Anonymous, Esq.

In the US, there is no meaningful legal definition for educational/academic neglect in any of the 50 states or federally. What this means is that a child can be "homeschooled" and exclusively be taught how to cook and clean, reach the age of 18 being unable to read, write, or count, and this alone is not considered neglect. That 18yo, should they even have the knowledge that suing exists, has no legal grounds to sue their parents for denying them an education.

In over 40 US states, a convicted child abuser can homeschool their children. So someone who has done time for child abuse and somehow regains access to their child(ren) can decide upon returning home that they want to "homeschool" their kids. Those children are now locked in a home with their abuser where nobody can see them.

There are no welfare checks.

There are no routine assessments.

There aren't even databases — state or federal — keeping track of how many homeschooled kids there actually are.

Meaning a child can be locked in their home for their entire life with their convicted abuser, learn absolutely nothing, never go to the doctor, and so long as that child is fed, clothed, and the abuse isn't physical or sexual, that child has almost no chance of rescue and no legal ground to seek restitution if/when they escape.

The only way homeschooled children get rescued is if they're beaten, starved, or physically neglected and they're able to get the right person to see that. Otherwise? They have to wait until someone finds out they were murdered as a result of their parents "homeschooling".

And feral homeschool parents love to jump down my throat about this, and then get even more pissed when I tell them I'm a homeschool alumni.

Because I know it's not all homeschoolers. But even one is too many, and the lack of protections should scare everyone. If you're a good homeschool parent, nothing will change. If not, you deserve whatever comes your way as a result of adequate oversight.

-Replacing his vitimens with poision

- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.

- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.

-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?

- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.

📢 IN EVERY UNIVERSE BABY 📢

i'm concerned about the rhetoric coming out of some of those candidates but as long as they're willing and able to defeat the republicans, i don't care right now. the dems love to infight & then we lose races and it does us exactly zero (0) good.

I just can really sympathize with a lot of angles on this one.

Like, okay -- and please know I just speak for myself here, I don't label myself "leftist" or "liberal" anymore because I have too many bits that don't comfortably fit -- I admittedly had an extremely bad time voting for Kamala Harris. Why? Because she was a prosecutor. And most of the American voting public doesn't know prosecutors, or "progressive prosecutors," and they don't know the kind of things prosecutors say or what they mean when they say those things, but there were times when I instantly recognized the way she identified problems and solutions. When asked how she would alter business regulations to produce less of [x bad thing, I can't even remember what it was specifically], she immediately said that what needed to be done was to prosecute bad actors, not to change regulations to incentivize different behavior. It's exactly 100% how prosecutors think. If there is wrongdoing, there is someone to Punish, and once they are Punished, the problem is Solved?

For someone unfamiliar with that pattern, she did sound very liberal and good on many things. And I wasn't about to not vote, or vote for someone who didn't have a chance to win. I voted for her.

But there was a big part of me that was like -- YIKES!! Like, in a world where Kamala is president now, do we really think she would be against Flock cameras? Would she want them taken down, or would she just say "we need to make sure that only GOOD cops are viewing the data"? Because I bet it would be the latter. I don't think prosecutors really believe "freedom" is a virtue, because they chose their virtuous life by picking a profession of control.

And fucking hell, some of the nearby Democratic governors are just infuriating. In Virginia recently, Abigail Spanberger, Democrat, vetoed a law that would have made possession of drug residue into a misdemeanor. Drug residue essentially being an amount of drugs only detectable through scientific examination on drug paraphernalia. Her justification was that Virginia's drug treatment courts provide an opportunity for offender accountability and treatment, and that removing drug residue charges would so tragically remove that avenue. Of accountability!!

Almost no one graduates from our local drug court, because they're hounded into accountability by repeated short stays in jail until they fail out of the program.

But, put that aside; I'm not practicing in Abigail Spanberger's backyard. Only a minority of Virginia's jurisdictions have a drug court, and the ones who have one are more likely to be urban, heavily populated jurisdictions. Those are the jurisdictions most likely to drop drug residue felonies because they are a fucking waste of time. Rural jurisdictions, without a drug court, are more likely to prosecute as felonies. So, Madam Spanberger, would you be willing to apply this law to the majority of jurisdictions in Virginia that do not have a drug court? Or do you just not want to budge on the notoriously destructive, violent, costly, and losing War on Drugs?

I'm sick of them! I'm sick of Republican-Lite!

At the same time, those Republican-Lite guys I'm so sick of did, in fact, help pass many small reforms, including a pet bill of mine involving juvenile shackling, that made a huge difference in the lives of my clients.

So: sympathy! Sympathy all around! I'm sick of Republican-Lite and also I acknowledge that working with a center establishment can be an enormously productive thing to do! I recognize that the specter of small reforms can distract from the need for ground-up restructuring and yet when ground-up restructuring is not going to happen, small reforms are crucial!

I say: "I am not interested in blame and I don't care who started it."

Y'all hear: "It is your fault and I am blaming you. You started it and I am holding you personally responsible for everyone's behavior."

Me: "I don't punish and I am not interested in punishing."

Y'all hear: "I would like to punish you specifically."

