The guy who has Paul pelosi captive also believed left wing conspiracy stories like systemic racism and was pro drug . Maybe college educated . The guy who tried to kill Brett kavaghan only believed left wing conspiracy theories and definitely was college educated
This brief is probably too cerebral and free thinking for 5/9ths of the court. As much as they extol their belief in the constitution, they prove they don’t believe it.
Yes. Although winning isn't everything, sometimes winning is everything. BTW, I think I saw a citation of Buckley v. Valeo in there as it flashed on screen. I'm intensely curious as to why. I'd find the text and read it myself, but I doubt I have the legal knowledge to get the joke. I'd be stoked if you'd explain it.
This is actually iconic, I love how the onion randomly pops up from time to time just to hit us all in the face with some surprisingly on point parody. so many layers of hilarity here
Peter Schickele has mentioned that his P.D.Q. Bach parodies of classical music wouldn't be nearly as funny if all the musicians weren't so good at playing. It really works best when everything is right on target except for the one ridiculous thing.
@@gsteixner It's so ironic that most defensive uses of that aphorism really do miss the point of it. PDs will jump out and say "it's only a few bad apples!" when discussing corrupt or criminal behaviour of individual cops who actually get caught. Of course, as you point out, the full aphorism goes: "A few bad apples spoil the bunch." Which was originally an observation that leaving a few rotting fruits in the same bunch as ripe ones leads them all to quickly rot (which, it turns out is a cool function of fruit biology involving ethylene). Thus, finding "a few bad apples" is really an indictment that the whole bunch is likely rotten or soon to be so.
I'm really hoping that you're not just NOW realizing that this police modus operandi (method of operating) occurs, because it has absolutely been the de facto (in effect) standard for law enforcement nearly everywhere in this nation for decades.
@@MrARock001 Generally, if a farmer found that many bad apples in their crop, I would expect that farmer to be searching very carefully for signs of the trees being blighted.
People should know that the Supreme Court denied hearing Novak's case Feb 2023. "Feb 21 2023 Petition DENIED." That's it. Justice died early this time. "like" this even if you don't like it so other people know.
My former brother-in-law is a cop. Like most cops I've known, he is a very big baby and a snowflake beyond all measure. Scary that these fellows are given guns.
“Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.” -Police to the people not required in their job description to know the law. “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” -Also Police, the people required in their job descriptions to know the law. Just a slight adjustment there. Honestly, makes it even more pathetic.
I was an English teacher. We studied "A Modest Proposal." A few days later a parent lodged a protest that I was teaching cannibalism. I have seen The Onion's power first hand.
I must have completely glossed over anything in "A Modest Proposal" that could have been taken as anything to do with cannibalism. Then again, I can be pretty stupid 🤔
@@lina9535 Swifts modest proposal is that lower class parents sell their "excess" offspring to the rich as a food source. The parent in question fell right into Swift's satire since he fully believed we were pushing cannibalism. Ain't people grand?
I lost respect for quite a few of my AP English classmates the day after our teacher assigned us "A Modest Proposal" for homework reading. Of course a few weeks later we got an (unlabeled) essay that I completely read as serious and proceeded to participate straight-faced in a discussion about until one student (who incidentally was my high school crush) interrupted us all to say, "Guys, it's David Sedaris."
They were mad that they got eleven phone calls and "tied up a bunch of their time". Wonder how much time they spent raiding his house, doing surveillance, trying to figure out what to charge him with, taking up a magistrates time and the list goes on. Violate someones rights then hide behind qualified immunity. What an absolute joke. Disband the entire department.
Time table argument should be strong... But, it complains about their process and not about how long they were gullible to stay on the phone to explain something (but still should be made part of the case)
I’ve been in dispatch for about 25 years. We are quite often a lot busier than any police officer and to be fair, you’re kind of comparing apples and oranges. A house raid and the legal behind the scenes stuff going on isn’t drawing any availability of first responders from the general public while tying up a communications center actually can. I think that’s the argument they made…but also to be fair…eleven phone calls isn’t a big deal and probably didn’t really make a dent. I get what you’re saying and I agree it was a waste of taxpayer money and time on the part of the city though.
@@eaglebauersrecordcollection How are the phone calls going to tie up first responders? Nobody should be calling 911 about a strange non-threatening Facebook post. They should be calling the police department's regular phone line. Fine the people making 911 calls they have no reason for.
@@JWQweqOPDH This just goes to show you how prevalent "you are dumb" people are in society, even in jobs, such as emergency dispatch, where we prefer them not to be dumb.
@@eaglebauersrecordcollectionThat raid cost a lot more police resources than the 11 phone calls did. Those that proposed and ordered it are more guilty of the crime Novak was arrested for than he was.
In any country with somewhat reasonable laws (and a police force with proper training and education instead of handing every idiot a badge and a gun after completing - not understanding, just completing - a 4h crash course) there is no qualified immunity. There is also no such thing as „give me 100m Dollars because you violated my rights“-lawsuits. In Germany, for instance, it is simply: If a police officer violates the law, not necessarily the constitution, they will be prosecuted criminally for violation of the StGB (penal code) and/or various other regulations (for instance, the police and ordinance litigation is regulated on state level due to the federal system, and every state has its own PolG or Polizeigesetz, police code). The possibilities in civil court are also restricted to the actual damage caused, and punitive damages don’t exist (especially not in those absurd sums, but there can be a compensation for pain or emotional damages that can’t be calculated exactly). Ah, and if a police officer is convicted of a felony, either above a certain threshold or especially in conjunction and violation of his official duties, he/she will be removed from service, likely lose his status as public servant, lose his pension and other benefits of state officials (the years served will be counted for the retirement pay by the respective social security insurance, part of the German social insurance system, btw). The main difference is the status of the constitution: The Grundgesetz, the German constitution in less a solitary document that is referred to separately (although this is possible). Generally, it is the base and background of all German laws, but referring directly to a violation of the constitution is way harder and in most circumstances not necessary, because there are likely laws covering that aspect without directly appealing to the Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG, Bundesverfassungsgericht. Keep in mind that I‘m no lawyer and that the system is way more complex than I can explain in a comment. But in general, that should be correct enough to give you an idea.
It's kinda funny how the police department has to argue that a post about hiring convicted pedophiles as police officers, and another one about not hiring PoC are close enough to the truth, that a reasonable person wouldn't neccessarily understand it as parody.
You mean...🤔 kinda funny how it's not funny that all their funny business is made funny by someone else? Or do you mean: Funny how something funny about things not so funny shows the funny business?
This is the perfect example of how bad American policing has become. Someone points out the obvious in a public forum and the police have to pursue legislation to prevent people from recognizing the truth. If you are not pushing copaganda YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF THE STATE. Do you get it yet?
When "a few bad apples" doesn't cut it, just arrest those who call you out and say it was because they impeded the police's work carrying out systemic racism
A small correction: _A Modest Proposal_ didn't suggest that the poor should eat their _own_ babies; it suggested that they should _sell_ their babies to the rich as food.
@@kimgkomg But that's already legal, not much is stopping you from selling your kidney if you decide you're poor enough and could do with one organ less. I think the difference is that here it's not the choice of the person selling, such as kids. So you probably mean you've heard real arguments used for why should OTHERS have legality in selling poor people's internal organs. Why shouldn't you have the right to sell off your own organs? You're the only one with legality to donate them to research facilities or museums too, it follows the same logic.
@@komenisai Because... USA, I guess. I always find it interesting how US law seems to be a mixture of laws protecting people from the police (seemingly under assumption that policemen are ill-intentioned crooks that can't be trusted) and others protecting the policemen regardless of what they do (ensuring that the police won't suffer any real consequences for being ill-intentioned crooks that can't be trusted).
on Feb 21 2023, the U.S. Extreme Court refused to hear the appeal from Anthony Novak, who was jailed for four days and charged with a felony for making a satirical Facebook page of his local police department. This leaves in place the lower court ruling that shielded the police officers and the city of Parma, Ohio from legal liability for their actions. Antidote: mock them more.
The white flight mentioned in this video was enacted in key areas being "overrun" by black people specifically so that they could create areas like Parma that are immune to change and criticism. It was remarkably effective and also decimated the areas they left so that they could then point to those areas as being proof of the failure of diversity.
@@wildfire9280 I mean Joe Biden is one of them, his crime policies (in particular the crack discrepancy legislation) were designed to strictly enforce segregation. Trump's another. So our election is going to be choosing between the least offensive segregationist.
It is VERY difficult to respect the law or law enforcement because of this common practice: use the law to punish things we don't like. The law serves power, NOT justice, nor the citizenry. I feel bad for lawyers. It isn't their fault the entire judicial system is rigged to ensure unfair practices of compliance and submission to authority,
you can disagree that what the guy did wasn't "disrupting public services", but isn't "search for a crime to fit the circumstances" literally how criminal prosecution is supposed to work
“How did Novak disrupt the Police Department?” By hurting its feelings, of course. I’ve seen enough police officers in action to know that they consider making fun of them a very serious crime.
There’s so many videos freely available of cops attacking or arresting people just because they got their feelings hurt. Cops are some of the most sensitive I swear.
@@obeseperson High on power and believing they are over the law. Hence why qualified immunity should go and cops need at least 3 years of education on civil rights and the Constitution. Plus, get rid of the "us vs. them" shit.
Every time the west side gets a bit to big for it's self, we have to remind them of Parma. Esat side may have crime and East Cleveland, but the west side has Parma. Of course, the Legal Eagle could make a video of what happens when almost an entire police department gets charged with felonies... like in East Cleveland... but that's not this video.
I can somewhat understand if the police department tried to sue him, but the fact that they raided his house and arrested him like some sort of drug lord is insane to me. Ironically, this type of story is EXACTLY something that would seem like a parody if it wasn't true - "SWAT team arrests man for making fun of them". This is the type of headline that you could see on The Onion, but unfortunately it is real life...
See, that's what I CAN'T understand. That's how a child would act at being spurned in the schoolyard or on the playground. Not how an adult should think and most definitely not an adult that enters into a job with tremendous amount of power over others. It's the very furthest thing that should be on your mind, when your job is to ensure the safety of the people. Which apparently isn't even what police in the States are doing, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at their overall not just incompetence, but actual petty malice. It'd be like becoming a firefighter and then just refusing to extinguish a house because the guy that lived there cut in line at the grocery store. And then suing that guy for arson.
This is amazing. I think the entire thing can be summarized in a single sentence: That a court concluded a post about a "pedophile recruitment event" might be mistaken, by a reasonable reader, as a legitimate post by a police department is possibly the single greatest argument in favor of police reform the country has ever seen.
@@IceMetalPunk ...And again, it's the Parma police department. If any locality _could_ inspire such an absolute _dearth_ of public confidence, it's this one.
Here the Onion have explained in great detail how explaining the joke ruins the comedic value of it, yet this work is made infinitely funnier because they've so seriously explained it.
I think the difference here is that the other party wants there to basically be a label upfront killing the joke, while the onion explains it on page hundred. Letting people in on the joke after they're already in on the joke doesn't kill the joke.
This is actually brilliant by the Onion, unironically. Brings huge amounts of attention to a case that would likely fly quietly under the radar, which is arguably doing more for the case than anything in the brief, even though the brief does make plenty of legitimate compelling arguments.
My only worry is the decrepit corpses on the Supreme Court don’t agree with them. The irony of disagreeing would of course just be plain comedy to anyone outside of the court
I fear Fox News could rebrand in court themselves as Parodists, instead of 'entertainment'. Because sooner or later, their use of the word 'news' in their official title when they are anything but has a major Karmic debt that is overdue. I don't want them to have this as a legal out when the guillotine blade finally drops.
