5 ms·

Having never heard of Martin Gottesfeld or Justina Pelletier before, and just spending some time reading articles, I'm pretty disgusted. At face value this seem

Having never heard of Martin Gottesfeld or Justina Pelletier before, and just spending some time reading articles, I'm pretty disgusted. At face value this seems like a horrible miscarriage of justice on many, many levels. Now I'm not exactly a fan of the USA, but this all seems a bit over the top, but I can find nothing debunking any of it. Does anyone have articles with dissenting view points about either of them, bringing arguments in favor of Massachusetts, BOP, or the Boston Children’s Hospital?

seemslegit 7y ago
Do you really need an argument in favor of Boston Children’s Hospital to realize that DoSing a hospital is nowhere near the scope of either a legally or morally acceptable course of action to deal with something like this even if his take on the case was 100% correct ?
- LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  Sometimes sacrifices have to be made, sometimes children have to suffer and die, for a moral outcry to be marshalled. Totally agree with seemslegit, he botched the political poker by not upping the stakes.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  If you want to engage in that, does that make him deserving of being in a secret (?) prison? Does that preclude the need of arguments in favor of them to excuse them of their treatment of Justina Pelletier? I think you read something into my comment that isn't there. edit: And I'm not even sure I could categorically state that DoSing a fundraiser of a hospital engaging in (at least from what I've read in the articles) medical kidnapping, using wards of state as guinea pigs, etc. is morally wrong. Another reason for my request for differing opinions.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - leftyted 7y ago
    You're far too credulous. This guy seems like an absolute loon to me. I find his claims of "secret prisons" and widespread corruption extremely dubious. You have an anti-US bias ("I'm not exactly a fan of the USA") that you should try to account for. > Does that preclude the need of arguments in favor of them to excuse them of their treatment of Justina Pelletier? The two things aren't related. The parents challenged the hospital in court and won. I think there's clearly an issue here (the hospital seems to have gone too far), but we Americans -- barbaric though we may be -- have means of settling disagreements without DoSing hospitals.
    - Semaphor 7y ago
      > You have an anti-US bias ("I'm not exactly a fan of the USA") that you should try to account for. Yes. I agree. This is why I asked for arguments in favor of the other side. So far I've read nothing but articles supporting Justina (and her parents) and Marty and their versions of the story. Then I asked for other viewpoints. And instead you tell me I shouldn't believe everything when I literally said "At face value" and that it seems over the top.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        The authoritarians in this nation don't have logic or the facts on their side. They make up for it with endless repetition. Every punishment for subjects, no matter how obviously extreme, must be supported. Every crime committed by the police, no matter the horrific circumstances, must be defended. Every authoritarian abuse of power must be good. If it's confusing to you, overseas, imagine living here and being subject to this noise constantly. [EDIT:] To be clear, I don't particularly believe or disbelieve any particular allegation in TFA. This is just an observation about comments ITT and how they echo comments in every thread about how we little unimportant people have overstepped our bounds.
  - seemslegit 7y ago
    Of course it doesn't excuse secret prisons ("communication management unit" is a very nice euphemism), there was probably a lot of wrong with the treatment of Justina Pelletier, and the morally and normatively bankrupt state of the BOP is well known - it's just that this guy is a really bad example to showcase this over. And if he indeed only disrupted a fundraising event rather than the hospital operation it could be a serious miscarriage of justice (with complicity from the news outlets who described it as such if this was amenable to fact checking), but this should be argued by lawyers familiar with the case because PR-wise he has very little going for him.
- seemslegit 7y ago
  Curiously - half of this comment was copy-pasted as a comment to the medium article and not by me.
mox1 7y ago
He DoSed the hospital, forcing them to basically shut down their internet service for multiple days. No transfer of medical records in or out. No radiological imaging in or out. Patient dieing on the bed and need to access their MRI scan from another hospital? Nope. Marty was (and I'm sure still is) incredibly arrogant. As the FBI got closer and closer to catching him, he would continually make up different stories about how "Anonymous" was doing all of this, etc. etc. After confronting him with irrefutable evidence, he made claims about large botnets he controlled, and other various crimes. His goal immediately shifted from completely innocent to criminal mastermind (again, huge arrogance) After being caught (which he was 100% certain would never happen), he attempted to flee the country by boat with his wife, almost died, and was picked up by a cruise ship. He is not a physically abusive guy, but something is not mentally 100% with him. He had an ok IT consultant career before all of this, but he very much assumed he was smarter than everyone else. Edit: Also not surprised about his outrageous claims of secret prisons, toxic water, etc. This is just what the guy does, bullshits and makes stuff up. He probably actually believes what he is saying (again, mentally off).
- Semaphor 7y ago
  Thanks! Do you have an article for this? I can't say I looked too far into him, finding the Justina case far more problematic, but searching still mostly showed up articles with a positive spin.
  - mox1 7y ago
    The are various articles. You could probably find most / all of what I wrote in court records. I was tangentially involved in his case, most of what I wrote is based on first and second hand knowledge. I have also personally met him a few times.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
I had never heard of Justina Pelletier until today. As someone with substantial familiarity with how things work in the social services portions of Massachusetts state government as well as the culture of the state (I grew up and currently live in MA) her story does not surprise me in the slightest. This general pattern of one wrong call in how a case is handled being perpetuated through the rest of the case is not an uncommon pattern when things go badly. People in this state very much take for granted that the administrative portion of government is competent and knows what it's doing. Government here is generally competent but there are many pockets of incompetent political appointees and totally under-resourced teams and there's no way of telling which is which from the outside. People also take as fact the word of big important prestigious organizations that are experts in what they do (and with good reason, they are usually right). BCH and similar may be experts as a whole and government may be competent in general but these institutions are made up of people and people aren't perfect and they get things wrong sometimes. Someone at BCH clearly made the wrong call. That wrong call got plopped on the desk of some overworked bureaucrat who takes it at face value because they're overworked and they're experts so why not trust them, they made the wrong call. So then the next person at BCH sees in this girl's file that she came in for X, got referred to the state, the state took her from her parents and that influences how they treat her going forward. This goes on and you get a heck of a feedback loop because everyone is just content to assume that the state and the experts know best and the parents are just whining about it. Nobody is in a position to evaluate the big picture and even if they do how do you stop the loop and say "hey wait, this looks wrong". I could fill a novel with all the sob stories like this that I know though most of them relate to drug addicts and the elderly so they wouldn't tug a heartstrings nearly as much as this story does. The culture of the state simply does not equip people in "the system" (both the government and private institutions like BCH) to doubt or re-evaluate the prior results of the system and the conditions of the state bureaucracy are not sufficient for the bureaucrats to reliably make the right calls the first (and often only) time around. It's sad but it is what it is. This is a complex problem that many societies grapple with and not the kind of thing any individual can change on their own. Regarding Martin Gottesfeld, I am not informed enough to comment.

