In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Just like healthcare, US justice is only for people with money.
and just like re healthcare, this is the rub of communicating about this: 90% (to pick a random number out of thin air) of hn's target demo has had perfect/sheltered lives and has never come into contact with the "law". so they believe all the political and institutional rhetoric around it.
the other 10% know it's a myth but fail to be able to convince the 90% because it would cause deep cognitive dissonance to accept that the US is deeply deeply inequitable and unfair and that it's not accidental but systematic. when i was younger i was in jail a handful of times (not prison thankfully). it's impossible to explain to someone how fucked up it is that's never experienced it. i stopped talking about the "justice system" a long time ago to co-workers/friends/etc and i don't tell anyone about my experience (only my wife knows).
If you go looking for the source of “evil” breaking these systems, you’ll surely find a few bad folks purposely fucking it up, but removing them is almost certainly not going to fix anything. The vast majority of these systems’ behavior (good or bad) is effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever.
> effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever
the agency of individuals in totalitarian/authoritarian institutions has been examined/analyzed/written about at enormous length since the rise of fascism in the early 1900s. the short answer is you're wrong but i'm not going to try to convince you (you have to want to learn to be receptive). instead i recommend a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Banality-Penguin-C...
EDIT: i'm being rate limited. to the guy below
> how even a system full of good intentions
you're just proving all of my points - you just can't fathom that the laws really were written with immoral intentions because "the law" is sacrosanct for you.
i note again: the 13th amendment abolished slavery except for in prisons. it's written explicitly in section 1 (no bad faith interpretation needed). please discuss for me the "good intentions" therein.
Most systems today are intended to produce outcomes that most people agree would be good, and they’re full of people trying to achieve those outcomes, and yet reliably failing to produce them.
There have been books written about this topic as well, but it’s not as flashy as comparing “every system that produces some bad results” to actual Nazis, I have to admit.
The important thing is for that energy to be expended in the pursuit of certain outcomes; the goals themselves are already self-contradictory.
The meta-system uses that to reproduce itself. Our lives are secondary to that goal.
Typically makes sense to fire anyone who wrote the broken version too, just to get a fresh set of eyes on it.
Not sure why there’s any non-performant or unmaintainable code in light of this fact.
I wrote a big chunk before I recalled that this is just an analogy. We're wandering off topic.
To your analogy, it's possible to incrementally improve a code base. It's also possible to stop it getting worse.
So too do prison guards and their unions.
You would be hard pressed to find a union that represents prison guards which has supported ANY kind of political reform to laws. Legalization, even changes to traffic laws, prison guard unions and their members almost exclusively vote against.
Just for two examples.
No one disagrees with doing that. They might disagree on what "better" means, and in particular better for whom. But 95%+ of the disagreement on these is not because one side is evil and the other is not.
So you you think, without those few bad folks, these systems would not tend to break, or that these few bad folks are not being challenged? I.e. do you think these few bad folks are completely inconsequential at a systemic level?
Pretty much yes, and so are the good ones. Such is the nature of systems. A thing becomes visible as and labeled as "a system" only after it's quite stable and resilient, i.e. after it has developed effective responses to common "attacks" (deliberate or otherwise). Achieving fungibility of 99.9% of individual humans is like objective #1 and the systems that fail to achieve it don't exist long enough to be problematic.
Theft and fraud in businesses is more common than software people think. Kickbacks to purchasing managers, for example. You're less likely to encounter this than a casually dirty cop, but it's out there.
For many years, it was popular (particularly in revisionist circles) almost entirely to deny individual agency and to rely instead exclusively on systemic arguments which highlighted the power of geography, ecology, culture, technology, and other complex systems to shape human events. That revisionist approach emerged partially in reaction to the near universal overreliance of prior generations of historians on the so-called "Great Man" theory of history, which assumes events are largely attributable to the decisions of a select group of politically powerful individuals. Nearly all of those individuals happened to be white, male, and wealthy, and thus Great Man history suffered not only from blindness to systemic factors that can shape events, but also to the experiences, contributions, and agency of anyone who was not rich, not white, not a man, or even simply not politically powerful enough to count. In other words, they ignore nearly everyone who has ever lived.
Although academic history has long since moved away from the Great Man theory, it remains a popular trope of low quality popular history books, and increasingly it has become clear that purely systemic, revisionist approaches with no consideration for the effects of individual actors are also inadequate to explain historical events.
Sometimes systems are more powerful than people, and no amount of good will or effort is going to fix a problem. The Vikings abandoned Greenland during the Little Ice Age because they had no way of controlling the climate or adapting efficiently to the changes. The climate system was more powerful than any individual Norse settler or group of settlers could ever hope to be.
Sometimes systems are weaker than people, and leaders can bend them to their will. After nearly 1000 years of independence from secular authority and mostly uncontested religious domination in England, the Catholic Church in the 16th century formed an incredibly powerful institutional system of religious control built on vast endowments of land. It was by and large extremely popular with the common people and historically served a critical role in bolstering the king's position by promoting a respect for hierarchy that naturally encompassed both their own elevated status as priests and the position of secular authoritarian rulers, who ruled as God's representative on Earth. Despite the Church's enduring local popularity, its immense wealth, its deep connections with the broader Christian world, and the powerful hold fear of excommunication and damnation had on most Christians, King Henry VIII managed to completely transform the institutional, legal, and property-managing system of the medieval English Catholic Church, sundering it entirely from Rome, depriving it of essentially all of its land holdings, and subordinating its institutions entirely to royal authority. And he accomplished this in a shockingly short period of time, only around a decade.
Why did Henry decide to throw his lot in with the Reformation? Was it because he saw the injustice of monks, priests, and friars siphoning off so much of his subjects' wealth to Rome simply to subsidize the already luxurious and decidedly un-Christian lifestyle enjoyed by the pope? Not at all, in fact in the years before his marriage to Katherine of Aragon soured, he wrote a book defending the pope, who promptly named the king Defender of the Faith in gratitude and recognition of his scholastic achievement. Did Henry instead recognize an opportunity to enrich himself? Probably not, the evidence suggests he wasn't that savvy about money, but luckily for him, he had Cromwell to take care of the pounds and the pennies. Ultimately, he just needed a divorce. Because if he failed to produce an heir, the danger of civil war would be intolerable, and Katherine was clearly beyond her childbearing years. But the pope wouldn't give him one, and Henry was a raging narcissist willing to burst through any boundary in service of his own ego, even risking his soul to break from Rome.
So individual idiosyncrasies can also affect the course of events, we can't just look at systems, and we can't just look at individuals, we need systems too. The relative influence of each over how a complex institution like a justice system develops is a highly contingent and fact-specific analysis. Sometimes the climate can push winters to be too cold even for the hardiest settlers. Sometimes an entire nation's centuries-long, enduring religious beliefs and ideologies can depend solely on the whims (and lust) of a single egotistical dictator. And sometimes when such a basic function is this messed up, you might actually find that there are indeed a limited number of individuals responsible, and that replacing them with competent or less malicious individuals will actually solve the problem.
That's the trick though, and where the systemic and individual-focused explanatory variables start to bleed into each other. If it is systematically impossible to find good people to staff these institutions, then yes merely swapping out individuals will not fix the situation because by definition you are swapping out bad people for other bad people. However, I seriously doubt that it is impossible to do so in this case, because even if the US justice system is messed up and broken, this is about the most messed up and broken that it gets. I think it's fair to say that 99.999% of the country does not experience systemic justice problems to the same extent as Maverick County, which is why so many people are reacting to this story with justifiable shock. So even assuming ad arguendo that it is systemically impossible to find truly good people to work in law enforcement or the judicial system, we know it's at least possible to find better people than they have in Maverick County.
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-202...
"(The fancy way of putting the influence of all of those factors, both the big structural ones and the little, subject-to-chance ones, is to say ‘history is contingent’ – that is, the outcomes are not inevitable but are subject to many forces large and small, many of which the lack of evidence render historically invisible.)"
White South African
Yes, working eyeballs
I think this is because effectively influencing European politics as a whole (as opposed to individual countries) is much more complicated than the US because of the diversity of languages, cultures and media, but then the EU-level politics will also influence state politics. But also every country has a commissioner in the commission and a vote in the EC, so there are several levels of feedback. Of course many internal and external actors are trying to own or destroy the EU, I just hope they won't be succesful.
In other words, the European welfare systems are actually a great tool of theirs to keep the competition down: if you're taxing the upper-middle-class workers at a ~50% rate, they need to out-earn you 2:1 to build wealth at the same rate.
Because there was an active socialist & communist movement -- with massive trade union support -- on the continent forcing them to.
That is basically non-existent in the US, and very weak and closer to non-existent in Canada. (We only have universal healthcare here because of the actions of the social democratic CCF/NDP in the 60s in Saskatchewan, winning against a doctor's strike and showing the centre-left in the rest of the country that it was possible. At that moment in time. I don't think such a thing could ever be won now. Not against an established insurance industry.)
