What It Was Like to Seek Asylum in Medieval England
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
> while Hebraic tradition went bigger, declaring six whole cities as places where criminals could take refuge
This is not true. The only sanctuary offered in those cities was if someone accidentally or via negligence killed someone. The relatives were not able to extract blood vengeance in those cities.
That's it. It was not for criminals. It was a way of discouraging blood vengeance, while also punishing the perpetrator.
The perpetrator would also be required to be tried in court after claiming refuge.
> These early asylums were established under the belief that the gods (or god) were inviolable, and thus their temples and holy sites shared this untouchable aspect.
Absolutely not true. If someone committed murder he could be dragged away from the holy of holies if necessary.
Example: In 1 Kings, Chapter 2, Joab flees to the tent of God and grabs the horn of the altar. He had participated in Adonijah's failed coup d'etat and killed two commanders of the Israeli army.
King Solomon doesn't even bother to drag him away from the altar before killing him.
Charlemagne also used monks and priests in something that looks like a proto-civil service role... the registry of births, deaths, sacraments (marriage, etc) could be used for taxation, sorting out property, etc.
It's an interesting book. Charlemagne comes across as very realpolitik-ish despite the outward shows of piety, and also an excellent administrator.
reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e3etn/what_were_the_rules_for_claiming_sanctuary_in_a/
... and probably many others from the same subreddit?
Durham's sanctuary knocker is pictured and mentioned briefly in http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20191/20191-h/20191-h.htm#ima... (which disagrees factually with the OP). Which seems to be based on the Rites of Durham - https://ia802205.us.archive.org/2/items/ritesofdurhambei00ca... (cf. pp 41-42).
Edit: for the lazy
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24aibx/how_hi...
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e3etn/what_w... ]
Longer than that. There was a case this year in Denver where an illegal alien was given sanctuary in a church to prevent his deportation. After nine months, a deal was worked out and he was allowed to leave without fear of deportation.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_26803443/man-facing-deport...
And of course the other big Asylum story is the recent case where a criminal was given "sanctuary" in San Francisco where he proceeded to randomly murder a tourist taking a stroll. Maybe there was reason that the practice was formally dropped in Europe centuries ago...
[edit for typo]
'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' George Santayana
What San Francisco did was refuse to comply with the ICE request to detain Lopez-Sanchez, because he didn't have a violent record and because ICE did not get an arrest warrant. In situations like this, ICE apparently does not want to go through the process of getting a warrant, preferring instead to treat local law enforcement as an extension of federal immigration enforcement.
But in the U.S.'s federal system, it is not the responsibility of local law enforcement to simply do whatever the feds them to do. The responsibility of SFPD is to the people of San Francisco, not to ICE. Obviously in this case the result was horrific, but up to this point the policy was in place because the City believed it better served the needs of the people of San Francisco, and the people apparently agreed.
There's obviously a good case to be made for local police departments to comply with ICE requests. On the other hand, I find it disturbing that ICE could simply order my local police department to detain me (a US citizen) without getting a warrant, just on their say-so. As someone with a strong respect for the U.S. federal system, I found your comparison to medieval sanctuary to be cheap and inflammatory. Hence my earlier comment.
ICE requested San Francisco to notify them when Lopez-Sanches was going to be released from jail in San Francisco so that ICE could pick him up then [1]. All San Francisco was being asked to do was make a phone call. Do you have a source for the claim that ICE asked San Francisco to detain him for them?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/us/san-francisco-murder-ca...
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-immigration-sa...
An ICE detainer is a request (not a court order) that a state or local police department detain an individual for 48 hours (excluding holidays and weekends) while ICE decides whether or not they want to take someone into custody for consideration for deportation:
https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border...
In retrospect, I probably exaggerated ICE's power wrt my local police department. Still, compliance with a detainer means an arrested citizen can be detained for up to five calendar days (48 hours + 3 day weekend) without charge, or indeed any sort of judicial review, merely on ICE's say-so.
Every time I touch on an immigration related topic on HN, I swear it is the last time, but because it is so personal to me I just simply can't resist.