@@inkandesk They don't even have to disagree. They could just decide not to take the case, shielding them from scrutiny. Much as I disliked the guy, Scalia would have been all over this case. So for those keeping score: decrepit SC corpses = 0, Actual corpse = 1.
@@temperededge - Eh, Scalia I imagine would, at best, be mightily furrowing his brow but going along with whatever the GOP wanted anyway - in this case, establishing precedent that police (who are overwhelmingly right-wing and have a huge white-nationalist problem nation wide) can do literally whatever they want to retaliate against any form of criticism.
“Searched for a crime to fit the situation” That right there is the point where they should have been fired. On the spot, immediately. Not even a second thought. Someone that petty should not be in a position of power where they can ruin someone’s life over hurt feelings.
"The Police get away with committing crimes if they don't know they are committing a crime! " - I scream from my cell after I have been arrested and jailed for committing a crime I didn't know I was committing.
I mean, this is the first thing we ever heard about Neil Brennan from Dave Chappelle when he was astounded that his white friend could get away with something by telling the cop I didn't know I could do that.. so either you didn't try telling the cop you didn't know you couldn't do that or you're a black person and in either case you should have known that you can't do that, just following the logic here! And what I mean by you should have known you can't do that is that you should have known you can't not say you didn't know that or be black!... It seems like there's a little bit of unbalanced outcome here I just can't put my white finger on it
@@chitlitlah am I the only person who assumed that chip is neil? LOL I don't remember why but there's several clues in that special end other interactions... But I could just be like oh yeah it must have been Neil cuz he's that white dude... LOL like even if the story is made up, it's still Neil in the made-up story that's all I'm saying
I just want to comment that while working as a 911 dispatcher I got roughly 15 butt dials a day. One user was a repeat offender that would butt dial twice a day for over a year and our officers for the city they lived in advised they can't do a thing about it. Similarily, we had frequently flyer homes that would call us multiple times a day for various issues. And we also took complaints for public services after hours as all people advised that their complaint is an emergency. My favorite being a caller that would call to complain park lights were on past 9pm when they were supposed to be off. She called this in at 7pm every day for a week and even threatened to murder me a few times. Officers said nothing could be done. The dispatcher time is worthless in the opinion of cities and cops. The only exception I have seen for the agencies I have worked for were injured officers that covered as dispatchers in small areas. Their ego is fragile.
My first phone was a brick phone, and if you pressed the 0 key (on the exposed, unprotectable keypad) a few times it would call 911. I stopped carrying it in my pocket after a week or two. Got tired of being called back by the dispatcher. ;)
I remember when I started college, so many of us Freshmen would accidentally call 911! It was back when not many people had cell phones yet, and it was tricky to get the hang of the dorm phones. You had to dial 9 to get an outside line, and it was still when you had to dial a 1 to call a non local number. I think the local dispatchers were used to it!
@@SchnauzerGal2500 this is something programmed into PBX systems today and is required so people don't need to dial the outside-line code '9' when in a panic. Causes many 911 false calls; I worked in telecom for 25 years programming these things 'under orders' from above and it is now required by law since 2020 ('Kari's Law').
I have exactly one story of a dispatcher being too over-eager at their job. My mom called 911 to ask how to smother a kitchen fire. The dispatcher was like "A FIRE?! Don't worry ma'am, help is on the way!" And my mom was like "What! No, I don't need a fire truck, just tell me what to do to smother it!" The dispatcher was like "Don't take chances! You should go wait outside for assistance." This was around when the fire truck drove over the bridge behind the house. We were at the bottom of a pretty long cul de sac so it took another minute or two for the fire truck to get there. They come rushing in to the house and ask where the fire is. My mom points to a pile of like three black macaroni noodles with a sad little spark sputtering out before dying. There were now more firemen in the house than pieces of burned macaroni. She pointed out to the firemen that in her defense, she DID tell the dispatcher not to send them. The lead fireman radioed the dispatcher and sarcastically commented on the great conflagration that she had been explicitly told did not need a fire truck and she was like "Do you need more help!? I'm sending more fire trucks!" The guy was like "NO I DON'T NEED MORE HELP! DO **NOT** SEND MORE FIRE TRUCKS!" The firemen advised my mom to get a fire extinguisher in case she ever needed it and left.
"The police then conducted a swat raid on Novak's home." That sentence sounds like it should be from a parody article titled "Police conduct swat raid on menace to society after menace assaults entire police department with posts".
Police considered his words to be classified as a deadly weapon, citing the law that "the pen is mightier than the sword." The court disagreed on the grounds that, in fact, Novak was armed with a computer, not a pen, and the police department was armed with not a sword but a SWAT team.
It reminds me somewhat of the criminal harassment tactic of "SWATsing". Main difference being that the idiots responsible are not calling it in over the phone using a hoax. They are conducting it.
"Novak can't help it if a magistrate judge and city attorney are closer to the lowest common denominator than the average reasonable reader" holy shit best burn ever
The case with Novak is a perfect example of the police not understanding how they appear to others. They're like, "We do so much good! Why don't you like us!?" Then someone posts something on the internet about them and it's "Let's bury them with the full weight of the legal system!" Which also included a swat raid, a few days in jail, and then a trial by jury. Excellent use of those funds' guys. Edit: I liked that Billy cameo
The lawsuit should be at minimum a billion dollars (in addition to the money for things other then the SWAT), because comedy, nonviolent Internet posts of any kind, and owning a Facebook page are not valid reasons for a SEAT raid nor for confiscation or searching of any items/technology whatsoever, regardless of whether the post is illegal.
@@Rayvn7 the issue with this is that cops pay out lawsuits with *your money*. You can’t legally sue a cop or a precinct, you sue the city, which uses city tax dollars to fight the case. That’s why cops drag it out as long as possible and why they couldn’t care less about breaking the law and getting sued. Even if they lose a lawsuit, there are zero consequences since it’s not their money anyway
@@fort809 - That's why qualified immunity needs to go, and cops need to have liability insurance - because then those static police department budgets are suddenly squeezed by hikes on the insurance rates after one of their officers does something actionable.
It's not that they don't understand how they look, they don't care how they look because they know if it goes too far they can just shoot the person pissing them off and come up with an excuse later.
Yeah that was my initial thought when I heard that said, "wait so they found something they didn't like and then went through a library to check if there was a crime they could pin on him? Not only does that show that the law officers just done know the law which is wild on its own, but they had enough spare time to try and assign someone a crime instead of watching for and stopping active crime. That sounds like an over-staffed and under-qualified department.
@@kempolar9768 "over-staffed and under-qualified" are the two best phrases to describe the US police system, followed by "over-funded," "hyper-aggressive" and "unhelpful"
The police exist to manufacture criminality. If what you're doing isn't illegal, but they'd like you to be a criminal, there are an infinite number of ways to do that.
In an Economics class in High School, we had to form groups and "create a business". We would need to detail how this business would make a profit, how it would be run, along with several other key details. My friends and I, being sarcastic jacka**es, created a business based off of 'A Modest Proposal'. Most of the people in the class had never read, or even heard, of it.. but the teacher.. the teacher LOVED IT. He let us go as far as we wanted. At the end of the assignment, our group had to stand before the entire class and give a speech on our business.. props/handouts/etc. As he sat in the back of the class attempting to stifle his laughter at the indignation of the other students.. we, my group and I, just went in deeper. I even added in bits from Soylent Green and any other dystopian movie or book. We received an 'A'.
Guess that's the one upside to the police doing the lawbreaking, they keep literal legal records of all their doings, something no smart criminal would do lol
@@pattygould8240 That's kinda my point. Though, "Alleged" was merely an example of the general category of words to distance oneself from the information. Having very little of this type of language is much stronger rhetoric you don't often hear from a lawyer.
@@kx7500 Believe it or not, there exist parts of the world where independent investigations are actually independent and power-tripping shenanigans are called out and punished as a result, for the betterment of society. Checks and balances are crucial, and some places have arranged them appropriately. Police are not "bad everywhere".
As soon as prosecutors found out that "qualified" essentially means "blanket", they started to do things, such as going into peoples houses and taking their stuff.
RIght? When I read that they took his "phone and computers" i was like ok sure, prolly has fb info, then said "and his gaming consoles"....wtf does an Xbox have to do with this? That's just next level pettiness.
Imagine trying to make someone a felon for making fun of them and hurting your feelings instead of trying to push back on messaging, or - heaven forbid - self-reflect. A gang of man-children with badges, if I've ever heard of it.
was listening to the video while driving and thought it was "we know crime" a statement that is correct, funny, and carries a couple implications for the reader to discern. we no crime is so much better.
- Cops thought this might have been illegal, at first glance: Yeah sure whatever - Cops thought it merited a SWAT raid: WTF mate - A court granted that warrant: WTF mate - The police confiscated his gaming consoles: WTF mate - Jury acquitted him: OK good, brief moment of sanity - Magistrate sided with the cops on balance of probability: WTF mate - Appellate court upheld that decision: WTF mate Hell of an indictment of the US judicial system, gotta say. An AP article about this case would be indistinguishable from Onion satire.
Agreed, this is what makes being a satirist harder these days, coming up with something stupid enough it can't be real (yet), when things more stupid than the past thing keep happening every day.
This is what happens when law enforcement are allowed to operate above the law as a paramilitary gang instead instead of as accountable public servants.
Parody page: "Hey all you pedos, we're ganna wipe your record and make you police officers!" Parma cops: "Thats wayyyyy to close to what we would actually post, this is illegal!"
This is *entirely* the problem here, in theory. The 'minorities are strongly encouraged to not apply' bit was 'parody', but also seems like genuine department unwritten policy. The 'joke' is simply in actually writing it out in full. Which IS pretty funny! But it's in no way absurd or, in fact, even faintly untrue. Which makes legally defining parody somewhat tricky.
@@Kanner111 It's actually a double-bind, though. If they acknowledge the parody to not be parody by virtue of being true, they would thereby also officially acknowledge how the PD is violating human rights. Hence the statement would not be defamatory anymore. This is actually what makes good satire: By its very nature it has very real consequences. This reminds me of a German satire show, which criticized the turkish president for misusing the German court system to silence any kind of criticism against him as defamatory. So they actually wrote a parody poem about him to show, what would actually be defamatory. The turkish president sued and in the whole aftermath the German chancellor at the time was forced to make a public statement about satire and art being protected by law and a law called "majesty defamation", which gave international head of states special rights to sue German people for defamation, was subsequently abolished.
Recently there was a debate on qualified immunity on NPR. I learned that police officers who swiped valuables from a home they were investigating invoked qualified immunity when they brought up on charges. The more outrageous police behavior is, the less likely it is that there is a prior court case that can be used to hold it unconstitutional. Qualified immunity is a crock.
the goal of the law is pretty good, I think. Literally nobody would be willing to take a job in govt without some form of this law. But I totally agree that the specifics of the law are not what the authors intended and it should be rewritten.
The people who are operating under these laws have completely forgotten the purpose, intent, and spirit of the law. Those with the right intent need no written laws at all. Those will mal intent will need an ever-expanding ocean of new statutes to govern them.
Its like the saying "You can get away with anything once as long as you're the first one to do it". Which is really not how immunity to prosecution should work for things that literally anyone should know is wrong. Which is apparent when anyone not a cop doing the same thing would be arrested. Also reminds me of that SR-71 story were they buzzed the tower at Sacramento Airport and after they landed their commanding officer came out and asked "do we have any regulations that say we can’t make approaches at Sacramento Airport?" to which the pilot replied "No sir." The CO then said "I want one on my desk at seven o’clock tomorrow morning."