-

Is it that I critiqued the behavior I saw? Because what I saw was this:

Y'all: I am extremely upset and personally offended at the existence of Democratic voters that don't agree with me and have taken actions I have found personally evil. Here are many citations to their evil, which I am right about and will not budge on. They deserve to be punished. I would like to exile them forever to the corners of the Earth.

Me: Ok but if you do that my clients will die and we will lose.

Y'all: But you don't understand: they're evil.

-

Hey, listen:

For once I'm not actually doing a bit; those "any resemblance to real persons living or dead" disclaimers genuinely exist because of Rasputin.

I know the obvious answer is probably that everyone still deserves rights regardless, but I think there's still some nuance I'm missing maybe? ty, I'm very fascinated by this stuff

Oof, I thought I'd answered this one, I'm sorry. It's so old now!

In essence, them getting their rights taken away is what happens -- but it's through what's called due process of law. People have a right to be free; when they're put in jail, that right is taken away. Due process of law is the part where the government has to justify why it put them in jail.

The 'due process' part is also where the government proves that 1) they were the one that dun it, and 2) that they deserve the rights being taken away as a result. Without that due process, the government can just point at someone and say "that guy, John A Smith, is a rapist! cut his balls off!" and the cops will arrest that guy and a doctor will grab a scalpel and someone will generate appropriate paperwork and nobody will check to make sure they got the correct John A. Smith, much less whether he actually was a rapist.

A very real example of this, right now, is deportation. ICE is deporting people with the most excruciatingly minimal due process of law that I've ever seen, and I promise, "due process" was always pretty fucking basic and janky. (See: my entire series of posts on the legal system.) ICE will just write up a piece of paper that says "This guy sucks and we get to take him out of the country" and when they show it to other legal authorities, those legal authorities are like /shrug, yeah, this looks like legal paperwork, I guess there's nothing we can do. But that guy didn't have a lawyer for that. That guy didn't have someone to advise them of their options. In many cases, no one even translated the paperwork they were intimidated into signing. That's what it looks like to have your rights taken away without due process.

In any society, there's going to be a little bit of taking people's rights away. It's one of the compromises that happens when you have a lot of humans trying to coexist in a network. Due process is, in theory, the thing where you make sure you do it right and fair.

(In practice, it's the enshrining in law of a lot of stupid human biases, thus making it seem right and fair when it is, in fact, on the whole, deeply horrifying.)

Hmm. I think you'd first need to look at the Bartz vs. Anthropic site to make sure you were in the main suit's class to begin with. There were four main criteria writers in the class had to fulfill:

Your work had to be one of those Anthropic used to train its LLM. Those works were acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, and there's a page where you can look up affected works by ISBN, ASIN, author name, or title over here.

A given work had to have been "registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in a timely manner". This apparently means "within five years of first publication." (See the Bartz vs. Anthropic FAQ page over here.)

A given work also had to have been registered "before being downloaded by Anthropic, or within three months of the work's first publication."

And a work had to have an ISBN or ASIN.

...Now, there's no requirement for a work to have been traditionally published to be part of this class. But somebody has to have formally registered it on or after publication with the USCO.

So if somebody, say, self-published their work through Smashwords, they'd probably need to talk to Smashwords to find out what commitment (if any) Smashwords has or had made to authors using them as regarded copyright registration with the USCO.

Note also, though, that "copyright protection" in the abstract sense (which can ensue simply on the publication of a work) is not the same as copyright registration. (The Bowker page here gets into this in some detail.) The US Supreme Court has apparently ruled that if you're going to seek monetary damages for copyright infringement, you have to have registered the work with the USCO.

Tags by @noirandchocolate. Fun fact, my best friend and favorite coworker has this mug on her desk.

Second read: “OH WAIT RFP. They need someone to do requests for production for them, that makes sense!

…

Wait, no it doesn’t they’re not a law firm.”

RFP in this context is almost certainly Requests for Proposals.

When an entity wants to do a public procurement for something they can either get bids or proposals.

If they just want to buy widgets, they will put out a request for bids and Company A will respond saying that they will sell the widgets for $10 and Company B says they will sell them for $12, etc. And then the buyer will generally select the lowest bid.

But if they want to procure something more complicated, like, say, someone to design a new bridge, they will put out a Request for Proposals, or RFP. And that RFP will lay out what kind of bridge they need and where and what is the schedule for the project and maybe what is the maximum price they can pay, etc. And then engineering firms will submit proposals that say how they will deliver the very best bridge design for the best value because they have an awesome track record and experienced engineers, etc etc. And the entity that needs the bridge will pick the best proposal and enter into a contract with that engineering firm.

Sometimes these RFPs are dozens or even hundreds of pages depending on how complicated the thing they’re procuring is! So it makes sense that an entity that procures lots of complicated stuff frequently would need an RFP writer.

Second read: “OH WAIT RFP. They need someone to do requests for production for them, that makes sense!

…

Wait, no it doesn’t they’re not a law firm.”

Turns out, if you continue to ignore sleep while sick for long enough, your body will eventually just stop giving you a choice in the matter.