seemslegit 7y ago

Do you really need an argument in favor of Boston Children’s Hospital to realize that DoSing a hospital is nowhere near the scope of either a legally or morally acceptable course of action to deal with something like this even if his take on the case was 100% correct ?

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made, sometimes children have to suffer and die, for a moral outcry to be marshalled. Totally agree with seemslegit, he botched the political poker by not upping the stakes.
Semaphor 7y ago
If you want to engage in that, does that make him deserving of being in a secret (?) prison? Does that preclude the need of arguments in favor of them to excuse them of their treatment of Justina Pelletier? I think you read something into my comment that isn't there. edit: And I'm not even sure I could categorically state that DoSing a fundraiser of a hospital engaging in (at least from what I've read in the articles) medical kidnapping, using wards of state as guinea pigs, etc. is morally wrong. Another reason for my request for differing opinions.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- leftyted 7y ago
  You're far too credulous. This guy seems like an absolute loon to me. I find his claims of "secret prisons" and widespread corruption extremely dubious. You have an anti-US bias ("I'm not exactly a fan of the USA") that you should try to account for. > Does that preclude the need of arguments in favor of them to excuse them of their treatment of Justina Pelletier? The two things aren't related. The parents challenged the hospital in court and won. I think there's clearly an issue here (the hospital seems to have gone too far), but we Americans -- barbaric though we may be -- have means of settling disagreements without DoSing hospitals.
  - Semaphor 7y ago
    > You have an anti-US bias ("I'm not exactly a fan of the USA") that you should try to account for. Yes. I agree. This is why I asked for arguments in favor of the other side. So far I've read nothing but articles supporting Justina (and her parents) and Marty and their versions of the story. Then I asked for other viewpoints. And instead you tell me I shouldn't believe everything when I literally said "At face value" and that it seems over the top.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      The authoritarians in this nation don't have logic or the facts on their side. They make up for it with endless repetition. Every punishment for subjects, no matter how obviously extreme, must be supported. Every crime committed by the police, no matter the horrific circumstances, must be defended. Every authoritarian abuse of power must be good. If it's confusing to you, overseas, imagine living here and being subject to this noise constantly. [EDIT:] To be clear, I don't particularly believe or disbelieve any particular allegation in TFA. This is just an observation about comments ITT and how they echo comments in every thread about how we little unimportant people have overstepped our bounds.
- seemslegit 7y ago
  Of course it doesn't excuse secret prisons ("communication management unit" is a very nice euphemism), there was probably a lot of wrong with the treatment of Justina Pelletier, and the morally and normatively bankrupt state of the BOP is well known - it's just that this guy is a really bad example to showcase this over. And if he indeed only disrupted a fundraising event rather than the hospital operation it could be a serious miscarriage of justice (with complicity from the news outlets who described it as such if this was amenable to fact checking), but this should be argued by lawyers familiar with the case because PR-wise he has very little going for him.
seemslegit 7y ago
Curiously - half of this comment was copy-pasted as a comment to the medium article and not by me.

