Pretty sure the police aren't enacting the laws they are obligated to enforce, the government is the ones doing that.
That is a very good point. The evidence is right there literally in black and white.
And they can easily get there conviction rates up, which probably matters.
How far do they go? Will they subpeona twitter if you have pseudonym and track down your ip address? How about tor and vpn, will they actually go thru four letter agencies to track you down?
Second: You are responsible for your actions, even if you're just following orders.
Are you arguing that the fault for being on the wrong side of the powerful lies with the people who could have just decided not to be on the wrong side of the powerful?
We're discussing here laws where someone, whether the police or some other authority figure, is going to be deciding whether you're subject to them based not on plain and objective facts, but on subjective criteria - which inevitably, and unaccountably, will include your other activities. They're designed to offer a fig leaf so that you can be prosecuted for something whose punishment is comparatively palatable, without having to acknowledge the actual cause for offense.
Of course one can argue whether any particular law falls in this category, but I think it's difficult to argue that the designed consequences of such laws are the fault of the person subject to them.
No.
I saying that people are responsible for their actions.
In western society (democratic) laws are implemented by people put in a position of authority by the very people those laws apply to.
I'm not really sure I understand the rest of what you're talking about, so I do t want to assume anything, but it sounds like you're after perfects laws no one can misinterprete? I don't think that's possible. Bug free software will likely come first.
Either way the conversation about power and who has it and who doesn't doesn't strike me as helpful.
> In western society (democratic) laws are implemented by people put in a position of authority by the very people those laws apply to.
Right (although I think that the latter sentence is, first, not limited to western societies, and, second, not ubiquitous in them), but the issue here is not whether people should escape consequences for actions that have been democratically deemed unacceptable (through direct democracy, or through people electing representatives who make the relevant laws). Rather it is, I think, the danger of using the cover of one action, that people have democratically agreed is unacceptable but that the makers or enforcers of law are not actually seeking to curtail, to regulate another action, that has not been democratically agreed to be unacceptable, and might actually be professed to be allowed or desirable while being indirectly and sometimes covertly suppressed.
> Either way the conversation about power and who has it and who doesn't doesn't strike me as helpful.
No matter what your philosophy of society and the role of law, it strikes me as hard to have such a philosophy that is of any use in actually helping to govern a society without paying attention to power, who has it, and who doesn't.
Power balances or plays in any society are inevitable. I just don't see it as relevant in this scenario. Certainly it's fashionable today to demonstrate how hard done by you are but in this context the people affected in the article are certainly inconvenienced by police at their door but hardly any of them that I can see were powerless and suffered because if it. Everyone can have their day in court. It's the courts that decide whether you're guilty, whether the police were over reaching; case law is full of such things.
One San Francisco flavor of this to get charged for bribing officials to do their jobs.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/three-construction-plan...
Over here we've seen this with various jurisdictions decriminalizing marijuana and other drugs by simply not policing it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66462895
No muddling of the law here, just pure police overreach.
Either way tit for tat examples help nothing.
Fact is, police are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Plus it's good to just blame them for things they aren't in control of.
But as they chose not to arrest her, this shields every other woman who might want to say similar. The argument being: if JKR can say a man is a man with impunity, then why can't anyone else?
So her making these statements of truth was a win either way. But being able to mount a solid defence in court, if needed, was essential to this strategy working.
The people who wanted JK Rowling arrested knew her views and comments are legal. If the police arrested her and she won in court, that would set a precedent and invalidate any attempt to use that legislation to prosecute people with similar views, which activists were hoping to use it for.
But also, her not getting arrested does the same.
So she was in a win-win position.
But yes I get and agree with your point. And it also highlights an important aspect often ignored in all this. The courts decide a person's guilt irrespective of police action, case law builds up around laws that are broad and easy to misinterprete.
JK Rowling, CH OBE FRSL is an author whose corpus of speech is mainly her novel-writing. Now how did nine letters come to be placed after her name, even as she shortened her first two initials? Because her writing (speech) has been in exemplary service and support of the Crown and the British Empire.
So why would police arrest JK Rowling for pushing back against one wedge-issue in the culture war?
The 70-year-old Guy being arrested outside the abortion clinic for holding a rosary and praying, is that the singular offence he committed? Possession of a phoenix feather? Did he rescue Tom Marvolo Riddle's mother? I don't know. Neither do you.