Brainwashing is sorcery
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
At the end of the day you need a reasonable judge and lawyers.
The suspect actually said:
"If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer (dog) cause this is not what’s up."
Is he actually requesting a lawyer? Maybe, or maybe he's saying he's innocent and asserting that he will defend himself (getting a lawyer) if charged. The police aren't required to execute subroutines either. You can't say "give me a lawyer if you think I'm guilty" or "give me a lawyer if Bobby was the snitch" or "give me a lawyer if the Collatz conjecture is true" (well you can, but they don't have to give you a lawyer then). You have to unambiguously ask for a lawyer if you want one.
And he's saying it's how he feels. He says he feels he should get a lawyer if they think he's guilty. This is not a clear request for a lawyer.
I agree, should. But ruling precedent by judges has said otherwise, that the request for a lawyer must be clear and unambiguous. It should not be a question, speculation about the need for a lawyer, "I think I need to..".
Yes, this is unfortunate. Especially considering the way the US very broadly interprets rights under other amendments, yet so very narrowly in the case of the 6th amendment.
Why not just give every suspect a lawyer immediately. And since any sane suspect will listen to their lawyer (who will advise them to plead the 5th), why not ban police from interviewing suspects altogether, and simply give a list of questions to their lawyer to discuss.
Only reason we don't is that its obviously too expensive and impractical. This is why we initially try without, and involve a lawyer when "it gets serious".
So consider this: Why should the suspect be punished for this reality?
There's no single magic phrase, but something like "I am invoking my right to legal counsel and will not answer any further questions". And then don't answer anything. Don't even ask anything related to the legal issue at hand.
So, the above comment is not necessarily stating their own opinion on how things should work. It is describing how things actually work in practice. Zero ambiguity.
Is it unfortunate that some people will get away with crimes, because they know to ask for a lawyer (unambiguously)? The "lawyer dog" suspect was found guilty of a serious crime (based on his interview with police), and I think he should have been convicted, and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality (at least in this specific case).
Or is it unfortunate that some people will be wrongfully convicted, because they didn't have a lawyer and said something which ended up making them (falsely) look guilty?
I suspect people will think it's a combination of the two - both false convictions exist, and some criminals get off because they know the system. But making it easier to get a lawyer will only fix one of these.
There has to be some balance. If the police can only convict based on physical evidence (and not suspect interviews) then a lot of crimes will be impossible to prosecute.
This phrasing is like identity theft, it puts the burden on the wrong party. Had he not been convicted, it would be because the state failed to successfully prosecute him by not giving him a fair trial.
A system where evidence obtained illegally is admissible in court creates a perverse incentive for police to collect evidence illegally and suffer the suffer the consequences of that in order to get a conviction. You have to take away the value to eliminate the incentive. Imagine a world where where theft was punishable by 2 years in jail but you got to keep whatever money you stole.
Assuming it was good in this case, and that the confession wasn't forced or some such, it's definitely not good in "big picture" terms.
Making evidence acquired outside of what is laws inadmissible keeps law enforcement honest since there will be nothing to gain by breaking the rules, and it ensures that evidence is not tampered with and that people's rights are protected.
Yes, these things sometimes let guilty people go free, but that's better than locking up innocent people. It sucks, but that's the reality of it.
Constitutional rights should be very easy to exercise and very difficult to limit. And in these scenarios, regarding the possibility that criminals might find an easier time getting legal help, you must consider part of the founding philosophy of the US legal system, a portion borrowed from England's William Blackstone: it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer.
Or, as codified by precedent from the US Supreme Court some time later in 1895, "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent".
To make it harder to get a lawyer because the person might be guilty... or having police or prosecutors make their own individual determinations on that difficulty based on their own subjective belief in the suspect's probability of guilt... Those are antithetical to the principals that founded the US legal system, and antithetical to the rule of law superceding the rule of men.
So there does not need to be a balance, at least not beyond the constitution and corresponding precedent-based legal doctrine. The entire point is that it should be very difficult to strip away a person's freedom. The job of police is not supposed to be easy. If a suspect that has not been found guilty wants the benefit of legal counsel then they are entitled to it. The job of police should not be made easier at the cost of losing fundamental rights.
