PhilipTheBucket

"The funny thing is that there’s a playbook for overturning autocrats. It was written here in America, by a rumpled political scientist I knew named Gene Sharp. While little known in the United States before his death in 2018, he was celebrated abroad, and his tool kit was used by activists in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and across Asia. His books, emphasizing nonviolent protests that become contagious, have been translated into at least 34 languages."

“I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb,” a former Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp’s writing."

"A soft-spoken scholar working from his Boston apartment, Sharp recommended 198 actions that were often performative, ranging from hunger strikes to sex boycotts to mock funerals."

“Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” he once said, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.”

"The Democrats’ message last year revolved in part around earnest appeals to democratic values, but one of the lessons from anti-authoritarian movements around the world is that such abstract arguments aren’t terribly effective. Rather, three other approaches, drawing on Sharp’s work, seem to work better."

"The first is mockery and humor — preferably salacious."

"Wang Dan, a leader of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations, told me that in China, puns often “resonate more than solemn political slogans.”

"The Chinese internet for a time delighted in grass-mud horses — which may puzzle future zoologists exploring Chinese archives, for there is no such animal. It’s all a bawdy joke: In Chinese, “grass-mud horse” sounds very much like a curse, one so vulgar it would make your screen blush. But on its face it is an innocent homonym about an animal and thus is used to mock China’s censors."

"Shops in China peddled dolls of grass-mud horses (resembling alpacas), and a faux nature documentary described their habits. One Chinese song recounted the epic conflict between grass-mud horses and river crabs — because “river crab” is a play on the Chinese term for censorship. It optimistically declared the horses triumphant."

Every so often, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court will surprise you with a well-reasoned decision that cuts against the grain of its usual pro-cop, pro-censorship, pro-“conservative values” output. This one, brought to us by Raffi Melkonian, unfortunately isn’t one of those exceptions. This one is more aligned with the rule.

This potential class-action lawsuit, brought by parolees represented by the Institute of Justice, alleged a Louisiana judge was making a mockery of due process by forcing defendants to use his preferred ankle monitoring contractor, which coincidentally had been formed by the judge’s former law partner and run by donors to his judicial election campaigns.

There’s an appearance of judicial impropriety here and you don’t even have to squint to see it. Christian Helmke and Leonard Levenson formed ETOH Monitoring in 2006. Here’s a little more on the judge and his connections to the founders of ETOH Monitoring, taken from the Fifth Circuit opinion [PDF]:

In 2016, Paul Bonin was elected as a judge on the OPCDC. During his campaign, Bonin accepted donations totaling $3,550 and a loan of $1,000 from Helmke and Levenson through their law firms. Levenson is Judge Bonin’s former law partner. Before serving on the district court, Judge Bonin had been a state appellate judge for eight years. Levenson and Helmke had donated $5,100 to his election campaigns for that position.

Maybe none of that would have mattered. But Judge Paul Bonin made sure it mattered. ETOH is one of three ankle monitoring options provided to defendants in Orleans Parish District Court. However, in Judge Bonin’s court, there was always only one option.

When ordering ankle monitoring, Judge Bonin regularly directed defendants to make arrangements with ETOH. He did not disclose the availability of other providers. After defendants obtained monitors, ETOH sent monthly reports to Judge Bonin about their payment status. Judge Bonin warned some defendants that nonpayment could result in their jailing. He conditioned some defendants’ release from their ankle monitors on their completing payments to ETOH. In one case, Judge Bonin conditioned a defendant’s release on completing payment to ETOH even though Judge Bonin considered waiving other costs the defendant was obligated to pay.

That certainly looks a bit corruption-y. Ankle monitoring isn’t cheap. ETOH charges defendants $10/day for the privilege of being monitored. And Bonin not only funneled defendants to a business run by his former law partner, but actually deprived them of their freedom until they threw some money in the direction of two of his campaign donors.

The lower court dismissed the lawsuit, saying nothing here added up to a due process violation. The Fifth Circuit — in this unpublished decision — says the same thing. Sure, it may look a little crooked, but it’s not enough to get the Constitution involved.

Our decision does not address the general legality or propriety of Judge Bonin’s conduct. We rule only on the question this case presents: whether ETOH had ties with Judge Bonin that created an unconstitutional risk of bias. Unexceptional campaign contributions and past business relations do not present an “extraordinary situation” in which due process is implicated. Individually and in their totality, the ties between ETOH and Judge Bonin do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that Bonin did not seek re-election in 2020, so he’s no longer in the position to force defendants to patronize his preferred ankle monitoring service. Add that to judicial immunity, and the sad fact is that even if the Fifth Circuit had recognized this seemingly obvious constitutional violation, the lawsuit would have been dismissed for those reasons. And while that loss would still have been a loss, it might have been more meaningful than the shrug the plaintiffs received here that basically says it’s ok to generate a constant appearance of impropriety so long as those you’re favoring haven’t spent too much money keeping you in office.

The affinity for Tucker Carlson (as well as the other things) is from the sidebar. Apparently their familiarity with Western media is enough to know he is pro-Russian, but not enough to realize that expressing on a leftist forum that they like him, will make them glow a little bit.

The original issue was that they posted a story from Mint Press News, and I dropped them a friendly note that it was Russian propaganda, more or less assuming they had included it innocently (since there was nothing wrong at all that I can see with the particular story, or in fact with any of the stories in that community.)

Things escalated. Fun quotes by the mod from the ensuing conversation:

It's actually not from "New Knowledge," it's from a US Senate report, but I doubt that will make this person believe it any more.

The real disinformation was inside us all this time. Of course, I was banned. Reason for the ban?

Clearly, their disinformation policy is lock tight.