ignore the fact that terms have common, shared understandings now? In the context of policy as it ought to be applied in liberal democracy no less!

It can see two reasons why it matters.

Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.

Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.

For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Tennessee and Elevenessee

Thanks for reaffirming my bias that new cars suck.

I am really concerned the next car I need to buy, which is probably 20 years off, is going to be this trend cranked to 11. With software and hardware I can find alternatives and hack my way around the “you paid for it, but we own it and can do whatever we want to it” mentality that tech companies push, but cars seem like a whole different world when it comes to the “you paid for it, but we own it” mentality.

Or you only consider your expenses after savings and think that you are “living paycheck to paycheck” because you use up all your non-invested money by the end of the month.

There could be a “validator” you choose that has to sign off on the blockchain the seller’s claims are true as a condition to finalize the sale. Similar to buyers (in the US at least) selecting and paying for a home inspector when buying a property.

In other words, for blockchain technology to be applied to sales validation, there needs to be a central authority who everybody trusts, that can validate transactions.

That is really just a map of poverty.

That seems like good news for Mastodon