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Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

This is only one part of a system that the rich have their rules, and the rest have "their rules".

It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge.

In Indiana, you can even expunge felonies up to a certain criminal threshold. Do you know what the primary criteria is? You have to PAY for them to expunge.

The USA has always been pay-for-play. Now, its being called out for what it is. This country, the legal system, elections; you name it. The more money you have, the more influence you have, and the "better" the system is for you.

How do we fix this? The simple answer is to elect people who have more liberal mindsets that try to get rid of these poor=disenfranchised laws. That's a long term, and not even guaranteed to work. What do we have short term? I have no clue.

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The ideology underpinning such unequal treatment ferments in places like HN. How often do we see the argument around here that unlimited inequality is fine so long as everyone improves in absolute terms?

That argument is bogus because political power closely tracks wealth -- and thus unlimited inequality facilitates a society where we are not equal under the law.

For the sake of argument, can you name a current law that treats people unequally by some immutable quality of the individual?

You bring up an important point with that question, what exactly is an immutable quality of the individual. Is the upbringing, cultural influences etc also immutable qualities or are you only talking about actual physical properties such as age, gender, skincolour etc.

I would say the latter. People have escaped their upbringing, culture, and socioeconomic position. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not immutable either.

But I’ve never seen a woman become a man or a white person become a POC. So that’s pretty immutable.

I’ll take examples from either category though.

People have sex changes.

Since race is a social construct and has no provable scientific reality, lots of people "pass" as other races depending on where/when they are being observed. Mixed-race people have always done this, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose.

Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman. There is no basis in science for that. If that were true, I could paint a tennis ball orange and eat it like a fruit.

Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test.

Where does all this anti-science rhetoric come from? I guess global warming and evolution is a myth too?

"race is a social construct" refers to the fact that the racial categories we place people in as a society do not have a strong relationship to the type of racial information available through biological testing.

Words are a social construct...so I’m not sure what your point is?

Everything is a social construct then.

>Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test.

This statement is not true. The racial information which can be determined via a DNA test does not necessarily match up with what that person, or others, would consider their race to be.

Saying "words are a social construct so you could mean anything" is not a good faith contribution to discussion.

It is good faith. Words are a social construct. We as a society have constructed them to categorize the world around us, to describe things and actions.

When you say race is a social construct because we may visually ascribe a person wrongly to a race seems pointless in an era of dna tests. The possibility of being factually wrong doesn’t suddenly make something a social construct.

If I see bear cub from a distance and then find out it was actually a dog, it doesn’t mean I should shrug and say that a bear and a dog are social constructs, so I wasn’t wrong because these distinctions are fluid based on the social norms of our day.

Why you seem to deny that science can blindly determine your ancestral origins (and thus race) with astonishing accuracy is beyond me.

It is not anti-science to allow people the freedom to determine their own gender. There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. All it requires is a degree of enlightenment and perhaps empathy.

> There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female.

It's true that there is a difference between gender (and gender identity) and biological sex, but biological sex is more complicated than simple binary distinction, too, and done biological sex features correlate with gender identity better than those we have historically mostly relief on to set socially ascribed gender.

Perhaps in the future, we can do a better job at first-impression gender assignment as well as avoiding blaming the victim when we get it wrong.

Please don't break the HN guidelines by taking threads off on generic ideological rabbit trails. Once you get this far, the resulting flamewars are all the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the guidelines by using HN primarily for political arguments. That's something we ban accounts for, because it's destructive of what this site exists for (i.e. intellectual curiosity). Can you please stop doing that?

Your bias is showing.

How is it not political when someone else says a man surgically inverting his penis into his body cavity magically becomes a woman?

But when I point out that the man still has the wrong chromosomes to be a woman, it’s somehow political?

Who’s arguing ideology and who’s arguing science in this scenario?

If that’s your idea of “intellectual curiosity” just ban me now. Please.

For what it's worth, I've received constructive criticism from Dan in the past as well (and I thought about it when replying to you when I tried to bring us back to the main subject of bail). Dan's bias is not so easy to discern.

> Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman.

Correct. The surgery aligns genitalia with gender identity; social norms have evolved to align ascribed gender with gender identity irrespective of genitalia, so even viewing "man" and "woman" as labels of ascribed gender rather than identity the surgery is largely beside the point.

I don’t think these social norms are as settled as you might think. The fallout of these new norms has yet to come, but it is coming.

By fallout, I mean women are starting to realize that men identifying as women isn’t in their best interest. Feminist are already split on this issue.

In the US, the state of Connecticut has biological boys who identify as girls competing in female sports and blowing them away, displacing biological girls on teams and soon in athletic scholarships.

This throws well-intentioned gender based laws into chaos. Title 9 will be challenged as biological men displace biological women in sports at larger scales. The Olympics will be dominated and world records will be shattered by biological men in female gender events.

Then there’s the guy in Canada that spent $50 to change his gender to female and saved $1,400 on his auto insurance.

This era of self identification will end since sincerity is not an objective truth and can’t be measured.

Or, another possibility, all laws attempting to promote equality between sexes and races will be made useless.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

All laws based on age, ability/disability, the place someone (or their parent) was born, gender, prior criminal status, and sexuality. I'm only talking about the US, though.

I can give examples of each if you don't believe me.

Yes, examples are exactly what I was asking for.

"Immutable", eh? That would exclude wealth. But disparities of wealth are a fountainhead of unequal treatment under US bail laws.

I wouldn’t consider wealth to be immutable, but I think your example is clear, so let’s roll it forward.

So you would rather see bail set at a percentage of net worth? That would make things equal?