Europeans have far more restrictions on their rights of speech, self-defence, and freedom of conscience than the Americans. They are also substantially poorer than Americans, and those numbers get worse when you account for America’s average being skewed lower by having a higher proportion of recent immigrants with lower earning potentials.
Our food is not riddled in toxic waste because of those horrible regulations that Americans don't like, our air is breathable because of those same horrible regulations, companies are not allowed to just steal and sell all of our data or keep it indefinitely, because of those horrible regulations, which makes American tyrants mad because they can't make their billion dollar startups here so easily since they're used to breaking the law, abusing people, or paying off governments to get what they want, which is a lot harder to do here. Much sad, many tear, for the poor American startup founder.
Europeans by and large don't share the same values as Americans. Being filthy rich isn't our goal, our goal is good health, spending time with our loved ones, having plenty of time to rest and dedicate on our hobbies, and being treated fairly and with respect. Americans on the other hand care about money at all cost, doesn't matter if it's at the expense of working class people, and they view people who work less than 80 hours a week as lazy.
I also don't know what freedom of speech you are talking about since I read the news and USA seems to have everything, BUT freedom of speech. Your education is down the toilet, crime is rampant, police murders minorities on a regular basis, school shootings everywhere, a government as corrupt as can possibly be, people fired en masse everywhere for not replying to an e-mail ...
Heck, Americans see Americans through the lens of reporting and social media.
Look at the incredibly polarized climate. Why is it a novelty to just bring together people of "opposite sides" to talk? When political "debate" is just a grounds to get your sound bites out to the media, democracy is in danger. And not just from the current administration.
In my last startup in Germany, I worked with a bunch of ex-management consultants who had all worked in a famous consultancy in the USA (you've definitely heard of it).
They all shared stories of Americans staying 12+ hours in the office but not actually doing anything. It was all performant "we're working really hard", mostly chatting to each other and scrolling social media. The Germans were incredibly frustrated because getting anything actually done was really difficult, and they ended up mostly sharing the work amongst themselves so they could actually get it done. Needless to say, their American colleagues thought they didn't work hard because they left the office after only 10 hours or so.
I've seen this in American-influenced startup culture, too - a tendency to use hours spent moistening a chair as a productivity measure, because measuring actual productivity was "too hard".
And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place, than to have to worry about carrying a gun around all the time, and whether or not a child might get accidentally get access to it. See also gun shooting figures.
They don’t. Americans earn something like 1/3rd more than the average European. They have substantially larger houses and own more cars.
> And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place
The vast majority of people will never need to use a gun whether they are in the US or Europe. The position you’re taking is one that it is convenient for you to take because you are not currently the victim a violent crime. This is akin to someone talking about all of the money they are saving by driving without insurance.
Likewise for "substantially larger houses". This is just not a relevant metric - Europeans generally live in denser cities, with more apartment living, more cycling, more parks. That's a preference. It's got nothing to do with wealth. Europeans don't have smaller houses because they can't afford them, but because they prefer living in smaller, denser, more walkable cities.
It’s not like that as we were discussing tangible measures of wealth. Can you provide any evidence that Europeans are materially wealthier than Americans? That is, that Europeans earn, own, and / or consume more than Americans?
I don´t want to own a car and drive 2 hours to work every day, and consume more car ownership - I want to cycle or walk, and stay fit and enjoy the sun.
You see the mistake you're making?
I lived in the US for 6 years, and could have stayed. It was an easy decision to go back to Europe.
As someone of moderate wealth (high earner, investments), I still live in the same small house in the same inexpensive city I did when I was earning a quarter of what I do now. Americans talk about "starter houses" and moving up, but that's a consumptive pattern I don't value. Instead, I value the financial freedom of not having a mortgage and having stable, well-constructed housing that I continuously improve. I could afford the bigger house but I don't want it.
As for cars, I have 2 but they rarely get used. One is a business van for transporting large equipment and the other is a cheap hatchback. I bike most places though, and drive only a couple times a week. I understand their utility as a tool, but if I could get away without owning one I would.
Money is nice, but financial security with social safety nets and public healthcare is a trade-off I'd gladly make.
In theory.
Articles like this are about how it works in practice.
That is true. However Europeans tend to believe that restricting some freedom leads to higher overall freedom: I can exercise a lot more freedom when I don't risk a gun pointed at me. I'm a much freer thinker when religious agenda pushed (overtly or subtly) on me (directly or through societal influence). Same for misinformation and other propaganda.
From a European perspective, "american freedom" seems like "free as in free-for-all", which certainly doesn't lead to the highest level of personal freedom. It's a local optimum at best.
> They are also substantially poorer than Americans
According to this random source (first result for "poverty rate by country") https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r..., America has a similar or worse poverty rate than a lot of Europe (not that European countries can easily be compared).
Salaries tend to be higher in the US of course, that doesn't translate directly to living conditions and poverty.
Regardless, I don't think that Europe's path to improve poverty level is US-style individual freedom.
What are you guys so scared of?
It's a literal fact that a gun is much more likely to be used to kill its owner (or a member of the owner's own family) than any intruder or external threat [0]
Why is this such a thing in the USA? Why do you guys hold gun ownership up as this amazing freedom when owing a gun is literally, provably, way more of a threat to you and your family than anyone else?
But the parent is talking about the USA having more self-defence freedoms, and gun ownership is definitely part of that. It's not about suicide, it's that weird "you gotta protect your family" that non-Americans find a bit worrying - what are you so scared of? I've lived in a few countries and nowhere I've lived has this level of fear. I've never felt that I would be safer if I owned a gun. I have no idea who I'd use it against (except myself, obviously).
Also, lack of police services is probably commensurate with the low levels of taxation that so many Americans desperately want and vote for.
Is there something unique about the USA's history with slavery that would cause this?
“God created man. Sam Colt made them equal.”
Denying self defense isn't a core part of human history and desire for political reasons is very unscientific.
The two answers I've read so far are: mexican cartels (ok, but if you don't live on the border what are you scared of?) and "all the other terrified people with guns" which I think is intended to be joking (but many a truth said in jest).
If you have a different answer, I'd love to hear it.
All the other terrified people with guns.
But if you’re poor and have an easily treatable illness, say type 1 diabetes, you’ll die begging for insulin.
It’s very easy to lose everything within a few months.
You get sick, lose your job, your entire family loses health insurance. We have this stupid prosperity gospel idea which conversely means poverty is your fault. Can’t afford medicine for your kids, well I guess it’s their fault for having a loser dad.
Taxes are still absurdly high in America for what you actually receive. Have any serious medical issues and you’ll be spending thousands upon thousands per month on top of 600 to 700$ for essentially useless health insurance.
We’re also a fear based society. When I visited London it’s perfectly normal to see single women waiting for the bus at 2am or whatever. Here as a grown man I got freaked out when I was approached by a stranger around 7pm. Was he going to rob me ?
He actually was a local politician passing out flyers , but we live in paranoia land.
America is closer to a developing country in both medical care and violent crime. I know I’d rather raise a family in Berlin than almost any American city.
> He actually was a local politician passing out flyers, but we live in paranoia land.
Sounds like you're a part of the paranoia. Violent crime happens mostly in small pockets but quite densely where it happens. But generally, most places are perfectly safe.
I've had so many experiences of telling friends I'm off to walk the dog around midnight or whatever and I get responses like "oh is that safe?" Of course it is! I do it all the time. People seriously think if you walk outside at night nearly anywhere, you're likely to be assaulted despite never having such a thing happen to anyone they know.
So many people are scared to ride public transit thinking "what if I'm attacked?!" And yet hopping in their car is the least safe thing they'll do that day with over 100 people dying in car accidents every day. You're way more likely to die a painful death in that car than you are riding the bus, and yet people question if it's safe to ride transit.
Most Americans cannot.
You have no idea what you’re talking about and there is no statistical basis to the claims you are making. The only two metrics Europeans win out on is life expectancy (by around 4 years) and (narrowly) on home ownership rate (around 5 percentage points higher in Europe). Americans are overwhelmingly wealthier than Europeans by every other metric.
Are you really arguing that Americans (and especially Americans below the median) don't have higher levels of medical debt, higher rates of medical bankruptcy, and get/take less vacation than Europeans.
> Most Americans cannot: Never take on medical debt, travel more than a month out of the year, have a couple kids and educate them in good schools, and retire.
Most Americans do these things, with the possible exception of month-long vacations.
$1.21 trillion in credit card debt, $1.66 trillion in car loans and $1.6 trillion in federal student loans - yes, Americans are overwhelmingly wealthier.
I note that you didn’t provide equivalent figures for the EU, however, so I imagine you’re less interested in making an actual argument than you are in looking clever.
Credit cards and car loans are also not that popular.
