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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider, why is this a credible institution over the jury and judge?

I can't speak to the institution but the only public statements on their website relate to this particular trial. It could be this is the first ever trial they have monitored in this way; it might also be a group that will only ever monitor this one trial.

In other words Greenpeace is trying to muddy the waters and hide their guilt by painting themselves as the victims of injustice?

How very original..

Yeah we're dealing with a mud fight between two highly resourced adversaries who are practiced in bullshit underhanded tactics and influence operations.

Nah, its one source of funding. The oil giants pump there money in bonkers oppossition- one Greta Thunberg glueing herself to a public street does more damage to that cause then the whole of counter propaganda ever could. And it prevents the debate about resonable measures like free public transport.

I guess I was expecting a Matt Levine-style breakdown of why the trial was run improperly and why an appellate court would be expected to strike it down. Instead we have vague statements that could have come from an elected’s staff.

Based on their "Meet the Committee" page, they look a bit more like they have a dog in this fight beyond simply adjudicating the case.

https://www.trialmonitors.org/meet-the-committee

Plenty of accomplished people there, but as a group "unbiased observers" isn't the first phrase that comes to mind.

Surely you can’t be suggesting that a committee of environmental activists might be biased in favor of Greenpeace?

https://www.trialmonitors.org/meet-the-committee

related topic -- "Judge shopping" refers to the practice of litigants strategically filing lawsuits in court districts or divisions where they are likely to be assigned to a judge sympathetic to their cause, often exploiting structural quirks in the judiciary

Most state courts randomly assign you a judge so it's not that simple, in some cases you can target certain districts in certain states where there are less judges (like the Texas patent judge). This is a trial in North Dakota because that's where the protests happened. I doubt they had many options in a single jurisdiction. The fallback for this stuff is of course a circuit court appeal.

Care to explain how a circuit court might come to hear an appeal out of a state court of general jurisdiction?

Because sometimes corruption happens.

They're a bunch of lifetime activists who spun up an authoritative sounding NGO that has done literally nothing else, but yeah muh corruption.

Oil companies have been suppressing climate change research for decades to keep cooking the earth for profits. Is that not corruption? I suppose if you are economically exposed to these gains, don’t believe in climate change, and/or won’t be here for the bad times from this, the facts may not matter to your mental model. The facts remain that climate change is real and oil companies are doing their best to extract every bit of profit they can until we’re off of oil, regardless of the negative trajectories and outcomes from this.

https://www.ucs.org/resources/decades-deceit

Oil companies have done worse than that, but we're not talking about them right now we're talking about Trial Monitors Dot Org, the real authoritative source on this trial that has done literally nothing else.

You know, it's possible for these oil companies to have done all this bad stuff, and for Greenpeace to be a pretty shitty organization. And for the person to have a different mindset than all the strawman assumptions you just made.

Oil companies have a definite history of punching people and then suing them for running into their fist. But I should also point out that Greenpeace is the kind of shitty activist company that also does those kind of tactics, so an oil company suing Greenpeace leaves my priors as "I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario."

> I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario.

What are the motives? Follow the money? Who profits most might give an indication of who is more likely wrong.

Don’t underestimate the capacity of feelers to be wrong for free.

Oil companies haven't done a damn thing. We are the cause of global warming. Every time we pump gas into our car, buy anything that came from far away, or use any technology dependent on oil. Blaming oil companies is childish garbage people do to avoid recognizing their personal share of the responsibility.

You know the carbon footprint concept was literally created by BP marketing, to place the blame for climate change on society, and distract from all the evil stuff they did to promote more fossil fuel consumption and sabotage climate science.

The Climate Town channel on Youtube has lots of video's on this, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE

The blame is 100% on society, so BP is correct to place it there. If we wanted to reduce our CO2 output to near zero we could do that easily. But it turns out that we would rather have all of our modern conveniences, so this is 100% our fault. Blaming it on oil companies is like a murderer blaming Smith and Wesson.

You’re sadly making this a simpler issue than it actually is. There are countless industries that have used immoral tactics to make more money. That includes tobacco companies (lying about health benefits & consequences to smoking), gambling companies (misleading people about how much money they can expect to make), and, of course, oil companies (lying about how harmful gas is to the environment).

Using gas is not actually necessary to have all our modern conveniences. In fact, it is fucking stupid to rely on continuous resource extraction, deleting our fuel supply to create energy, when we can get it continuously for free from the environment with a minor up-front investment.

It is not 100% our fault. This is only like blaming it on Smith & Wesson if Smith & Wesson had created “pacifist guns” that allegedly solved societal violence, or if Smith & Wesson spent huge amounts of money trying to convince people that guns are not actually dangerous objects.

Blaming oil companies for the extremely well documented history of suppression of research and action into the impact of climate change is not childish.

It is childish to think that anything would have been different if this research was released.

Exactly. I mean look what happened when we worked out CFCs were destroying the ozone layer through rigorous scientific research and public disclosure.

Those were a lot easier to swap out. Oil is the foundation of modern society, CFCs were far from.

Yes, and cigarettes, asbestos, lead in gasoline, and a few others, too. Clearly there is a place for education and coordinated action among the common people.

You are literally avoiding the topic (Greenpeace intentionally created a misleading authoritative-looking entity) to say "Oil bad! Boo oil companies!".

The facts remain that Greenpeace did in fact attempt to slander (legal definition) the big oil corp.

Maybe you support "win at all costs" in this fight, but don't pretend one side is pure and honest.

In America, just about anything is more cridble than our "justice" system.

Well, let's not get into this left-right thing because that could go back and forth forever. Especially in the current environment.

eg - "As an outsider, why is [the jury and judge] a credible institution over the monitors?"

We should all just give the legal experts time to look over the records of what happened, and assess why. From there, a consensus will likely emerge as to what happened during and before the trial. And the justice or injustice of the matter will present itself.

But you can't have a judge say one thing and some other single expert say another, and from those pieces of information decide anything of an authoritative nature. Our institutions just don't have that type of credibility any longer. This is the consequence of credibility crises for any society's steward classes.

It was a long slide getting here, decades actually. But I think we are firmly now at the point of the "credibility collapse" portion of the "credibility crisis".

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