Not worthy of a thread News

[Simple Torture]

It's hard to tell if it's an optical illusion or not, but it sort of looks like there are people on the roof...but part of me is like, there can't be, they would've died of smoke inhalation.

[Simple Torture]

I'm giving this ten more minutes to come down, or until this baseball game ends, whichever comes sooner.

[LetMeSleep]

I've been in some of those council houses and holy shit, the safety was a major turnoff. I hope everyone is okay.

[The Argonaut]

They're not. This is gruesome.

[Norah]

yeah

[LetMeSleep]

I was just reading more. Oh shit.

[Simple Torture]

Oof reports of people definitely being trapped in there; police are begging people that if they're on the phone with someone inside, they should tell them to try and make it out on their own.

https://www.reddit.com/live/z3ito60myvwz/

[LetMeSleep]

Alice Ross has just filed this devastating account from the scene:

People can be seen at the windows, including one man waving a blanket from the window. People from neighbouring estates are huddled outside in their pyjamas near the flaming building, some shouting “put your head out the window” or calling the man with the blanket to shout his flat numbers so they can guide the fire services to him. Fire officers are spraying his window with water to try and douse the flames.

There’s a smell of acrid smoke and flaming debris is spiralling from the building. There’s the sound of breaking glass and dull pops.

“There was a woman with a child. I saw her waving maybe 30mins ago,” said a man who asked not to be named. “She said I’ve got a child ... I saw them spraying her window.”

Hadil Alamily said in the past hour she saw “someone jump on fire from the top floor”. She had seen him flashing a light in an SOS pattern.

“He was screaming help, help, help but no one helped. He dashed a mattress out of the window. He was literally on fire and jumped.”

[Norah]

Neither police, ambulance nor the fire brigade have given specifics about injuries, but multiple eyewitness accounts – including that of the Guardian reporter on the scene, Alice Ross – have spoken of people being trapped inside the building.

Local man and witness, Tim Downie, told the Guardian it seemed impossible that there would not be fatalities. “The sheer scale and the speed with which it spread, the closer you got, it seems like there must be casualties and fatalities.”

By 5am, he said, the building was almost entirely burned out and the fire was sending a huge plume of acrid black smoke into the sky.

“It has gone very quiet now, we heard a lot of sirens and screaming in the early hours, but now the building is pretty much all consumed. I hope everyone is out and being treated.”

He also told of seeing people using their mobile phone lights to get the attention of rescue crews.

[BurtReynolds]

yeesh. I kinda forget this thing can still happen.

[Norah]

Anyone else been following the Michelle Carter case? She's the girl who encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself and now she's guilty of manslaughter. She waived her right to a jury trial so a judge heard the case and issued a verdict from the bench.

Here's Kevin Cullen's Boston Globe piece on the verdict.

Michelle Carter was sunk by three little words, and those three little words weren’t “I love you.” They were:

Get back in.

That’s what she told her virtual boyfriend, 18-year-old Conrad Roy, when he got out of the cab of his pickup truck as it filled with carbon monoxide one summer’s night three years ago.

Get back in.

As he had when he tried to drown himself, Conrad Roy’s instinct to live overcame the horrible depression that told him to die and he sought fresh air in the parking lot of a Kmart in Fairhaven.

But, some 40 miles away, in Plainville, 17-year-old Michelle Carter told Conrad he had to go through with it. He had put it off too long. He had to stick with the plan.

Get back in.

Those were the words that persuaded Judge Lawrence Moniz to convict Carter of involuntary manslaughter at an extraordinary sitting of the Bristol County juvenile court in Taunton. Those three words, and the fact that Carter sat there with her phone in her hand that day, listening to Conrad Roy draw his last fitful breaths, instead of using that phone to summon help.

Moniz’s decision, followed nationally if not internationally, had all the drama of the climax of a ripped-from-the-headlines television show. Carter seemed to sense her fate. As soon as Moniz began to speak, she began to cry.