PS: if you buy 30k van you are down more than that as you need to get an insurance, gas, parking lot, pay tax, etc.
If you’re implying that student debt doesn’t exist in Europe because schooling is “free” for everyone you are wrong. Plenty of European countries don’t provide free schooling and even the ones that do such as Germany often have a parallel private system for those who fail to get into the more exclusive public schools. Europeans who do graduate are then faced with substantially higher tax rates - education, like healthcare, doesn’t just fall out of the sky for free.
Europeans also own credit cards; they probably have lower levels of debt than Americans (who have a fairly unique culture of credit-financed consumer spending), but they also aren’t capable of servicing the debt that an American can service, for the simple reason that they earn less than Americans.
> PS: if you buy 30k van you are down more than that as you need to get an insurance, gas, parking lot, pay tax, etc.
This is a red herring. When you eat dinner you not only have to pay for the food but also spend time purchasing, preparing, and eating it. This doesn’t prevent people from eating because they derive utility from eating which exceeds the opportunity costs associated with purchasing, preparing, and eating it.
Vacation time itself might be a good metric for quality of life (which I am not disputing is probably comparable if not better in Europe if you discount the importance of material wealth), but time abroad is not since Americans have access to a lot more variety within America than a European would have within their own country; it’s the same reason more Europeans have passports.
Isn't this purposefully minimizing what essentially amounts to a poor-people-torture machine.
The purpose of the system is what the system does.
In the US we have deeply ingrained perverse financial incentives in criminal justice with wildly variable sentencing that depends on the mood of the judge that day.
Stray any amount from the fine line of legal, and if you're unlucky you could be plunged into a system where you'll be put into massive debt, while also losing your job, home, important documents, etc. We claim to want to reform criminals, yet we kick out their feet at every turn and expect them to say "thank you".
And then the people who face the smallest amount of risk to being victimized by this system like to say "Yeah, it's not perfect".
Similar things are uttered by the same people about Canada, but with more denigrating comments.
In absolute terms the US is much wealthier than either. But like always with statistics it's important to look at the distribution, not the average.
Staying on topic: the Canadian legal system is probably about as bureaucratically dysfunctional as the US, just without the private super-prisons and the monetary shakedown. Which is to say it's dysfunctional and broke.
Ukraine started to get closer to European Union: more transparent, more democratic, less corrupt and richer.
When Russians saw that it was possible in Ukraine, they would get rid of Putin. So he invaded.
It amazing how US billionaires managed to have a majority vote against their interest and endure this shitshow. Time for the US to realize that their governments are meant to represent them and not the other way around.
Sure, there might be actual Nazis who would like to lose everything if it just allowed them to force their beliefs on others as was historically the case. But most people who vote for right wingers do so because they believe they will have tangible benefits.
But if your premise is false, your conclusion is also false.
atoav called the government a "a neo-nazi connected right wing party". It won't actually be neo-Nazi because that's surely illegal in Austria. So it's probably some kind of propaganda that led him to believe that or exaggerate its significance as being against the interests of non-Nazis. Maybe they offer something their voters want and their voters don't care about whatever media-hype-hate-frenzy label they're given.
"Who allowed them to live so well?".
When you measure wealth, it makes a huge difference how exactly you calculate it. Having a few astronomically rich oligarchs in your country increases the arithmetic mean, but does nothing about the median.
This is how Russia can have better numbers in national statistics, and yet the average Russian soldier can feel the other way round in Ukraine.
[del: Most Russian soldiers are paid over $100,000 a year to volunteer to fight in Ukraine. :del] In contrast, most of the Ukrainian soldiers are conscripts.
Here's a Youtube channel by a Brit who moved to Russia in 2002 or 2003:
https://www.youtube.com/@SamsRussianAdventures/videos
At the current time, the top video (i.e., the latest video) in that list is titled, "I'm Much Happier Here in Russia - Here's How Much it Costs".
Sadly, I haven't been able to find out (after watching about 5 of his videos) how much he earns and how he gets his money.
Russia's Gini coefficient is 35.1 whereas the US is at 41.3. Zero means perfect equality whereas 100 is the most unequal society possible.
Remember that wealth distribution in Russia is extremely skewed and many people don't even have access to luxury such as an indoor toilet (roughly 1/4th of the population).
yes, American exceptionalism relies on a comparing itself to the worst countries in the world and ignoring that developed nations exist and work out decently.
but there really is a skepticism about some Europe nations, can they - and the bloc - sustain its 21st century advances and social safety nets while adequately paying for its own defense? inquiring minds would like to know, and now we don't have to debate it anymore. Is the budget really balanced if all commitments were funded as agreed? Can European nations really tolerate each other with the rearmaments?
stay tuned
There are 2 absolutely basic pillars of modern free society worth living in - 1) how it takes care of its weak and injured ones (healthcare and social services); 2) and how it builds a better future via good available public education. US fails in most if not all of those. There are aspects it excels in but they are not primary markers of happiness, life fulfillment, low stress and such.
There is more consensus on accessing these things - healthcare and higher education - via wealth, or programs within the state of residence. Some individual states/cities do offer free higher education, and free healthcare. Segments of the population also get healthcare subsidized from the national federal government, the same experience as if it was universal. Private options are available for all, just like many European nations have or even mandate, to complement a public system.
The consensus is very similar to what JD Vance wrote in the group chat: that it remains to be proven that Europe can solve its own problems while gloating about what they've built up domestically by appropriating their budgets towards advances we aren't willing to do. and its "pathetic" that we subsidize their defense, while we do experience squalor and infrastructure problems. The American perspective is very similar to what JD Vance - the vice president - wrote, even if its oversimplified or even inaccurate.
Vance didn't just appear from the void, he is a 40 year millennial, who briefly lived in Bernal Heights, San Francisco for more than a year while working at a Menlo Park-based biotechnology company in Silicon Valley, was in the army, from the middle of the country, who openly criticized Trump like anyone else in the SF Bay Area would before finding it more favorable to seek power. His perspectives are not fringe in any way. He is just saying them outloud and with journalists around now.
Also, its not just US throwing money into black pit of Europe - the money came back with interest in form of global power projection with additional half a billion people standing by you even in your most fucked up invasions like Iraq, thats over for good. We mistakenly bought tons of military hardware from US to the tune of hundreds of billions USD - thats over now too, and it doesn't matter who will be the next guy, the trust is broken for good (for what - some additional negotiation pressure on Ukraine to force them into some minerals deal? Bravo, this is how things are when you give too much power to a bipolar narcissistic person).
I am not holding my breath that US will fix half of the issues I've mentioned, although they are pressing issues now.
Also, every time I mention healthcare costs in US somebody comes and tells how its almost a fixed issue already. then I read how people give 20k or 40k for a birth, how open heart surgery costed them 60k on top of insurance, how some long term medicine is crushingly expensive. Compare it to here - 0, our 2 childbirths, wife was twice off work for 6 months, full salary kept coming. Even in most capitalistic country in Europe - Switzerland. Also I've had paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, been off work, on wheelchair, tons of MRIs, physiotherapies and so on. Cost - 0, also salary fully compensated by mandatory employer's insurance.
Where jdv comes from and his background is irrelevant, he is ass licking amoral pos and showed it to whole world live numerous times. If he represents half of US population, well then the division is just naturally following discord between our continents, cultures and philosophies.
I’m aware, this is the best inception I’ve ever seen because Europeans are acting like its their own idea because they're scared of the US / Russia now
and not that the people in the current US administration have been demanding Europe to do this for 8 years straight.
less talking, and just scare people into action. Same result, at the expense of some relationships that wore out its welcome. and everyone investing into their local economies.
sidenote: I like Switzerland. Way to go guys.
Nobody is forcing US to field the largest army in the world. It is their own choice. We all would much rather if they didn't have such an incentive to arbitrarily start wars just to justify their defense budget.
BTW, if US is such a mighty nation as they advertise themselves, they should have no problem providing safety net for their citizens. The problem is that they just don't want to do that. They don't care about their citizens. All administrations just want to avoid taxing the rich and shift the blame to made up external enemies.
US has been destroying Middle East for decades. Where do you thing that migrants from those regions run to?
Wars in Middle East are not something that EU needs or wants. We just went with it because of all the "we are allies and we respect each other" lies that were used by US administrations to swindle EU and get what they want.
Or do you propose that US pays for the costs of immigration problems around the world?
It is obvious that only reason US doesn't have safety net for their own citizens is US.
It will be interesting to see how long EU support for Israel will last without the pressure from US.
As for America starting wars in the region, if you think America started the wars Russia has waged and is waging against Georgia and Ukraine, you've been huffing Kremlin retard gas. You lot have a problem on your border, America didn't make it and its not America's responsibility to fix it. Maybe the American people would be more eager about helping Europe if Europeans didn't take every opportunity they could to gloat about how they're better than America, how Americans are stupid to spend so much on the military. Doesn't matter now though, the damage is done. Take care of yourselves.