This, from a explaination of the UK system in a comment below.

> Police can only hold you for up to 96 hours without charging you with a crime. Once you are charged with something and awaiting trial, you have to be tried within 56 days. If you are not tried within those 56 days you have to be released on unconditional bail. Police can set up bail before the trail, but it cannot involve money - frequently it involves staying at a particular address, reporting to the police station daily, not contacting certain people etc - it depends on the severity of the crime, you cannot be released on bail for acts of violence or armed robbery for example.

Is this what you’re advocating?

Police get to optionally, at their discretion, set bail?

That seems ripe for abuse.

At this point in history, I would NEVER look to the UK as a model for anything state related. It barely qualifies as a western democracy these days.

> It barely qualifies as a western democracy these days.

Care to explain?

There seems to be an assault on freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the right to self defense (life).

Freedom of the press: The Tommy Robinson episode which is the first time I had heard of the broad government ability to ban news stories from being reported. You don’t have to agree with Robinson’s politics, you just need to realize the precedent it sets.

Freedom of speech: Chelsea Russell - https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/woman-wh...

Mark Meechan - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-scotlan...

I’m not defending these people, but think about the chilling effect this has on speech.

Right to self defense: U.K. took away the right to legally own hand guns in 1996. Since then knife violence has been on the rise. London is now considering “common sense knife control”. There is no longer any legal weapon you can carry that will give you a force multiplier over an attacker. This is especially dangerous for women.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...

Nonsense. Have you actually lived in the UK?

No. Is all you have an appeal to authority argument?

What about what I said is nonsense?

Are you saying that you have freedom of speech while a 19yr old posting lyrics from a rap song on her private Instagram page is censured and fined for doing so?

Are you saying your government can’t censor media outlets from certain topics?

Are you saying you have the right to defend yourself with some sort of force multiplier?

If you’re willing to explain why I’m wrong factually or philosophical, I’m willing to listen.

Tommy Robinson was arrested for breaching his parole. This parole caused by his prior arrest in 2017 for contempt of court outside Canterbury Crown Court. So the reason he got this seemingly harsh sentence, was because it was a reoffence, contrary to the terms of his suspended sentence.

The judges correctly found a real risk of prejudicing the jury and like it or not, the UK judiciary take potential infringements on the fairness of a trial very seriously.

A right to a fair trial for others is at least as important as his free speech.

With the gun point I disagree strongly. London has a rate of 1.45 homicides per 100,000 people. Potentially 180 murders this year. This is fewer than most large cities in the US. Most people in the UK don't carry weapons and the rates of murder are significantly lower than in the US. Access to guns increases the ease of homicide. New York has decreased it's rate (although it's still above London's rate) by limiting access to guns.

You didn’t argue that the press is free, that speech is free, that the right to defend yourself exists.

You argued that the restrictions on press are justified, said nothing about free speech, and that you hopefully don’t need to defend yourself.

So it sounds like we agree on the basic premise I set forth, but disagree on the importance of it.

> It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge.

Fun fact: the government wins almost all of its cases against the "bigshot attorneys" too. The DOJ secures a conviction in 90%+ of white collar, official corruption, and organized crime cases, comparable to the conviction rate for narcotics convictions: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao/legacy/2011....

Isn't this a selection problem though? I've heard criticism of the 'chickenshit club' variety - basically that the government only pursues the most slam-dunk easy win cases at all. If that's true, certainly bigshot attorneys still work, just in that they induce the government to never go to court in the first place as opposed to going to court and then losing.

Another possible factor here...what percentage of US politicians are attorneys?

Whether it's lobbies, tort-reform, whatever we always sortof seem to be expecting reforms to come from people with incentive for these systems to stay the way are.

Why are you so sure a conservative mindset wouldn’t be more helpful?

In practice, it was liberals who enacted heavy sentences on crack usage.

California, an extremely liberal state, voted in a 72% majority referendum for the three strikes policy.

So, I’m just curious why liberals have some sort of lock in the minds of people as being on the “side of the poor”.

I'm not sure the Dems are focused on the poor anymore. One of Trumps main pushes was that he would represent the working class Americans who are working but still struggling. I think the GOP has been targeting the working poor away from the Dems in recent years

They are focused on the poor - the decline of unions and lack of traction of economic issues has lead to the drift - or more specifically general refusal to adopt views or stances held which they find unacceptable for other reasons. Typically this is referred to as "voting against their interests" but that depends upon personal priorities be they wise or foolish. Tech workers refusing to work on abuseable projects are technically acting against their interests fiscally. I will try to abstain from judgement here.

Also they do have a large portion of the working class - just not definitively over the white part who traditionally bear the name. Perhaps related to their strong hold on minorities that made them not stand out as a distinct bloc. Parts of their other coalition having views at odds with theirs and friction related is not new (see the Hard Hat Riots for one and environmentalists vs industrial workers). Similarly Republicans have long been reaching them on social issues as well - pre civil rights act related inversion even arguably.

Regardless of one's moral opinions facing their overtures largely rejected and power diminished why should the democrats try to serve them at the cost of others strategically? They aren't special or numerous enough which makes the political capital better spent elsewhere.

Blue-dogs exist and are run where locally favorable but they aren't nationally prominent for a reason.

"California, an extremely liberal state, voted in a 72% majority referendum for the three strikes policy."

Incorrect. In 1994, when the three strikes legislation passed, CA was a purple state with a moderate Republican governor.

It is the anti-immigrant rhetoric around Prop 208 in 1996 that undermined the GOP in the state, by driving the majority of the young and non-white into the arms of the Democrats.

1994 - mostly blue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_...

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