Making innocent people's lives harder just to catch the least prepared criminals doesn't sound like much of a trade-off.
It's obviously not a conditional "If you think I'm guilty, then I want a lawyer" (as the parent is attempting to parse it). But a statement of "You really think I did this? I didn't so I want a lawyer".
The issue is that in communities like HN and most important where the judge and police come from, this can seem more ambiguous. The real issue is, is this misreading of ambiguity in bad faith or not.
No, the issue is that the police will dishonestly feign misunderstanding of any potential ambiguity out of institutional interest, and that (especially elected) trial judges are, for the most part, inclined to do the same out of personal political interest.
Genuine, good-faith cultural misunderstanding is an insignificant issue; it may sometimes be present, but it's not anywhere close to the dominant issue.
Is this from another court case, or your own personal speculation? Saying "can I get a laywer" (as in, just that, not as part of a long winded sentence) is a much clearer statement of intent than what the "lawyer dawg" guy said. For that reason I think the courts would count that as "requesting a lawyer", even if your 5th grade english teacher disagrees.
Like it's nuts that the court system rewards deliberate misunderstandings of someone's intent.
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
The only relevant part is that the words "get me a lawyer" were said, and these words mean - hear me for a second here - that the person in question requested a lawyer.
But the point here is that there shouldn't be such a test in the first place. "If y'all think I did it" was him (belatedly) realizing that he was a suspect, after the police put on a kabuki-show of pretending that he wasn't, which they are trained to do, specifically to get suspects to talk without asking for a lawyer. The whole thing is a farce. "It's okay to screw him because technically he didn't quite do the thing that we intentionally put in place to let us screw people more" is the sort of claim that's wrong even when it's right, because it's so very far removed from a genuine attempt to discover the truth of the matter.
Yes, the police sailed a bit close to the wind. But maybe the law is currently too suspect-friendly in the USA (which then is compensated with extreme penalties for the tiny number of suspects who are found guilty in a trial). The US system is such a mess that the police and suspects basically conspire to avoid it (plea bargaining). And while it's easy to just blame the "law and order" crowd, they're partly just reacting to the fact that it's almost impossible to fairly convict a savvy criminal in the US without physical evidence or multiple witnesses.
In most of the world, police interrogations aren't optional (if you know the cheat codes). I believe that in the UK, Canada, Australia you have the right to remain silent, but police or prosecutor can tell the jury which questions you did not answer (and then the lawyers will argue over why that was the case). The right to council is often for the trial, not telling you how to avoid answering questions during a police interview. If the purpose of legal systems is to "discover the truth of the matter", then I think the US does a poor job (making it far too easy for a smart criminal to simply shut down a case against them), and a lot of the disfunction they have seems to be an attempt to compensate for all the rights that a smarter criminal can have.
Your summary does not seem to be correct. The police/prosecutor can tell the jury that you refused to answer questions, but only in limited circumstances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence_in_England_an...
This is not true. Every US citizen is protected by the constitution, all the time, and has the right to a lawyer, no matter what. The "magic" in that phrase is that if you try to exercise your right to a lawyer, and the cops refuse, and in so doing break the law and defy the constitution, saying the magic phrase means that they are more likely to get in trouble for doing so.
It's absolutely not relevant. Everyone has rights. This "people who seem guilty should have a harder time in the legal system" take your comment is leaning into is a self sabotaging approach to justice, I hope for obvious reasons.
What is important is there must be minimum standards to try and remove individual bias and push the system towards evidence based outcomes. If there is no evidence someone did something, they should not be punished. But if there is overwhelming evidence from the get go that they've committed a crime then the police can go through the motions and interpret the procedures unhelpfully.
It isn't perfect (in fact, the system is terrifyingly arbitrary) but it must be acknowledged that a case looking to be open-and-shut is suggestive of guilt and should influence how procedures are applied.
The enforcement system is wildly imperfect and a side effect of that is the people involved have to make judgement calls about how to treat the people who get caught up in the legal system. If you can think of a way around that then you'll get your name in the history books.