Russian thing is all EU fault. Glut for cheap oil made putin think he has a big bargaining chip against EU and that this will all be a simple task.
I don't know what propaganda media you get your information from, but people of Europe are not gloating or thinking you are stupid. I work for a company that has US offices (as many Europeans do) and we work very well together. We travel a lot between countries and work face to face and there have never been any problems.
I think this is a mixed bag, but also I think the perception is there. There is a lot of "Scandinavia does this perfectly" talk that creates the perception in the US, even if perhaps no one in Scandinavia is the least bit bothered either way!
If you think this is the only problem that Europe has at the moment, we most likely do not live in the same Europe. Europe has an energy crisis, a demographic crisis, a budget crisis, a housing crisis and an illegal immigration crisis.
> We already started across most Europe, to the tune of half a trillion of additional spending just now. Most of that money will come back to our economies, so expect EURO value to rise.
Sure, let's just keep adding to the debt of the EU countries who most of them are already broke. I bet our children and grand-children will thank us for spending their money to buy weapons so that we can defend ourselves against an hypothetical war again Russia. Russia who by the way has trouble holding on to a 5th of Ukraine but who somehow miraculously will have it's tanks roll around Paris and Berlin in just a few years if we believe out dear European leaders.
> Compare it to here - 0, our 2 childbirths, wife was twice off work for 6 months, full salary kept coming. Even in most capitalistic country in Europe - Switzerland. Also I've had paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, been off work, on wheelchair, tons of MRIs, physiotherapies and so on. Cost - 0, also salary fully compensated by mandatory employer's insurance.
The fact that you think all of this costs 0 tells me all I need to know. There is nothing free in this world. If you are not paying then someone else is. Usually it's done through taxes which are paid by companies and people.
When people talk about universal/socialized healthcare as free healthcare, they simply sweep under the rug the real cost of healthcare. And when the economy is doing poorly and companies are leaving, most of the cost will be shouldered increasingly by the middle class who will start wondering why they should be the only ones paying for all this.
The fact of the matter is that even France which ranks second as the most taxed country on the planet, had a 6% budget deficit last year. But it's got "free" healthcare so it's all good.
EU supported US war on terror, or whatever you call last 25 years of US invasions, with our own troops and what did we get out of that? Immigration crisis. We basically had to spend huge amounts of money on handling immigrants because of all the wars US (our so called ally) started.
Also, EU banks invested a lot of money in US scam financial institutions and our saving got wiped out in 2008. All of that money dissapeared in US economy.
US doesn't charge you for services by issuing an itemized bill, but instead they suck it out through different venues. Like a leach. I guess you can easily ignore things like that if it doesn't fit your narrative.
You are at the same time complaining that the EU is too dependent on US and that it doesn't pay its' share. The main problem with dependence is that you don't develop your own industry and instead you rely on imports and send money to other countries for services. So how can EU at the same time be both dependent on US and not sending money to US? That doesn't make any sense.
Citizens of EU have been complaining about reliance on US to our governments for years, but our bureaucrats ignored it and kept sending money over seas because it was the easiest thing to do. Current US administration has finally shown that this dependence is dangerous, and now hopefully instead of sending money to US they will divert it into EU economy.
Europe 2025: Fuck the US.
This definitely isn't true. American healthcare has vast amounts of public funding of it. It's the mixture of private companies working within a Byzantine regulatory framework (or multiple frameworks) that's causing the issues.
The US health system is excessively regulated. It’s anything but unrestricted capitalism. I would argue that the regulation is what makes the system so broken.
Isn't America spending the most per capita on healthcare in the world with horrible outcomes (life expectancy 4 years behind poor countries like Portugal)? Aren't there public healthcare systems outside of Europe?
Doesn't America have an insane amount of natural resources and the benefit of controlling world's exchange currency to make up for any additional defence (and offence) expenses?
Seems to me a like story to help cope with a subconscious inferiority complex.
Demographics has a big impact on life expectancies. Asian Americans have a life expectancy of 84 years for instance. Which is better than Portugal by 3 years. Comparing life expectancies on a per country basis is fraught with error if attempting to attribute differences to health systems. Genetics, climate, diet — all have huge impacts on life expectancy.
Puerto Rico has a life expectancy of over 82 years and has the same system as the U.S. It’s a year higher than Cuba in fact. Why does Puerto Rico do better than Cuba when the Cuban system is often claimed to have a better health system? Puerto Rico also has a higher life expectancy than Portugal.
Where are you getting that figure from? I’m seeing 79 years, which is still higher than I would have guessed, but not higher than Portugal at 81.
Yes. The EU's defence is a political unity issue. Not a spending one. It needs a unified foreign policy where that makes sense and the like. Not countries receiving preferential gas pricing and pusyfooting when it comes to giving arms to Ukraine or the like. It's greatest single threat is russia. One may think they spend a far greater share on it's military and so Europe should too. But it's economy is smaller than Italy's and it has no capacity to fight the block.
Europe might need more spending to launch major military adventures on the other side of the globe, which is what the US does quite a bit and why we "need" so much military spending, but for defense? LOL, no. Adjustments in procurement strategies, maybe a little more spending, given the US can no longer be regarded as a solidly reliable supplier and so Europe's going to have to de-globalize some of its military supply chain, but... lots more spending? Why???
https://kyivindependent.com/europe-could-face-russian-occupa...
When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better.
The established process for making plutonium fuel is to grind uranium oxide together with plutonium oxide in a high energy ball mill, then pack the powder into pellets, sinter them, and then have somebody stick the pellets into a fuel rod with gloves. The process creates Pu nanoparticles, once of which could give you lung cancer if it gets deep into your lungs.
In the factory Karen Silkwood worked at they couldn't control the dust to the extent that people could work without wearing respirators. The factory successfully made fuel for the Fast Flux Test Facility but being forced to wear respirators was a "normalization of deviance" that regulators would not grant to subsequent MOX (mixed-oxide) facilities in the US. In France on the other hand, wearing respirators was seen as just fine.
It was a difficult problem to determine the occupational hazard at that kind of factory, confused by the "Healthy Worker" effect such that people who work in almost any job are healthier than the average population. Circa 2015 the evidence was clear that MOX workers really do get lung cancer, I think it's no coincidence that the US shuttered a planned MOX factory around this time.
> When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better.
First off, US food labels aren't nearly as strict as most people think. There are a number of exceptions and cases where things simply don't have to be listed, and in others the label can outright lie. Tic tacs somewhat famously are listed as having "zero calories." They do not. But because tictac says the serving size is one and it has below a certain number of calories, they're allowed to round down to zero. But there are also allowances for simply not listing ingredients.
Another example is that US food manufacturers were required to label if a product contained allergens, but the whole thing has been watered down because they lobbied for an additional rule, which was that they could just slap a warning that a product might contain allergens and not have to test for allergens at all. Similar to CA' widely mocked Prop 65 labels. The reason those labels are worthless is because the industry lobbied to be allowed to just slap the label on everything and not have to test their products for toxic materials.
Speaking as someone who lives in the US: US food labels contain more because there's far more allowed to go into the product, because corps have said "let the market decide, if they don't want RED40 in their food they won't buy it." The industry also incessantly fights the FDA on what's considered toxic, and even if it is, trolls over "well there's only a very tiny bit of it, so you have to prove it'll ACTUALLY have an effect on people" which of course is very difficult if the risk is statistically small and there's a million other things that can be the same or greater risk.
In the EU, toxic crap for the most part isn't allowed in the food period, so there's less need to be so strict about what does or doesn't go into a food label, because EU consumers don't have to both educate themselves in what's toxic and check a label to see if it's got something that is toxic in it.
EU regulators seem less bothered by psychiatric medicines that have serious side effects (agranulocytosis) or might make you have your liver enzymes checked periodically. What you find is that EU regulators permit things that US regulators won't accept and vice versa.
The typical US prisoner 1) did their crime; 2) did many other crimes besides the one they're in prison for; 3) is very likely to commit additional crimes upon their release.
Small, homogenous European countries have absolutely no idea how to solve our crime problem and their criticisms reflect an irritating combination of ignorance and arrogance.
We can just observe the society you have and wonder how you can simultaneously not take responsibility for your outcomes, and bash others who make different choices and have better outcomes.
From your post it sounds like you feel that you do know better, and the only issue you’re having isn’t your policy, but your “lack of homogeneity”, which makes it impossible to improve anything.
i can tell you being physically strong comes with it violence and is at the fabric of being an American. so i’d say the issue is complicated and nuanced as is most.
breaking the law (through violence) is also American. we stand up for what we believe in. even if it means breaking the law and going against our government. this is America.
the fact that you have better outcomes for crime is great. how’s your investment system? how’s your sports teams? how’s your military? how’s your stock market? how’s your currency?