Her pessimism seemed warranted when Moniz began by saying that the Commonwealth had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Carter’s actions, including her constant encouragement of Roy to kill himself, constituted wanton and reckless conduct — the standards required for an involuntary manslaughter conviction.

But in the next breath, Moniz appeared to throw Carter a lifeline. He said the Commonwealth had not proven that her conduct had actually caused the death of Conrad Roy.

At this point, both Carter and her attorney, Joe Cataldo, gripped each other, thinking they had prevailed.

The judge began citing the defense’s talking points: that Conrad took significant actions of his own to kill himself, that he researched how to do it, that he bought the generator that would produce the lethal gas, that he parked his Ford F-250 pickup truck in a remote part of the Kmart parking lot.

“However,” the judge said, pivoting dramatically, “he breaks that chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle.”

That Conrad Roy could have survived the day he actually took his life and then succeed in killing himself on some future date “is of no consequence,” the judge said.

And then, showing how much research he put into a decision that he knows will be scrutinized closely and appealed probably all the way to the US Supreme Court, Judge Moniz cited a case in western Massachusetts from 200 years ago when an inmate at the Hampshire County jail was charged with encouraging a fellow inmate to hang himself. The inmate who hanged himself was due to be executed by hanging six hours later for killing his father.

Some 200 years ago, a Massachusetts judge found that even a condemned man deserves to be “cheered by hope until the last moments of his existence.”

Moniz agreed with that sentiment.

“When he gets out of the truck, she instructs him to get back into the truck,” Moniz said.

She did this, he said, even knowing Conrad’s fears and reluctance and ambivalence about actually going through with suicide.

“Ordering him back in the truck constitutes wanton and reckless conduct,” the judge said, and when he said that, I knew Michelle Carter was guilty.

So did she. She put a tissue to her mouth and held it there, staring off at something that might have been freedom.

The judge noted that Michelle Carter had gone out of her way to obtain the telephone numbers of Conrad Roy’s mother and sister in the days before his suicide, but she didn’t call them after Roy had second thoughts and got out of the truck.

“She called no one,” the judge said.

He took pains to dismiss one of the defense’s central arguments, that medication Michelle Carter was taking for her own mental health problems left her involuntarily intoxicated, so that she lacked empathy or the ability to know what she was doing was wrong. He called that evidence “not credible.”

“Please stand,” Moniz said. When he declared Michelle Carter guilty, she looked confused and asked Joe Cataldo what it all meant.

Bristol County prosecutor Maryclare Flynn asked Moniz to revoke Carter’s bail, saying she should be locked up to await sentencing because she’s a danger to herself and others. But Moniz sided with Cataldo’s argument that she has been cooperative with the long legal process and never failed to appear in court.

Pending her final sentencing, Moniz sentenced her to social media isolation: no texting, no Facebook, no Snapchat, no nothing. Left unsaid is that if Michelle Carter had not had access to the weapon she used, her cellphone, Conrad Roy wouldn’t have killed himself that day.

There will be a time to argue whether someone as unstable as Michelle Carter appears to be is better served by a prison cell or a psychiatrist’s chair, but Friday wasn’t that time.

There will be a time to call on legislators to craft a law that removes all ambiguity, making it explicitly illegal to encourage someone who is clearly reluctant to kill themselves, but it wasn’t Friday.

Friday was a time to reflect on those three little words. Michelle Carter had regularly told Conrad Roy that she loved him. Those were the three words — “I love you” — that gave her so much power, so much credibility, so much leverage that summer’s night, the night she didn’t say “I love you” when Conrad Roy decided to live. The night she said, instead, “Get back in.”

[malice]

That's a disgusting story

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[LoathedVermin72]

She did the right thing

[Norah]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opin ... -text.html

Michelle Carter Didn’t Kill With a Text

Can malicious speech constitute violence? No. But Friday’s shocking court decision — which found Michelle Carter guilty of sending lethal text messages — is bound to confuse the issue.