Qualified immunity isn't for crimes intentionally committed. It's like a good Samaritan law where if you try to do CPR but don't know what you're doing you don't get sued
I've seen a lot of explanations of "qualified immunity" and it's only now that it clicked in my head: state and federal governments can abuse my constitutional rights, at least as long as no one else has complained about it before.
for us citizens, breaking a law that they didn't know about is still illegal meanwhile for the us police, not only is it not illegal but even has its own name
@@inafridge8573 You can say things that are incorrect, that's not illegal. You could argue it's impersonation of a police official, but that has some pretty specific requirements. I think that was genuinely the best they could come up with.
I personally owe quite a lot to The Onion. As a young teen I fell for one of it's articles and shared it to friends and family who immediately pointed out it was wrong. The level of embarrassment I felt for doing so taught me a very good lesson, never accept anything without first hearing it from other publications.
@@MusicfromMarrs I don't know about you, but if I accidently took a parody new story as actual news, I would find if very helpful if my friends and family pointed that out. Because, it would be wrong. Factually incorrect. Because its made up.
I've often wondered if "we" can have qualified immunity for things that no one ever told us was against the law - just like police officers. Like "I didn't know it was illegal to dump 40 tons of cow shit on the police chief's lawn! I was just trying to help him have a greener lawn! And if some of it oozed under his front door and fertilized the carpets on every floor, well I didn't know that was illegal either!"
@@mrthingy9072 exactly! Violating Constitutional rights is a big thing cops should know not to do. It makes no sense that they could get away with it by claiming not to know, and if I didn't know that dressing up a goat in women's underwear and taking it on a little red wagon ride on a downtown sidewalk on a Sunday was against the law, I'd still be held liable for the 'offense'.
There's literally a name for the legal doctrine of not excusing people for being unaware of the law: ignorantia juris non excusat. The fact that the US not only doesn't follow this, but specifically doesn't recognize that an officer of the law, as in someone who technically works as the active enforcer of law, can be considered not guilty for violating the constitution, the basest form of law out of which the rest of the legal code blooms, epitomizes the latent authoritarianism of the US and it's institutions.
Pretty sure he said “judicially inventED”, because it arose out of a SCOTUS ruling rather than being passed as a law by a legislature. Pierson v Ray, I believe.
The Onion also made a similar video about the SCOTUS with respects to a ruling involving lethal injection. In it, SCOTUS watched a video of lethal injection taking place, and the entire SCOTUS overall reaction was akin to how "dude bros" would've reacted. As an example: Justice Ginsberg said "That's wicked!" Later, the only descension decision was of Justice Scallia, who only voted against it because the ruling was too restricted and didn't go far enough, where the only proper punishment would be if the prisoner were put in a sort of Hunger Games-esque battle royal where they effectively need to fight like rabid animals for survival. I love how Onion keeps the theme of "Supreme Court of the United States are just a bunch of dope party animal frat boys" going.
Objection! A Modest Proposal didn't argue that the poor Irish should eat their *own* babies. It argued they should sell them to the wealthy people in England and Ireland (the majority of whom were also English) so that the rich could eat them. Also this is the best Amicus brief ever. And your dog is adorable. Thanks for all the awesome videos.
Yeah, it was making fun of the shithead oppressors. That the English were making the Irish so desperate that they had to sell their own children to survive, and that the English were such rapacious monsters that they would happily buy and eat Irish children.
True story: in college I read Swift's Modest Proposal and for some reason didn't catch that it was parody. Perhaps it was the serious tone of the prose, or maybe i was having a moment of extreme gullibility. Regardless, I was super mad the following day and wanted to go off about it in class, until my friend laughed in my face for like 10 minutes before telling me it was a damn joke. And that was the moment i stopped taking myself (and pretty much everything else) very seriously.
I remember a girl in high school become openly appalled when we had to read Modest Proposal in high school. That was such an amazing day full of laughter, even if it was due to a classmate's reaction. I even took a class on the Satirists in college and found that it once again had the same effect on people, even though they knew they were in a class covering works of satire.
"In a final round of briefing in January 2023, Novak's lawyers framed the case as an opportunity to either reconsider qualified immunity or better balance it with the right to free speech.[33] The Supreme Court denied the petition on February 21, 2023,[34] letting the lower courts' decisions stand.[35] Novak expressed concerns for future implications for "others who poke fun at the powerful", while an attorney for Parma praised the outcome.[35]"
Damn. Even the thrones of feudal Europe and Asia understood the importance of a court jester for a society to keep itself in-check. I fear we're on a path of a fascistic reign which our ancestors couldn't imagine, and that's saying somethin'.
They didn’t like being made fun of, so “they searched for a crime” to charge him with… That’s both pathetic, and detestable. Your Tax dollars at work, citizens of Parma, OH 🙄
It's unbelievable that qualified immunity is being spread so wide.wife. police can just say willingly ignorant of the law, and apply it as they wish as a result.
All I can say is the writers for the Onion are geniuses. There is no way I could come up with the topics they parody. Thank you Onion for protecting me and others like me with your fortress of comedy. And thank you Devin, for helping me to keep my eyes and ears open to the absurdity of injustices.
I really appreciate how well they pointed out that comedy, like stage magic; is reliant on the audience not knowing the punchline, or the trick behind the illusion. It’s completely contrast to the way a lot of other things can and would be handled legally. Very interesting concept.
It would be like someone suing a magician. Either they're upset that the magician was using real magic, or they're upset that the magician fooled them.
@@panagea2007 that's so plausible I'm near certain there's precedent regarding patrons claiming a magician left them in crisis, questioning reality. Probably how event/venue tickets wound up sprinkled w/ fine print purchase agreements.
Imagine if Weird Al Yankovic had to add a disclaimer before every song he’s ever written saying that the song is a parody and not to be taken seriously. It would totally remove the ‘paradise’ in Amish Paradise.
No, that's either missing the point or a dishonest slippery slope fallacy. These types of debates exist in the first place because we need to hold institutions like newspapers or even more official distributors of public information (research agencies, universities, governmental institutions, etc.) to a high standard of truth, and so they have to be careful with how they present untrue texts. Doesn't mean they should be denied all access to parody, as has been laid out in this video and its comment section, but you shouldn't pretend that the question at hand is about whether parody can exist *at all* either. (And yes, The Onion isn't a newspaper, but that's exactly the point: How far you need to go to distance yourself from claims of being an official authority, and if you *are* an official authority, how much of the inofficial nature of the particular text you are publishing has to be made explicit so it won't qualify as misinformation.)
@@TheHadMatters Oh well. A few years, a shitstorm descended on a German newspaper for publishing an "offending article". Apparently, there were quite a few people who did not understand that the article was *very clearly* satirical. Apart from being very clearly satirical, the article was also marked, *very clearly, in large friendly letters* as SATIRE Didn't help either. “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
@@TheHadMatters marking it as satire doesnt do shit Streetfighter 2 is the father of all fighting games During aprill fools a magazine published a joke article that stated on big bold italic letters on the bottom that "THIS IS A JOKE" and proceded to say that there was a secret hidden character on the game Thousands were fooled by it and the rumor only truly went away during the digital age
I they said the callers "honest to god thought the page was real", but then it turns out that wasn't the case... didn't whoever said that commit perjury? Was that statement made under oath?
@@trshaw52...all I can think of is the Harley Quinn episode of Batman: the animated series when she says, "it was my fault, I didn't get the joke..." There is probably a connection, but I cant think of it right now.
One relevant bit of history.... The Onion started in Madison WI as a newspaper. They included the local campus police blotter in the paper. No editing needed. The blotter served as a self parody, because it tended to be ridiculous stories dealing with college students.
So qualified immunity is basically that ignorance of the law is an excuse to break the law but only for state officials. Sounds super just and fair and definitely not prone to abuse
Remember the golden rule: mocking the government is a reasonably good gag, but mocking the government and then the government not finding it funny is a really good gag.
I made it all the way to the end of this video and still absolutely cannot stop laughing at him copying and pasting the fake page notification to his parody page verbatim.
And yet, this evidently DIDN'T count as disclosure that the page WASN'T real, AND the cops didn't try to claim he infringed their copyright by copying it verbatim without crediting them.
It's says a lot about the Parma police dept. when they're citing qualified immunity and jumping through hoops to dodge accountability rather than act like adults and own their mistakes. The ability to hold oneself accountable and admit wrongdoing is a sign of maturity these people clearly lack.
qualified immunity is a big catch 22. Not qualified if a precedent exists, but cases are dismissed before they can set precedent. If qualified immunity could have any value at all, then every qualified immunity case should be adjudicated to the point where, for precedent use, the question is resolved so that qualified immunity could only be used once for a given rights violation.
It's atrocious honestly. While it may be next to impossible to do away with at the Federal level, that's not the case at the state level. Colorado, and New Mexico both did away it at the state level.
Parody and satire are the lifeblood of a healthy political process. One of the best we have to protest injustice is humor. Humor is also one of the oldest forms of political protest and is a vital educational tool. This brief can and should be used to teach about parody, satire, and the purpose they serve.
News update: The supreme court left the lower ruling in place. That is another extremely upsetting and disheartening showing that police are deemed above the law and able to abuse others with no punishment nor recourse for those abused.
One of the coolest things about the Onion is that their newspapers were always free. I used to love grabbing a copy from the newsstand and reading it during my walks home from High School.
@lesselp Please explain to me how being woke would be criminally punishable. I’m genuinely curious. By that logic, does that mean that having beliefs other than your own should also be illegal? 🤔
You reading the Latin legalese has me realizing that when my dad and his friend "spoke Latin" to each other to show off in front of the kids they were likely just spouting legal jargon and acting... This is the whole "introducing himself as a doctor" thing all over again.
If you need their help, it takes ages, and you can count yourself lucky, if they do *anything* at all. "Yeah, we will search for your stolen car." they won't. If one makes fun of them, they instantly set all gears in motion and care about it without any hesitation in full force. Shows where their priorities are.
Omg! My old neighbor waited over 5 hours for the cops to show up about his stolen car. My partner and I passed a cop on the way to the gas station hours before they showed up. My neighbor knew where the car was; he had a tracker. They just wouldn't come with him. By the time they got to the "car," the tracker was removed, and car was gone. It's all so incredibly frustrating.
So the people that called to "interrupt the functions of any police operations", why were they not charged? Didn't realize making people ask questions on FB was disrupting police when it was other people calling the police directly with no real police business
There is a satire page for the town I work in. It is labeled a parody page, but people constantly believe it’s real. One of the mayoral candidates (current mayor) actually got into an argument with the page creators believing it was legit. That candidate lost. New mayor was a judge at a Rocky Horror Picture Show costume contest/showing the other night.
In highschool, one of my classmates did not understand that "A Modest Proposal" was satire...it was hilarious to watch his outrage at the proposal 😄 it's one of my favorite things I had to read in highschool.
To be fair to your classmate, in my Victorian Literature class this semester, I read a dead serious brief on why the British Empire needed to educate Indian citizens strictly in English, due to it being the only language with any financial, cultural, historical, literary, or academic merit. It absolutely read like parody in parts. XD
While it is funny to take a modest proposal seriously, it's not that unreasonable to believe it's a genuine text if you've ever read anything by Malthus lol. The man literally advocated eugenics and genocide because poor people eat too much. Like, sure, advocating for eating babies is blatantly absurd, but how much more absurd is it than "We should just soft genocide the poors because we hypothetically might not have enough food in the future and they have no value, even though the poors are the ones who produce the food and all we do is eat banquets, start wars and sell drugs to other countries. Also I don't know how future projections work, despite being a learned economist."? Fun fact, he also advocated focusing on making luxury goods to "balance" the economy and combat inflation. If that sounds as familiar as it does stupid (not to mention contradictory), congratulations you've been paying attention.
