The real issue with social media is actually already illegal: you cannot form harassment gangs which stalk and abuse people.
I would support governments legislating this issue, but so often, it's seen purely through a hate-speech lens -- which is madness.
One has to wonder of the politics behind this: are harassment campaigns permissable against white men? It is fine to hate them? One has to imagine legislators believe so.
The illegal behaviour here is fairly obvious, and not so hard to police: prevent social media platforms from "easy sharing" behaviour by default, and ban it for harassing accounts, etc. Give fines to people who instigate targeted campaigns against non-public figures. Enshire an absolute right to good-faith expression for any member of the public online, so any sincerely held belief can be expressed without fear of mobbing.. etc.
It is very odd that this issue is seen through a 'minority rights' lens, rather than the more obvious social harassement lens.
The crime is violence and threats of violence which, as you're saying is easy to monitor. All we need is to let people use social media to incriminate themselves.
The real issue is just that we don't have the resources to give them all due process. If we can fix that part we'll be ready for everyone to have global reach and social media.
We didn't solve that problem before the technology came about which indicates that the we just weren't ready for social media. Sadly the whole world is suffering for it, and extremist anti Western and anti civil rights groups are exploiting that.
It’s an intractable problem, that’s why we haven’t solved it. Crimes were intended to be serious transgressions worthy of the government spending untold sums enforcing for the good of society. Thus all of the expensive due process; it’s a serious transgression that carries serious penalties, so it’s important to be correct.
The system was never intended to handle an explosion in regulations to the point where the average person accidentally routinely commits felonies. The world’s judicial systems are collapsing because we are unwilling to admit that the judicial system would need to be like a quarter of our society to actually enforce all the laws we have, and we’re also unwilling to repeal laws to a subset we could actually effectively enforce.
I’m skeptical; we’re already automating as hard as possible by extorting defendants to not exercise their right to a trial. E.g. a typical court case will involve a plea deal for X days in jail, with the prosecutor threatening to argue for 10*X days if the defendant goes to trial.
98% of federal cases never make it to trial. Most states have rates above 90%. Some counties haven’t had a case go to trial in like a decade, everyone pleas out.
To be clear, we have already gutted everything not strictly necessary from the judicial system, and it’s faltering even under the ‘crisis mode’ operations they’ve been pursuing.
There’s a latent black swan event waiting to happen there. If defendants ever band together and collectively refuse to take plea deals, our judicial system would cease to function almost overnight. We barely have enough judges for the couple of percent of cases that actually go to trial; we would be talking an order of magnitude or two more cases.
More generally, I think the complexity of law grows exponentially based on the size of the corpus that makes it up. The laws interact with each other, so the number of interactions grows exponentially rather than linearly. Our ability to automate grows quickly, but not as quickly as that exponent.
That's all human element, so it's true, we can't automate that part.
A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right?
The current limit to the number of judges is artificial. Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job. That's not a lot of incentive to remain a judge. Those are easily fixable if legislators choose to fix them.
Instead, Congress seems to be hoping they can get Facebook to make the problem go away, ignoring the root cause.
> A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right?
In a sense, though there's also some intersecting concerns. E.g. judges and lawyers aren't economically productive in the "creating things that we can sell or export" sense. That presents an opportunity cost, because it means we are pulling people out of roles that are economically productive and into roles that are not.
E.g. the general cost of labor would probably rise if the judicial system started employing full percentage points of the US population more than they currently do. Likewise, I suspect GDP would drop since we are pulling people out of "making things" and into "regulating things". We would just be literally making fewer things, since we had fewer people employed "making things".
> Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job.
One of the issues here is that the government (state or federal) is both the prosecutor and the source of funding for the defendant's lawyer. E.g. here's a fun tidbit for California: a prosecutor's average salary range is $98k-$132k while a public defender's average salary range is $89k-$119k. Even among jobs working for the government, it's about a 10% pay cut to defend people instead of prosecuting them. Across the country there are roughly twice as many employed in prosecutorial roles as there are in defense roles (funding roughly matches that, with prosecutor's offices getting funded at ~180% the rate of public defenders). In 2018, there were 372 arrests per attorney in public defender's offices but only 260 per attorney in district attorney offices.
Prosecutors can afford to spend ~150% of the time on a case that public defenders can, and can afford to spend far more per case on expert opinions, lab results, etc.
The government wants it that way, because it feeds into the "efficiency". People are far more likely to take a plea deal when they know their public defender is overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced compared to the prosecutors. Funding defense attorneys makes cases take longer to get through court, because people would be more likely to reject plea deals and the public defenders would have more time to formulate legal arguments.
Anecdotally, you can see this first hand in video from court cases. It's not unusual for there to be 3 attorneys sitting behind the prosecutor's table, and a single attorney behind the defendant's. The prosecutors are just that much more well-resourced; they can afford to send a trio of attorneys to double-check each other. Meanwhile the public defenders are scrambling with stacks of folders trying to figure out which one is for their next defendant.
And, the public defendant advises taking a deal anyway because he has very little incentive to take on more work.
But still, it doesn't have to be that way, if there are more judges, better pay, a lower barrier of entry, and a lot of automation.
I'm not saying I have it all figured out, I'm saying there's some low hanging fruit in that direction and there's a huge need for moving that way too.
It seems likely that we will.
Anecdotally, the high cost of education alone is the primary reason that many of my immediate acquaintances didn't go to law school and instead contributed to saturating the tech market. Myself included.
I don’t think I have this all figured out either, and I would not want to be in charge of this. It’s a very complicated, dynamic issue with dire consequences for mistakes. Hats off to anyone making a genuine attempt at progress.
> But still, it doesn't have to be that way, if there are more judges, better pay, a lower barrier of entry, and a lot of automation.
