We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
Then again, it's very hard to know at CLAT age what you really want to do with your life, so another option is doing law for one year at NLS, and decide after a year whether you want to drop out and try for another exam or course...
I always wondered whether it's possible to come back from an almost-alt-right POV and whether most / any people can even ever move between both sides of the spectrum. Politics and leanings seem like such a hardwired thing in many people (other than arguably a common drift towards conservatism as you get older), or something that seems to become hardwired or people double-down on very quickly, that it becomes very hard to find common ground between both sides (and good arguments don't really seem to cut it once an opinion is formed).
One question I had for you, if you don't mind: what did you find attractive about the alt-right 'movement', 'sub-culture', 'literature', etc, when you were toying with the ideas? I can see that the eco-system can be a fascinating, but that can't solely be the reason people are into it, right?
If your point is simply that cultural discourse is polarised and both the left and right of the spectrum in the US lie and are hypocritical in different spheres, and that political correctness vs freedom of speech online is a complicated subject, then maybe this does not deserve more great discussion, unless you have something specific to add that you would like to discuss.
But it seems you are just sharing a video with the afterthought "also, let's discuss". If you can't suggest a legitimate avenue of discussion or angle on this, will unpublish this thread as off-topic. What's next: Trump, AOC and Bernie Sanders speeches?
But if US politics like this is of genuine interest to readers, please let us know.
But, even if we don't get into specifics, do we even want to get into a game where some seats are labelled as meritorious (good), and others are by implication non-merit (i.e. neutral or 'bad')? What about women's quotas? State quotas? Disability quotas? Are all the ones who get into those, without merit?
Also, neo-stalinist and neo-maoist might make sense, if there was such a thing? Who do you think would fit the bill? Maybe calling the chinese neo-communists could make sense, though it probably makes them sound both cooler (because Neo is cool - have you not seen the Matrix?) and more communist than they actually are, as it might be more accurate to describe them as fundamentally totalitarian / neo-fascist free-market capitalists with a heavy 'guiding' hand of the state, which is communist in not much except the name of the party and a couple of social welfare programmes.
We hereby retract our earlier comment when the first Babones thread was posted a month ago, when we had initially said he looked a bit batty, then we watched his full India Today video after urging, and retracted out statement and clarified that he wasn't completely batty:
https://www.legallyindia.com/convos/topic/242851-indias-intellectual-class-is-anti-india-as-a-class-and-not-as-an-individual-salvatore-babones-at-india-today-conclave#comment-243278
Have done you the favour of watching the full video now, and can confirm: the video is shared by Pgurus (first flag), and the fellow started out ranting about George Soros, and it didn't get better from there.
There was some conspiracy stuff about Tulsi Gabbard, Hinduism, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Omidyar, yadiyaa something, then he rants inexplicably about the weather in Hawaii and how much he likes going to Hawaii for vacations. Then he went into rigged elections, communists, fixing British democracy or something along those lines. The only thing missing was mentioning lizard people and actually criticism of Newslaundry...
The only core to his argument is that Omidyar provided some seed funding to Newslaundry, but it's also riddled with factual errors, in that he can't even get the stake owned by Omidyar right (if someone's really interested in Newslaundry ownership structure, they're quite upfront about it: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/07/02/who-owns-newslaundry ).
And he also does the old trick of: "I'm not saying Newslaundry is XYZ [insert thing you hate or that scares you here], but questions should be asked." That's scarcely better than this kind of stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3vt1Gqrn4
Feel free to check out the video on PGurus YouTube channel but the video doesn't need to be amplified on LI or add to the discussion.
Priceless: Piers' expression when Tate keeps saying he doesn't care about Taliban banning women from getting an education.
Also priceless: Piers trying to both agree and disagree with Tate that feminists are bad.
Also lol: Piers explains how the police arrested someone but eventually didn't prosecute someone who made a death threat against Morgan's family on Instagram. Tate: "If that same man called a transgender person the wrong pronouns, he would be in trouble... That would never happen in a place like the United Arab Emirates, a place I'm now residing." Lolz.
Finally, why is Tate so scared of crime all the time? He walks around Harrods with 6 bodyguards, and he's still scared someone will steal his watch? Isn't he some kick-boxing champion?
2. Please explain the word 'wokism'. What is this thing you speak of? Is it a religion? Is there a book I can read so I can become one?
3. Please explain the word 'Marxist'? Are you born with it or do you catch it later in life? Do I have to apply for a membership card, and can I just choose to be one?
Will be happy to sign up for whatever you have in mind, pls let me know so I can make an informed decision.
I.e., neoliberal by itself is surely not toxic, any more than 'socialist' is toxic by itself: i.e., when used descriptively as in "this government is following neoliberal policies" or "your arguments are fundamentally socialist".
But using any of those as a pejorative would be toxic. Then again, so would calling someone a 'clown', and no one is proposing 'banning' clown or reducing its use in discourse.
https://www.newslaundry.com/subscription
As a historical side note, you're right that all this is not a "new-fangled woke project", but it used to be called "political correctness" in the 90s and back then certain people were up in arms about wanting to have the right to use words such as "chairman" or "lady doctor", most of which are now accepted to be somewhat archaic.