In general life in Europe is pretty good and could be better, thanks for asking. We can invest, we watch different sports than you do and we don't have a comparable military. The stock market is fine, the currency is fine.
I guess the social media campaign is addressed at those of you, who would like less crime, and who would like rule of law, and less aggression, and a safer lifesytle. To lie to them and tell them that having these things leads to downfall or something.
and i did also say it was complicated and nuanced so please do not ignore that detail of my comment.
i’m glad to hear life is good, and to hear you’re humble enough to acknowledge it could be better. it could be better over here, too. are we doing it right or are you? i have no idea. :)
we’re probably both doing things right and wrong. should it even be solved? are we just living a Memento (great movie) like existence where we’re keeping ourselves busy and at war because if we all got along we would over-populate the planet and destroy earth?
what if our ignorant violent human behavior is actually an environmental mitigation technique?
Obviously in Europe there will be more variety because there’s more cultures and independent countries.
We have the advantage that we can take good ideas from each other, because people can travel easily and observe that certain things work well.
The US doesn’t have this benefit, since it’s so inward oriented. That’s fine, but don’t go saying Europeans don’t have freedom if you can only look at Europe through the domestic lens.
True, but, interestingly, we can travel thousands of miles within the United States and in so doing observe that different US states have wildly different outcomes while living under the same federal government and very similar state governments.
Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Minnesota live under the same Constitution, the same federal government, and with very similar state governments -- and yet we see that they have very different outcomes on a variety of measures.
Norway and Louisiana have very different crime rates, but so do New Hampshire and Louisiana. This tells us, at a minimum, that the form of government isn't likely to be the primary factor.
That's correct. We should have a lot more people in prison than we do. We are far too soft on repeat offenders and we've allowed courts to deem unconstitutional practices that literally nobody at the founding would have thought were questionable.
When you talk to people about "mass incarceration" in the abstract, they think it's bad. But when you show them what the modal prisoner and the modal prison sentence is actually like, they think it's too soft. Opposition to "tough on crime" policies is based on the myth (the lie?) that most US prisoners are innocent or, if not innocent, guilty only of harmless crimes like drug possession -- that the system is racist and unfair.
But that's not what the data show.
What the data show -- again -- is that the modal prisoner did the crime, and many others besides, and that they are very likely to commit more crimes once released.
Criminal justice is not a mysterious science. You identify repeat offenders and then you execute or otherwise permanently incapacitate them. This works because a large share of all crime is committed by repeat offenders.
But of course that's probably not what you mean when you say that our solution to crime isn't working well.
(Reduced sentencing loads mean you can raise standards for court-appointed counsel, possibly ban plea deals, et cetera.)
The US, in fact, has a comprehensive federal and civil and criminal prohibition applicable to such behavior (the prohibition on deprivation of rights under color of law and conspiracy against rights), but the criminal prohibition is consistently inadequately enforced, and the civil prohibiition has been neutered by applying qualified immunity against it, which arguably is inconsistent with the letter of the statute.
I think one thing that is needed is a "viral" kind of law that criminalizes essentially all attempts to perpetuate, conceal, aid or abet the underlying malfeasance. So that if you can get some people wedged in who do want to do the right thing, they can bring the whole house crashing down by convicting the whole network of corrupt officials.
Ultimately you're right though that there does need to be some cooperation from "inside the system". The question is just what can we do do lower that threshold.
The only checks on any part of the justice system are from within the justice system itself, and its pretty hard to get those people to voluntarily cut their own pay, staff, benefits, and control in the name of justice, especially when it would most likely just get them fired and blacklisted. There are very little checks against what they do, and the people who have been involved with the courts and know how it works either benefit personally from it, or are considered a no-good criminal who's word is given zero heed. In most places if you get a felony you even lose your right to vote.
Source? This is certainly untrue for elected judges and DAs, so we’d expect to see a difference if that were the reason. Instead we see elected judges and DAs running on tough on crime pitches due to voter preferences. Not funding concerns.
Through someone in jail unnecessarily for a felony, and now you've taken a productive person and made them negatively productive (in jail) and destroyed most of their productivity when they return (nobody will hire or train them for anything valuable). Now their dependants, such as kids, also lack resources. Family lose not only their futures, but homes, health care, education, ....
Obviously prison is necessary in some cases, but other countries have low crime rates with far less incarceration.
I would willingly donate to their cause.
However, mass violation of the constitutional rights of citizens seems to me the venue for a class action?
Everyone has a right to a trial by jury in theory, but if you waste the prosecutor's time by exercising it it might just ruin your life.
People repeat this anecdote all the time, but I'd challenge you to find a single person who has ever been put on the sex offender registry for nothing more than public urination. (Let alone being charged with sexual assault, which is nonsensical -- look up how that crime is defined in US law.)
Cases this small probably don't get articles written about them often. That's why we have the phrase "falling through the cracks"
As someone whose main knowledge of the US prison system is only from TV and not from first person (thankfully), I think I don't understand what "solitary" is. I thought the whole point of it was that the detained person didn't have contact with others?
[] e.g., he was driving across country and stopped for a couple of days at a friend's house in Illinois. He was in a traffic stop and while talking to the cop, the cop realized he'd been in Illinois for over 72 hours and was given another prison sentence for failing to register.
https://www.nacdl.org/Media/TrialPenaltyScourgeofAmericanCri...
So if you are in the know a bit of drunk driving is a 2k fine. If not, you loose your drivers license and likely your livelihood.
The reason is that a moving violation fucks up your insurance rates and costs a ton of money over time, so it ends up being in everyone's interest to pay a lawyer (takes a cut of what would have been paid in higher insurance rates) to ask their colleague's golfing buddy ("hey, Jim says your short game's getting better!") to accept a plea (less work, hooray!) for a non-moving violation that, gee, would you look at that, just happens to have a fine double what the speeding ticket would have (another cut of the would-have-been-higher-insurance-rates goes here) so sure, the city government and courts are perfectly happy with that arrangement.
source: thousands of hours observing criminal courts
I knew a guy who if you were not a death penalty case you got the joke, and if you were a death penalty case you got the all out work his ass off to save you. He took a lot of death penalty cases.
I've written about this here before, but I've been involved in two civil lawsuits in my life. One was in the USA, the other was in mainland China.
I should stress that I am an American, and I wasn't even in China when the lawsuit over there was moving along.
The Chinese process was very fast -- it went before a judge who reached a verdict in something like ten months -- and it was extremely inexpensive. Total fees were less than $10k. What's more, the court attained the right outcome, and I won the case. Still better, the court itself enforced the verdict, and I was able to attain the monetary damages it decided were owed me.
The US process was interminably slow. A year on, we were barely past the starting line. Two years on, and we were just at the beginning of "discovery" -- an amazingly invasive process that appears to be unique to the US legal system. At that point bills far exceeded $150,000. I realized that I was looking at spending >$1M and taking five or ten years to fight the case, and, though I was sure I would have won in the end, decided that I had to settle and get the hell out.
The US civil legal system is basically a game of financial attrition. This is why the big corporations seem to get away with whatever they want, whereas being dragged to court can be life-ruining for smaller entities and persons.
I don't know how things are in Europe, and hope I never have to find out, but the Chinese civil system is truly something like 20x better than the US system. (>10x cheaper, >2-5x faster.)
It’s a part of most common law legal systems.
In Sweden at least this level of insanity is only heard about as anecdotes online...
It's still a much saner jurisdiction in many respects, especially for physical persons. You might get marginally nicer judgements in commercial law in certain US states, though I'd personally prefer both swedish law and swedish arbitration due to a combination of lower costs and the average quality of commercial law here. The Stockholm Chamber of Commerce arbitration institute is actually rather popular among international corporations for roughly these reasons.
This is common in almost all legal systems. How else would the defendant get to examine the evidence against them and how else would you provide evidence if there was no discovery process?
Its hard to imagine there would be a legal system without it.
If you're the plaintiff and you have evidence that supports your version of events, you give it all to the court. If you're the defendant and you have exculpatory evidence, or anything that shows that the case is frivolous, you give it all to the court. The judge can then ask for more evidence, or utilize what's provided.
My legal team didn't need to sift through ten years of emails in order to find a few needles hidden in the haystack. The process wasn't adversarial. The parties can't use "discovery" to get trade secrets or proprietary information. And the costs were near enough to zero.
I wouldn't even say that it's a "better" system. I'd characterize US-style discovery as simply broken, and the Chinese system as something that works in a common sense way.
Yes, but what if you're the plaintiff/defendant and the other party has evidence in your favor? How do you get it before the court? That is what discovery is for.
Honestly it just sounds like you had an easy case tried in China and a hard one tried in the US and are making some really broad assertions about the two legal systems based on a small sample size.
What do you know of this evidence and how do you know about it?