I believe if you want more judges, the first issue would be creating more courts. I don’t think there are vacant courts for us to hire more judges into. Someone would have to do some napkin math on how many new courts are local, circuit, appellate, etc. Not a huge deal, just saying the current constraint there is courts rather than judges.
I’m also not a fan of lowering the barrier to entry of being a judge. Remember that any judge can create binding precedent (our whole legal system would need an overhaul to get rid of that). That can be overruled, but it makes court cases a mess and erodes confidence in the court system when it’s impossible to predict what precedent will be applied.
Also, I think there are virtually no barriers to entry. There are no binding requirements to become a judge short of being nominated (no law requires a judge to have been a lawyer or even to have been in a courtroom before). I believe the same is common for county judges. I’ve been to a few rural counties where the former sheriff was running for judge or something (God help us all).
I don’t disagree that we can get better, but I just don’t think we can sustain this level of continued addition of regulations.
Even beyond the costs, the lack of enforcement is teaching an awful lot of people that they don’t _really_ have to follow laws. The umpteenth time someone commits a felony and hasn’t been caught, they start to realize the laws are mostly a facade which emboldens them.
People are buying full auto switches for Glocks off Wish. Nothing says “our justice system isn’t working” quite like people being willing to tie their purchase of an item that carries a decade prison sentence to their PayPal account. It’s not even a clever scheme or well hidden; people are just that confident that our justice system is too dysfunctional to be able to find out about it and file a warrant with PayPal. And they’re largely correct.
For clarity, the barrier of entry I'm referring to is financial. Law school just costs too damned much to then go practice in the public sector and make next to nothing.
We want smart people to be judges, but we're eliminating potential candidates that opt out because some simple math finds the return on investment for law school isn't motivating in a permanent position in the public sector.
The former judges I know became judges to bump their opportunity at partnership at big law firms. They just worked some years in the public and then flipped to private when the salary offers looked good. Same for AG office, etc.
Better yet copy the minds jury system, if you flag a post or series of posts as harrassment, and hit a submit button, 1000 random users vote if it's harrassment or not and and I'd so then the person gets banned or temp banned from their account... However Facebook and the ad driven socials won't dare do that because even harassers have eyeballs to view ads with.
Well, aside from bots, 1000 real people would easily downvote a video of a guy eating a hamburger. Let's not get carried away with our faith in humanity.
Really? I reread his comment and didn't get that interpretation. In any event, I doubt the people posting death threats on social media are the type to reflect rationally on their actions.
I'm not sure. There's two[1] types of errors at play, correct axioms but incorrect logic, and incorrect axioms and correct logic. Which of these errors do you tend to see death threat makers engaging in?
1. I'm oversimplifying. Ofc it's possible to combine the two as well. But we are talking about tendencies.
You are painting the mentally ill with too broad a brush. There is a difference between 'ill' and 'dangerous'. We should not engender a society that encourages people to toe that line.
Interesting thought. I have many more questions than I'm willing to type in this tiny box of expiring interest but will think more on this. Government is naturally reactive so I don't think innovation will come from that area, but what is intriguing is what type of justice system would be fair in a modern era.
> One has to wonder of the politics behind this: are harassment campaigns permissable against white men? It is fine to hate them? One has to imagine legislators believe so.
I don't see why because that'd also be hate speech.
In the USA, Counterman v Colorado upends your first point, a case where a man who by any rational definition was stalking and harassing a woman, made the legal standard harder for all future victims.
Also Kiwi Farms regularly brigades people with zero consequences.
This says "the defendant’s subjective intent to threaten the victim must be established based on a showing of (at least) recklessness".
I think many could argue that speech which wasn't intentionally intended to harm should not be interpreted as such, and I don't see where this makes intentional harm less prosecutable. Everyone's opinion is different, including judges of course, and I'm not saying yours is wrong, but I'd like to hear more about why you think this makes "things" harder.
Regardless of race or gender, you would be hard pressed to find a victim of online harassment who reports anything along the lines of "the law bent over backwards to help me."
As a white man who has been harassed on Facebook and who got no help from Meta or the law, your comment doesn't seem to add anything helpful to the discussion.
Stereotyping and persecuting all white males due to the actions of a very small (but visible) minority is not a point of view with which many would agree.
> White males hold a lot of power in society, so -- as a group --
What about
> Muslim men commit a lot of terrorist acts, so -- as a group --
this entire line of thinking is the definition of racism and sexism. You take some tiny minority (people in power, people committing terrorist acts, etc) and extrapolate the traits of that tiny group onto some giant group based solely on some immutable trait, where the people in that giant group have nothing to do with it except that they happen to have the same immutable trait.
The implication that they hold that power because they are white men´, with the addition that there is nothing even tangible to the comment, it's impossible to disprove because there are no specifics to what "power" even means.
One could make similar comments like "Most corporate issues are caused by white women" or "Asian women hold the most societal power" or "Black men are the most favoured by their families", there is nothing to these comments but prejudice.
Thank you, sir. If I may also suggest, you could also try being actually factually correct in your initial assertions in the future. In the United States, White men are pretty middling in terms of per-capita power[1].
If you really intend to make the correct selections for the racial Revolution, it's those goddamned Taiwanese-Americans, Brahmin Indians, Jews[2], and Filipinos you need to line up against the wall first.
I think you have a solid plan, dehumanizing the most successful groups. Pol Pot and Hitler were pretty effective at this, and I'm sure you have a good shot of doing it too. I'm just a little sad that authentic Thai food will go away before I get the bullet.
I think it's because harassers are from the same 'club', and their victims are not. Their club will often be led by white men, but can be more diverse, because it's mostly about class.