I was in the gifted program, and when our teacher had us read it in class without explaining, basically the entire class did not pick up on the satire. We had to have it explained because we couldn't inherently accept that something our English teacher would ask us to read from an 800-page literature anthology would be anything other than a face-value essay about the topic-at-hand. This was also pre-internet culture, where people of today would be far more used to seeing this kind of composition. I have to imagine born-20-years-later-me would have spotted it immediately.
I've been a lawyer for almost 38 years now. I have done a small amount of appellate work in that time. This would have been the brief I would love to have written but never would have had the guts. Thanks for living out my fantasy, guys.
I have the utmost respect for The Onion's writers. I had laughed many times before, but this story has them: standing up for the little guy (and everyone), doing the right thing , and being absolutely hilarious while doing so.
This one has a sad ending, unfortunately. In a show of 'not our circus; not our monkeys,' the Supreme Court told Novak et all that they didn't want to hear it. This was after another satirical organization (the conservative The Babylon Bee) also filed an amicus brief that was favorable to The Onion's and agreed with them despite being on the opposite side of the philosophical aisle. So the lower court's decision stands as precedent now. Fun.
@@Maphisto86 wild that not the onion exists, shameful that ate the onion exists (not necessarily, although sometimes, shame on the people that eat the onion, but rather the fact that people eat the onion at all)
Now I want to know what the application process for the position of in-house counsel at The Onion looked like. I'll bet those gents have been waiting their entire careers for the chance to write something like this.
Long time fan and Cleveland resident here. This is the single most accurate and concise description of Parma and Cleveland's relationship with Parma I've ever heard
Being from Cleveland and a perpetrator "DWB" Parma is in so many sad ways a joke. I am so happy you covered this case and I love The Onion even more for their support. At first I thought the entire case was actually from The Onion. This is great! BTW: I actually love the diverse Eastern European and Mediterranean population of the city but yeah, there is a clear past and current history of racism.
My friend and I were pulled over about five years ago when she was driving my car home from a doctor appointment. The officer actually asked me (white woman) if my friend was kidnapping me. This was my first experience of DWB, although I knew it existed. My jaw just about hit the floor, I was so flabbergasted and disgusted.
They should also add, that if the police department thought those texts were plausible, it reflects more on the police department than on the parodist. And that it is a great parody, because if even the target think it's plausible, that means the parody is well earned and the target should improve.
Police are the equivalent of the bully that only draws a line when someone says something that hurts them. They are insecure, aggressive, self-righteous asshats that can't deal with even the mildest form of constructive criticism.
⚖ Should Novak win?
☕ Find out on Morning Brew for free: legaleagle.link/morningbrew
The guy who has Paul pelosi captive also believed left wing conspiracy stories like systemic racism and was pro drug .
Maybe college educated .
The guy who tried to kill Brett kavaghan only believed left wing conspiracy theories and definitely was college educated
@@brandonelston1969 if he can be prosecuted then fox pundits should be prosecuted too
This brief is probably too cerebral and free thinking for 5/9ths of the court. As much as they extol their belief in the constitution, they prove they don’t believe it.
EYbrows of i'm clearly holding back laughs
Yes. Although winning isn't everything, sometimes winning is everything.
BTW, I think I saw a citation of Buckley v. Valeo in there as it flashed on screen. I'm intensely curious as to why. I'd find the text and read it myself, but I doubt I have the legal knowledge to get the joke. I'd be stoked if you'd explain it.
This is actually iconic, I love how the onion randomly pops up from time to time just to hit us all in the face with some surprisingly on point parody. so many layers of hilarity here
Peter Schickele has mentioned that his P.D.Q. Bach parodies of classical music wouldn't be nearly as funny if all the musicians weren't so good at playing. It really works best when everything is right on target except for the one ridiculous thing.
Yeah, I thought the Onion was dead, so when I started watched the video I thought it was talking about a long-gone thing. But apparently not
Reality is so crazy now they may have to up their game to keep up with the ridiculousness
God, I miss them being stationed here in Madison, WI. They may still be here but they were iconic in the 90's and 2000's.
They're freakishly good at predicting the future.
"They searched for a crime to fit the situation..." is a chilling off-the-cuff remark.
"It only takes a few bad apples to ruin the bunch." and they are all rotten to the core.
@@gsteixner It's so ironic that most defensive uses of that aphorism really do miss the point of it. PDs will jump out and say "it's only a few bad apples!" when discussing corrupt or criminal behaviour of individual cops who actually get caught. Of course, as you point out, the full aphorism goes: "A few bad apples spoil the bunch." Which was originally an observation that leaving a few rotting fruits in the same bunch as ripe ones leads them all to quickly rot (which, it turns out is a cool function of fruit biology involving ethylene). Thus, finding "a few bad apples" is really an indictment that the whole bunch is likely rotten or soon to be so.
I'm really hoping that you're not just NOW realizing that this police modus operandi (method of operating) occurs, because it has absolutely been the de facto (in effect) standard for law enforcement nearly everywhere in this nation for decades.
@@dionh70 not at all. It's just the host's casual use of the line that makes it distubingly clear how ubiquitous it is.
@@MrARock001 Generally, if a farmer found that many bad apples in their crop, I would expect that farmer to be searching very carefully for signs of the trees being blighted.
"We no crime". Words to live by.
It's even more hilarious if the original was 'We know crime'. I don't know if it was, and doubt it, but wouldn't that be great.
Preserve and collect!
I'd have gone with "We no justice"
@@harbingerdawn yeah, but it'd have brought down the funny aspect by hitting too close to reality at that point :/
Every police slogan should be, "Can I see your ID?"
People should know that the Supreme Court denied hearing Novak's case Feb 2023. "Feb 21 2023 Petition DENIED." That's it. Justice died early this time. "like" this even if you don't like it so other people know.
Bummer
Damn, that's actually very sad, case sounds so ridiculous it might be funny but someone life is actually damaged
Sadge. :'(
Somebody offered Thomas a free vacation. That's why they voted against it.
sad, Thanks
This entire case feels like the cops got mad for being made fun of and are just taking it out on the dude however they can
it's transparently obvious it's just nobody wants to say it
@@JohnSmith-kc6ov i want to say it 😡
My former brother-in-law is a cop. Like most cops I've known, he is a very big baby and a snowflake beyond all measure.
Scary that these fellows are given guns.
I bet the parodist thought this could happen. If the Parma police lose this at the suspense court the whole country will make fun of them forever.
Cited for Contempt of Cop
“Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.” -Police
“I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” -Also Police.
i didn kno the lah was chill like dat
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ...
That has to be Deputy Superintendent Chip
me and chip were driving see? now im not driving chip is driving and hes driving a little crazy
“Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.” -Police to the people not required in their job description to know the law.
“I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” -Also Police, the people required in their job descriptions to know the law.
Just a slight adjustment there.
Honestly, makes it even more pathetic.
I was an English teacher. We studied "A Modest Proposal." A few days later a parent lodged a protest that I was teaching cannibalism. I have seen The Onion's power first hand.
I am irish and big into history. Let me tell you that Swift was not too off considering Trevelyans' laissez-faire attitude
Haha!
I must have completely glossed over anything in "A Modest Proposal" that could have been taken as anything to do with cannibalism.
Then again, I can be pretty stupid 🤔
@@lina9535 Swifts modest proposal is that lower class parents sell their "excess" offspring to the rich as a food source. The parent in question fell right into Swift's satire since he fully believed we were pushing cannibalism. Ain't people grand?
I lost respect for quite a few of my AP English classmates the day after our teacher assigned us "A Modest Proposal" for homework reading.
Of course a few weeks later we got an (unlabeled) essay that I completely read as serious and proceeded to participate straight-faced in a discussion about until one student (who incidentally was my high school crush) interrupted us all to say, "Guys, it's David Sedaris."
"Ignorance isn't a defense unless you're a cop" is terrifying & a perfect example of why we don't trust them
This comment has been repeated several times in the comments. As it well deserves to be. It could not be repeated too often.
you don't trust them
@@Neurotik51 we don't trust them, or you
@@Neurotik51only boot lickers trust the boot that crushes
@@Neurotik51You, plural, referring to every decent human. Way to call yourself out...
They were mad that they got eleven phone calls and "tied up a bunch of their time". Wonder how much time they spent raiding his house, doing surveillance, trying to figure out what to charge him with, taking up a magistrates time and the list goes on. Violate someones rights then hide behind qualified immunity. What an absolute joke. Disband the entire department.
Time table argument should be strong... But, it complains about their process and not about how long they were gullible to stay on the phone to explain something (but still should be made part of the case)
I’ve been in dispatch for about 25 years. We are quite often a lot busier than any police officer and to be fair, you’re kind of comparing apples and oranges. A house raid and the legal behind the scenes stuff going on isn’t drawing any availability of first responders from the general public while tying up a communications center actually can. I think that’s the argument they made…but also to be fair…eleven phone calls isn’t a big deal and probably didn’t really make a dent.
I get what you’re saying and I agree it was a waste of taxpayer money and time on the part of the city though.
@@eaglebauersrecordcollection How are the phone calls going to tie up first responders? Nobody should be calling 911 about a strange non-threatening Facebook post. They should be calling the police department's regular phone line. Fine the people making 911 calls they have no reason for.
@@JWQweqOPDH This just goes to show you how prevalent "you are dumb" people are in society, even in jobs, such as emergency dispatch, where we prefer them not to be dumb.
@@eaglebauersrecordcollectionThat raid cost a lot more police resources than the 11 phone calls did. Those that proposed and ordered it are more guilty of the crime Novak was arrested for than he was.
Got to give The Onion credit for finding a legal team that would make it sound like they made up the names of their legal team.
It also helps that their profile pictures look like AI generated art that you would get by typing in, “white lawyer-y guy in a suit.”
@@roberthelmsen6961 Parody all the way down
😂😂😂 Absolute chads in every way.
Once upon a time my attorney was Mr. Swindle of Salt Lake City.
And yes, I chose him because of his name 😅😅
names are Dutch, so probably descendants of Dutch immigrants.
I love the irony of qualified immunity being the exact flip side of the “ignorance of the law is no defense” coin. Wait, no, actually I hate it
Yeah it *really* needs to be struck down ASAP. 😕
Life's a sadist's paradise.
Enjoy the pain of strangers and the joy of friends.
Imagine approving a law that by its very nature allows people to violate constitutional rights. 🤦
In any country with somewhat reasonable laws (and a police force with proper training and education instead of handing every idiot a badge and a gun after completing - not understanding, just completing - a 4h crash course) there is no qualified immunity. There is also no such thing as „give me 100m Dollars because you violated my rights“-lawsuits. In Germany, for instance, it is simply: If a police officer violates the law, not necessarily the constitution, they will be prosecuted criminally for violation of the StGB (penal code) and/or various other regulations (for instance, the police and ordinance litigation is regulated on state level due to the federal system, and every state has its own PolG or Polizeigesetz, police code). The possibilities in civil court are also restricted to the actual damage caused, and punitive damages don’t exist (especially not in those absurd sums, but there can be a compensation for pain or emotional damages that can’t be calculated exactly). Ah, and if a police officer is convicted of a felony, either above a certain threshold or especially in conjunction and violation of his official duties, he/she will be removed from service, likely lose his status as public servant, lose his pension and other benefits of state officials (the years served will be counted for the retirement pay by the respective social security insurance, part of the German social insurance system, btw).
The main difference is the status of the constitution: The Grundgesetz, the German constitution in less a solitary document that is referred to separately (although this is possible). Generally, it is the base and background of all German laws, but referring directly to a violation of the constitution is way harder and in most circumstances not necessary, because there are likely laws covering that aspect without directly appealing to the Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG, Bundesverfassungsgericht.
Keep in mind that I‘m no lawyer and that the system is way more complex than I can explain in a comment. But in general, that should be correct enough to give you an idea.