Back then, the criticism was about "it's political correctness gone mad", by people like Jeremy Clarkson. Then after a decade or two of relative quiet in those culture wars, the battle is back again with the "wokes gone mad" and are trying to ban my words.
In short, nothing is ever new, language will keep evolving, people will fight about it and will come to some compromises. Rinse, repeat :)
Regarding featuring, most anti-reservation comments are full of statements amounting to "oh the wokes are the downfall of human civilisation", "to mention caste is to encourage Hinduphobia", "only upper castes are smart" and other such pearls. If you agree with those statements and want them featured, please print the comments out or start a Facebook group or something.
If there's a well-argued argument adding to the discussion made against reservation or for a conservative cause, without ad hominem, hate, untruths like the above examples, we have and will feature those comments. That is not a high bar and should not be difficult.
"LawChatGPT, write me a draft seller-friendly response to this email from the Buyer on this SPA's warranties".
You're right, you'll still need a lawyer to look at it before it goes out and there'll be scope for top lawyers to negotiate that extra bit. Question would be whether that kind of gain in efficiency would reduce billings because GPT has written 90% of your draft in 2 seconds, or whether lawyers will find new revenue streams or billing models to compensate.
Or it could be that the software has developed sentience and realised that malarkey poster should be shadow-banned from voting, judging by their propensity to believe unlikely conspiracy theories about how they are being victimised by the bad left-wing man? :)
All we're suggesting, contrary to the media response: don't start panicking just yet in India.
While it's theoretically possible the virus came from a lab and China undoubtedly mismanaged the early days of the pandemic (and the current wave also), there is only circumstantial evidence for this theory and no peer reviewed evidence at all.
And does that mean all media except Telegraph and Newslaundry and The Wire and Scroll are toeing the central government's line?
Gryffindor peeps take themselves far too seriously, Ravenclaws never leave the library, but Hufflepuff and Slytherin are obviously where it's at, they have freedom to discover themselves (except technically Slytherin, who are free to do whatever they like as long as it includes being evil)
LI's 2 cents. Be afraid. Be very afraid. But that goes for nearly all creative / intellectual professions done with a computer nowadays, including copywriting, translation, 2d and 3d graphics and even computer coding, many parts of which could in some years time be largely automated by this kind of technology.
But, importantly for legal:
1. It's not quite there yet both in terms of quality and reliability (but it probably will get there at some point in the coming years).
2. There will still be scope for human supervision and checking, particularly for high-value legal issues, but there might not be as much need for as much human and junior time.
3. Some of it will be positive for newbies, in that it may assist you in doing research and drafting faster by suggesting intelligent things that you can do.
In terms of law school assignments, a good professor can probably still spot a GPT authored paper and it likely won't get a very good grade (for now), though you're right, it might actually be good enough for a passing grade. Also, turnitin or other plagiarism checkers might adjust to also use AI that might be able to determine whether something was written by a GPT-style algorithm or not.
Would love to hear reader views.
But mostly this is a comment putting responders on notice that please let us not turn this thread into a discussion of 'cancel culture', 'wokism' etc, but on the merits of OPs points. We have accordingly modified the headline.
Regarding Amnesty: moving from Amnesty to the UN is surely not miles away, and the contacts you'll make in top international NGO like Amnesty will likely include UN people or others who can help you get a foot in the door.
Because the revenues of even successful media businesses are surely dwarfed by his other businesses, so the more likely reason he's buying this is for power and influence as subset of business (and if it's about power and influence, Ravish has a potential point)
Also, "very likely" here is still false, unless new evidence comes to light beyond current circumstantial evidence. Here's a more recent scientific study of the virus origins and genomic make-up: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337 This concludes:
Quote:
> The precise events surrounding virus spillover will always be clouded, but all of the circumstantial evidence so far points to more than one zoonotic event occurring in Huanan market in Wuhan, China, likely during November–December 2019.
Quote: Do you have any evidence of this? Hasn't the government been regularly sitting / rejecting a whole bunch of collegium recommendations?
In any case, most of the recent files haven't actually revealed anything new: it was public information that the FBI and DHS had departments dealing with online misinformation. That they would actually use that power and engage with social media companies and try to get them to do stuff for them, like take posts down, etc, shouldn't surprise anyone.
Neither should it be a surprise after Snowden that FBI and Homeland Security they would not try to abuse that power (and that most US social media companies would play ball). This story, for instance, is much more interesting thing out of the Twitter files than yet another rehashing of the Hunter Biden laptop thing:
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/
Sure, Greta and her followers and generation are not saints and all eco-warriors, but you don't know enough of them to claim they are all hypocrites who buy iPhones every year and produce more electronic waste than others and that they've done nothing or that they're activism is worthless compared to 'simple folk', both of which are dishonest reductions.