The 'Ligue du LOL' in France had a fair number of women, most of them integrated because they slept with Vincent Gad or the other leader I forgot the name of, and were especially nasty with other women who refused to do so (the primary target, despite what the media said, were not 'feminists' but women who refused to sleep with members). They also harassed white men, especially non-Parisian, and were nastier if that person was overweight or on the spectrum. The harassment could go very far, with fake death announcement, and I've heard, physical intrusion (Korben, French tech journalist has a lot more details, I only knew a bit because I'm from a rural area, and accointances tried to take a small part of sunlight before getting absolutely trashed by that Parisian harassment club).
It really has nothing to do with minorities: it's just that it's easier to mock them, and harder for them to be in this kind of social class, because imho, it's more a class thing: you want to put down people before they can get opportunities to get to your level.
It's not an arrest, it's a peace bond. And there's nothing to worry about, if you tag a garage door, you probably won't get a life sentence. This is for the children, so "it is critical that the bill progresses through Parliament to committee swiftly". And this bill was only drawn after studying similar laws in Germany. 90 years ago, by the looks of it.
The beginning of the end. Its been a ride, see you in a totalitarian canada in 10 years. I'm excited to read the "how did this happen" posts, then, I guess? Good time to start a business providing visas for other, less crazy, countries.
Beginning? It's been beginning for at least two decades now. People havd been prosecuted for political speech by "tribunals", journalists arrested, bank accounts frozen, all that. They are sleepwalking into totalitarian nightmare, but the public doesn't seem to care.
Perhaps they don't live in the south and you can share another point of view. Or asking specifically what makes them think that's so. Instead of assuming the worst and dismissing them.
I do live in the south. I'm a lifelong Texan raised around Evangelicals, Baptists and Pentecostals. Pro-life, pro-cop, pro-military God and guns red state to the core people. I've been watching the normalization of extremism and radicalization within my own culture for years. I know whereof I speak.
It is, though. Maybe that was a typo, or maybe you didn't bother reading my entire comment, but that's what I believe.
I mean, look at what's happened with anti-abortion laws post Roe v. Wade, with the "anti-woke" backlash leading to book burnings and closing libraries for hosting wrongthink, the whole moral panic over trans "groomers," schools prevented from teaching about slavery in a way that presents it as evil, because that might "victimize white people," the return of school prayer.
I don't see how someone can not see the trends or the way the winds are blowing. One of two viable Presidental candidates has openly called for the repeal of the Constitution because of the imaginary stolen election that led to Jan. 6, and he has a chance because half the country at least agrees with him in principle. We have Republicans openly praising Hitler, citing white supremacist conspiracy theories and calling for the end of democracy. And it's normal now.
> I mean, look at what's happened with anti-abortion laws post Roe v. Wade
The overturning of R v W simply kicked the issue back to the states, with each state now having the right to make up their own laws around it. In a way this move was "anti-totalitarian" because now instead of 8 justices making up the rules, each state can do what they want.
> with the "anti-woke" backlash leading to book burnings and closing libraries for hosting wrongthink
Can you point me to a source on these supposed book burnings? If you are talking about book bans then this applies specifically to school libraries, you can still buy every book that is "banned" on Amazon, not much of a ban when you can get is shipped to your house in 2 days or get it instantly as an eBook. And as for the "anti-woke" backlash, this is mostly drummed up by political commentators that are looking for views and attention and are cherry picking various instances to highlight their point.
> the whole moral panic over trans "groomers,"
Again to go back to my point about political commentators drumming stuff up for views. Most of this moral panic I only see on Twitter / X and personally I don't think a Twitter moral panic can be equated to a legit moral panic.
IMHO the notion of "turn off the TV and go outside" is not a bad prescription. If you're on X, listening to Fox News or poltical podcasts all the time you can easily get the impression that there is something seriously wrong because all these disparate events are combined into one news segment. But personally my threshold is "do I see it outside of the news" and so far, the answer has been a definitive "no"
Did you not read the thread before commenting? "Down south" is relative to Canada, meaning the US in general. To agree with them, you have to assert Massachusetts is descending into "theocratic olligarchy". As for why, let's not pretend we don't probably know already; SCOTUS ruled states may set their own abortion laws, which again prompts the question of how Arizona's abortion policy, whatever it ends up being, makes Massachusetts life different enough to prompt this nation-scale hysteria.
Perhaps next time you should think this more careful assessment through instead of assuming the worst of my rebuttal to dismiss me.
If laws were products, this would be self-inflicted brand damage. Commercial feedback loops, including revenue and brand value of good products, would eventually lead to withdrawal of the bad product.
Imagine a law to protect lawmakers from undue media influence, in order to improve the quality of their future lawmaking..
McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". His insight is that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content it delivers, but by its own characteristics. McLuhan points to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles, or a television has programs, but it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces at night that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content.
the liberals have so badly damaged their brand they can't damage it more. This way they get to have a weapon to use against people they disagree with before the next election.
What matter is an already poor brand vs a weapon that allows you to put your enemies through the criminal justice system and cost them tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if they're found innocent? The process is the punishment as much as anything else.
What is it about the Anglo-Saxon system that absolutely pushes for this type of dystopian laws?
At random intervals such proposals are made, or such laws are pushed, and you know from the headline, or the approach that it's going to be the UK, Canada, or Australia. (We'll leave out the US, where the problem is of an other scale.)
What is it that drives lawmakers and politicians to unbashfully push forward more and more liberticidal and dystopian laws, as if it was the most natural thing in the world?
I'm fully aware that some lawmakers in other "democratic" countries are dreaming of doing exactly the same, but most of them wouldn't dare to bring it up so forwardly.
There's nothing Anglo-Saxon about it. Similar things are appearing all over the western world. And they are absolutely being brought up forwardly.