It seems obvious to me that people who hold the authority of a public office should be held to a higher standard than ordinary citizens. Not excused.
It's kinda funny how the police department has to argue that a post about hiring convicted pedophiles as police officers, and another one about not hiring PoC are close enough to the truth, that a reasonable person wouldn't neccessarily understand it as parody.
You mean...🤔 kinda funny how it's not funny that all their funny business is made funny by someone else?
Or do you mean:
Funny how something funny about things not so funny shows the funny business?
Underrated comment
The irony
@@f_USAF-Lt.G…….yes?
And The Supreme Court agreed, so they seem to have apretty low opinion of The Executive Branch.
Parodist: "lol this department is racist and incompetent as HELL"
The actual department: "This is too close to the truth to be allowed!"
This is the perfect example of how bad American policing has become. Someone points out the obvious in a public forum and the police have to pursue legislation to prevent people from recognizing the truth. If you are not pushing copaganda YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF THE STATE. Do you get it yet?
this includes the whole supreme court
When "a few bad apples" doesn't cut it, just arrest those who call you out and say it was because they impeded the police's work carrying out systemic racism
it's supposed to be "speak truth to power". We're powerless, WHY ARE YOU TELLING IT TO US?!?!? :P
@@shrykoyou are dumb
A small correction: _A Modest Proposal_ didn't suggest that the poor should eat their _own_ babies; it suggested that they should _sell_ their babies to the rich as food.
Even worse! 😃
I love that essay. It is so good
I've seen similar, real arguments used for why it should be legal for poor people to sell their internal organs
@@kimgkomg But that's already legal, not much is stopping you from selling your kidney if you decide you're poor enough and could do with one organ less. I think the difference is that here it's not the choice of the person selling, such as kids. So you probably mean you've heard real arguments used for why should OTHERS have legality in selling poor people's internal organs. Why shouldn't you have the right to sell off your own organs? You're the only one with legality to donate them to research facilities or museums too, it follows the same logic.
@@kimgkomg Better than China executing ethnic minorities so they can sell their organs.
Ah ok, that's way more reasonable. lets give it a go!
The idea that 'ignorance is not a defence' other than for cops who don't know basic civil rights is so unbelievable it deserves to stay on the onion
Yeah, you’d think out of everyone, the people whose jobs it is to enforce the law wouldn’t be able to get away with being ignorant of it
That’s a great point. If I break a law I don’t know about, I’m still held responsible. Why shouldn’t the cops?
@@komenisai Because... USA, I guess. I always find it interesting how US law seems to be a mixture of laws protecting people from the police (seemingly under assumption that policemen are ill-intentioned crooks that can't be trusted) and others protecting the policemen regardless of what they do (ensuring that the police won't suffer any real consequences for being ill-intentioned crooks that can't be trusted).
I was just about to say, I thought ignorance of the law doesn't exclude you from it.
@@jonboze7314
It depends on the law.
Some laws require you to know that you’re breaking the law. But yes, most don’t require intent.
on Feb 21 2023, the U.S. Extreme Court refused to hear the appeal from Anthony Novak, who was jailed for four days and charged with a felony for making a satirical Facebook page of his local police department. This leaves in place the lower court ruling that shielded the police officers and the city of Parma, Ohio from legal liability for their actions. Antidote: mock them more.
The Roberts Court is just as bad as Parma PD.
On it
The white flight mentioned in this video was enacted in key areas being "overrun" by black people specifically so that they could create areas like Parma that are immune to change and criticism. It was remarkably effective and also decimated the areas they left so that they could then point to those areas as being proof of the failure of diversity.
@@EscapeCondition With the results we’ve produced it feels like our country is still run by ardent segregationists.
@@wildfire9280 I mean Joe Biden is one of them, his crime policies (in particular the crack discrepancy legislation) were designed to strictly enforce segregation.
Trump's another. So our election is going to be choosing between the least offensive segregationist.
Searched for a crime to fit the circumstances. That's the most fitting description of most current law enforcement.
+
"He can't do that! Shoot him or something!"
"It only takes a few bad apples to ruin the bunch." and they are all rotten to the core.
It is VERY difficult to respect the law or law enforcement because of this common practice: use the law to punish things we don't like. The law serves power, NOT justice, nor the citizenry. I feel bad for lawyers. It isn't their fault the entire judicial system is rigged to ensure unfair practices of compliance and submission to authority,
you can disagree that what the guy did wasn't "disrupting public services", but isn't "search for a crime to fit the circumstances" literally how criminal prosecution is supposed to work
“How did Novak disrupt the Police Department?”
By hurting its feelings, of course. I’ve seen enough police officers in action to know that they consider making fun of them a very serious crime.
There’s so many videos freely available of cops attacking or arresting people just because they got their feelings hurt. Cops are some of the most sensitive I swear.
@@obeseperson High on power and believing they are over the law. Hence why qualified immunity should go and cops need at least 3 years of education on civil rights and the Constitution. Plus, get rid of the "us vs. them" shit.
from the writings of Cartman, "Respect My Authority"
@@6770chiefs *Authoriteh
FTFY
Funny how often people screaming 'snowflake' and 'facts not feelings' seem to be the most hurt when they don't get hteir way.
I applaud the Onion for defending the time-honored Cleveland tradition of making fun of Parma.
Every time the west side gets a bit to big for it's self, we have to remind them of Parma. Esat side may have crime and East Cleveland, but the west side has Parma.
Of course, the Legal Eagle could make a video of what happens when almost an entire police department gets charged with felonies... like in East Cleveland... but that's not this video.
I get the impression Parma has earned it.
what's up with the red ss bolts on their badge?
The onion is a left wing rag and hasnt been funny in years
Ahhhhh. The mistake on the lake.
I can somewhat understand if the police department tried to sue him, but the fact that they raided his house and arrested him like some sort of drug lord is insane to me. Ironically, this type of story is EXACTLY something that would seem like a parody if it wasn't true - "SWAT team arrests man for making fun of them". This is the type of headline that you could see on The Onion, but unfortunately it is real life...
"Fear will keep them in line."
And the irony of that truth is lost on a lot of people. I find that un-funny.
See, that's what I CAN'T understand. That's how a child would act at being spurned in the schoolyard or on the playground. Not how an adult should think and most definitely not an adult that enters into a job with tremendous amount of power over others. It's the very furthest thing that should be on your mind, when your job is to ensure the safety of the people.
Which apparently isn't even what police in the States are doing, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at their overall not just incompetence, but actual petty malice.
It'd be like becoming a firefighter and then just refusing to extinguish a house because the guy that lived there cut in line at the grocery store. And then suing that guy for arson.
@Sephiroth144 And it never goes any better in real life than for the empire. Although sadly they don't blow up very often IRL lol
This is amazing. I think the entire thing can be summarized in a single sentence: That a court concluded a post about a "pedophile recruitment event" might be mistaken, by a reasonable reader, as a legitimate post by a police department is possibly the single greatest argument in favor of police reform the country has ever seen.
Or the single greatest argument against critical literacy expectations in Ohio.
Could've been a sting. Ya never know.
It's satire doing what it's best at, critique
@@normanclatcher Let's say it's about a sting... Then it's the most unsubtle sting possible, and would still indicate the department's ineptitude.
@@IceMetalPunk ...And again, it's the Parma police department. If any locality _could_ inspire such an absolute _dearth_ of public confidence, it's this one.
@@normanclatcher Which leads back to the original point of both the parody page and this comment thread: Parma PD *should* get its act together.
Here the Onion have explained in great detail how explaining the joke ruins the comedic value of it, yet this work is made infinitely funnier because they've so seriously explained it.
Their explanation of the explanation of jokes is a parody of people explaining jokes... parodyception
The funny part is how the analysis points out the inanity of it’s own existence.
seriously, when you have to explain shit like this the funny just comes full circle lol
only the onion could pull off such a feat
I think the difference here is that the other party wants there to basically be a label upfront killing the joke, while the onion explains it on page hundred. Letting people in on the joke after they're already in on the joke doesn't kill the joke.
This is actually brilliant by the Onion, unironically. Brings huge amounts of attention to a case that would likely fly quietly under the radar, which is arguably doing more for the case than anything in the brief, even though the brief does make plenty of legitimate compelling arguments.
the fascist "supremos" must be fuming at the idiot cops
PERFECT WELCOME FOR JUSTICE KITANJI
My only worry is the decrepit corpses on the Supreme Court don’t agree with them. The irony of disagreeing would of course just be plain comedy to anyone outside of the court
I fear Fox News could rebrand in court themselves as Parodists, instead of 'entertainment'.
Because sooner or later, their use of the word 'news' in their official title when they are anything but has a major Karmic debt that is overdue.
I don't want them to have this as a legal out when the guillotine blade finally drops.
@@inkandesk They don't even have to disagree. They could just decide not to take the case, shielding them from scrutiny.
Much as I disliked the guy, Scalia would have been all over this case. So for those keeping score: decrepit SC corpses = 0, Actual corpse = 1.
@@temperededge - Eh, Scalia I imagine would, at best, be mightily furrowing his brow but going along with whatever the GOP wanted anyway - in this case, establishing precedent that police (who are overwhelmingly right-wing and have a huge white-nationalist problem nation wide) can do literally whatever they want to retaliate against any form of criticism.
“Searched for a crime to fit the situation”
That right there is the point where they should have been fired. On the spot, immediately. Not even a second thought. Someone that petty should not be in a position of power where they can ruin someone’s life over hurt feelings.
"The Police get away with committing crimes if they don't know they are committing a crime! " - I scream from my cell after I have been arrested and jailed for committing a crime I didn't know I was committing.
Our judge dredd days are just over the horizon
At least you have a phone in jail.
I mean, this is the first thing we ever heard about Neil Brennan from Dave Chappelle when he was astounded that his white friend could get away with something by telling the cop I didn't know I could do that.. so either you didn't try telling the cop you didn't know you couldn't do that or you're a black person and in either case you should have known that you can't do that, just following the logic here! And what I mean by you should have known you can't do that is that you should have known you can't not say you didn't know that or be black!... It seems like there's a little bit of unbalanced outcome here I just can't put my white finger on it
@@theduckfromthejoke152 Neil Brennan? Do you mean Chip?
@@chitlitlah am I the only person who assumed that chip is neil? LOL I don't remember why but there's several clues in that special end other interactions... But I could just be like oh yeah it must have been Neil cuz he's that white dude... LOL like even if the story is made up, it's still Neil in the made-up story that's all I'm saying
I just want to comment that while working as a 911 dispatcher I got roughly 15 butt dials a day. One user was a repeat offender that would butt dial twice a day for over a year and our officers for the city they lived in advised they can't do a thing about it. Similarily, we had frequently flyer homes that would call us multiple times a day for various issues. And we also took complaints for public services after hours as all people advised that their complaint is an emergency. My favorite being a caller that would call to complain park lights were on past 9pm when they were supposed to be off. She called this in at 7pm every day for a week and even threatened to murder me a few times. Officers said nothing could be done. The dispatcher time is worthless in the opinion of cities and cops. The only exception I have seen for the agencies I have worked for were injured officers that covered as dispatchers in small areas. Their ego is fragile.
My first phone was a brick phone, and if you pressed the 0 key (on the exposed, unprotectable keypad) a few times it would call 911. I stopped carrying it in my pocket after a week or two. Got tired of being called back by the dispatcher. ;)
I remember when I started college, so many of us Freshmen would accidentally call 911! It was back when not many people had cell phones yet, and it was tricky to get the hang of the dorm phones. You had to dial 9 to get an outside line, and it was still when you had to dial a 1 to call a non local number. I think the local dispatchers were used to it!
