Minister defends arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
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
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.
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
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.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
[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.