For example, German ministers can't stop talking about banning one of their most popular political parties outright and they have the powers to do so. They also have announced plans to introduce laws that criminalize "mocking the state", including the weaponization of every aspect of the government against citizens that disagree with them, for example by revoking their local business licenses, implementing exit visa (banning people from leaving) and "depriving them of their income". This also in cases where people haven't actually done anything but are merely influential [1]:
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD): "We are coming up against legal limits. At present, financial investigations are limited to incitement to hatred and violence. That is not enough. I therefore want to amend the law to ensure that the potential threat is taken into account. This involves other factors such as potential for action and social influence."
Germany is hardly alone. Ireland is also introducing a draconian hate speech law. [2] The EU is investigating one of its own MEPs for hate speech after he said he thought EU policy on asylum seekers was intended to attract more migration [3] (i.e. they disagree that it's OK for politicians to express opinions on government policy). In Finland the former minister of the interior was prosecuted for her tweets [4]. She was acquitted and then the government appealed to try and get her again.
The reason you think it's specific to the Anglo-Saxon world is just that those stories affect a lot of English speaking people and this is an English speaking website. Also, negative stories about the EU often get flagged here, and of course in many parts of the world like China such laws already exist for a long time.
You might be surprised to discover that news outlets throughout the world publish local and international news in English. Just a few examples, to broaden your horizons:
The guy is an Indian refugee from Uganda, where his family were expelled out of by Idi Amin because of ethnicity and religion. So somebody who has witnessed discrimnation and racism at a young age. When such an individual with childhood trauma finds himself in charge of the justice portofolio in a socialist government calling themselves liberals, what you get is Pre-hate-crime.
That's a tragedy, but to your point I'm reminded of the Mitchell and Webb sketch where a man is interviewed on his opinions about a safety system not being installed, and he keeps trying to insist that his views are extremely biased as his wife's life would've been saved by such a system[0].
Me too, but only because we don't call them Ministers in the US. (I could see this happening in parts of the US as well, but the headline would be worded differently.)
Canada used to seem like a peaceful place to live, but with the real estate crisis, power hungry corrupt government, and increasingly violent crime, it’s quickly becoming a hell hole.
Canada has its problems...it's also exceptionally cold for many months in most places. That being said, most places around the world are becoming hell-holes due to the increasing presence of technology and the enormous amounts of effort we need to maintain that technological increase.
The best predictor of crime is a previous crime yet there’s a revolving door on jails and DAs won’t prosecute anything. It’s looking quite a bit like the Soviet Union where political dissenters were punished worse than murderers.
There’s quite a few behaviors that are illegal because they are associated with stuff people are concerned about even if they aren’t inherently harmful.
Public intoxication for example was criminalized long before Minority Report was a thing.
We didn’t make photographing critical infrastructure illegal, but people were pushing that narrative and it could have easily happened.
Is the presence of alcohol or is it the way some people behave while drunk? Because that behavior could be illegal without being drunk also being illegal.
Put another way, people get arrested sitting quietly because they are drunk without any obvious outward signs of being drunk so it’s is hardly intimidating.
That’s because a drunk persons’s decision making is inherently impaired. They might be sitting quietly now. The vast majority of criminal violence (domestic or otherwise) occurs in conjunction with impaired faculties and alcohol is often the cause.
"It's been determined with more than 86% accuracy that you are likely to commit a crime within the next 6 months. You will be detained until the probability goes down."
The limit case of prosecutorial discretion is pragmatically indistinguishable from tyranny. The more selective law enforcement is when everything is illegal, the less meaningful the laws themselves actually are and the more important the personalities of the enforcers.
Unfortunately the notion that law is best used to restrict government is a uniquely English cultural development. It’s unsurprising that Canada is losing that as she accelerates away from her English heritage. In principle of course there’s no reason a multicultural society couldn’t adopt the principle, but I’m unaware of that actually happening except for lip service.
All you dissenters are under arrest. The only reason you'd be against this is if you're planning to commit a crime; therefore, you must be planning to commit a crime!
They are already having trouble arresting people doing "home invasion" (breaking and entering with guns while the person is home), even with children in the house.
Our government is in complete shambles. All of them are trying to one up each other with no concept of reality.
Our education system(all levels) is in the same state. Tests are blatantly wrong, plagiarism is rapant among professors (even with that incredibly high bar) and the administration is stuck on "everyone does it" and "the course has been approved by the regulator."
We have hospitals with 20% of a budget doing 80% of the workload for a city.
Oh and our security agency can't find time to fix obvious problems with the largest corporations websitea that are actively leaking PII (including full phone logs).
The worst part is that the federal opposition parties seem little better. Many of the provincial governments are disastrous. Even my municipal government is a trainwreck. Canadian governance as a whole seems to be on a decline, and there's no end in sight.
The Canadian motto is, "peace, order and good government." At least we still have peace.
Not surprised at all to see this is Canadian Liberals.
The Liberals have essentially lost the next election and have decided to go totalitarian in response. Canada doesn't have a recall procedure, so they get to do this.
I'm following Bill C-26 as well which states that Politicians can decide to secretly have people disconnected from the internet countrywide. No due process, no court or judge involved.
This bill is by Marco Mendicino, the same person who deployed the Canadian Army and at least 1 tank to crush a protest. Which they did do, and has since been found to have been very unconstitutional.
How are they gonna prosecute anons on imageboards & irc? They can't, which leads me to conclusion, that the law true purpose is to inflict fear among population, leading people to self-censoring their online speech. Another purpose is to silence political dissidents and key public figures from political parties, who are deemed dangerous to the government regime. We desperately need anonymity, otherwise, free speech will die.