OP falls into the classical logical error equating undocumented/unlawful/illegal immigrants as criminals. It is just simply impossible for certain individuals/groups to wrap their minds around the simple fact that ones immigration status does not and can not constitute a crime in and of itself. Almost everyone is aware there is civil and criminal laws, I also think everyone knows immigration law is civil in nature, but you will never stop those with a certain bias from wrongfully projecting immigration status as a criminal issue, hence the existence of terms such as "illegal immigrant" for the mere fact that is sounds closer to a criminal label...its sad really.
If you break criminal law, you are committing a crime and can be prosecuted and punished for that, on the other hand civil law is characterized as a dispute between two parties and the only crime you can then commit is to flout a court ruling on the matter, which may then progress into criminal law if it is serious enough, or may be referred back for yet more civil proceedings. However even if you do flout a court ruling, and the process becomes criminal, what you originally did remains civil, it is your subsequent conduct towards the court that can be judged as criminal.
Here's a good source regarding migration law in the US http://blog.chron.com/immigration/2008/04/being-undocumented...
"If true"...like I said there are just certain groups/individuals who can not wrap their minds around the idea immigration status is separate and distinct from criminal law. The crazy thing to me is not even where these ideas come from, I guess it just doesn't matter, but the length people go to in order to maintain their present state of thought. Just do a simple Google Search of "is immigration law civil or criminal", you don't even need to click a result, Google gives you the Answer.
>Could you point to some sources that explain the difference between "unlawful", "illegal", and "criminal" as you understand them?
Its not so much as I understand them, as their definitions in a legal context.
"Unlawful"/"illegal" are terms that may be used interchangeably and by definition indicate the violation of a law (either civil or criminal), so all criminal acts are unlawful/illegal but not all unlawful/illegal acts are criminal. For example, the Court ruled that Apple unlawfully/illegally fixed e-book prices[1], yet that is not criminal nor to we go around calling Apple an "illegal company". That is the pejorative nature of "illegal" in the immigration context, where it implies criminality...in fact is likely the reason you didn't know immigration law is civil and presumed a parallel with criminal trespass.
Source: myself, but I can point you to Black's Law Dictionary, I feel confident their definitions will be consistent with my own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchenasyl
We (Denmark) also had a case in 1991/1992 where hundreds of (criminal) rejected asylum seekers occupied a church for a long time, in full cooperation with the priest and plenty of left-wing politicians and musicians. It ended with a special law that granted them asylum -- whereupon most of them continued to inflict crimes upon the natives and so did many of their children.
https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pal%C3%A6stinenserloven
The extreme left tried to repeat the "success" in 2009 and a new batch of (criminal) rejected asylum seekers and other (criminal) foreigners who had been banned from the country. This time they didn't succeed, despite ready displays of violence from violent blackshirts ( https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifascistisk_Aktion ) and widespread support from the media.
Yes, people use the word "sanctuary" to describe the practice explained in the article, and also to describe modern U.S. localities' policies of selectively enforcing federal immigration laws. (I say "selectively" because sanctuary cities will typically hand over known criminals for deportation.) But the modern practice, based in the differing jurisdictions and legal obligations of various levels of government in the U.S. federal system, does not have a lot to do with medieval sanctuary laws. Medieval sanctuary practices, as described in the article, largely took the place of (or served as) criminal punishment, at every level of government, due to an interesting commingling of church and secular law to which there is little analog in the U.S. Sanctuary cities also, of course, only decline to enforce immigration laws, not other criminal laws as was the case in medieval England.
And while I suppose it is slightly interesting to ponder the difference, I'm not sure this slight relevance justifies injecting this flame-war inducing topic (especially in such glib terms as "a criminal was given 'sanctuary' in San Francisco where he proceeded to randomly murder a tourist taking a stroll").
The proper way to converse on HN is to address the content of the comment, not complain that it exists, like speech police. Unless the comment is clearly WAY over the line, like if it were full of racial slurs. This case is not at all like that.
These kinds of speech police comments---and there is more than just this one---are what is turning this thread into a flame war.
Only a very small part of the political specturm would interpret the comment in question as contra their political views and thus "inflammatory," and I'll leave it to implication which part that is. Hint: It's the part that is the usual culprit for wanting to restrict speech.
