71–80 of 90 posts
Once they've criminalized being a common person, then the government can exercise discretion and selection to eliminate people they does not like, for any reason.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only p…
One thousand upvotes. The criminalization of everyday life (of which licensing/regulation/registration/TSA searches are a key part) goes hand in hand with fewer actions against actual criminals like those involved in the recent spate of "flash mob" attacks. We've seen this before. In the Soviet Gulag depicted in "The Way Back", one of the leads questions why the guards have given so much authority to the Russian mafi…
I don't get it: Arresting/picking up black teenagers in a large city simply because of their skin color would be racist, would it not? Isn't that exactly what the policeman is saying?
Your belief that targeting black teenagers in general would of course lead to the arrest of the specific (unidentified) perpetrators doesn't sound all that likely to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a free society, everything is permissible unless it is forbidden. In a non-free society, everything is forbidden unless it is permitted. When the laws are so numerous and complicated that the ordinary person does not know what is forbidden, a free society feels and functions like an un-free society. A society under law means that people cannot be prosecuted by the whim of the authority, but only according to objec…
Can you think of any examples of real-world "free" societies like the ones you describe? I can't.
The problem is, the law is accountable to the government, not the other way round.
I guess you could create a hybrid system, in which higher courts shape the morass of law and precedent into simple explicit codes for the citizenry and lower courts to follow. That might give you the best of both worlds, but it might have its own problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thousand upvotes. The criminalization of everyday life (of which licensing/regulation/registration/TSA searches are a key part) goes hand in hand with fewer actions against actual criminals like those involved in the recent spate of "flash mob" attacks. We've seen this before. In the Soviet Gulag depicted in "The Way Back", one of the leads questions why the guards have given so much authority to the Russian mafi…
> Same thing in today's USA. The mob of teens who broke Emily Guendelsberger's leg could not be arrested because the policemen were afraid of charges of racism. I don't get it: Arresting/picking up black teenagers in a large city simply because of their skin color would be racist, would it not? Isn't that exactly what the policeman is saying? Your belief that targeting black teenagers in general would of course lead…
Easier to punish the guy digging up arrowheads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find that to be the most plausible mechanism for the proliferation of laws at all. More likely, it's an emergent property of the legal system in a democratic context that can probably be explained in terms of game theory. At any legislative junction, there's a cost or benefit associated with enacting or not enacting a law. Take the arrowhead removal example from the article. You're a lawmaker and you're faced…
Reducing laws means reducing the bureaucracy supporting their enforcement. This is a powerful counter-incentive. This would never be discussed in public, but will induce lots of rationalizations. Example: When Prohibition of alcohol ended, the regulating agency faced serious reductions in staff. Funny, severe restrictions on firearms (NFA) were enacted right about the same time - and guess which body was assigned ove…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find that to be the most plausible mechanism for the proliferation of laws at all. More likely, it's an emergent property of the legal system in a democratic context that can probably be explained in terms of game theory. At any legislative junction, there's a cost or benefit associated with enacting or not enacting a law. Take the arrowhead removal example from the article. You're a lawmaker and you're faced…
I think it's a perfectly apposite quote. No, the proliferation of laws is not there as the result of an evil conspiracy to make everyone guilty of something. But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects. Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something. If the police want to arrest you, th…
I'd say that by postulating an evil conspiracy that does things for the sake of harmful side effects, you are obscuring the mechanism that produces the harmful side effects in the real world. People have a tendency anyway to see agents that execute plans instead of faceless systems that happen to produce certain effects.
Of course, evil conspiracies might still make for good fiction, but stories like that usually don't do as well at offering insights as they could, because a large portion of readers will be misled into thinking there really is a conspiracy.
Is this Hacker News? I suppose it might be tied to our theme by the story of the inventor. I think it's a shame that the US federal government has ballooned the way it has, and I believe it's a slap in the face of the Constitution. Discarding the concept of mens rea while maintaining more than 250,000 pages of regulation is malicious, and anyone supporting this movement is not someone who should be in political power…
What I don't understand (as a non-US-citizen, mind you) is how the fact that these are federal laws is relevant at all. It sounds to me like the problem is the number of obscure laws, the vagueness of the offenses, and the lack of mens rea requirement. Surely it would be just as bad if these were state laws (for the citizens of that state, anyway)? Or are there for some reason no state laws of that kind? If so, what…
To give an example, in Florida, one is guilty of a felony for having sex with a person under 18 (if the older person is 24 or older) no matter how reasonable it might have been to believe the person was of legal age. A forged driver's licence that would fool the DMV and get the bartender off is no defense here; it's a strict liability crime.
I would favor a Constitutional amendment blocking the enforcement of any criminal law that did not include a culpable mental state for every element of the crime. To implement such a change without crippling the legal system, it could make the default mental state criminal negligence if none is given.
People complain about activist judges but I think a bigger problem is activist prosecuters who look to stretch the law to include targets that were not intended by the law. The biggest example of this that I can think of is the anti-hacking laws that are being made to charge people of simply using a web browser.
I'd argue it's flagrant abuse of the death penalty, to the extent that several states (Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York) have banned it since 2000 on constitutional / equitable use grounds. The politicization of prosecution makes certain punishments untenable. Not that there isn't a certain amount of abuse of "anti-hacking" and similar rules. In both cases (capital crimes, small-scale / activist hacking), d…
I've heard people say that rich people get special treatment by the justice system but I suspect that they simply have to money necessary to make the system behave as it should.