Fascist policy grows in stagnant Liberal society. Right now, in many of the wealthiest nations we have two Liberal parties. (For instance the democrats and republicans in the US, which are both Liberalist parties.)
Without a more diverse political landscape, the government accelerates hard towards corporate power and centralization of wealth, at the expense of the worker and individual.
When individuals cannot seem to succeed, and start to get frustrated, they seek populist candidates. The sort of "I just wish someone would tear this all down and rule in my favor" candidates.
Trump and trump era republicans do not believe in liberal democratic ideals or the englihtenment. They are not liberals. Trump would absolutely take absolute power if he thought he could get away with it.
No, they’re not neoliberal either. Steve Bannon calls for a “deconstruction of the nation state” which is just pomo enough for me to believe that he is pretty much comic book evil.
The Post-WW2 era you speak of ended in the 1970s or so.
We always believe the hunger for piece of prosperity after 1945 would last forever. Nothing lasts forever. People forget, and then go on to repeat the same mistakes. Time is a circle.
Explain more. Are you suggesting that hate cannot be a motivator for a crime? That hate cannot cause a crime to be committed that would otherwise not be committed?
Or that we should not punish people who commit crimes purely out of hate any more severely than, say, out of random chance?
I believe that it's patently absurd to suggest hate crimes don't exist, and ignorant of objective facts and reason, so I'd like you to explain more in case I misunderstood.
The term is commonly used to either make a crime out of something just because of the constellation between the offender and the victim. Or to aggravate the punishment. I don't think the constellation should play any role at all.
Same for other constellations that exist and modify punishment, like children being punished less (or not at all). Or drunk/drugged people getting massively less punishment. Or harassment against politicians getting punished a lot harsher. Or "sick" people being punished less or not at all. (Many of these examples only exist in my country I think). It's all abused either by the offender, the victims or third parties.
Is it a hate crime if you attack someone because you hate that they're rich?
Is it a hate crime if you attack someone because you hate blue shirts and he was wearing a blue shirt that day?
What exactly is a hate crime and how is it precisely defined such that it's more serious than crime in general?
If you punch someone in the face
vs
Punch them because they are a woman
vs
Punch them because they are white
vs
Punch them because they are black
vs
Punch them because they are gay
vs
Punch them because they are a nazi
vs
Punch them because they are a commie
Which of these is a hate crime and which is a "normal" crime. Which get punished more harshly and how to decide the motivation other than in the absolutely most obvious cases of the person confessing why they did it.
>I believe that it's patently absurd to suggest hate crimes don't exist, and ignorant of objective facts and reason, so I'd like you to explain more in case I misunderstood.
How do you even prove a crime was committed due to "hate"? And why is that any better or worse than a generic criminal offense?
Punishing someone more or less because of their personal justification of the crime seems batshit insane to me and how it came to pass boggles the mind.
Perhaps you're a freedom-of-speech fundamentalist, but to other people, who consider that this particular individual right does not automatically supersede all the others, hate crimes are a label for utterances and behavior that are likely to cause harm to groups or individuals.
It may not be easy to define, and that's what the cause for alarm is. It's one thing to shout "kill all the <minority of choice>", and quite another to say "xir is not a pronoun" or "the prime minister has committed fraud."
in italy we often use as aggravation to senteces "futile reasons" to encompass a vast umbrella of reasons. "hate crime" alone is easily gameable term. Otherwise we would need to put all the leftists in prison for they hate towards the wealthy
The "reasonable" way of handling such situations would be to notify suspects that they are in a watchlist for "terrorist threat" and listing maybe inside a police station what punishment the risk by "acting".
The objective of laws like this is to be opaque, so they can be applied arbitrarily and on demand. Informing suspects that they are under suspicion would give them the opportunity to comply with the the rules and avoid punishment.
I come from a country where the exaltation and apology of communism, was ever present in the school system. It was not part of the curriculum, but teachers would praise communism openly in the classroom, and academia (part of it) was openly Marxist.
This is the result, a generation that was indoctrinated in this system, and that now sees this behavior as accepted.
Too many echoes of the barbarity of the Chinese cultural revolution come to mind.
The politicians proposing these things aren't Marxists or leftists. They are liberals or centrist conservatives. The people putting these bills forward absolutely detest Marx and Marxists.
Marxism is a wide, wide set of ideologies. Soviet and Maoist Marxists are only one type.
I would support governments legislating this issue, but so often, it's seen purely through a hate-speech lens -- which is madness.
One has to wonder of the politics behind this: are harassment campaigns permissable against white men? It is fine to hate them? One has to imagine legislators believe so.
The illegal behaviour here is fairly obvious, and not so hard to police: prevent social media platforms from "easy sharing" behaviour by default, and ban it for harassing accounts, etc. Give fines to people who instigate targeted campaigns against non-public figures. Enshire an absolute right to good-faith expression for any member of the public online, so any sincerely held belief can be expressed without fear of mobbing.. etc.
It is very odd that this issue is seen through a 'minority rights' lens, rather than the more obvious social harassement lens.
The real issue is just that we don't have the resources to give them all due process. If we can fix that part we'll be ready for everyone to have global reach and social media.
We didn't solve that problem before the technology came about which indicates that the we just weren't ready for social media. Sadly the whole world is suffering for it, and extremist anti Western and anti civil rights groups are exploiting that.
The system was never intended to handle an explosion in regulations to the point where the average person accidentally routinely commits felonies. The world’s judicial systems are collapsing because we are unwilling to admit that the judicial system would need to be like a quarter of our society to actually enforce all the laws we have, and we’re also unwilling to repeal laws to a subset we could actually effectively enforce.
98% of federal cases never make it to trial. Most states have rates above 90%. Some counties haven’t had a case go to trial in like a decade, everyone pleas out.