> Honestly it just sounds like you had an easy case tried in China and a hard one tried in the US and are making some really broad assertions about the two legal systems based on a small sample size.
lol, no. It was actually the other way around. The US case was completely open-and-shut, whereas the Chinese case hinged on a matter of sensitive technology with military or "dual use" potential and it could have gotten ugly. I'll swear on whatever you like that I could hardly wait to get our US case in front of a US judge, but it was practically impossible. There are just so many absurd pretrial hoops to jump through. And all of them expensive.
This is but one of infinite examples of the other party having evidence helpful to the other side and harmful to themselves.
You provide the court with that information, and the judge presiding over the case can (and almost surely will, if you're correct,) ask for the logs. If they don't provide them upon request, they're hit with a adverse inference, just as they would be if they withheld documents in discovery.
It's plain common sense.
Now, it's true that "you don't know what you don't know" and that discovery can be an investigative process, but for the vast majority of cases it's totally unnecessary. And, in very many cases, discovery will actually impede access to justice. In court systems without discovery, judges tend to take on a slightly more investigative role, besides.
Exactly. The US justice system works for people with money.
It's called "discovery" for a reason. You ask for everything you think might be relevant.
Red-Team Lawyer: "Provide us with all emails from 1/1/2010 through 1/1/2020, inclusive, that include or mention [product x] or are of relevance to its research, development, production, or marketing."
Blue-Team Lawyer: "That's overly broad and many of those emails contain proprietary confidential and trade-secret information, which is protected. My client will not provide them."
Judge, intervening after objections are filed: "Counsel, under FRCP 26(b)(1), discovery must be proportional to the needs of the case. Red Team, narrow the timeframe to 2015–2020 and limit the search to emails involving R&D leads and marketing executives. Blue Team, designate confidential portions under FRCP 26(c) as 'Attorneys’ Eyes Only' and produce a privilege log for withheld items. Failure to comply may result in sanctions under FRCP 37."
Every single part of this costs money and takes time. It usually takes a judge ~1-3 months to rule on discovery disputes. Filing the dispute is non-trivial. And "designating confidential portions" can provide junior attorneys with months of work.
That's hardly even the tip of the iceberg. There are so many sneaky tactics you can use in discovery that entire books have been written about them. For instance: https://jamespublishing.com/product/guerrilla-discovery/
Whereas if both sides just provide their evidence to a judge's office which compiles them into an account, all of this cost and effort is spared.
Basically you're complaint here is about formality and paperwork. Which, fine. It sucks. But the fact that it exists is precisely what prevents someone from doing stuff like paying off the judge or just destroying evidence. I don't love it either but I sure as shit know which system I'd rather be living under.
[1] It's also actually wrong as a matter of pedantic fact: discovery requests are court filings and are made "to" the court, not the opposing counsel. But again, that's a distinction without meaning.
"Paying off the judge" is not a systems-level problem; it's the sort of thing that has been criminal for as long as man has had legal systems. You can't point to it as an example of "legal system is good" or "legal system is broken." Doesn't work that way.
It literally criminalizes it! People go to jail and lawyers get disbarred for obstruction every year. And as a result reputable firms won't even try to dance around these things. If you're an attorney and get a subpoena or discovery request, you tell your client to freeze their backups right away and send repeated emails reminding them, then print them out and file them along with the response. This is true even if it's a ridiculous request you know you'll beat. Because you know if you fuck this up you'll lose your career.
I mean... have you ever actually talked to a corporate lawyer?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_614
Rule 614. Court’s Calling or Examining a Witness
(a) Calling. The court may call a witness on its own or at a party’s request. Each party is entitled to cross-examine the witness.
(b) Examining. The court may examine a witness regardless of who calls the witness.
(c) Objections. A party may object to the court’s calling or examining a witness either at that time or at the next opportunity when the jury is not present.
Ha, well, you would say that.
You don't sue people for fun, right? It's either they did something to you and you have damages, costs, paperwork, records, CCTV footage, medical examination records, whatever, or you want them to do something based on some regulation/statute/right.
Discovery usually tries to show that so and so higher up knew about it all along, no?
This statement is false, both the German and French legal systems do not have something like discovery. To confirm for yourself just Google "is there something like discovery in the German/French legal system". Considering that many legal systems are based on these two (one could argue the German one is based on the French as well) I think we can conclude that not having discovery is in fact common.
> How else would the defendant get to examine the evidence against them and how else would you provide evidence if there was no discovery process? > > Its hard to imagine there would be a legal system without it.
Here is a link how the German system works without it. It also explains why for German legal practitioners it is a concept that violates some of the core principles of fair justice. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/german-way-discovery-just-don...
You can't just spew blanket judgements when the actual course of events depends so heavily on the specific facts. I question the intelligence of anyone who managed to have a lawsuit going on for 2yr and not come away with an understanding that specific facts matter greatly.
Federal civil court averages 33.7 months from filing to trial. Needless to say, it can be a lot busier than that in slower districts. (~43 months in the 2nd District!) And then there are appeals, etc...
Best case, we were looking at 40 months from filing to trial in the 9th District, which is statistically nominal, but the whole process would probably have taken far longer.
Current statistical table: https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/data-tables/2024/12/31/st...
I've never heard of a single 21st century US (Federal) civil case that went to trial in less than a year, to say nothing of three months. I can point to a mountain of cases that have been dragging for many years.
It was not a land or probate matter or any other matter for which there is a bespoke streamlined process. Both parties agreed on records, facts, etc.
1. The police are looking for someone. They arrest you, a second, different person.
2. They determine you are not the person they were looking for.
3. They bill you for their time.
A credit card from it was used twice at a gas station (cameras galore) that is not near anything—except it's the last gas station on the route to the local, rural-located (little other reason to be out there) Amazon distribution center. We lived in a typical dead-end shitty suburban neighborhood where nobody ever passes through who doesn't live there, except delivery drivers. It was an Amazon delivery driver who stole it, I'm not even Sherlock Holmes and I figured that out in about two minutes with one CC statement and a Maps search.
The cops took a report, didn't give a fuck about the fact that it'd almost certainly take take comically little work to catch the perp and informed us they didn't intend to even try, then... fucking charged us for a copy of the police report we needed for the CC companies.
Definitely didn't feel protected, and only "served" in the sense of "you got served!"
I can only assume resistance to the "defund the police" movement comes entirely from people who've never dealt with them. Ok, our issue was pretty minor, sure it was about the easiest damn case to investigate in all of history but they only have so many people—but I've got a half-dozen other stories like that, from employers, relatives, and friends, and they're all the same, even with much bigger-ticket and serial(!) thefts. They're completely useless, the amount I'm happy to pay them unless they significantly improve is zero dollars. That's before even factoring in their fucked-up "warrior culture", normalized rampant civil rights violations, and lots of murders. Like, putting aside the abuse, they're just goddamn useless at their supposed primary function.
Yeah, to get proper value out of a service it usually needs a little more funding, not less.
In a criminal case you aren't liable for the legal costs of the prosecution. I think you're confusing criminal court with civil court.
In most times and places, this is true. Ancient times, recent history, autocracies, democracies...
Justice is expensive.
Justice, and the legal college as an ideal often specifically negates this. Equality before the law. Blind justice, etc.
That said... justice is inevitably ridden with contradiction, hypocrisy and whatnot. That's what justice is.
Degrees vary, but the structure is usually constant.
Say you are a ceo, fund manager or whatnot. You are in dispute with your employer over $10m of compensation. Your bonus, performance-based compensation.
Now imagine that you are a normie, with a dispute over $10k.
Those to legal processes are entirely dissimilar. One will have teams of lawyers, many proceedings. Completely different aspects of justice will come into play. It's a different justice.
There's no way around this.
Thankfully most of the instances of it not being true exist right now. Let's stay grounded in current reality or just agree not to discuss the topic. Saying "welp what do you expect" is downright worse than ignoring it entirely.
It can (usually does) have nothing to do with how well the justice system works, or whether it favors those who can afford a good lawyer.
Anyway... name a country. Where's this country with just justice?
I said that it is different.
I also like that the Biblical law, from commands to its case law, is the size of a small paperback. Much of that is redundant or case specific, too. One person could learn it in a few months of study. Whereas, there's no hope of ever knowing if you're breaking some law in this country.
Oops, sorry about that.
Joshua and the other judges were chiefs. They lead armies, built alters, pronounced judgements and whatnot. Often advised by prophets.
Mosaic Law, the scrolls of the torah, dod not exist at this point. Not even according to the bible. This came later, during the time of kings.
The stuff quickly scribbled on rocks by The Almighty so that Rabbi Moses could go deal with that whole mess down below... it's sparse. It's got a list of things god likes to eat. A recipe you are not allowed to make.
It doesn't even tell you what to do when a Midian Schiester sells you a faulty woman. Not one word on right to representation, if you can believe it.
American' legal system is based on a mostly illiterate culture's legal tradition, form the black sea. It's very good at dealing with disputes involving fish, pillage and private property.
