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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
8 hours ago, Barry said:

I’m glad this turned into a @CleanHandsappreciation thread because that guy rules and is genuinely someone I look up to as an aspiring criminal lawyer. I’ve kind of wanted an excuse to voice my appreciation but felt it sounded super lame. I acknowledge it sounds that way now anyway… but since everyone is doing it. 

 

7 hours ago, TheMidnightOil said:

Agreed. Dude's the sort of lawyer I aspire to be. I imagine we're not the only law students / recent lawyers who think this.

Although, you can't deny that there's something pretty funny about how a thread called "Forums & Negativity" ended up centering on him 😆

You guys are way too nice and flattering when I'm not even a lawyer yet myself but I'll strive to become the kind of lawyer that actually warrants these comments, and to keep chatting with students when that's the case. Feel free to DM me whenever if there's anything I can offer with my limited knowledge and experience.

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GGrievous
  • Law Student
41 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

when I'm not even a lawyer

Well I was gonna say aspiring criminal articling student but you work for the Crown, and I’m hoping you’ll be fixed by the time you start practice. (Kidding of course)

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GROUP HUG

Forums like these take all kinds. You need the mix of posters and the mix of perspectives. You need the kind comments, you need the cynical quips, you need the bring-you-up-short replies, you need the inside jokes.

I would just warn anyone against becoming a character of themselves. Don't feel you bring a certain voice to the forum so you always have to use it. Make sure you just keep on being you. If @CleanHands  ever reads a post and decides that this poster needs gentle reassurance, he should feel free to supply that, especially since it would absolutely floor most of us into uncharacteristic silence. Similarly, if @BlockedQuebecoisever comes around on Denton's and decides to admit he was wrong, we should all support him on that journey. And one day - ONE DAY - @Rashabon may finally concede that the GOP "has a point", and personally I want front row tickets to that if it ever happens because it will actually portend The End Of Days and I understand there will be fireworks.

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Rashabon
  • Lawyer

Rep Paul Gosar, who infamously had an attack ad put out against him by his entire family who said he was a piece of shit, posted numerous times a video from Attack on Titan that was modified to show him killing various Democratic politicians a day or two ago. Also the video was created by a neo Nazi. No outcry from the GOP who cried endless crocodile tears over Kathy Griffin and Trump.

I wouldn't hold your breath.

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
2 hours ago, Barry said:

Well I was gonna say aspiring criminal articling student but you work for the Crown, and I’m hoping you’ll be fixed by the time you start practice. (Kidding of course)

Defence totally tickles my bomb throwing anarchist g-spot more, and the idea was to get some training, experience and insight from the Crown before getting back on track, but they keep hiring me back and offering me stability and benefits and training and mentorship and the luxury of avoiding the entrepreneurial aspect of law (the devils; making it attractive).

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BlockedQuebecois
  • Lawyer
37 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Defence totally tickles my bomb throwing anarchist g-spot more, and the idea was to get some training, experience and insight from the Crown before getting back on track, but they keep hiring me back and offering me stability and benefits and training and mentorship and the luxury of avoiding the entrepreneurial aspect of law (the devils; making it attractive).

This is funny to me, as I am currently considering a move that would give me the luxury of engaging with the entrepreneurial aspects of law and get rid of the trappings of practicing within a firm or with the Crown. 

If you had asked each of us a year ago about this I suspect I would have sung the praises of the cushy life and you would have disclaimed the need for such frills. 

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Mountebank
  • Lawyer
7 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

This is funny to me, as I am currently considering a move that would give me the luxury of engaging with the entrepreneurial aspects of law and get rid of the trappings of practicing within a firm or with the Crown. 

If you had asked each of us a year ago about this I suspect I would have sung the praises of the cushy life and you would have disclaimed the need for such frills. 

You're moving into a position in which you will be without a reliable infrastructure or any of the support of an established, competent firm? You really are moving to Denton's!

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GreyDude
  • Law Student
4 hours ago, CleanHands said:

You guys are way too nice and flattering when I'm not even a lawyer yet myself but I'll strive to become the kind of lawyer that actually warrants these comments, and to keep chatting with students when that's the case. Feel free to DM me whenever if there's anything I can offer with my limited knowledge and experience.

It sounds like @CleanHands hopes to be a lawyer just like @CleanHands, as well. 

 

7 minutes ago, Jaggers said:

Go for the cushy life. It's very comfortable.

This seems deductively true. So... QED. I'm sold. 

Edited by GreyDude
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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
25 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

If you had asked each of us a year ago about this I suspect I would have sung the praises of the cushy life and you would have disclaimed the need for such frills. 

My preference for defence over Crown work never had anything to do with the allure of running a business as the former requires. I've always pretty consistently not looked forward to that aspect of things and preferred the actual lawyering.

But you're correct in that the idea of not having a boss (or having a boss that one is friends with as part of a small crew) and not being part of some big organization and being subject to the institutional and structural trappings that come with that (particularly as a public servant with all the responsibilities that flow from that), is and always has been a plus on the defence side for me.