> Your argument strikes me as incredibly dishonest at best, and just plain evil at worst.
Hopefully the path from dishonest to evil passes through some more positive places, because there are a lot of options that seem to be missing there.
How fantastic that a legal system acknowledges that a State with an agenda will wring all sorts of construed meaning out of silence; and pre-emptively writes out large swathes of that type of testimony (even if I disagree with some courts interpretation of testimony). Restricting the State to having to make a case on material facts.
Many warts that our legal system may have, most of the more pressing ones are problems of will to prosecute or investigate tough cases and lackluster investigatory technique when done.
The "seems pretty sus" barrier has no place in a justice system. Material facts. The world around a genuine wrong-doer will tell more than enough to convict them without playing games with "well they made the investigator's life more difficult by not opening the door and answering questions" and a follow up game of who is better at formulating the more intellectually palatable leading questions. Not one person should have to lift a finger to help contribute to building the walls in which the State seeks to contain them, and every innocent suspect deserves the finest council to help them navigate the vagaries of the legal system, and even the guilty deserve to have the case depriving them of life and liberty be conducted to the squeakiest degree humanly possible, with the aid of a robust defense.
To do anything less is an affront on human decency, and the integrity of the judicial apparatus.
no, they didn't give him the fair process card that he should have had.
In Australia, not always true. You have no right to remain silent if questioned by an Examiner of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), a rather Star Chamber-esque federal law enforcement agency tasked with investigating terrorism, organised crime and other “major crimes” (a rather ill-defined category; pretty much any murder investigation could be given that label if they wanted to, although most murders wouldn’t interest them.) However, while they can force you to answer questions, they aren’t directly allowed to use your answers to prosecute you (but they can use them to prosecute other people, and they may be able to use them against you indirectly, if your answer leads them to discovering new physical evidence or witnesses.) You have the right to a lawyer, and the lawyer is allowed to object to questions, but you still have to answer them-if they object, they can attempt to get a court order after the fact to stop the answers from being used, if your lawyer doesn’t object at the time a court can dismiss an application for any such order on that basis. Also, if they call you in for questioning, it is a crime for you to tell anyone except for your own lawyer that they are questioning you.
> The right to council is often for the trial, not telling you how to avoid answering questions during a police interview.
It is important for the interview too. One’s lawyer can object to leading questions. They can give advice on how best to answer questions-you can be telling the truth, but some ways of phrasing the truth can sound much better than others. They can give advice on when it would be best to exercise one’s right to silence, and when it might be better not to.
Sometimes it even just serves to scare the police off. One guy I know was a bit of a hothead when he was younger, ended up in a fistfight, he put the other guy in hospital. He claimed self-defence, and it was one of those iffy “Who started it? Did he use excessive force in defending himself?” cases. He swears the only reason he wasn’t prosecuted, is he turned up to his official police interview with this really expensive, locally well-known criminal lawyer, and that scared the police and prosecution off, he was never charged. Who knows, but he’s probably right. Probably there’s some other guy out there who was in a similar situation, whose parents couldn’t afford that kind of lawyer (or didn’t know who they were or where to find them), and ended up being charged, going to trial, maybe even convicted, or talked into pleading guilty for a lesser sentence.
So you sorta do sorta don't.
Ironically, it's impossible for the police to screw you by following the exact letter of the law. The exact letter of the law says the request for a lawyer has to be one that a reasonable layman would assume is a request for a lawyer. Therefore, relying on a legality to disqualify the request is a paradox.
Im happy to discuss the rights of suspects in various western societies. In Australia you have to answer your identity (name, address, date and place of birth) and otherwise can remain silent and nothing can be assumed from your silence. In Canada, any questions answered before you are told you can get a lawyer are considered inadmissible and the notification of your rights includes an option to call a free legal aid lawyer right then before the interrogation starts. The UK is complex, but range from a 100% right to remain silent (except for identifying themselves like in Australia) in Scotland to a more complex set of exceptions to the rights in England and Wales that needs a solicitor to explain.
That is not true. I don't even think police or prosecutors think that.