To be clear, we have already gutted everything not strictly necessary from the judicial system, and it’s faltering even under the ‘crisis mode’ operations they’ve been pursuing.
There’s a latent black swan event waiting to happen there. If defendants ever band together and collectively refuse to take plea deals, our judicial system would cease to function almost overnight. We barely have enough judges for the couple of percent of cases that actually go to trial; we would be talking an order of magnitude or two more cases.
More generally, I think the complexity of law grows exponentially based on the size of the corpus that makes it up. The laws interact with each other, so the number of interactions grows exponentially rather than linearly. Our ability to automate grows quickly, but not as quickly as that exponent.
A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right?
The current limit to the number of judges is artificial. Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job. That's not a lot of incentive to remain a judge. Those are easily fixable if legislators choose to fix them.
Instead, Congress seems to be hoping they can get Facebook to make the problem go away, ignoring the root cause.
In a sense, though there's also some intersecting concerns. E.g. judges and lawyers aren't economically productive in the "creating things that we can sell or export" sense. That presents an opportunity cost, because it means we are pulling people out of roles that are economically productive and into roles that are not.
E.g. the general cost of labor would probably rise if the judicial system started employing full percentage points of the US population more than they currently do. Likewise, I suspect GDP would drop since we are pulling people out of "making things" and into "regulating things". We would just be literally making fewer things, since we had fewer people employed "making things".
> Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job.
One of the issues here is that the government (state or federal) is both the prosecutor and the source of funding for the defendant's lawyer. E.g. here's a fun tidbit for California: a prosecutor's average salary range is $98k-$132k while a public defender's average salary range is $89k-$119k. Even among jobs working for the government, it's about a 10% pay cut to defend people instead of prosecuting them. Across the country there are roughly twice as many employed in prosecutorial roles as there are in defense roles (funding roughly matches that, with prosecutor's offices getting funded at ~180% the rate of public defenders). In 2018, there were 372 arrests per attorney in public defender's offices but only 260 per attorney in district attorney offices.
Prosecutors can afford to spend ~150% of the time on a case that public defenders can, and can afford to spend far more per case on expert opinions, lab results, etc.
The government wants it that way, because it feeds into the "efficiency". People are far more likely to take a plea deal when they know their public defender is overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced compared to the prosecutors. Funding defense attorneys makes cases take longer to get through court, because people would be more likely to reject plea deals and the public defenders would have more time to formulate legal arguments.
Anecdotally, you can see this first hand in video from court cases. It's not unusual for there to be 3 attorneys sitting behind the prosecutor's table, and a single attorney behind the defendant's. The prosecutors are just that much more well-resourced; they can afford to send a trio of attorneys to double-check each other. Meanwhile the public defenders are scrambling with stacks of folders trying to figure out which one is for their next defendant.
But still, it doesn't have to be that way, if there are more judges, better pay, a lower barrier of entry, and a lot of automation.
I'm not saying I have it all figured out, I'm saying there's some low hanging fruit in that direction and there's a huge need for moving that way too.
It seems likely that we will.
Anecdotally, the high cost of education alone is the primary reason that many of my immediate acquaintances didn't go to law school and instead contributed to saturating the tech market. Myself included.
> But still, it doesn't have to be that way, if there are more judges, better pay, a lower barrier of entry, and a lot of automation.
I believe if you want more judges, the first issue would be creating more courts. I don’t think there are vacant courts for us to hire more judges into. Someone would have to do some napkin math on how many new courts are local, circuit, appellate, etc. Not a huge deal, just saying the current constraint there is courts rather than judges.
I’m also not a fan of lowering the barrier to entry of being a judge. Remember that any judge can create binding precedent (our whole legal system would need an overhaul to get rid of that). That can be overruled, but it makes court cases a mess and erodes confidence in the court system when it’s impossible to predict what precedent will be applied.
Also, I think there are virtually no barriers to entry. There are no binding requirements to become a judge short of being nominated (no law requires a judge to have been a lawyer or even to have been in a courtroom before). I believe the same is common for county judges. I’ve been to a few rural counties where the former sheriff was running for judge or something (God help us all).
I don’t disagree that we can get better, but I just don’t think we can sustain this level of continued addition of regulations.
Even beyond the costs, the lack of enforcement is teaching an awful lot of people that they don’t _really_ have to follow laws. The umpteenth time someone commits a felony and hasn’t been caught, they start to realize the laws are mostly a facade which emboldens them.
People are buying full auto switches for Glocks off Wish. Nothing says “our justice system isn’t working” quite like people being willing to tie their purchase of an item that carries a decade prison sentence to their PayPal account. It’s not even a clever scheme or well hidden; people are just that confident that our justice system is too dysfunctional to be able to find out about it and file a warrant with PayPal. And they’re largely correct.
For clarity, the barrier of entry I'm referring to is financial. Law school just costs too damned much to then go practice in the public sector and make next to nothing.
We want smart people to be judges, but we're eliminating potential candidates that opt out because some simple math finds the return on investment for law school isn't motivating in a permanent position in the public sector.
The former judges I know became judges to bump their opportunity at partnership at big law firms. They just worked some years in the public and then flipped to private when the salary offers looked good. Same for AG office, etc.
Ads are the cause of all this evil, really.
1. I'm oversimplifying. Ofc it's possible to combine the two as well. But we are talking about tendencies.
Did you coin that phrase? It wonderfully expresses the idea.
I don't see why because that'd also be hate speech.
Also Kiwi Farms regularly brigades people with zero consequences.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
This says "the defendant’s subjective intent to threaten the victim must be established based on a showing of (at least) recklessness".