Also... who ya'callin godless. Get your own god. You can go back to Thor if you don't like what you got here.
Nitpick: Process is expensive. Process does not yield justice by itself. It (assuming it's crafted right) just makes the outcomes more consistent.
While I agree, and it's an important distinction, I think it's probably true conversely that the chances of justice for the average person are increased by the imposition of "good" due process.
The weasel word "good" there means that I can disagree with any specific instance, but I mean to say that I don't think process is inherently bad. Bureaucracy is definitely a bane of most of our lives, but the obvious alternative, a greased-wheels process where somebody makes decisions quickly and without significant accountability, is great only if the decision maker is on your side, and terrible otherwise.
I don't think that is necessarily true. But the system favors the rich and powerful, and that has been true of legal systems throughout history, which means that those with the capacity to make the system more fair are incentivized to maintain the status quo, or at least not change it too much.
Often true... but networks of incentives are subtle in how they build up. It's rarely just macro, societal-level incentives.
Anyway... one major aspect is that lawyers do law for a living. It's an industry. An industry that thrives, and has thrived since at least antiquity, by representing the interests of well paying clients.
Besides that... formal truth is expensive. It's expensive to have a procedurally validated scientific truth (eg drug testing). It's expensive to create a judicial truth via trial. Very expensive. That's why we do so little of it, even though judicial (and scientific) ideals demand quite a lot of it.
Most legal matters are settled by lawyers negotiating. Courts are a rubber stamp, and (usually) theoretical last resort. Most (vast majority) criminal convictions involve a confession. In Medieval Europe they would publicly torture convicts, obtain a confession and then hang them. These days, you can confess and serve 2 years in prison... or contest and serve 12.
Otherwise, courts could not handle the volume.
The problem here is high standards. People know about the ideals of justice. Expect justice to live up to these standards. IRL it never has. Not close. Justice is an institution of society that exists to solve problems. Often sticky, ugly problems. The ideals play a role, in keeping that institution balanced... but the ideals are not the balance.
The worst part of the experience for me was agreeing to pay my $150 fine. This was the amount stated by the judge. But of course when you actually go to pay, the cost if $400 because of the fees. I'd rather just pay a lawyer next time.
For a few years before Illinois did away with cash bail they had a rule you could pay your bail off $5/day by... sitting in jail. So if you sat in jail for a year you might actually save up enough credit to be able to bail out.
In Southern California a family law judge was actually censured for putting deceased people's real property on his name. He retired with full pension.
I would like to cite this, but my cell phone search engine and small screen prevent it.
Anyone here who keeps chiming in about a specific case... Please use Google... West Law and Lexis are available for free at most law libraries.
I want names, dates, case summaries, court locations, judgement summaries, contact information. For both parties.etc..etc...etc.
Horrific. This egregious human rights violation is something you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a developed nation.
The local jailers are probably doing well, though sticking it to the local rubes who support them.
bruh you have no idea. seriously. the "justice system" in the US should not be called a justice system, but a slavery and penal system:
> Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
the US also has private prisons. do you understand? e.g., there are about 1000 prisoners in california that are also firefighters getting paid $10 a day. do you think they cost $10 a day to california?
EDIT: I was possibly mistaken about this example specifically (see below) but only as of 2022-2023 (the fire fighters program has been around for much longer than 2022-2023). there are many other examples; if you've ever seen prisoners stamping license plates in a movie, the allusion is exactly to this kind of "work":
https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/national-veri...
damning pull quote:
> Two out of three people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are also workers, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) estimated in a June 2022 report.
“E.g.” is is misused here: California prison firefighters are not an example of private prisons (California does not employ private prisons.)
> do you think they cost $10 a day to california?
Well, yeah, they are state prisoners in state prisons, whos do you think is paying the $10/day to the prisoners?
[0] https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
[1] https://www.vera.org/news/the-fcc-is-capping-outrageous-pris...
https://www.thepomonan.com/news/2023/10/2/7investigative-cal...
> AB32 included exemptions which allowed private prisons to focus on other profitable "community corrections" programs, such as day reporting centers, counseling facilities, halfway houses, rehabilitation centers, medical offices, and mental health facilities. Currently, these exemptions are worth around $200 million a year. Included are locations that mimic detention facilities and are run by organizations that also run private prisons in California.
https://www.ilrc.org/biden-administration-partners-private-p...
> 09/26/2022
> Pasadena, CA - Today, an en banc 11-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that GEO could block California’s AB 32 (People not Profit, Bonta) from going into effect for the duration of the lawsuit, pending further review from District Court. AB 32 is a state law signed in 2019 which banned private prisons and private immigration detention centers in the state.
I do not know if this applies to the Conservation (Fire) Camp Program
Sadly, we have become one of the shit-hole nations Trump loves to rant about. And we (the voting public) have been 100% complicit.
Yes, but a note of hope. "The future is unevenly distributed" cuts both ways, the good and the bad. At least we know about some of the atrocities happening here, and good that we haven't been warn down and we still recognize them as such. One tip to deal with a firehose of bad news: rank it based on physical proximity. That way you won't be overwhelmed and lose perspective. "Life is suffering" as the Buddhists say. I believe that if you could empathize with even 1% of the suffering of humans this moment you would be overwhelmed. Egregious failures of the state, like in the OP's piece, must ultimately be solved by those that caused it. Our desire to swoop in and fix other people's problems needs appropriate caution. Consider the lessons of US intervention in the Somali Civil War in the 90's.
Numbers for anyone curious US gdp per capita ~$82.7k EU gdp per capita ~$41.1k
Shame.
All evidence shows the US is a failed democracy.
You would be simply insane to think that Bavaria wasn't far far wealthier than Mississippi though.
This doesn't show the limits of either the US or European ways of life but rather GDP itself as a figure. It has it's uses but that's it. Lay people are far too dependent on GDP as a meaningful indicator of wealth. Professional economists use a variety of metrics to compare and contrast different areas and systems.
“We’re rich” is not a reasonable defense against hurting people, yet it is consistently what Americans choose as their defense.
This isn't to excuse the abysmal state of affairs in large swathes of the US. Just to say that the US is rarely sufficiently uniform to summarize as a single entity, especially in topics like justice systems where States have significant sovereign power.
Doesn't surprise me that a county that has both problems this exists somewhere.
> Like most Texas county judges, he does not have a law degree.
I'm sorry, what? Anyone off the street can be a judge? That one line begs soo many questions, and at least some outrage, which is simply glossed over.
Doing my own research, I guess I see why it's glossed over, because apparently this isn't uncommon - a quick search says that only 28 states require judges presiding over misdemeanors have a law degree. In 14 of the remaining 22, you can request a new trial from a lawyer-judge if you receive a jail sentence from a non lawyer-judge.
I take it for granted, to me it's common sense, that a judge should a law degree. I mean, how can one preside over and act as arbiter in legal matters without knowing the law?
https://www.txcourts.gov/media/1454620/judge-qualifications-...
In a bench trial, the judge is both the fact finder and the law interpreter. The argument in favor of non-lawyer judges is that for misdemeanor cases the facts dominate the law, ie whom do you believe, not what's larceny or drug dealing.
Yes, and some can be very bad at their job. The goal of requiring one to pass a bar exam in order to practice law is to minimize the number of practicioners who are horribly incompetent, because of the serious damage it can do.
It seems to me that a judge who doesn't know how the law works can do even MORE severe damage.
A degree is ultimately just a piece of paper (or parchment, if they went to a fancy school). It’s not a guarantee that they’ll be any good at their job.
Would you be comfortable visiting a doctor who didn't have their "piece of paper"?
Obviously a degree is not a guarantee of skill or knowledge. No one is saying it is. However, a degree is a very strong indicator that the person is above some minimum level of knowledge.
The counterpoint of "there are shitty lawyers with degrees" is ridiculous. Remove the requirements and those same people would still be shitty lawyers -- you've just lowered the floor so that even more shitty lawyers can practice.
This is exactly what the piece of paper shows when you get it from an accredited and reputable institution.
What is your proposal? Do surgery until you stop killing people to prove that you can do them now?
Accreditation is an incredibly low bar; all it tells you is that the institution has the right number and type of courses. All a degree tells you is that the student passed some of those classes. But grades in classes do not tell you much about actual ability. And reputation just means that the school has good advertising. It’s not like you can sample a bunch of schools to find out which is actually the best.
Doctors still need to be trained before treating patients but there’s no reason we have to require them to attend so many years of school. If we use our imaginations we can probably come up with alternatives that still achieve that goal. Some of those alternatives would have fewer drawbacks than the system we use today.
For example, our existing schools have the drawback that the school itself decides whether the student was successfully educated. Just as when police departments investigate themselves after a complaint tend to determine that their officers did nothing wrong, schools that investigate themselves tend to find that their professors did all that was necessary and that their students are all perfectly educated. Accreditation was an attempt to solve that kind of problem but it is much too weak to be effective.