@@SchnauzerGal2500 this is something programmed into PBX systems today and is required so people don't need to dial the outside-line code '9' when in a panic.
Causes many 911 false calls; I worked in telecom for 25 years programming these things 'under orders' from above and it is now required by law since 2020 ('Kari's Law').
@@rieaweer7459 Couldn't the dentist explain? xD
I have exactly one story of a dispatcher being too over-eager at their job. My mom called 911 to ask how to smother a kitchen fire. The dispatcher was like "A FIRE?! Don't worry ma'am, help is on the way!" And my mom was like "What! No, I don't need a fire truck, just tell me what to do to smother it!" The dispatcher was like "Don't take chances! You should go wait outside for assistance." This was around when the fire truck drove over the bridge behind the house. We were at the bottom of a pretty long cul de sac so it took another minute or two for the fire truck to get there. They come rushing in to the house and ask where the fire is. My mom points to a pile of like three black macaroni noodles with a sad little spark sputtering out before dying. There were now more firemen in the house than pieces of burned macaroni. She pointed out to the firemen that in her defense, she DID tell the dispatcher not to send them. The lead fireman radioed the dispatcher and sarcastically commented on the great conflagration that she had been explicitly told did not need a fire truck and she was like "Do you need more help!? I'm sending more fire trucks!" The guy was like "NO I DON'T NEED MORE HELP! DO **NOT** SEND MORE FIRE TRUCKS!" The firemen advised my mom to get a fire extinguisher in case she ever needed it and left.
"The police then conducted a swat raid on Novak's home." That sentence sounds like it should be from a parody article titled "Police conduct swat raid on menace to society after menace assaults entire police department with posts".
☝🏻well said 👏🏻
☝🏻well said 👏🏻
☝🏻well said 👏🏻
Police considered his words to be classified as a deadly weapon, citing the law that "the pen is mightier than the sword." The court disagreed on the grounds that, in fact, Novak was armed with a computer, not a pen, and the police department was armed with not a sword but a SWAT team.
It reminds me somewhat of the criminal harassment tactic of "SWATsing". Main difference being that the idiots responsible are not calling it in over the phone using a hoax. They are conducting it.
For anyone watching this now and interested: The supreme court did not take the case and let the ruling of the lower court stand. This is concerning
What'd you expect from 'em? They were chosen by the orange of whom we don't speak, so clearly the government > free speech.
uFUcuuccck that's chilling and sad
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, if you think they actually care for civil rights you’d be sorely mistaken
Concerning but unsurprising.
Hell, I wish I didn't know that. That is awful.
"Novak can't help it if a magistrate judge and city attorney are closer to the lowest common denominator than the average reasonable reader" holy shit best burn ever
The case with Novak is a perfect example of the police not understanding how they appear to others. They're like, "We do so much good! Why don't you like us!?" Then someone posts something on the internet about them and it's "Let's bury them with the full weight of the legal system!" Which also included a swat raid, a few days in jail, and then a trial by jury. Excellent use of those funds' guys.
Edit: I liked that Billy cameo
This is what they do. They don’t stop crime, that is nowhere in their job descriptions apparently.
The lawsuit should be at minimum a billion dollars (in addition to the money for things other then the SWAT), because comedy, nonviolent Internet posts of any kind, and owning a Facebook page are not valid reasons for a SEAT raid nor for confiscation or searching of any items/technology whatsoever, regardless of whether the post is illegal.
@@Rayvn7 the issue with this is that cops pay out lawsuits with *your money*. You can’t legally sue a cop or a precinct, you sue the city, which uses city tax dollars to fight the case. That’s why cops drag it out as long as possible and why they couldn’t care less about breaking the law and getting sued. Even if they lose a lawsuit, there are zero consequences since it’s not their money anyway
@@fort809 - That's why qualified immunity needs to go, and cops need to have liability insurance - because then those static police department budgets are suddenly squeezed by hikes on the insurance rates after one of their officers does something actionable.
It's not that they don't understand how they look, they don't care how they look because they know if it goes too far they can just shoot the person pissing them off and come up with an excuse later.
The phrase "looked for a crime to fit [the parody they didn't like]" should be the most dystopian component of this whole thing.
And yet.
It’s okay, we just have to give the police departments a few more thousand dollars, they’re so close to solving crime!
@@liljimmy8248 another 1.9bil should help them get these darn criminals
Yeah that was my initial thought when I heard that said, "wait so they found something they didn't like and then went through a library to check if there was a crime they could pin on him?
Not only does that show that the law officers just done know the law which is wild on its own, but they had enough spare time to try and assign someone a crime instead of watching for and stopping active crime.
That sounds like an over-staffed and under-qualified department.
@@kempolar9768 "over-staffed and under-qualified" are the two best phrases to describe the US police system, followed by "over-funded," "hyper-aggressive" and "unhelpful"
The police exist to manufacture criminality. If what you're doing isn't illegal, but they'd like you to be a criminal, there are an infinite number of ways to do that.
In an Economics class in High School, we had to form groups and "create a business". We would need to detail how this business would make a profit, how it would be run, along with several other key details.
My friends and I, being sarcastic jacka**es, created a business based off of 'A Modest Proposal'. Most of the people in the class had never read, or even heard, of it.. but the teacher.. the teacher LOVED IT. He let us go as far as we wanted. At the end of the assignment, our group had to stand before the entire class and give a speech on our business.. props/handouts/etc. As he sat in the back of the class attempting to stifle his laughter at the indignation of the other students.. we, my group and I, just went in deeper. I even added in bits from Soylent Green and any other dystopian movie or book.
We received an 'A'.
Now get a copy of the movie Brazil
Sounds like my econ teacher :3
Abortion pizzaria?
You know it is bad when a lawyer is laying into a police department and not offering up a single qualifying statement such as "allegedly."
Guess that's the one upside to the police doing the lawbreaking, they keep literal legal records of all their doings, something no smart criminal would do lol
"Is you takin' notes on a criminal fuckin' conspiracy?" -Stringer Bell, The Wire
"Alleged" just means unproven, he's talking about admissions made on the record.
what're they gonna do, sure him?
@@pattygould8240 That's kinda my point. Though, "Alleged" was merely an example of the general category of words to distance oneself from the information. Having very little of this type of language is much stronger rhetoric you don't often hear from a lawyer.
American police : arrest first,
Figure out what law can justify the abuse later
This is just all police to various degrees.
*shoot
@@kx7500 the US worse than most
@@Toto-95 true, but I’m saying America is not super special at a fundamental level with their cops. They’re bad everywhere
@@kx7500 Believe it or not, there exist parts of the world where independent investigations are actually independent and power-tripping shenanigans are called out and punished as a result, for the betterment of society. Checks and balances are crucial, and some places have arranged them appropriately. Police are not "bad everywhere".
As soon as prosecutors found out that "qualified" essentially means "blanket", they started to do things, such as going into peoples houses and taking their stuff.
RIght? When I read that they took his "phone and computers" i was like ok sure, prolly has fb info, then said "and his gaming consoles"....wtf does an Xbox have to do with this? That's just next level pettiness.
Prosecutors and judges actually don’t need qualified immunity. They have total immunity in these cases.
Prosecutors? Do you mean maybe, police? Prosecutors don't enter people's homes as far as I know
@@ASpaceGhostFC2C I think he means prosecutors in this case. Which was police as they were prosecution and the dude was the defense.
qualified immunity isn't needed. They could have done it without giving a parody guy an actual case by calling civil forfeiture on his property.
Imagine trying to make someone a felon for making fun of them and hurting your feelings instead of trying to push back on messaging, or - heaven forbid - self-reflect. A gang of man-children with badges, if I've ever heard of it.
There's a place near Philadelphia where police are almost all about that...
@@f_USAF-Lt.Gfrom better call saul
"We no crime" had me giggling far too much.
was listening to the video while driving and thought it was "we know crime" a statement that is correct, funny, and carries a couple implications for the reader to discern. we no crime is so much better.
@@handlethesenutz I read it like "we no-crime", the latter being positioned as a verb. What a marvelous multi-function from only three words.
This alone should have been a clear sign that it was a satire page. It obviously doesn't apply to the real police department.
My brain slowly registered it while watching the video and I kept laughing throughout the video.
pls explain :)?
"Jurisprudence fetishish gets off on technicality" is and always shall be the greatest headline ever written. Thank you, The Onion.
Heh. Satire *and* double entendre. 😁
That is also one of my favorite headlines.
PS: The word you were looking for was: fetishist.
They sell a shirt with that headline on it. I bought one :)
*Fetishist
+2
As someone who was born and raised in Parma, you are spot on about everyone in Cleveland making fun of Parma.
Thank you for your sacrifice
as someone from cleveland, yeah💀
I moved to Brooklyn just so I didn't have to live in Parma 😬
Facts
I live a stones throw from Parma in Newburgh Heights. Pink flamingos and chrome balls aside, I like Parma.
"A hypothetical, reasonable officer."
There's the word hypothetical doing enough heavy lifting to win a strongman contest.
I think "reasonable" ended up winning that particular context. Must've been all the stretching it did that made the difference.
They’re on the same Olympic team 🏅
- Cops thought this might have been illegal, at first glance: Yeah sure whatever
- Cops thought it merited a SWAT raid: WTF mate
- A court granted that warrant: WTF mate
- The police confiscated his gaming consoles: WTF mate
- Jury acquitted him: OK good, brief moment of sanity
- Magistrate sided with the cops on balance of probability: WTF mate
- Appellate court upheld that decision: WTF mate
Hell of an indictment of the US judicial system, gotta say. An AP article about this case would be indistinguishable from Onion satire.
Agreed, this is what makes being a satirist harder these days, coming up with something stupid enough it can't be real (yet), when things more stupid than the past thing keep happening every day.
And now the Supreme Court denied Certiorari
@@soumajitsen1395 lovely.
Such a failure of the law.
This is what happens when law enforcement are allowed to operate above the law as a paramilitary gang instead instead of as accountable public servants.
Parody page: "Hey all you pedos, we're ganna wipe your record and make you police officers!"
Parma cops: "Thats wayyyyy to close to what we would actually post, this is illegal!"
Defund the Parma PD! 🤣
*abolish
@@jmurray1110 *murder
This is *entirely* the problem here, in theory.
The 'minorities are strongly encouraged to not apply' bit was 'parody', but also seems like genuine department unwritten policy. The 'joke' is simply in actually writing it out in full. Which IS pretty funny! But it's in no way absurd or, in fact, even faintly untrue. Which makes legally defining parody somewhat tricky.
@@Kanner111 It's actually a double-bind, though. If they acknowledge the parody to not be parody by virtue of being true, they would thereby also officially acknowledge how the PD is violating human rights. Hence the statement would not be defamatory anymore. This is actually what makes good satire: By its very nature it has very real consequences. This reminds me of a German satire show, which criticized the turkish president for misusing the German court system to silence any kind of criticism against him as defamatory. So they actually wrote a parody poem about him to show, what would actually be defamatory. The turkish president sued and in the whole aftermath the German chancellor at the time was forced to make a public statement about satire and art being protected by law and a law called "majesty defamation", which gave international head of states special rights to sue German people for defamation, was subsequently abolished.
Recently there was a debate on qualified immunity on NPR. I learned that police officers who swiped valuables from a home they were investigating invoked qualified immunity when they brought up on charges. The more outrageous police behavior is, the less likely it is that there is a prior court case that can be used to hold it unconstitutional. Qualified immunity is a crock.
the goal of the law is pretty good, I think. Literally nobody would be willing to take a job in govt without some form of this law. But I totally agree that the specifics of the law are not what the authors intended and it should be rewritten.
The people who are operating under these laws have completely forgotten the purpose, intent, and spirit of the law. Those with the right intent need no written laws at all. Those will mal intent will need an ever-expanding ocean of new statutes to govern them.