I think many could argue that speech which wasn't intentionally intended to harm should not be interpreted as such, and I don't see where this makes intentional harm less prosecutable. Everyone's opinion is different, including judges of course, and I'm not saying yours is wrong, but I'd like to hear more about why you think this makes "things" harder.
Doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, but I think it’s disingenuous to act like this doesn’t add another hurdle for prosecutors
What about
> Muslim men commit a lot of terrorist acts, so -- as a group --
this entire line of thinking is the definition of racism and sexism. You take some tiny minority (people in power, people committing terrorist acts, etc) and extrapolate the traits of that tiny group onto some giant group based solely on some immutable trait, where the people in that giant group have nothing to do with it except that they happen to have the same immutable trait.
One could make similar comments like "Most corporate issues are caused by white women" or "Asian women hold the most societal power" or "Black men are the most favoured by their families", there is nothing to these comments but prejudice.
If you really intend to make the correct selections for the racial Revolution, it's those goddamned Taiwanese-Americans, Brahmin Indians, Jews[2], and Filipinos you need to line up against the wall first.
I think you have a solid plan, dehumanizing the most successful groups. Pol Pot and Hitler were pretty effective at this, and I'm sure you have a good shot of doing it too. I'm just a little sad that authentic Thai food will go away before I get the bullet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/economics-an... (Ethnicity and Religion being correlated by 89%, in this case)
When you start generalizing based on skin color and gender, that's the actual dictionary definition of racism and sexism.
The 'Ligue du LOL' in France had a fair number of women, most of them integrated because they slept with Vincent Gad or the other leader I forgot the name of, and were especially nasty with other women who refused to do so (the primary target, despite what the media said, were not 'feminists' but women who refused to sleep with members). They also harassed white men, especially non-Parisian, and were nastier if that person was overweight or on the spectrum. The harassment could go very far, with fake death announcement, and I've heard, physical intrusion (Korben, French tech journalist has a lot more details, I only knew a bit because I'm from a rural area, and accointances tried to take a small part of sunlight before getting absolutely trashed by that Parisian harassment club).
It really has nothing to do with minorities: it's just that it's easier to mock them, and harder for them to be in this kind of social class, because imho, it's more a class thing: you want to put down people before they can get opportunities to get to your level.
Dont be weak and let the religious nutters be the only ones to practice their 2A right.
I mean, look at what's happened with anti-abortion laws post Roe v. Wade, with the "anti-woke" backlash leading to book burnings and closing libraries for hosting wrongthink, the whole moral panic over trans "groomers," schools prevented from teaching about slavery in a way that presents it as evil, because that might "victimize white people," the return of school prayer.
I don't see how someone can not see the trends or the way the winds are blowing. One of two viable Presidental candidates has openly called for the repeal of the Constitution because of the imaginary stolen election that led to Jan. 6, and he has a chance because half the country at least agrees with him in principle. We have Republicans openly praising Hitler, citing white supremacist conspiracy theories and calling for the end of democracy. And it's normal now.
I don't know what else you want.
The overturning of R v W simply kicked the issue back to the states, with each state now having the right to make up their own laws around it. In a way this move was "anti-totalitarian" because now instead of 8 justices making up the rules, each state can do what they want.
> with the "anti-woke" backlash leading to book burnings and closing libraries for hosting wrongthink
Can you point me to a source on these supposed book burnings? If you are talking about book bans then this applies specifically to school libraries, you can still buy every book that is "banned" on Amazon, not much of a ban when you can get is shipped to your house in 2 days or get it instantly as an eBook. And as for the "anti-woke" backlash, this is mostly drummed up by political commentators that are looking for views and attention and are cherry picking various instances to highlight their point.
> the whole moral panic over trans "groomers,"
Again to go back to my point about political commentators drumming stuff up for views. Most of this moral panic I only see on Twitter / X and personally I don't think a Twitter moral panic can be equated to a legit moral panic.
IMHO the notion of "turn off the TV and go outside" is not a bad prescription. If you're on X, listening to Fox News or poltical podcasts all the time you can easily get the impression that there is something seriously wrong because all these disparate events are combined into one news segment. But personally my threshold is "do I see it outside of the news" and so far, the answer has been a definitive "no"
Perhaps next time you should think this more careful assessment through instead of assuming the worst of my rebuttal to dismiss me.
Imagine a law to protect lawmakers from undue media influence, in order to improve the quality of their future lawmaking..
Paging Marshall McLuhan scholars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
What matter is an already poor brand vs a weapon that allows you to put your enemies through the criminal justice system and cost them tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if they're found innocent? The process is the punishment as much as anything else.
At random intervals such proposals are made, or such laws are pushed, and you know from the headline, or the approach that it's going to be the UK, Canada, or Australia. (We'll leave out the US, where the problem is of an other scale.)
What is it that drives lawmakers and politicians to unbashfully push forward more and more liberticidal and dystopian laws, as if it was the most natural thing in the world?
I'm fully aware that some lawmakers in other "democratic" countries are dreaming of doing exactly the same, but most of them wouldn't dare to bring it up so forwardly.
For example, German ministers can't stop talking about banning one of their most popular political parties outright and they have the powers to do so. They also have announced plans to introduce laws that criminalize "mocking the state", including the weaponization of every aspect of the government against citizens that disagree with them, for example by revoking their local business licenses, implementing exit visa (banning people from leaving) and "depriving them of their income". This also in cases where people haven't actually done anything but are merely influential [1]:
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD): "We are coming up against legal limits. At present, financial investigations are limited to incitement to hatred and violence. That is not enough. I therefore want to amend the law to ensure that the potential threat is taken into account. This involves other factors such as potential for action and social influence."