To your point: I think you'll find that I did primarily address the content of the comment, concluding that it drew a false comparison. My suggestion that the comment was probably more inflammatory than valuable was the conclusion of my discussion of the content. I can't quite see that you've given me the same courtesy, though.
It's exactly like one person saying "Criminals use guns to rob people" and another person saying "But police use guns, too, so they're just as bad as criminals." The proper distinction is that criminals use guns to rob, and police use guns to protect.
There is a technical name for this trick, "equivocation." It's equating things that are different in essence by referencing superficial similarities.
And you've added a helping of sarcasm on top of that, which is never germane to making a rational argument.
> I can't quite see that you've given me the same courtesy, though.
If I'm standing up for someone who is being "attacked" (for lack of a better term), I can't exactly be courteous to the attacker in the sense you are asking, which is "not disagreeing." Which is not the normal sense of the word "courteous." In the normal sense of "courteous," I have been courteous. The post I made doesn't even reference you personally. This is another equivocation on your part---equating actual courtesy and "not getting called out."
Now, I'm going to end this conversation before someone who actually "works at" HN has to come along and ask us to stop. I hope somebody has learned something about equivocation from this comment, which is my intention. Otherwise it would be pointless and I would not post it.
But there was also a point buried in there: I think it is clearly not contrary to the ideals of free/open speech to also hold the view that not every comment is productive or welcome in the context of every conversation given the prevailing community norms. This is why it is typically considered rude to bring up religion, politics, or sex at a dinner party, to take just one example.
What is going on here is merely that you think that comments suggesting that other comments are a bit out of bounds are themselves out of bounds. Clearly, therefore, we both believe that a conversation ought to have some subject matter limits, so I don't think its fair to suggest that I am somehow anti speech, while you are just here to defend others' rights. We just disagree about what the proper limits of an HN discussion are, nothing more.
After all, my original comment was itself speech, speech that, apparently, you would oppose.
Those who wish to censor, can on HN discussions.
You mean assholes, insecure in their convictions?
I don't know that liberals are any more guilty of wanting to restrict speech than anyone else. I do know that, whenever liberals raise issues of free speech, an awful lot of politically-conservative trolls (on this very board! posting in this very thread!) like to come out of the woodwork and bleat on about how free speech was not violated, after all, since Congress passed no law about it, which is all the 1st amendment to the US constitution mentions. As though any violation of free speech requires a literal act of Congress.
So no, despite your hint I'm not totally clear on which part of the political spectrum you're referring to.
The Denver church instance bears a very strong resemblance to the mediæval practice, as did the time when the Vatican gave sanctuary to Manuel Noriega.
The more people we are, the greater the chances that the web remains usable without JavaScript.
Until now most content-heavy sites (like most university sites) are not problematic for the most part (1). Which I suppose is why there's no complaining till now. By having a healthy community of users with JS disabled, hopefully there will be enough complaints when it gets worse.
(1) the static parts, which is most URLs used during the day. If I encounter a site that requires JS to log in, I'll open a separate browser with JS. If I encounter a page that only shows the content with JS, I just close it unread, unless in the very rare case that it's important to me (most important content is still not relying on JS).
I think the idea that you need Javascript to drive a page designed to show an article consisting of text and images is probably worth questioning. Maybe you do, I don't know. But I think you should at least think about instead of falling back on the idea that the web is Javascript-driven.
You (probably) won't be benefiting the people without Javascript because hopefully your page works for them anyway. (Astoundingly, some simple article-type pages do not.) You will be benefiting yourself and almost all users because, without JS, your site will load faster and (often as not on really JS-heavy websites) scroll faster.
If you're creating a webapp, sure, you'd be crazy not to use Javascript.
But it's insane that Internet comment threads or text-based articles can drive yy i7 to 100% usage.