Its like the saying "You can get away with anything once as long as you're the first one to do it". Which is really not how immunity to prosecution should work for things that literally anyone should know is wrong. Which is apparent when anyone not a cop doing the same thing would be arrested.
Also reminds me of that SR-71 story were they buzzed the tower at Sacramento Airport and after they landed their commanding officer came out and asked "do we have any regulations that say we can’t make approaches at Sacramento Airport?" to which the pilot replied "No sir." The CO then said "I want one on my desk at seven o’clock tomorrow morning."
Qualified immunity isn't for crimes intentionally committed. It's like a good Samaritan law where if you try to do CPR but don't know what you're doing you don't get sued
@@mlebrooks Except in practice it does end up being for crimes intentionally committed. That's kinda the crux of the issue.
I've seen a lot of explanations of "qualified immunity" and it's only now that it clicked in my head: state and federal governments can abuse my constitutional rights, at least as long as no one else has complained about it before.
Yeah, it's akin to a handsy fratboy saying, "Whaa? All of the other girls liked it when I did it!" It's a disgusting precedent.
for us citizens, breaking a law that they didn't know about is still illegal
meanwhile for the us police, not only is it not illegal but even has its own name
"Searched for a crime to fit the situation."
Now doesn't that just about summarize the problem?
That line actually earned my subscription. Lol
Is it not illegal for it to be false? He didn't disrupt the police using technology.
Only if you overanalyze by actually looking at it... (GOP defense of Trump in 2 impeachment trials)
@@inafridge8573 You can say things that are incorrect, that's not illegal. You could argue it's impersonation of a police official, but that has some pretty specific requirements. I think that was genuinely the best they could come up with.
My favourite Onion piece will always be on LGBT soldiers and how precious they are, over 10 years old at this point still gets a chuckle out of me
One of my favorites is Putin Attempting to have Putin assassinate Putin
My favorite was the pedo giving advice on how to make your kids less attractive 😂
"The equivalent of three Americans killed in Iraq today"
Although not politically hard hitting, my favorite and the thing that introduced me to the Onion is the Sony time vampire
Just watched it. Laughing through the whole thing. It’s very wholesome.
I personally owe quite a lot to The Onion. As a young teen I fell for one of it's articles and shared it to friends and family who immediately pointed out it was wrong. The level of embarrassment I felt for doing so taught me a very good lesson, never accept anything without first hearing it from other publications.
I'm curious, do you remember the article?
The Onion - not wrong: satire. Parody. Fiction for fun. So your friends and family weren’t helpful at all.
That's not even the right lesson to take lol
I personally live in awe of the onion. Their densely layered humor is so well made I almost never find myself reading their articles without laughing
@@MusicfromMarrs I don't know about you, but if I accidently took a parody new story as actual news, I would find if very helpful if my friends and family pointed that out. Because, it would be wrong. Factually incorrect. Because its made up.
so i looked it up and the appeal was once again denied apparently, fantastic America
The way Devon called Qualified Immunity "Judicially Inventive" had some searing undertones. That's a backhanded compliment done right.
Legal fiction proves lawyers write better fiction than literary writers.
I've often wondered if "we" can have qualified immunity for things that no one ever told us was against the law - just like police officers. Like "I didn't know it was illegal to dump 40 tons of cow shit on the police chief's lawn! I was just trying to help him have a greener lawn! And if some of it oozed under his front door and fertilized the carpets on every floor, well I didn't know that was illegal either!"
@@mrthingy9072 exactly! Violating Constitutional rights is a big thing cops should know not to do.
It makes no sense that they could get away with it by claiming not to know, and if I didn't know that dressing up a goat in women's underwear and taking it on a little red wagon ride on a downtown sidewalk on a Sunday was against the law, I'd still be held liable for the 'offense'.
There's literally a name for the legal doctrine of not excusing people for being unaware of the law: ignorantia juris non excusat. The fact that the US not only doesn't follow this, but specifically doesn't recognize that an officer of the law, as in someone who technically works as the active enforcer of law, can be considered not guilty for violating the constitution, the basest form of law out of which the rest of the legal code blooms, epitomizes the latent authoritarianism of the US and it's institutions.
Pretty sure he said “judicially inventED”, because it arose out of a SCOTUS ruling rather than being passed as a law by a legislature. Pierson v Ray, I believe.
The fact that Novak got arrested for the Facebook page, after it was already down no less, is dystopian honestly
Not just arrested, SWATed.
Selected displays of ignorance are rewarded richly by the law
We live in a boring dystopia and have for many years now. Unfortunately far less boring for some than for others.
Posting the police notice in the parody account was definitely a chad move
The Onion also made a similar video about the SCOTUS with respects to a ruling involving lethal injection. In it, SCOTUS watched a video of lethal injection taking place, and the entire SCOTUS overall reaction was akin to how "dude bros" would've reacted. As an example: Justice Ginsberg said "That's wicked!" Later, the only descension decision was of Justice Scallia, who only voted against it because the ruling was too restricted and didn't go far enough, where the only proper punishment would be if the prisoner were put in a sort of Hunger Games-esque battle royal where they effectively need to fight like rabid animals for survival.
I love how Onion keeps the theme of "Supreme Court of the United States are just a bunch of dope party animal frat boys" going.
Objection!
A Modest Proposal didn't argue that the poor Irish should eat their *own* babies. It argued they should sell them to the wealthy people in England and Ireland (the majority of whom were also English) so that the rich could eat them.
Also this is the best Amicus brief ever. And your dog is adorable. Thanks for all the awesome videos.
Exactly, eating your own would be a waste of resources. The British already basically killed the children anyway which is part of the message
Yeah, it was making fun of the shithead oppressors. That the English were making the Irish so desperate that they had to sell their own children to survive, and that the English were such rapacious monsters that they would happily buy and eat Irish children.
You’re absolutely right. I was about to post the same correction about “A Modest Proposal.”
I thought so. Been decades since I read it, but the thought occurred to me as well.
The Onion is really the hero we need and deserve.
And yet no one asked for..
.. DOG BLESS AMERICA ✌️
True story: in college I read Swift's Modest Proposal and for some reason didn't catch that it was parody. Perhaps it was the serious tone of the prose, or maybe i was having a moment of extreme gullibility. Regardless, I was super mad the following day and wanted to go off about it in class, until my friend laughed in my face for like 10 minutes before telling me it was a damn joke. And that was the moment i stopped taking myself (and pretty much everything else) very seriously.
swift was All Parody All The Time
remember the lilliputians tieing a normal human up ?
Parody makes the world a much better place
I mean, one does expect and Englishman to be like that, so as long as you didn't know he was Irish...
I'd eaten three babies before somebody explained it.
I remember a girl in high school become openly appalled when we had to read Modest Proposal in high school. That was such an amazing day full of laughter, even if it was due to a classmate's reaction. I even took a class on the Satirists in college and found that it once again had the same effect on people, even though they knew they were in a class covering works of satire.
"In a final round of briefing in January 2023, Novak's lawyers framed the case as an opportunity to either reconsider qualified immunity or better balance it with the right to free speech.[33] The Supreme Court denied the petition on February 21, 2023,[34] letting the lower courts' decisions stand.[35] Novak expressed concerns for future implications for "others who poke fun at the powerful", while an attorney for Parma praised the outcome.[35]"
Damn. Even the thrones of feudal Europe and Asia understood the importance of a court jester for a society to keep itself in-check. I fear we're on a path of a fascistic reign which our ancestors couldn't imagine, and that's saying somethin'.
@@J5L5M6dont forget the fact the attorney for Parma is going and having a little happy dance going "Tee hee we won you lost nya nya nya nya nya nya"
They didn’t like being made fun of, so “they searched for a crime” to charge him with…
That’s both pathetic, and detestable.
Your Tax dollars at work, citizens of Parma, OH 🙄
Would have been a better usage of tax dollars to make some chicken parm
@@warlordofbritannia it's very hard to beat chicken parm
What is it with all the jokes about OH?
Revenge is a dish best served with a search warrant and flash bangs that have the potential to burn down a house with a child inside. -Abe Lincoln
Wouldn't the crime just be impersonating police
I love the idea of the Onion seeing this happen and just cracking their knuckles.
Unfortunately, the Latin Dorks upheld the sixth court decision in Febuary
It's unbelievable that qualified immunity is being spread so wide.wife. police can just say willingly ignorant of the law, and apply it as they wish as a result.
All I can say is the writers for the Onion are geniuses. There is no way I could come up with the topics they parody. Thank you Onion for protecting me and others like me with your fortress of comedy.
And thank you Devin, for helping me to keep my eyes and ears open to the absurdity of injustices.
I really appreciate how well they pointed out that comedy, like stage magic; is reliant on the audience not knowing the punchline, or the trick behind the illusion. It’s completely contrast to the way a lot of other things can and would be handled legally. Very interesting concept.
It would be like someone suing a magician. Either they're upset that the magician was using real magic, or they're upset that the magician fooled them.
@@panagea2007 that's so plausible I'm near certain there's precedent regarding patrons claiming a magician left them in crisis, questioning reality. Probably how event/venue tickets wound up sprinkled w/ fine print purchase agreements.
Imagine if Weird Al Yankovic had to add a disclaimer before every song he’s ever written saying that the song is a parody and not to be taken seriously. It would totally remove the ‘paradise’ in Amish Paradise.
No, that's either missing the point or a dishonest slippery slope fallacy. These types of debates exist in the first place because we need to hold institutions like newspapers or even more official distributors of public information (research agencies, universities, governmental institutions, etc.) to a high standard of truth, and so they have to be careful with how they present untrue texts. Doesn't mean they should be denied all access to parody, as has been laid out in this video and its comment section, but you shouldn't pretend that the question at hand is about whether parody can exist *at all* either.
(And yes, The Onion isn't a newspaper, but that's exactly the point: How far you need to go to distance yourself from claims of being an official authority, and if you *are* an official authority, how much of the inofficial nature of the particular text you are publishing has to be made explicit so it won't qualify as misinformation.)
@@TheHadMatters Oh well.
A few years, a shitstorm descended on a German newspaper for publishing an "offending article". Apparently, there were quite a few people who did not understand that the article was *very clearly* satirical.
Apart from being very clearly satirical, the article was also marked, *very clearly, in large friendly letters* as SATIRE Didn't help either.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
Funny as hell-song.
That would pave paradise and put up a horse tying post
@@TheHadMatters marking it as satire doesnt do shit
Streetfighter 2 is the father of all fighting games
During aprill fools a magazine published a joke article that stated on big bold italic letters on the bottom that "THIS IS A JOKE" and proceded to say that there was a secret hidden character on the game
Thousands were fooled by it and the rumor only truly went away during the digital age
They're annoyed, they have the ability to harass people and throw them in jail, and no real oversight or accountability.
I they said the callers "honest to god thought the page was real", but then it turns out that wasn't the case... didn't whoever said that commit perjury? Was that statement made under oath?
Lol good joke, cops being punished for perjury
yeah they routinely lie. Big part of their job.
yeah df did that happen
hope someone explains that shit
@@ooooneeee They even have a term for it. Some More News has done a great video about it.
@@Hurricayne92 Some More News is fuggin' awesome.
Alternate title: The Onion explains humor to a police department
they didn't get the joke.
@@trshaw52...all I can think of is the Harley Quinn episode of Batman: the animated series when she says, "it was my fault, I didn't get the joke..."
There is probably a connection, but I cant think of it right now.
Whether or not it's a joke doesn't matter. Police officers are the softest MF little crybabies on the face of the planet.
@@trshaw52 that’s the funniest part.