> The US system is such a mess that the police and suspects basically conspire to avoid it (plea bargaining)
Also not true. The plea bargaining system is not something that suspects "conspire" to use, it is foisted upon them and sometimes causes innocent people to plead guilty.
> In most of the world, police interrogations aren't optional...
Nor are they in the US. It's true that the police often stop questioning someone once they ask for a lawyer, but that's not because the questioning is "optional", it's because they know the lawyer will tell the suspect to shut up.
Your whole post is wildly miscalibrated. Calling legal representation a "get out of jail free" card is absurd. I don't know where you learned about the American legal system, but boy, I hope you never get arrested in the US for a crime you didn't commit, because it would not go well for you.
https://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf
> In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).
But this seems this is more of the ruling, note that the judge points out 'prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it'
> I agree with the Court's decision to deny the defendant's writ application and write separately to spotlight the very important constitutional issue regarding the invocation of counsel during a law enforcement interview. The defendant voluntarily agreed to be interviewed twice regarding his alleged sexual misconduct with minors. At both interviews detectives advised the defendant of his Miranda rights and the defendant stated he understood and waived those rights. Nonetheless, the defendant argues he invoked his right to counsel. And the basis for this comes from the second interview, where I believe the defendant ambiguously referenced a lawyer—prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what's up."
> As this Court has written, "[i]f a suspect makes a reference to an attorney that is ambiguous or equivocal in that a reasonable police officer in light of the circumstances would have understood only that the suspect might be invoking his right to counsel, the cessation of questioning is not required." State v. Payne, 2001-3196, p. 10 (La. 12/4/02), 833 So.2d 927, 935 (citations omitted and emphasis in original); see also Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452, 462, 114 S.Ct. 2350, 2357, 129 L.Ed.2d 362 (1994) (agreeing with the lower courts' conclusion that the statement "[m]aybe I should talk to a lawyer" is not an unambiguous request for a lawyer).
> In my view, the defendant's ambiguous and equivocal reference to a "lawyer dog" does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).
Naturally, everyone involved in this case was aware of this. They just decided to enjoy abusing their power by feigning misunderstanding, because it worked to their advantage, because they wanted to, and most importantly, because they knew they could get away with it. Truth is less important that power.
If the defendant hadn't spoken English, they would have been obliged to provide a translator. It is obvious that linguistic barriers don't cede ones constitutional rights. This is somehow even worse, however, than not providing a translator. It is a bad-faith abuse of the inherent diversity of English to deny someone their rights.
SUPREME COURT OF LOUISIANA No. 2017-KK-0954 STATE OF LOUISIANA VERSUS WARREN DEMESM
A) consider whether the person might be requesting a lawyer and help them exercise their constitutional right.
B) find some way, any way, to interpret their request as something else. Apparently the police thought he wanted a "lawyer dog"? Come off it.
Rights are only real if people can exercise them. This court decision decimated the right to a defense in every meaningful sense.
Reminds me of the “what is a photocopier” dialogue: https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE
And, for fun, in serval US circuits the suspect would have been asking for a lawyer.
Adding qualifiers is usually a linguistic filler, not attempting to add more information. Other phrasings also considered not to ask for a lawyer by the courts under the same standard are: "I think I need a lawyer", "is there a lawyer I can speak with" and "where's my lawyer". Do you really think those weren't clearly asking for a lawyer, and really were expressing unacted on thought, question about the general availability of lawyers or asking the cops to report on the location of his attorney as a completely isolated question?
The "if" clause does not apply to the request to get a lawyer.
>If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it
He knows he didn't do it if they all think they he'd done it.
This is followed by a request do get a lawyer.
Are we done now?
For a police officer, who regularly deals with this sort of slang, to misunderstand this - that only happens when they want to intentionally violate the rights of the accused.
It's fair to say that it's extremely difficult to prove manipulation, which makes it seem arbitrary. But, there's plenty of legal standards that require proving intent, not just action. That's a high bar, but it's not unreasonable or arbitrary
It's true that withholding of information can be manipulative. Either this definition left out how we are to judge this (and so failed to establish that it's "actually very clear") or you think you have a right to the private contents of my mind and 100% of the gains from trade.
