Only one person brought a gun (singular). The rest didn't shoot anyone, nor was there any evidence that they planned to do so. They were convicted for being at a protest where one asshole brought and shot a gun.
He could have had the book thrown at him. As for the rest, if you seriously think that getting 70 years for being at a protest where one person shot a gun is appropriate, you have a lot in common with a Stalin-era Soviet judge.
Thank you for giving a front-page example of the CCP's logic when it comes to dealing with protests and dissenters. Find one who did something illegal, hang the rest for conspiracy.
A guy deliberately drove his car through a street full of scattering protesters in my neighbourhood a few years ago, and when people tried to pull him out of it, he shot one of them, and then ran off, waving his gun (with a jungle-taped pair of mags inserted into it).
Was he a (disorganized) political terrorist? If these guys got 70 years for being at the protest, how many hundreds of years in prison do you think were warranted for him?
Only one person opened fire. He got 100 years. (I agree that he shouldn't have gotten a slap on the wrist for what he did, but I'll happily point out that killers serve less, if at all.)
The rest got 70. None of them had guns.
The guy who got 30 years wasn't even at the protest.
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There is no universe where this is not completely batshit insane, but it's interesting to see you use the exact same logic[1] the CCP has in its crackdowns and pogroms to justify it.
The reason the sentences were so high, by the way, was because the judge took dozens of minor offenses and added the sentences for each. It's the equivalent of sentencing someone who stole a 12-pack for 12 counts of theft, or someone tagging 'FUCK ICE' for 8 counts[1] of destruction of federal property.
For some reason, the current regime does not hold its footsoldiers and other useful idiots to the same standard.
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[1] Someone in a protest/movement/group did something bad, brand them all terrorists, and make sure that everyone's going to a 're-education' camp for what will remain of their lives.
[2] One for each letter, and another one for the space.
The case was pretty clear-cut, and as for the pardon... He clearly didn't pay the right president, Trevor Milton got one right at the start of this presidency.
> In an authoritarian government basic liberties we take for granted in the West are considered corruption
Could you list some of those basic liberties? Are they the sort of liberties whose exercise involves taking half a billion in bribes?
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Generally, basic liberties like showing up to a protest aren't considered corruption, they get called terrorism, or somesuch. A Texas judge just sentenced a dozen people to 30-70 years in prison for exercising them, by the way. Some of the people given 30 weren't even at the protest. Half this forum looked at that, and saw nothing wrong with it. I can only imagine that if they were born on the other side of the Pacific ocean, they would be card-carrying party members.
> If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life,
Do you?
Your 'civilization' doesn't run on some kind of command economy five-year-cultural plan. Its values and views of what's good and bad are just some (often dystopian) local maximum it's stuck in.
Not to mention the obvious - what if you strongly disagree with your civilization's values?
There's something beyond idiotic about a society that goes out of its way to make having children an absolutely batshit insane decision for anyone before their mid-thirties.
Doubly so when it blames children's television for its ills, instead of the obvious suspects of nuclear families (who have no free adult time for child care), dying rural areas (which push young adults to move away from their parents), a fucked up and unaffordable healthcare system, an ever-growing chasm between haves and have-nots, and the expectation that children should not be left unsupervised for even a moment (by either their parents, who presumably have to work for a living, or by a paid babysitter, who the have-not parents are somehow supposed to afford) until their teens. Oh, and in more recent years, the redder regions of it have also been waging and winning a war against women's reproductive health. Not to mention the war against the 'wrong'[1] kind of immigrant.
No, it's clearly television that's at fault.
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[1] The definition of 'wrong' changes every fucking week, suddenly and without warning. You'd have to be insane to have a child when you or your partner can lose your/their status, and be arrested and deported at the whim of the tweeter-in-chief. The amount of work the 'family values' party has been putting into tearing families apart is really something.
The federal felony investigation was for a protest where one asshole shot a gun, and the others, who didn't, got 70 years in prison. There is no world where this isn't completely fucking insane. There is no need to whitewash this.
(Meanwhile, the Jan 6 insurrectionists, who were a credible threat to the peaceful transfer of power - the foundation of democracy - were all pardoned. By the guy who sent them there.)
Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.
The difference between AI and artists is that artists are humans, which should grant them more rights and fewer penalties than some fucking software.
Artists don't get penalized, but for that reason, we should penalize the hell out of it.
If a bunch of hyper intelligent space aliens came in and started squeezing the rest of us out of creative economic activity, they shouldn't be on an equal playing field either. Laws and rules exist to serve humans, not machines.
Labor arbitrage isn't why the average personal vehicle MPG in the US is 25, but 40 in Europe.
Nobody bombed us, all our problems are self-inflicted. Reducing America's oil and energy consumption was a priority for both parties until fracking was discovered and the Republicans fully committed to setting the world on fire.
4) People in China want to save money on gas, while America prefers to bitch about gas prices, while doing nothing to switch away from gas-guzzling ICE land yachts.
Since you're kvetching about stupid political reasons I'm assuming you're volunteering to go first as drone cannon fodder?
That 'political reason' is that US is war-weary, and the electorate will flip their shit when their kids get sent into the meatgrinder of a pointless war that none of them wanted, ran by TV stars, where the stated objective changes every 30 minutes.
> But this may be one of the few times we have been unable to achieve a purely military objective.
The military objective can be achieved, it would just require the 'No New Wars' party to implode from having 272 seats to having ~150 seats after the midterms.
He could have had the book thrown at him. As for the rest, if you seriously think that getting 70 years for being at a protest where one person shot a gun is appropriate, you have a lot in common with a Stalin-era Soviet judge.