AS I SAY BELOW, just about everything Judge Esther Salas says, I agree with. I will not mention a few things I disagree with just now - but listen to what she is saying about the violence and harassment that is coming the way of judges because of Donald Trump and his allies lies and violence provoking language about them.
Here's my comment on this video.
I agree with just about everything Judge Salas said, but I would add that it was the judges and, especially, the "justices" who decided that these kinds of attacks were perfectly all right when it comes to them being made against other People. Whether they be politicians, especially, as it turns out Democratic politicians or teenagers who are victims of online harassment. There was a case in Massachusetts quite a while ago where a teenage girl was harassed and badgered and terrorized by girls at her high school and one of the girl's mother who was egging them on into committing suicide and when her mother tried to get redress she was told by the courts that her daughters assassins had a First Amendment "right" to drive her daughter to kill herself.* If the judges and "justices" had not made that interpretation of the First Amendment the kind of thing that she is rightly objecting to when it's judges who are the target of it would not be happening. You can't have that interpretation of the First Amendment and the kind of civility or even safety she is advocating.
* I haven't located the post I wrote at the time on that one but I did find one I found about a male nurse who frequented suicide blogs posing as a young woman, encouraging People to commit suicide online for his sexual pleasure. It was all about how he and lawyers said he had a "right" to do that. Here's a bit of what I wrote then:
Pretending he was a women half his age,* Dinkel trolled suicide websites (NB) and encouraged people to kill themselves in front of web cams for his sexual gratification. He’s suspected in at least five suicides and was believed to have encouraged as many as a hundred around the world. While pursuing his “suicide fetish (sic)” he worked as a nurse in hospitals and nursing homes. After years of doing this he was outed by Celia Blay, a 64-year-old woman with few technical skills, who tracked him down when police refused to become involved. The details of the case are pretty awful but even worse is the fact that the criminally degenerate Dinkel will likely get off without prosecution in the United States. As he has put it "Nothing is going to come of it, ... I've moved on with my life, and that's it." And, given the free speech fetish in our current legal culture, he’s probably right. As he moves on with his life, his victims will, of course, not. The law that St. Paul police used to finally stop him, for now, is likely to not be deemed to cover internet predators of his kind, encouraging people to kill themselves for his gratification on web-cams. If he never serves a sentence of a day, it wouldn’t be surprising. Here is how Jonathan Turley puts it: Turley said that if prosecutors file charges against Melchert-Dinkel, convicting him would be difficult, especially if the defense claims freedom of speech. The law professor said efforts to make it illegal to shout "Jump!" to someone on a bridge have not survived constitutional challenges. "What's the difference between calling for someone to jump off a bridge and e-mailing the same exhortation?" he said.
With all respect to Judge Salas, the judges and, especially, "justices" are now in a sewer they put the rest of us in. I only wish she would realize that what she wants for judges, they deny to the rest of American society.
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