Germany is hardly alone. Ireland is also introducing a draconian hate speech law. [2] The EU is investigating one of its own MEPs for hate speech after he said he thought EU policy on asylum seekers was intended to attract more migration [3] (i.e. they disagree that it's OK for politicians to express opinions on government policy). In Finland the former minister of the interior was prosecuted for her tweets [4]. She was acquitted and then the government appealed to try and get her again.
The reason you think it's specific to the Anglo-Saxon world is just that those stories affect a lot of English speaking people and this is an English speaking website. Also, negative stories about the EU often get flagged here, and of course in many parts of the world like China such laws already exist for a long time.
[1] https://www.eugyppius.com/p/germany-announces-wide-ranging-p...
[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-irish-should-reject-the-new-hate...
[3] https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/word-police-f...
[4] https://www.christiantoday.com/article/how-long-before-a-uk-...
dw.com
https://www.france24.com/en/
https://czechdaily.cz/
https://www.dutchnews.nl/
https://www.aljazeera.com/
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98CWbGG2DJ0 [video]
Who knew the movie Minority Report would come true.
Public intoxication for example was criminalized long before Minority Report was a thing.
We didn’t make photographing critical infrastructure illegal, but people were pushing that narrative and it could have easily happened.
This, on the hand, is up to the guy in charge. Anyone can be affected by this if they happen to be on the bad side of the people in charge.
Put another way, people get arrested sitting quietly because they are drunk without any obvious outward signs of being drunk so it’s is hardly intimidating.
So, much less bad than what canada is up to.
Unfortunately the notion that law is best used to restrict government is a uniquely English cultural development. It’s unsurprising that Canada is losing that as she accelerates away from her English heritage. In principle of course there’s no reason a multicultural society couldn’t adopt the principle, but I’m unaware of that actually happening except for lip service.
Our government is in complete shambles. All of them are trying to one up each other with no concept of reality.
Our education system(all levels) is in the same state. Tests are blatantly wrong, plagiarism is rapant among professors (even with that incredibly high bar) and the administration is stuck on "everyone does it" and "the course has been approved by the regulator."
We have hospitals with 20% of a budget doing 80% of the workload for a city.
Oh and our security agency can't find time to fix obvious problems with the largest corporations websitea that are actively leaking PII (including full phone logs).
The Canadian motto is, "peace, order and good government." At least we still have peace.
Only because even the most fervent US warmonger would have a hard time justifying an invasion of Canada.
The Liberals have essentially lost the next election and have decided to go totalitarian in response. Canada doesn't have a recall procedure, so they get to do this.
I'm following Bill C-26 as well which states that Politicians can decide to secretly have people disconnected from the internet countrywide. No due process, no court or judge involved.
https://openparliament.ca/bills/44-1/C-26/
This bill is by Marco Mendicino, the same person who deployed the Canadian Army and at least 1 tank to crush a protest. Which they did do, and has since been found to have been very unconstitutional.
Note: Liberal as in liberalism or neoliberal, not as shorthand for "progressive", which is how it is sometimes used in the states.
Y'now, to protect the children or whatever.
I mean, I would have expected abuses of state power, which always exist and are limited, but never putting this in law, even in war time.
Without a more diverse political landscape, the government accelerates hard towards corporate power and centralization of wealth, at the expense of the worker and individual.
When individuals cannot seem to succeed, and start to get frustrated, they seek populist candidates. The sort of "I just wish someone would tear this all down and rule in my favor" candidates.
No, they’re not neoliberal either. Steve Bannon calls for a “deconstruction of the nation state” which is just pomo enough for me to believe that he is pretty much comic book evil.
We always believe the hunger for piece of prosperity after 1945 would last forever. Nothing lasts forever. People forget, and then go on to repeat the same mistakes. Time is a circle.
The free world that evolved after WW2 is simply not compatible with the internet.
Or that we should not punish people who commit crimes purely out of hate any more severely than, say, out of random chance?
I believe that it's patently absurd to suggest hate crimes don't exist, and ignorant of objective facts and reason, so I'd like you to explain more in case I misunderstood.
Same for other constellations that exist and modify punishment, like children being punished less (or not at all). Or drunk/drugged people getting massively less punishment. Or harassment against politicians getting punished a lot harsher. Or "sick" people being punished less or not at all. (Many of these examples only exist in my country I think). It's all abused either by the offender, the victims or third parties.
What exactly is a hate crime and how is it precisely defined such that it's more serious than crime in general?
If you punch someone in the face vs Punch them because they are a woman vs Punch them because they are white vs Punch them because they are black vs Punch them because they are gay vs Punch them because they are a nazi vs Punch them because they are a commie
Which of these is a hate crime and which is a "normal" crime. Which get punished more harshly and how to decide the motivation other than in the absolutely most obvious cases of the person confessing why they did it.
How do you even prove a crime was committed due to "hate"? And why is that any better or worse than a generic criminal offense?
But I agree, the original comment was confusing.
we already differentiate accidents to deliberate intent.
intent to commit crime, kinda implies hate, so the prefix of "hate" to the word crime, is, pointless
It may not be easy to define, and that's what the cause for alarm is. It's one thing to shout "kill all the <minority of choice>", and quite another to say "xir is not a pronoun" or "the prime minister has committed fraud."
I agree generally tho, the entire farce is a ploy to allow discrimination and vague laws to suppress l'homme du jour
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller
I come from a country where the exaltation and apology of communism, was ever present in the school system. It was not part of the curriculum, but teachers would praise communism openly in the classroom, and academia (part of it) was openly Marxist.
This is the result, a generation that was indoctrinated in this system, and that now sees this behavior as accepted.
Too many echoes of the barbarity of the Chinese cultural revolution come to mind.
Marxism is a wide, wide set of ideologies. Soviet and Maoist Marxists are only one type.