> Would their definition forbid it
Our context is a discussion of good or bad norms. Technically you could want to live under bad norms.
For example, if I invest in a publicly traded company, I expect the company to be honest on their quarterly filings, but I don't expect to have access to all of their financials. If a company withholds pertinent information because they don't want to impact the stock price, that is manipulation. If they withhold the same information honestly believing it isn't significant to the stock price, that's not manipulation (though it may be incompetence).
Another example: If I target financially illiterate people with predatory loans, that is often manipulative. I'm deliberately targeting people who I wouldn't expect to be able to analyze repercussions of the loan, and I'm lying when I say it will be positive.
If I target financially illiterate people and give them credit cards that I believe are within their means, then I'm not being manipulative - even if some of those folks default or their lives are made worse by the loan.
Yeah, I think this is reasonable. IANAL but I have the impression that manipulations like these would go under "fraud" -- most debatably the last couple. The OP was about pressures to establish laws and norms that are more open to interpretations:
> we also seem to include some more flexible offenses, such as “brainwashing”, “propaganda”, “manipulation”, “deception”, “misinformation”, “harassment”, and “gaslighting”. Again the key is that these tend to be defined less in terms of what exactly was done wrong, and more in terms of a disliked result.
so I just wanted to object to a claim in this context that "manipulation" actually is open-and-shut. If I'm right that your last couple of examples are where "manipulation" leaves more discretion to enforcement than the "fraud" standard, then I don't think you're disagreeing much with the OP on this point (though probably you are on whether this discretion is excessive).
If that is what charges of "manipulation" actually corresponded to in practice, then one could just punish the actual instances of deception, dishonesty, or withheld information (DD&WI). But, in fact, it's rather rare for people to object to DD&WI when it is used to support a position they agree with, and in these situations they essentially never call it "manipulation". (If your friend Bob withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".) In other words, "manipulation" is only used as an additional charge, beyond DD&WI, for things we disagree with.
(One could argue that we correctly have laws that punish actions based on the action's impact, like attempted vs. completed murder, and that "manipulation" could be for when DD&WI is deployed effectively. But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with, and they never claim that effective DD&WI of this type should be punished more harshly than ineffective DD&WI.)
> Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties.
If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.
He's then calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining a person's intent. I actually think that's counter-productive and leaves you vulnerable to (for want of a better word) manipulation.
A person's intent matters and effects how you should interpret and respond to information they deliver. If I'm debating with someone, I want to know whether their intent is to 1) figure out the truth or try to reach consensus, 2) prove themselves right, or 3) just prove me wrong. 1 is fun, 2 is normal, and 3 is a troll. Whether they agree with me or not isn't relevant - their intentions very much are.
He's not conflating, he's just taking a different stance than you to linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.
> He's then calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining a person's intent. I actually think that's counter-productive and leaves you vulnerable to (for want of a better word) manipulation.
No, he's not. He never mentions intent in the post. He is calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining the actions outcome.
I might be an alien, but I do call this manipulation and I do so openly and loud enough to in fact did receive a lot of "counter attacks", just for insisting on truth and facts, which is indeed not normally welcome by any side in tribal wars.
And I rarely call this behavior out in those words in those situations.
Example? Vaccination. I am in the "political" camp of people, who think as much people as possible should get vaccinated against covid.
Still, when I see posts written that go: "there is no reason to not get vaccinated, they are totally safe" (meant especially to covid, but also in a general sense) and I respond, that "no, they are not total safe, there have been incidents of contaminated production batches for example and it is not 100% clear, that for young people there is individually more benefit than potential harm and no doctor ever advised of taking just any vaccination (there are many vaccinations with actual higher risks, only benefiting, when visiting certain areas)" than I have to word it very, very careful or face a shitstorm even here. As in their perception I fight then against their political cause - overcoming the pandemic with more vaccinations. While in my perception they try to reach their goals with lies, which I do not agree with, despite agreeing to the goal.
So yeah, if you would try something like that within the context of a very contested issue, I would definitely assume you're clandestinely trying to sabotage the discussion.
People mean different things, when they say they want to have a discussion guided by facts.
I mean it literal.