I don't think my views on any of this has really changed. But I have gotten used to not even having to docket so moving back to billable hours and business development is one aspect of a potential switch that does seem incredibly unappealing.

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GGrievous
  • Law Student
27 minutes ago, Jaggers said:

Go for the cushy life. It's very comfortable.

Comfort makes me uncomfortable. 

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
26 minutes ago, Barry said:

Comfort makes me uncomfortable. 

That's why we do crim law, baby. To stay in the gutters where the world makes sense to us, even after we have the education to climb out of it if we wanted.

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epeeist
  • Lawyer

I figure that if one is being even slightly helpful, if one wants to engage in mild nastiness that's a reasonable price.

E.g. if providing an answer easily found with Google making a snide comment about searching first - you're giving the person the answer they asked for, being helpful in that sense, and sending a subtler message that asking questions that aren't easily Googleable is a better use of everyone's time.

Also, sometimes the answer the person wants is not what's genuinely helpful, and sometimes harsh truths/negativeness may be intended to make the person pay attention - i.e. motivated by a desire to be genuinely helpful not just tell someone what they want to hear - whereas a more friendly polite warning might not get the person's attention.

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Another thought.

I'll sometimes read an OP express that if people don't answer in a specific way (e.g., nicely), they would rather not hear from us at all. Which I find adorable.  Obviously, an OP has an interest in a thread, and we are typically responding to the inquiries or concerns raised in their post. But aside from mods' general policy of locking most threads at OP request, I never really look at a thread as belonging to the OP or anyone other one person (although, technically, I assume they belong to our beneficent technological overlord:@Ryn?). In fact, unless I'm unusually sympathetic to someone, I'm rarely responding just to that one person. Ideally, any good response is for the benefit of the other users and lurkers who might find themselves in a similar situation, but who don't post and ask themselves. 

As it relates to negativity, my most negative responses are often not intended to benefit the person I'm responding to. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't consider myself one of our most negative posters (are unsolicited, unnecessary arrested development gifs negative?). But when I am more direct, it's often because I want to smack down some ill-advised or pernicious thought before it can take root in the minds readers who are less savvy or are temporarily vulnerable due to their circumstances. 

More ramblings, for whatever they're worth.  

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
5 hours ago, epeeist said:

Also, sometimes the answer the person wants is not what's genuinely helpful, and sometimes harsh truths/negativeness may be intended to make the person pay attention - i.e. motivated by a desire to be genuinely helpful not just tell someone what they want to hear - whereas a more friendly polite warning might not get the person's attention.

 

4 hours ago, realpseudonym said:

As it relates to negativity, my most negative responses are often not intended to benefit the person I'm responding to. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't consider myself one of our most negative posters (are unsolicited, unnecessary arrested development gifs negative?). But when I am more direct, it's often because I want to smack down some ill-advised or pernicious thought before it can take root in the minds readers who are less savvy or are temporarily vulnerable due to their circumstances. 

A while back on the forums there was a thread started by an imbecile who got accepted into Windsor Dual and he wanted someone to tell him he could easily just do 1L in the dual program and then transfer into the single program. He disingenuously framed it as asking about the process and likelihood of being able to do so, but no, he literally just wanted people to tell him that's a solid plan and totally viable and wouldn't be a problem.

Multiple posters told him this would be very difficult and unlikely and not something he should bank on. Some of the initial replies informing the OP of this were polite. But they didn't say what the OP wanted so he just kept repeatedly asking the same question over and over until someone would give him the reassurances he sought.

It turned into a dogpile and I was one of the people who shit on him. @Hegdis is normally really laid back and hands off, and I love that (seriously the moderation on this forum is a breath of fresh air after dealing with certain petty tyrant mods like Erin on the old forums), but that thread got a bit out of hand to the point where even he stepped in to tell people to cool it.

But that thread is a fantastic example of where @realpseudonym's point is spot on. To be blunt, that OP was a lost cause (and frankly he very quickly made me not care about being helpful to him), and he was going to make his stupid decision based on wrongful assumptions no matter what anyone wrote. But with respect to @Hegdis (who I'm sympathetic to as I am sure it gets annoying herding the cats here), I definitely take issue with the "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" approach not because I have issues with sparing the hurt feelings of idiot OPs like that, but rather because the threads are going to be preserved and other applicants will stumble upon them, and it's important to convey that bad ideas are bad ideas. So in a case like that, there is value in shutting down an OP and being quite emphatic about it after the polite responses were completely disregarded and contrary (wrong) opinions were being actively pursued.

Edited by CleanHands
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  • 3 weeks later...
SNAILS
  • Law Student

On the topic of rude forum posters, I'd say that there is a marked difference between the internet and real life. People are much more conflict adverse in real life. I would say, on the internet, that it is less about being rude than about piling on, and in an internet dispute, the battle usually has one or more prime antagonists and a large number of groupies.

A prime antagonist will usually have a decently articulated argument to the affect of "Hey, you said X, but X is either factually false or misleading or insensitive or immoral." The person on the receiving end of the pile on may have either (a) a terrible and indefensible position for the aforementioned reasons, or (b) be engaged in a more-or-less logical attempt to defend an unpopular position (sometimes coupled with working out any weaknesses in the argument and reformulating it on the fly).

