Posted October 4, 20223 yr The Onion Filed a Brief With the Supreme Court. It's Not a Joke https://news.yahoo.com/onion-filed-brief-supreme-court-205748242.html Quote The brief is laced with dramatic hyperbole, jabs at the self-seriousness of the legal profession, and outlandish, obviously false declarations of fact. Filing a parody brief was of course the point, the site’s lawyers explained, as they threw their support behind an Ohio man arrested for publishing a Facebook page making fun of his local police department. "The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,” the site’s lawyer Stephen van Stempvoort wrote. The case involves petitioner Anthony Novak, who faced criminal charges linked to the police department parody page he made on Facebook. He was briefly jailed after his arrest and went to trial, where he was acquitted. Novak filed a civil suit against the arresting officers and the city of Parma, Ohio, arguing that his constitutional rights were violated. Novak and his lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to step in after a federal appeals court ruled the officers were protected against being sued by a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity. Justices have yet to decide whether to hear the case. I hadn't heard about this case - which is pretty disturbing for free speech lovers. Arrested for making a parody page on FB about the local police department. Quote 88 "The Onion regularly pokes its finger in the eyes of repressive and authoritarian regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, and domestic presidential administrations,” van Stempvoort wrote. "So The Onion’s professional parodists were less than enthralled to be confronted with a legal ruling that fails to hold government actors accountable for jailing and prosecuting a would-be humorist simply for making fun of them.” The site pushed back on the idea that humor needs advance warning, arguing that would "pop the balloon” of parody from the start and assume "ordinary readers are less sophisticated and humorless than they actually are.” The brief unpacks the machinations of this type of comedy, explaining that the idea is to first trick the reader into thinking the content is real "and then allowing them to laugh at their own gullibility.”
October 4, 20223 yr 3 hours ago, Toastrel said: The Onion Filed a Brief With the Supreme Court. It's Not a Joke https://news.yahoo.com/onion-filed-brief-supreme-court-205748242.html I hadn't heard about this case - which is pretty disturbing for free speech lovers. Arrested for making a parody page on FB about the local police department. Weird you never said anything when Biden's DOJ threw the book at a guy for making memes.
October 5, 20223 yr 2 hours ago, VanHammersly said: Has Babylon Bee plagiarized the brief but made it less funny yet? We'll know when it's fact-checked
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