"there is no reason to not get vaccinated, they are totally safe"
And since this is factual wrong, I think it is very weird to assume that I would want to sabotage a discussion, when relativating absolutistic statements, that bring no benefit to any discussion. They only enforce groupthink. But this this rather the cultural default, which I am quite aware of.
I think this depends on both the position and the actual arguments that were used (or withheld).
To give a hypothetical example for Democrats in the U.S.:
- If Bernie Sanders were to information about the negative budgetary repercussions of his Medicare-for-all plan (I'm not claiming he has or hasn't; I'm just giving an example), many Democrats probably wouldn't consider that "manipulation" of the public.
- But if he were to withhold information about how Medicare-for-all would actually somehow benefit corporate interests/profits at the cost of taxpayers (again, I'm not claiming this; I'm just giving a hypothetical example), a lot of the same Democrats probably would consider that "manipulation" of the public.
Of course there are people who would behave the same way in both situations too, but my point is that there are lots that would behave differently.
And obviously this isn't to claim people have zero bias here, but I don't think that's particularly specific to "manipulation". People just have a bias against criticizing people whose conclusions they agree with in general, whether the accusation is one of manipulation, corruption, or something else.
I assert that Democrats who supported his plan would not use the word "manipulation" for this. Instead, the Democrats who criticized Sanders for this would only say he was deceptive or withheld info.
The energy requirememts for consistent sync are massive.
Whether this flexibility is a problem or a virtue is another question. When the author calls for us to eliminate these flexible laws/norms, he's trying to formalize something quite vague. Even if that's possible I'm not sure it's desirable. Perhaps when it comes to millions of people living together in harmony, vagueness is a good thing.
Is this bad faith in the techniques of the persuasion, or that the persuasion is being used in a malicious way?
For example, if I say something misleading (or omit a few facts) to encourage people to vote for an objectively good candidate, is that bad faith? The persuasion is using a dark pattern, but I've got good intentions.
On the other hand, maybe I have some objectively bad belief, and I openly and candidly try to persuade people of it. Is that bad faith?
I'd lean towards the former being "bad faith". I believe that free and candid discussion is the best mechanism to move society forward, and I think that more progress would be great. But there are people who would disagree, because it took a lot of work to get our society to its current state, and they want to prioritise conserving what we've already got.
> But there are people who would disagree, because <reasons>
That is an example of mental gymnastics to avoid classifying the thing they want to do as bad in their own view. They want to do something but they don't want to think of themselves as behaving in bad faith because they're a good person doing the right thing.
If I feel hurt, fearful, hateful, or threatened, and I feel it's your fault, then it's your fault.
> The key difference is that such “flexible offenses” tend to be defined more in terms of how someone important doesn’t like an outcome, and less in terms of what specifically someone did to induce that resulting dislike.
There are so many crimes that anyone can be charged at any time. The reality of prosecution (in the USA, but moreso in the soviet union and other places) is that often prosecutors first decide who needs to be charged with a crime, and secondly what crime to charge. And there are enough laws that there is always something to charge.
This is also how the Soviet Union--which ostensibly had free speech and assembly--operated. Anyone who was problematic would find themselves guilty of obscure tax violations or other nonsense.
The book '3 felonies per day' is focused on this problem.
I happen to think this is one of the most under-stated problems of our society, and it's difficult to fix because the people charged often did do something bad--just not illegal.
As an example: the recent news of a journalist charged with hacking that gov website comes to mind.
etc,etc.
All corrupt states do this and the USA's corruption is easily at Soviet levels.
>the USA's corruption is easily at Soviet levels.
This statement is hard to quantify, but as an observer who never lived in USSR and only briefly in the USA, there's no way. The USSR was rotten to the core. USA has it's own rot for sure and needs to fix so much, but it's no where close to Soviet levels of corruption.
There's a reason so many Russians fled for the USA and not vice-versa.
The USA lied to start a war in Iraq that killed at least 200,000 people. The US started and led and funded War of Terror has killed 900,000 people (Brown University). Nearly all these deaths were Muslims.
The USA has intense income inequality and the police regularly murder its citizens with impunity.
