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from the laugh-and-(some-of)-the-world-laughs-with-you dept.
'The Onion' filed a real brief with the Supreme Court supporting man jailed for making fun of cops:
When was the last time you've read an amicus brief? If you're not involved in the legal profession, chances are you may have never actually spent precious time reading one. This amicus brief (PDF) could change that. It was submitted by The Onion, which describes itself in the brief as "the world's leading news publication" with "4.3 trillion" readers that maintains "a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires." [...]
The Onion, of course, is the popular parody website that once named Kim Jong-un as the sexiest man alive. Its team has filed a very real amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Anthony Novak, who was arrested and jailed for four days after briefly running a Facebook page parodying the police department of Parma, Ohio back in 2016.
[...] Despite writing the brief in the same voice its publication uses, and despite filling it with outlandish claims and hilarious quips, The Onion made a very real argument defending the use of parody and explaining how it works:
"Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original. The Sixth Circuit's decision in this case would condition the First Amendment's protection for parody upon a requirement that parodists explicitly say, up-front, that their work is nothing more than an elaborate fiction. But that would strip parody of the very thing that makes it function.
I highly recommend reading the brief yourself [PDF]. [hubie]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 10 2022, @10:28AM
In my state, there was a newly passed redistricting ballot amendment that was aimed at preventing gerrymandering. The party holding control of the government in my state simply passed a gerrymandered district map as usual, and after 4 rounds of the state supreme court saying "that's not OK by the new rules, do it again" and them coming back with basically the same map, that's the map we're going to be using. Oh, and nobody involved in this blatant violation of the state constitution and the will of the people has paid any fines or gone to jail for contempt or anything like that.
Power never gives up power willingly, even if it means breaking the alleged rules to remain in power. And since they're the ones holding the power, they're the ones that decide what happens when somebody breaks the rules. Isn't that convenient?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.