Notice also that schools mostly make their students pay up front before success or failure has even been determined. You wouldn’t pay a contractor up front to fix your roof because they’d be tempted to take your money and disappear. You might pay half up front if you’re feeling generous, but even that still has some risk.
https://samhenrycliff.medium.com/tarrant-county-sheriff-bill...
"[...] people regularly spend months behind bars without charges filed against them, much longer than state law allows."
In such a litigious society like the one in the USA, what stops convicts from hiring the lawyer and suing authorities, there are many lawyers who would gladly work for success fee, if indeed the law was broken and they can expect an easy win for a huge amount that people get in US courts because, say, they spilled hot coffee on their laps and it turned out the coffee is hot?
a month in jail has some concrete damage but it's still going to be harder than pointing at a medical bill, right?
For personal injuries? Absolutely. For federal civil rights violation cases? Few and far between.
- Liebeck initially only requested McDonald's cover the medical fees from going into shock and having 3rd degree burns over her lower body (including genitalia), which McDonald's refused and only offered $800.
- McDonald's had received hundreds of reports of the coffee scalding people.
- Liebeck didn't get the multi-million dollar payout because the judge reduced it 640k, trebled the compensatory damages, which is incredibly normal for punitives.
There's a Some More News episode about police car chases (TL;DW they're definitely net-harmful and should be avoided in all but the most extreme circumstances, but the public likes watching them and doesn't realize how bad they are, and police fucking love anything that gives them an excuse to Go Nuts and act like they're in an action movie, so they remain distressingly common in most states) that, as a necessary aside, also discusses how intentionally awful police stats collection is—and you'd think maybe it was just for that one issue, or SMN's researchers suck at their jobs, except you run into the exact same problem any time you look into deep reporting or research on basically any issue connected to US policing. What we have looks really bad, but also we're constantly working from (probably less-bad-looking than the median...) datasets from a few places that manage to actually collect meaningfully-complete statistics.
America's a rough place to stand out.
For the last nine years, I’ve aggressively saved money because I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I cannot buy my way out of a problem. Cynical? Absolutely, but I live in the US.
I think this is terrible, but just because I don’t like it doesn’t change the fact that this is how it is at least for now.
The reality is we are naked and pretending otherwise is a prisoners dilemma.
Personally, I blame Citizens United for doing the most damage. Because of that horrendous decision, our information space has been flooded with paid-for advocacy and sophistry of the most pernicious sort. It's like we live in an always-on disgusting court battle between two cynical, unethical lawyers willing to say or do anything to "get" the other side. There isn't sufficient reputational damage attached to this behavior, and the result is an increasingly cynical, unethical public convinced that's the only reality there is. It is utterly tragic what we have lost in so short a time.
Any day now...any day...
The progressive DAs elected a few years ago prioritized decriminalization and deincarceration, and for formerly incarcerated, movements such as 'ban the box' (prohibiting employers to require info on past inceration) and restoring voting rights have also been priorities.
There's also focus on the 13th amendment of the Constitution, which has an exception for incarcerated people to be used for forced (slave) labor.
So why isn't it used?
The answer is simple and twofold: 1. These people don't know to do that, let alone how. 2. They don't have the money to pay somebody who knows to do that.
The final, uncomfortable answer here is that most of these people are actually guilty. If they filed the writ, it would only serve to speed up the actual filing of charges. This could be seen as a good thing, but why would you take the few thousand dollars to file habeas corpus when your family is now suffering because you aren't working anymore - and because you committed the crime you aren't going to be working for some time to come. So might as well wait out the period anyway. Is it fair or good? No, its brutal calculus.
So, firstly the prisoner needs to be very legally savvy and have access to things like pencils, paper, law library etc, which is no given, especially if they are in a county jail which is usually far more restrictive than prison.
Then I believe you would have to exhaust your state habeas first before you can file federal habeas. State county courts have judges who rarely know the law and will never have seen a habeas action. So when you file it, they'll probably spend a year pushing it down the docket (especially because you're in jail) before finding some random reason to dismiss it.
You'll get more educated responses from federal court, but filing there is a little bit harder and the cases take just as long.
Habeas could easily be a multi-year, perhaps up to a decade to litigate through to disposition, especially for someone acting without a lawyer.
source: lots of experience
I have a feeling you're just tickled by someone using language you consider low-brow to express a thought that you consider high-brow. It doesn't seem that deep to me, but maybe I'm missing the fun. Can you help me understand?
I feel that there isn't enough of a focus on class issues in the US because that's what this is- a lot of the people involved are non-white democrats, and it's not an issue of improper/racist decisions per se- it's just literal incompetence and lack of care for anyone without resources to stand up for themselves.
At least in urban areas there are some (probably upperclass) people willing to work on the most egregious human rights violations in the court system.
In some town in Texas no one is around to advocate for your most basic rights.
That's how California wound up with gun control under Saint Reagan (hack ... spit).
If the democratic trifecta that has run the state for the past few decades actually cared more about civil rights than scary guns, they would repeal the law.
I lived in Western Pennsylvania during Reagan's terms of office--I assure you that my beefs with his governance are WAY more substantive than a stupid issue like gun control.
The question is, why is it important to you to try to make those powers socially outre (which is the point of using ridicule)? What do you gain?
And most importantly, cui bono? Who are you serving, intentionally or knowingly or not? I think it's probably the people with most to lose from votes and protests - those in power.
Next door to NYT in the deep blue state of Massachusetts, two men have been arrested for simple trespass even though they had valid active IDs. Cops simply took the ID and left it out of police report, and never turned it over to the DA or the defense as exculpatory evidence. All with complete impunity and re-arrested them half a dozen times again repeating the same exact way!
You'd think where gay marriage was first legalized (and has a lesbian governor), plenty lawyers would take such cases. They've had to go through six lawyers because they refused plea bargain deals so that the dirty cops would have to testify under oath. But the corrupt DA dropped each and every charge on the days of trials, to save the cops from perjury; but not until after nearly two years of fake and phony court hearings to make sure these two lose their jobs or give up their rights.
You'll never read their story on the front page of NYT or any other big corp media because it happened right at the heart of Massachusetts in Cambridge/Boston on the precious private property of an elite university.
Both men are highly educated and had no prior records which is why they've been able to fight their cases. one is a Yale/Harvard mathematician and actually worked for the Lincoln & Draper Labs where he alleges Epstein was funding the lie-detector cheating research. The other had been a research fellow with MIT Energy Initiative and was at the Media Lab when Epstein was funding them.
So judge for yourself...
I'm sure (?) they had some better angle on it than this, but I'm laughing here imagining some poor, incredibly bored researchers going "did lie detectors actually work this time, despite not working in the prior 1,000 studies we ran? Let me check... nope, sure didn't! Oh well, we'll start the next study tomorrow, I wonder what the outcome will be..."
* The overtime scandal; TLDR for years there has been a culture of falsifying overtime often in multiple excess of base salary
* A recruit was beaten to death in an alleged hazing incident
* Accepting bribes to pass CDL inspections
* Drug labs faking results, 21k convictions overturned... years later
* The Karen Read drama, which is just embarrassing regardless of who's the murderer
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...
https://www.wcvb.com/article/recent-massachusetts-state-poli...
https://www.wcvb.com/article/massachusetts-state-police-trai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_State_Police#Con...
https://howiecarrshow.com/onetime-head-of-state-police-has-a...
Needless to say MIT police officers look up to and emulate Chief DiFava:
Joseph D’Amelio had arrested a student for protesting, twice - long before Trump: https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/mitai-announce/2004-August...
but turned up to be a gangster drug dealer himself: https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/news/former-mit-police-...
Duane Keegan had also arrested two MIT student hakers and tried to cover up for his drug dealer buddy D'Amelio. He was fired and quietly rehired and is now implicated in the witness intimidation case of the two whistleblowers mentioned below: https://thetech.com/2009/05/08/keegan-v129-n25
Certainly the Massachusetts case you describe is as bad as -- probably worse than -- the Texas case described by the NYT article. But the NYT was using that specific case as an illustration; the point of the article is that this is happening REGULARLY, even to a majority of the cases in that county.
One-off failures of justice are unavoidable (because no system can be 100% perfect) but they must be aggressively stamped out to maintain the integrity of the system. System-wide failures mean that the integrity of the system is already gone.
In Massachusetts private police enjoys both the un-constitutional qualified immunity doctrine, and exemption from FOIA document requirements, even though they're in uniform, have badges, carry weapons and make arrests. That makes very difficult to litigate this racket and to get any documentary proof. https://casetext.com/case/harvard-crimson-v-president-and-fe...
NYT in particular reports all the time about injustices in blue states. Its done a string of stories on the horrific stories on Rykers Island prison. There's also been extensive coverage of prison conditions in California.