The current president is at best a mislead old man or an active oppressor, responsible for much of the law that keeps communities of color in debt and unfairly jailed by draconian crime bills that targeted the PoC community.
The US media is almost exclusively corporate and owned by a handful of corporate entities most own by billionaires who use such media to push views that benefit them politically and economical.
The USA is rife with conspiracy theories and has a very low vaccination rate compared to its western peers for reasons above.
The USA is best seen as an oligarchy where the wealthy get what they want from a legislative agenda perspective and are almost always above the law. Trump's only signature piece of legislation and the GOP's top priority was a significant tax cut for the wealthy that was permanent and a lesser one for the middle class that expires.
The USA has nearly 30m uninsured people compared to their western peers who all have some type of universal health insurance system.
The USA is destroying women's right, especially the right to choose and access to birth control and the morning after pill.
The USA has an incarceration rate of 639 inmates per 100,000 people, which is the worst in the world. This almost twice the USSR's rate. 40% of these inmates are black in a country where 13% of the population is black.
I think a lot of Americans are in denial of the everyday corruption here.
>There's a reason so many Russians fled for the USA
I'm not sure how true this is. We didn't see significant migration from the Eastern Bloc until their economies got much much worse. Communist nations that did well economically had low levels of migration. The same way largely Democratic, yet poor, Crimean Ukrainians welcomed corrupt Russian annexation because it meant being part of the powerful Russian economy ($3k gdp per capita vs $10k). In other words, people welcome an oppressive state if it means more money. Flights for freedom are often propaganda. Flights for money are often the truth. My parents fled their country to go to the USA solely for economic reasons. "Freedom", mom, apple pie, and baseball are laughable bullshit to the immigrant community.
>and not vice-versa.
The USA had 2x the GDP capita than the USSR during 1980s migrations. Again, this was purely an economic flight for nearly all immigrants.
And Soviet Russia was still 10x worse.
However close he came to success (which we might dispute), he lost it in the first place, then be failed to hold on, and then he was removed. This leaves the US easily 1000x more free and more democratic than the USSR, which never ran an election without tampering with the vote in the first place, and which never saw its leaders democratically deposed. They succeeded in suppressing democracy much earlier in the process.
The rest of your comments suffer a parallel problem.
Is not the ringing endorsement of American stability and greatness you think it is. Especially when none of the coup planners have been charged, let alone imprisoned.
It wasn't a coup. Nor a coup attempt. It was a protest against an election that many people considered fraudulent that got out of hand.
Exactly why it got out of hand and who encouraged that is another topic.
History suggests we have about ten years until the consequences of leaving the plotters unpunished come back to us. The people in charge now will mostly be retired or dead of old age.
Maybe Jan. 6 still clears that bar. I don't know enough of the details to say that it doesn't.
OK, it became a coup attempt the moment someone shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" at a riot where some people built a gallows, some people roved around inside the building carrying Tasers and handcuffs, and some other people brought firearms, ammunition, and IEDs.
But I imagine you'll just move the bar^H^H^Hgoalposts again, because that's what Trump apologists are good at.
Meanwhile, holy shit, imagine if those people really had been the BLM and Antifa agitators that the Republicans tried so desperately to tell us they were.
Maybe Jan. 6 still clears that bar. I don't know enough of the details to say that it doesn't
On the off chance that's true, I would say that this is an excellent time to start paying attention to what's going on. Again, we have about 10 years, give or take, going by the example of the Beer Hall Putsch.
You are bringing a lot of vitriol to the table, unprompted. A personal failing is that I can't help but respond, but I am able to leave it at that.
While the US is not free of political corruption, it is generally considered to be relatively free of corruption: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa
Admittedly that's not a high bar to clear, but... we're over it.
but of course, "lobbying" is not corruption because it's lobbying. (then again lobbying does end up undermining the will of the public individual in favor of the will of the public corporation... so much for "the people" unless the people are businesses and companies)
It didn't though. Or the same way China has freedom of speech. You disappear if you say things the regime doesn't like.
It's also codified in the RSFSR Penal Code. 58-10 seems pretty explicit by itself:
58-10. Anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation: at least 6 months of imprisonment.