One relevant bit of history.... The Onion started in Madison WI as a newspaper. They included the local campus police blotter in the paper. No editing needed. The blotter served as a self parody, because it tended to be ridiculous stories dealing with college students.
So I watched this on Nebula and waited for the UA-cam release just to ask a question: Can we call the dog Legal Beagle? 😁
What do you have there?
"A PUN!"
NO!!!
I thought that was already the pup's name!
We already call her that
That's been her nickname since the first time she was mentioned
If you watch older episodes, she is definitely called that.
So qualified immunity is basically that ignorance of the law is an excuse to break the law but only for state officials. Sounds super just and fair and definitely not prone to abuse
Isn't that unconstitutional in itself because it is against the rule of law?
@@inafridge8573 apparently not
Remember the golden rule: mocking the government is a reasonably good gag, but mocking the government and then the government not finding it funny is a really good gag.
I made it all the way to the end of this video and still absolutely cannot stop laughing at him copying and pasting the fake page notification to his parody page verbatim.
Comedy genius move.
And yet, this evidently DIDN'T count as disclosure that the page WASN'T real, AND the cops didn't try to claim he infringed their copyright by copying it verbatim without crediting them.
@@burgerforcongress1001 I hadn't even thought of that, that's the big brain play for his legal team. "We had a disclaimer up, it's right there!"
Make people think that the real page is actually the fake, brilliant move.
Objection! Billy is, indeed, allowed up there. He requires indemnity in the amount of being told he's a good boy and a new toy.
Now and in perpetuity.
Loss of consortium claim too...? 🤔
You're not supposed to be on the computer either, Billy.
Please give Billy his own channel. Legal Beagle!
Ty
It's says a lot about the Parma police dept. when they're citing qualified immunity and jumping through hoops to dodge accountability rather than act like adults and own their mistakes. The ability to hold oneself accountable and admit wrongdoing is a sign of maturity these people clearly lack.
I remember how horrified one of my teachers once was when he saw a newspaper startet saying SATIRE in the headlines of satirical columns.
qualified immunity is a big catch 22. Not qualified if a precedent exists, but cases are dismissed before they can set precedent. If qualified immunity could have any value at all, then every qualified immunity case should be adjudicated to the point where, for precedent use, the question is resolved so that qualified immunity could only be used once for a given rights violation.
That would be a reasonable use of qualify immunity,
A path to reasonable accountability for police, therefore it can never happen in 'Merikuh.
It's atrocious honestly. While it may be next to impossible to do away with at the Federal level, that's not the case at the state level. Colorado, and New Mexico both did away it at the state level.
Yeah, but the way the US criminal system works, I doubt prosecuting attorneys want to try a case and undoubtedly piss off the police.
Acab
The fact they put him in jail over a funny ass joke that's 100% protected is wild.
Parody and satire are the lifeblood of a healthy political process. One of the best we have to protest injustice is humor. Humor is also one of the oldest forms of political protest and is a vital educational tool. This brief can and should be used to teach about parody, satire, and the purpose they serve.
News update: The supreme court left the lower ruling in place. That is another extremely upsetting and disheartening showing that police are deemed above the law and able to abuse others with no punishment nor recourse for those abused.
One of the coolest things about the Onion is that their newspapers were always free. I used to love grabbing a copy from the newsstand and reading it during my walks home from High School.
gees...I nearly forgot about it being in print at one time!
@@Ruby_Ruby_Roo Since 1756!
I always assumed the onion is getting hella sued by everyone but I didnt know they ball in the legal filings as hard as they do in their content lol
Man, I can't even imagine being The Onion as far as litigation goes. I can imagine they get sued for quite literally everything.
Woke is not a crime, unfortunately.
@@lesselp poor baby
...which probably explains why they have plenty of lawyers available to compose this gem of a brief.
@lesselp Please explain to me how being woke would be criminally punishable. I’m genuinely curious. By that logic, does that mean that having beliefs other than your own should also be illegal? 🤔
@Shannon Lavery to these idiots, including a woman in something counts as woke. 50% of the population of the planet trigger them
You reading the Latin legalese has me realizing that when my dad and his friend "spoke Latin" to each other to show off in front of the kids they were likely just spouting legal jargon and acting... This is the whole "introducing himself as a doctor" thing all over again.
bad thing is:
english "precedent" law Sux
real law is Rights : actual roman law of Rights
I thought it sounded like Harry Potter casting a spell.
@@wayneurquhart7192 I mean, most of Harry Potter spells are pretty much latin phrases and words, or derived from them, so you're not wrong there lol.
@@Alfonso162008 Really? JK must have researched this stuff pretty deeply.
@@wayneurquhart7192 Nah, most of the latin in HP is pretty basic. Like everything else in her books, its an inch deep and an inch wide.
If you need their help, it takes ages, and you can count yourself lucky, if they do *anything* at all. "Yeah, we will search for your stolen car." they won't.
If one makes fun of them, they instantly set all gears in motion and care about it without any hesitation in full force. Shows where their priorities are.
Omg! My old neighbor waited over 5 hours for the cops to show up about his stolen car. My partner and I passed a cop on the way to the gas station hours before they showed up. My neighbor knew where the car was; he had a tracker. They just wouldn't come with him. By the time they got to the "car," the tracker was removed, and car was gone. It's all so incredibly frustrating.
So the people that called to "interrupt the functions of any police operations", why were they not charged? Didn't realize making people ask questions on FB was disrupting police when it was other people calling the police directly with no real police business
That's an excellent point actually, but if their function is to arrest people for having a sense of humor then people should disrupt them even more
@O. B. Then again, almost every phone is just a computer in disguise!
There is a satire page for the town I work in. It is labeled a parody page, but people constantly believe it’s real. One of the mayoral candidates (current mayor) actually got into an argument with the page creators believing it was legit. That candidate lost. New mayor was a judge at a Rocky Horror Picture Show costume contest/showing the other night.
Now that's a cool story, in all its facets.
Also, I loooove your name.
In highschool, one of my classmates did not understand that "A Modest Proposal" was satire...it was hilarious to watch his outrage at the proposal 😄 it's one of my favorite things I had to read in highschool.
To be fair to your classmate, in my Victorian Literature class this semester, I read a dead serious brief on why the British Empire needed to educate Indian citizens strictly in English, due to it being the only language with any financial, cultural, historical, literary, or academic merit. It absolutely read like parody in parts. XD
@@solitarelee6200 Kipling wrote "The White Man's Burden" as a serious piece - try reading it today with a straight face xD
I read it twice in college, then after I graduauted, I nearly stood on Jonathan Swift's head in Ireland.
While it is funny to take a modest proposal seriously, it's not that unreasonable to believe it's a genuine text if you've ever read anything by Malthus lol. The man literally advocated eugenics and genocide because poor people eat too much. Like, sure, advocating for eating babies is blatantly absurd, but how much more absurd is it than "We should just soft genocide the poors because we hypothetically might not have enough food in the future and they have no value, even though the poors are the ones who produce the food and all we do is eat banquets, start wars and sell drugs to other countries. Also I don't know how future projections work, despite being a learned economist."?
Fun fact, he also advocated focusing on making luxury goods to "balance" the economy and combat inflation. If that sounds as familiar as it does stupid (not to mention contradictory), congratulations you've been paying attention.
I was in the gifted program, and when our teacher had us read it in class without explaining, basically the entire class did not pick up on the satire. We had to have it explained because we couldn't inherently accept that something our English teacher would ask us to read from an 800-page literature anthology would be anything other than a face-value essay about the topic-at-hand.
This was also pre-internet culture, where people of today would be far more used to seeing this kind of composition. I have to imagine born-20-years-later-me would have spotted it immediately.
10 calls? 😂. I work police dispatch. We get more than that when the power goes out in an area of town.
I've been a lawyer for almost 38 years now. I have done a small amount of appellate work in that time. This would have been the brief I would love to have written but never would have had the guts. Thanks for living out my fantasy, guys.
I have the utmost respect for The Onion's writers.
I had laughed many times before, but this story has them: standing up for the little guy (and everyone), doing the right thing , and being absolutely hilarious while doing so.
When my dad and I go anywhere we have their podcast playing. Makes me sad that they ended it but they're great to listen over and over again.
Their ability to mimic basically any tone and style is incredible 🤣
@@smeggiamagarwine Yes
This one has a sad ending, unfortunately. In a show of 'not our circus; not our monkeys,' the Supreme Court told Novak et all that they didn't want to hear it. This was after another satirical organization (the conservative The Babylon Bee) also filed an amicus brief that was favorable to The Onion's and agreed with them despite being on the opposite side of the philosophical aisle. So the lower court's decision stands as precedent now. Fun.
I'm surprised that The Onion is still going considering how reality is outdoing it for absurd stories these days.
@@_t.m_ nah it's yee ;)
There is literaly a subreddit called "nottheonion" that posts real newspaper headlines that sound like parody but really are not.
I'm pretty sure that's why House of Cards is no longer running 😅
@@Maphisto86 wild that not the onion exists, shameful that ate the onion exists (not necessarily, although sometimes, shame on the people that eat the onion, but rather the fact that people eat the onion at all)
Reporting the news with a straight face is how the onion does it's parody now. It works surprisingly well.
Now I want to know what the application process for the position of in-house counsel at The Onion looked like. I'll bet those gents have been waiting their entire careers for the chance to write something like this.
Printed on fancy paper, and framed for sure
Their contracts were typed in comic sans I’d bet
We demand more Legal Beagle with Billy.
MORE BILLY OR WE RIOT
BILLY
BILLY
BILLY
BILLY BOI
What a low-key, smoooooooth way to call the judge and attorney idiots at 16:43. So smooth, it's almost imperceptible.
Seeing him instantly go into baby-talk mode when Billy hopped up on screen was great XD
Moar Billy plz kthx
best part of the video was Billys cameo
That was actually a very advanced form of legalese.
MOAR PUPPY PLZ. Puppy content is wholesome af.
Long time fan and Cleveland resident here. This is the single most accurate and concise description of Parma and Cleveland's relationship with Parma I've ever heard
*_Ha-haaaaaaa!_* (clap) A-HA-hahahahahahahahagu-huuh-huh-huh-huh-hehehehe * *hic!* *
I imagine that when the swat team showed up, Novak to himself "wow, y'all really coming in here to prove my point now, aren't ya?"
One my favourite line from the onion
"Look he's just like me a human. We can exploit that."
Being from Cleveland and a perpetrator "DWB" Parma is in so many sad ways a joke. I am so happy you covered this case and I love The Onion even more for their support. At first I thought the entire case was actually from The Onion. This is great!
BTW: I actually love the diverse Eastern European and Mediterranean population of the city but yeah, there is a clear past and current history of racism.
I live in parma, those cops are stuck in 1950 in every wrong way possible
@@Furry-ousNews Well, the motorcycle cop does have a 70's pornstache... Progress?
My friend and I were pulled over about five years ago when she was driving my car home from a doctor appointment. The officer actually asked me (white woman) if my friend was kidnapping me. This was my first experience of DWB, although I knew it existed. My jaw just about hit the floor, I was so flabbergasted and disgusted.
They should also add, that if the police department thought those texts were plausible, it reflects more on the police department than on the parodist. And that it is a great parody, because if even the target think it's plausible, that means the parody is well earned and the target should improve.
Police are the equivalent of the bully that only draws a line when someone says something that hurts them. They are insecure, aggressive, self-righteous asshats that can't deal with even the mildest form of constructive criticism.
Wait did you not include the onion's greatest headline (and one of the best jokes ever), "Jurisprudence fetishist gets off on a technicality"?
is that sentence UA-cam friendly?
@@EvoliPlays oh right I forgot all their weird stupid monetization restrictions
He did bring that one up, on Nebula. ;)
That's hilarious!