In my opinion, prime antagonists are fine. Groupies suck because they need to articulate their own thoughts or GTFO.

One example of this would be a recent discussion in law school about pay disparities between men and women and whether these inequities should be perpetuated by gender specific actuary tables in tort settlements. This would have been an absolute brutal war if it occurred on the internet. In real life, it was completely peaceful.

 

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Psychometronic
  • Lawyer
17 hours ago, SNAILS said:

On the topic of rude forum posters, I'd say that there is a marked difference between the internet and real life. People are much more conflict adverse in real life. I would say, on the internet, that it is less about being rude than about piling on, and in an internet dispute, the battle usually has one or more prime antagonists and a large number of groupies.

Some people give such unbelievably awful advice that a "pile on" is useful in sending a message that their advice is, indeed, unbelievably awful. Are there other ways to send this message? Maybe. This is still an effective way to warn third parties to avoid their advice. 

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  • 1 year later...
Naj
  • Law Student
On 11/9/2021 at 6:22 PM, realpseudonym said:

I generally knew enough to avoid the types of exchanges that tend to get people repeatedly ridiculed.

Do you really?

On 11/9/2021 at 6:22 PM, realpseudonym said:

@Diplock has informed me that I am being “intellectually dishonest” on at least one occasion

Have you considered the reality that you are an intellectually dishonest person? Or at least you demonstrated yourself to be in our only exchange that ever took place on this forum in which you intentionally misrepresented my argument and effectively encouraged a "pile-on" as you describe it.

Sorry, I just found this post really funny after browsing and noticing you are the author. I can't quiet get the point of this post, it feels more self serving than anything else after having exchanged a few words with you a few weeks ago.

If you want to make this forum a better place, which presumably you do based on this post, perhaps you ought to work on the way you conduct yourself. I can see our last conversation is closely related to the type of law you practice, so it makes sense why you'd be more passionate than usual, but what resulted was degraded conversation in which I was forced to flee when your overzealous comments began to pervert the discussion and the way others were going to perceive it.

 

On a side note, @CleanHands is overzealous and egotistical. I am merely an applicant so I'm not engaged with many posts and discussions related to law students and practitioners. While @CleanHands likely contributes to some discussions, more often than not in those discussions that I (as an applicant) am likely to observe and engage in, he does nothing more than serve his own ego by shitting on clueless applicants with snarky remarks and farming likes for it.

I will admit that I browsed the previous canadianlawstudents forum, and its nice to see that @CleanHands is making some effort to be less of a piece of shit, but I thought this guy was getting much more love than he deserved in the comments of this post. I think I need to balance that out by saying that his positive reinforcement is mostly a result of unaware applicants and students who are intimidated when approaching this forum and feel the need to positively engage @CleanHands in hopes that they aren't on the receiving end of his cringe-worthy wit one day. Although I find this amusing, I also find it dissapointing.

 

On 11/9/2021 at 8:42 PM, Deadpool said:

 but I also believe that there is a place - or a necessity even - to have more straight-to-the-point members

As an applicant, I can attest to this. I'm not going to bother elaborating, but I will say that this forum has changed the way I view some things, including law school and applications - whatever that may be worth. However, not to be confused with the uniquely shitty contributions that @CleanHands has left for many applicants and probably even unsuspecting law students. 

With that being said, there certainly are some members who fit this description, I wont bother tagging them because the praise wouldn't be worth the inconvenience of being invoked here, but also because its probably not important to them anyway. They provide unfiltered input and contributions that are intended to benefit other users. Unlike @CleanHands where any benefit seems incidental as his primary goal is to be a keyboard warrior and get his dopamine release as his reputation count increases.

 

In any case, @realpseudonymsounds like you got a taste of your own medicine and you're here crying to feel better. My response to you isn't necessarily personal, I just found this post amusing is all. Big-ups to those members who give their time and effort here without feeling the need to project and validate themselves 24/7.

 

 

 

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer

@Naj- So you're still mad enough about a month old exchange with @realpseudonymto necro a different thread that hasn't had a reply in over a year to gripe about it? If you want to provide commentary on other people's psychological investment in the forums...glass houses, dude.

9 minutes ago, Naj said:

I thought this guy was getting much more love than he deserved in the comments of this post.

Sure, I agree with this and don't mind you balancing that out. Still weird you are invested enough in this to do so on a thread that hasn't been active since Nov 2021.

Anyways I have nothing further to add here, but you tagged me so you wanted a response, right?

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Naj
  • Law Student
3 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

@Naj- So you're still mad enough about a month old exchange with @realpseudonymto necro a different thread that hasn't had a reply in over a year to gripe about it? If you want to provide commentary on other people's psychological investment in the forums...glass houses, dude.

 

Like I said, I was just browsing and found it funny, maybe @realpseudonym will appreciate my evaluation and take it in good faith. I have nothing further to add either.

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Pecan Boy
  • Articling Student

Me when I'm told I'm intellectually dishonest: I appreciate this evaluation. I'm going to take this in good faith. Thanks

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