The parallel with the U.S. system even if far from being perfect is disingenuous.
It's probably why people don't talk about it, because many feel like it could come in handy for them in the future.
tangential: is there a tl;dr of the book? Does the typical american really commit 3 felonies a day? If so, what?
One case involves somebody "out in the woods gathering shell casings from federal land", a very normal activity.
For an overview, how about this: https://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-tod...
> > a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system
Note that this bit from GP would be readily agreed with by both the far left and far right in the US. However they would each give completely different examples of things that were destabilizing (according to them).
This for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_b...
Or what about the vice president shooting one of the founding fathers dead over what was basically a twitter war for that time? Lol yea we are more extreme and divided now. Give me a break.
What you don't tell is what other, much more murkier circumstances would also be covered by the law - e.g. journalists publishing well-researched allegations of corruption.
It’s not surprising then that we have a few unpatched bugs.
If I craft and send a message that does harm to a machine that I don’t own the law is pretty clear about what happens next.
If I craft and send a message that does harm to a human by exploiting one of our bugs…
Wildly incorrect beliefs are the most dangerous thing in the world. It's what led to 9/11 (islamism), WW2 (nazism), The Great Famine/The Cultural Revolution (Maoism), etc.
We do need to defend against incorrect and dangerous ideas. Just putting misinformation in scare quotes to dismiss it isn't a good response.
The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse- few are convinced by an authority saying a position is wrong. And there is no such authority that is free of corruption; there is no ultimate source of truth.
Setting effectiveness aside, it is a cruelty to deny the right of expression to anyone. Humans deserve to share their beliefs with others. One of us is wrong right now. Would you prefer a world where that one is made to remain silent?
Well.. sort of. This is true if you're dealing with an honest debate partner. It's not true if you're dealing with an opponent that is a psy-ops operator of some kind or a 4chan troll army.
False beliefs are literally infinite. They are fractal. Debunking also takes more effort than to invent a new idiotic position.
This is an asymmetrical war. We want to limit the asymmetry so it becomes closer to symmetrical between wrong things and right things. This is a hard problem, but letting bots run rampant surely isn't helping. "The solution to bad speech is more speech" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't really make logical sense. The solution to confusion isn't more confusion. The solution to lying isn't more lying.
If someone invents new idiotic positions when they are proven wrong, they look like an idiot, and even dumber-than-average people can tell. If those people believe, rightly, that their side is not being given a fair fight, they may not be inclined to update. And they will be inclined to move to a community where the truth is not given a fair fight.
>"The solution to bad speech is more speech" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't really make logical sense. The solution to confusion isn't more confusion. The solution to lying isn't more lying.
The solution to confusion is clarity. The solution to lying is telling the truth. The solution to bad speech is good speech. There's not a fundamental logic error there. If I'm wrong, it's on the object level.
There is logical error in using speech to say that more speech won't advance your objectives. If you don't think that speech can do good, why would you waste your time participating in it?
People yes. People that will interact with a given issue on social media? Now that's a totally different thing!
> The solution to bad speech is good speech.
100% agreed.
But note how very different that statement is than the more common "the solution to bad speech is MORE speech".
If good speech is drowned out by the megaphone of bad speech it is as if it doesn't exist. This is what we need to protect against.
This is beside the point, though. If misinformation meant robots and Russian conspirators, sure, ban it- it won't matter because arguments are not won by counting advocates, and there is very little of this anyway.
But it doesn't, and you've said as much above. Wildly incorrect and/or dangerous beliefs are not 'bad' speech. They are precisely the speech that 'free speech' is intended to protect; speech that disagrees with or threatens the establishment is the only speech that has ever been under attack. More of it is better.
If good speech is somehow drowned out by bad, people will start learning to seek out trustworthy sources again. People are not stupid. The ones that are don't spend their days reading and writing. And even the morons have every right to choose what they believe from the infinite set of possibilities.
For example, they have convinced an entire race of people that a word is offensive, in itself. Context doesn't matter. You can't even quote someone saying it. From the outside perspective, it's absolutely insane. It is very scary to think that there are poeple who pulled this off. What else can they do?