Judge Lawrence Moniz, of Bristol County Juvenile Court in southeastern Massachusetts, ruled that Ms. Carter, 17 at the time of her crime, had committed involuntary manslaughter by urging her depressed 18-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to kill himself. Mr. Roy had flirted with the idea for weeks, and Ms. Carter — after initially telling him to seek counseling — seemed to warm to the idea, consistently egging him on via text: “The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it! You can’t keep living this way. You just need to do it like you did last time and not think about it and just do it babe.”

On July 12, 2014, Mr. Conrad drove to a Kmart parking lot and connected his truck to a water pump that released carbon monoxide. At one point, sick from the fumes, he got out of the truck. Ms. Carter told him to “get back in.” His body was found on July 13.

Ms. Carter also struggled with mental illness. Her lawyers claimed antidepressant drugs influenced her behavior; though the prosecution preferred to cast her as a callous narcissist who craved the sympathy of her peers and believed a suicidal boyfriend would earn her a popularity boost.

In either case, Ms. Carter’s conduct was morally reprehensible. But — at least until today’s ruling — it was clearly legal. While some states criminalize the act of convincing people to commit suicide, Massachusetts has no such law. Moreover, speech that is reckless, hateful and ill-willed nevertheless enjoys First Amendment protection. While the Supreme Court has carved out narrowly tailored exceptions for literal threats of violence and incitement to lawless action, telling someone they should kill themselves is not the same as holding a gun to their head and pulling the trigger. Nor is it akin to threatening to kill the president, which is specifically prohibited by law — and in any case, only considered a felony if done ”knowingly and willfully.” (Merely expressing hope that the president dies isn’t enough.)

Judge Moniz’s verdict is a stunning act of defiance against this general principle. By finding Ms. Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter — rather than some lesser misdeed, such as bullying or harassment — the court has dealt a blow to the constitutionally enshrined idea that speech is not, itself, violence. That’s cause for concern.

“Mr. Roy’s death is a terrible tragedy, but it is not a reason to stretch the boundaries of our criminal laws or abandon the protections of our constitution,” wrote Matthew Segel, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a statement. “The implications of this conviction go far beyond the tragic circumstances of Mr. Roy’s death. If allowed to stand, Ms. Carter’s conviction could chill important and worthwhile end-of-life discussions between loved ones across the Commonwealth.”

This one-off decision in juvenile court may not sway legal precedent. But it will undoubtedly draw the attention of school officials and police officers in the state of Massachusetts and negatively affect an area of the law already suffering from authoritarian governmental overreach: teen discipline.

For decades, efforts have been underway to criminalize every obnoxious or problematic social interaction between K-12 kids in American schools. Hardly a week passes without a national news story about teenagers who were arrested on child pornography charges — and face unfathomably long prison sentences — because they had inappropriate pictures of classmates (or even themselves) on their phones. In Iowa, in June 2016, authorities tried to brand a 14-year-old girl as a sex offender for Snapchatting while wearing a sports bra and boy shorts. The following month, Minnesota police officers busted a 17-year-old for swapping consensual sexts with his 16-year-old girlfriend. Such matters should be handled by parents and teachers, not the cops. The same is true for the various issues that plagued Ms. Carter and Mr. Roy.

By all means, let’s empower teachers to confront harassment and refer troubled teenagers to mental health professionals. But we don’t need to broadly criminalize teen cruelty to do that. Nor should we continue down the path of pretending that the First Amendment’s ironclad protection of hateful expression is voided whenever someone says (or texts) something that makes us squirm.

What Ms. Carter said to Mr. Roy was outrageous. Sending her to prison on a possible 20-year sentence is both outrageous and unjust.

[LoathedVermin72]

How the fuck does a naval vessel just run into another ship?

[bune]

my exact thought when I saw that headline. You're on a giant flat surface, the only thing you can see for miles around are other ships so wtf.

[BurtReynolds]

Boats are idiots

[Bi_3]

You're on a giant flat surface

Kyrie Irving post

[bune]

You're on a giant flat surface

Kyrie Irving post

You're on a giant somewhat convex surface.