mox1 7y ago

He DoSed the hospital, forcing them to basically shut down their internet service for multiple days. No transfer of medical records in or out. No radiological imaging in or out. Patient dieing on the bed and need to access their MRI scan from another hospital? Nope. Marty was (and I'm sure still is) incredibly arrogant. As the FBI got closer and closer to catching him, he would continually make up different stories about how "Anonymous" was doing all of this, etc. etc. After confronting him with irrefutable evidence, he made claims about large botnets he controlled, and other various crimes. His goal immediately shifted from completely innocent to criminal mastermind (again, huge arrogance) After being caught (which he was 100% certain would never happen), he attempted to flee the country by boat with his wife, almost died, and was picked up by a cruise ship. He is not a physically abusive guy, but something is not mentally 100% with him. He had an ok IT consultant career before all of this, but he very much assumed he was smarter than everyone else. Edit: Also not surprised about his outrageous claims of secret prisons, toxic water, etc. This is just what the guy does, bullshits and makes stuff up. He probably actually believes what he is saying (again, mentally off).

Semaphor 7y ago
Thanks! Do you have an article for this? I can't say I looked too far into him, finding the Justina case far more problematic, but searching still mostly showed up articles with a positive spin.
- mox1 7y ago
  The are various articles. You could probably find most / all of what I wrote in court records. I was tangentially involved in his case, most of what I wrote is based on first and second hand knowledge. I have also personally met him a few times.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

I had never heard of Justina Pelletier until today. As someone with substantial familiarity with how things work in the social services portions of Massachusetts state government as well as the culture of the state (I grew up and currently live in MA) her story does not surprise me in the slightest. This general pattern of one wrong call in how a case is handled being perpetuated through the rest of the case is not an uncommon pattern when things go badly. People in this state very much take for granted that the administrative portion of government is competent and knows what it's doing. Government here is generally competent but there are many pockets of incompetent political appointees and totally under-resourced teams and there's no way of telling which is which from the outside. People also take as fact the word of big important prestigious organizations that are experts in what they do (and with good reason, they are usually right). BCH and similar may be experts as a whole and government may be competent in general but these institutions are made up of people and people aren't perfect and they get things wrong sometimes. Someone at BCH clearly made the wrong call. That wrong call got plopped on the desk of some overworked bureaucrat who takes it at face value because they're overworked and they're experts so why not trust them, they made the wrong call. So then the next person at BCH sees in this girl's file that she came in for X, got referred to the state, the state took her from her parents and that influences how they treat her going forward. This goes on and you get a heck of a feedback loop because everyone is just content to assume that the state and the experts know best and the parents are just whining about it. Nobody is in a position to evaluate the big picture and even if they do how do you stop the loop and say "hey wait, this looks wrong". I could fill a novel with all the sob stories like this that I know though most of them relate to drug addicts and the elderly so they wouldn't tug a heartstrings nearly as much as this story does. The culture of the state simply does not equip people in "the system" (both the government and private institutions like BCH) to doubt or re-evaluate the prior results of the system and the conditions of the state bureaucracy are not sufficient for the bureaucrats to reliably make the right calls the first (and often only) time around. It's sad but it is what it is. This is a complex problem that many societies grapple with and not the kind of thing any individual can change on their own. Regarding Martin Gottesfeld, I am not informed enough to comment.