S = 'N';
s = s + 'o';
s = s + ',';
s = s + ' ';
s = s + 'n';
s = s + 'o';
s = s + ' ';
s = s + 'i';
s = s + 't';
s = s + ''';
s = s + 's';
s = s + ' ';
s = s + 'r';
s = s + 'e';
s = s + 'a';
s = s + 'l';
s = s + 'l';
s = s + 'y';
s = s + ' ';
s = s + 'n';
s = s + 'o';
s = s + 't';
s = s + '.';
$("comment_field").innerText = sIf you want static documents, I recommend pdfs?
Which of course aren't viewable in a terminal.
The Web is about the interchange of documents, and documents are text.
That's a silly criteria.
Books on art, magazines, maps, etc. are all definitely documents and aren't view-able in a terminal.
The web was never about interchange of documents, where'd you dream up that fantasy?
I'm kind of surprised how dense the ret-con fantasies here are about the web considering this is a pretty technical forum.
> The web was never about interchange of documents
See also http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/, your perception of what is and isn't viewable in a terminal, and what should be, is strange for somebody who claims to know the web's history.
The Web has literally never been about VT100 text document displays. I'm not sure why this is hard to understand. That was gopher.
I'm really serious. I swear you young people sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
Here, email him yourself and ask away timbl [ a t ] w3.org
Hypertext links was simply the first step, but those existed for us for years before the web: gopher, specialty systems, etc.
A desire to move beyond those systems was part of what made the web work, and the first step was moving the web to graphical systems capable of displaying more than formatted fixed-width text on a VT100 terminal like some of the parents above think it was about. That's what gopher was for, that's not what the web was for.
It's both important and unimportant about what the web originally was, because just like I said earlier, the web is about documents as much as cars are about horses. The web has had javascript longer than the web only supported text and links. Think about that.
No it wasn't. The goal was to get documents that could be read by users no matter what software or computer they were using.
In this thread we're talking about a text document with some images. Javascript contributes nothing to the content. All Javascript is used for in this example is to put a fucking huge ad over the content before the content has loaded, and add some social media widgets. These detract from the content, and make the page harder to use.
again, where is this notion coming from? even if we scope to just text and no images, we already broken on this idea once we move beyond non-latin scripts and unicode.
But that's not the web, the web is not intended for lynx, it's intended for a browser, and all the foibles that browsers bring along with them.
Go rethink your position a bit, because maybe I'm old, but I remember the way the internet worked before the web and after the web, and "displaying documents suitable for a vt100 terminal" was not what the web was ever about.
From W3C and the like. I dunno, they built WWW, I guess they have some idea what their intentions were.
> even if we scope to just text and no images, we already broken on this idea once we move beyond non-latin scripts and unicode.
Just so we're clear about what my claims are: you don't need javascript for a simple text article with a few images. The submitted article is a simple text article, with a few images. Javascript is used only to make the experience worse.
You're wrong about images and about unicode - neither of those need javascript. I don't know why you mention vt100 terminals (why so redundant?) - that's not a point I'm making.
But since you brought it up a web dev has to be some kind of clueless cunt if they can't display a bit of text with image placeholders on a text mode display.
technical documentation includes information that can't be displayed on VT100 terminals and pretending like that's all the web is is clearly and obviously incorrect
I've started adding same to my default stylesheet as block elements.
This covers a lot of sins:
[class*="modal"], [class*="popup"], [class*="overlay"],
[class*="interstitial"], [class*="social"], [class*="cookie"],
[class*="flyout"], [class*="colorbox"], [class*="Modal"],
[class*="Popup"], [class*="Overlay"], [class*="Interstitial"],
[class*="Social"], [class*="Cookie"], [class*="Flyout"],
[class*="Colorbox"], [id*="modal"], [id*="popup"], [id*="overlay"],
[id*="interstitial"], [id*="social"], [id*="cookie"],
[id*="flyout"], [id*="colorbox"], [id*="Modal"], [id*="Popup"],
[id*="Overlay"], [id*="Interstitial"], [id*="Social"],
[id*="Cookie"], [id*="Flyout"], [id*="Colorbox"] {
display: none;
}
Why on earth is anyone going to sign up for your mailing list when at this point, they haven't yet had a chance to read anything on your site?
If you must insist on a sign up box, put it at the end of the article (and preferably after the article, not hiding the text).