Well, I didn't expect blatant racisim in HN comments, but there it is. Based on ignorance no less. Can we ban people like this? /serious
I am all for free speech, but excusing murder based on race is where I may have to draw the fucking line. Feel free to post this on a board relevant to your hopefuly unique interests.
I did not realize this was considered racism. I never excused anything. Is it true or false that native Americans took part in murderous rituals? It is very unfair to label my post racist. I am certainly not name-calling. The entire argument you presented in response was an ad hominem attack on me instead of refuting anything I mentioned. I am saddened that you are incapable of understanding my point. Please address the specific point I made earlier. Thank you.
To some. There are also quite a few traveling americian yuppies that trade aid for 'souls', for the sole purpose of bragging about it back home. Its an unfortunate mix.
There most definately are, although not extremely common. I recall reading a HAYES (pro-fat) article calling for beauty equalization or some rediculious thing. Sure its not common, but to dismiss any extreme you arent aware of does not help the conversation. The amount of impact is highly variable, but one must assume there is some, as many of these blogs have thousands of followers.
And you almost always make your actual life objectively worse in the process. I dated a media junkie, never any fun, always posing, aranging dishes, making 'moments' instead of actual enjoiable memories. She was an amazing person, but the near OCD levels of trying to make life look perfect to the outside just didnt work for me. The most amazing moments in her life, never documented, only a ghost shell online to paint a false memory.
There are far too many cases being brought into our courts for silly or erroneous charges. We need to end the war on drugs, for one, and stop prosecuting low-level offenses so harshly. This would reduce a huge amount of the load on the court system.
There are a lot of companies that make a ton of money off of having more people in prison. Maybe we should just tax them.
In any case, I think it's important to realize we cannot let widespread Constitutional violations go unchecked. It's not that there's no money. The real problem is that there are so many entities profiting from this unjust system that no one bothers to look for solutions in the first place.
You let them go free. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
If you actually have so many people committing crimes that there are actually too many guilty people for the courts to properly try, you have a societal engineering problem, not a courtroom efficiency problem - you need to get people to stop committing those crimes in the first place, since clearly the justice system isn't working as a deterrent. There are lots of options, including changing social conditions, reclassifying the behavior at issue as not a crime, etc.
This mentality is hard to get to for a lot of folks. It doesn't just hit this issue.
Let's talk about race. When a white supremacist wants to kills some folks, sure, that's a problem and we should try to detect, prevent, mitigate, and punish (in that order) their actions.
However, the real issue to solve at a higher level is the societal engineering one where large segments of the population feel a need to turn towards white nationalism. Note: I don't mean "let's make thoughtcrime a thing". I assume the issue is that racially homogeneous rural areas end up with a combination of little welfare and little economic opportunity.
In the medium/long-run, these sorts of issues require UBI, an improved education system, public transportation, and universal healthcare of some sort. That's a tall order and hard sell, so we're left demonizing individuals (treating symptoms).
The Eighth Amendment requires that citizens be given a speedy and public trial.
Very few go to trial because of false-carrots-on-a-stick plea deals to throw someone away without the trial, because the prosecutors know the trial may not go for them.
I wonder if it could be argued that plea deals deprive a citizen of their right to a speedy trial, and are therefore unconstitutional?
Some amendments are more strongly enforced than others. Also, it's the 6th that's a speedy trial. The 8th is the equally-ignored excessive fines and punishment.
Oh whoops I read them out of order in the list talking about the drafting of The Constitution. It may have been the 8th in an original list but two below it were not ratified. I am not worthy!
Frankly, if the courts can't handle the load of the minor cases, those cases should be dropped in favor of pursuing the more severe ones. The courts should be damn well certain someone is in fact guilty before convicting him instead of copping out and allowing plea bargains.
Which then brings up the thorny issue of which cases to drop, and why make those things illegal in the first place.
I don't know what the alternative is though. Maybe Judge Dredd style law enforcement of police, judge and jury in one job..
If plea deals were not allowed and cases had to go to trial (with adequate support for public defenders), we (as a society) would find satisfactory answers to those questions. It doesn't mean it would be easy, but if the pressure were there, we'd find a solution. Fewer cases would be heard, fewer people would be jailed, and a truer justice would be served.
Plea bargains allow the justice system to effectively ignore all those costs and instead push them onto a non-representative subset of society.
That's a good point. Others have answered that and I agree with them. But we also have to work with what we have. Petty things like drug possession should be decriminalized. However, good luck getting Congress or state legislatures to decriminalize minor things that aren't en vogue like marijuana. Taxes should be raised to fund the courts and other vital services. But everyone hates taxes so I doubt that will happen either. I'd really like to avoid the Judge Dredd style enforcement that we seem to be slowly approaching.
Misdemeanor trials cost $20,000 in an exemplar US county [0]. And that's only for the prosecution... take into account the salaries of court employees (judge, steganographer, etc) and utilities and things add up. Whether that is cheap or expensive depends on what you're comparing it to.
Cost of pleading? Maybe a couple hundred dollars.
Cost of ruining someone's life over a drug charge? Maybe worth tenz of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
These prices are very regional. New York State spends ~60,000$ per prisoner per year. So, a teen spending 60 years in prison (ignoring inflation) = 3.6 million directly + plus lost wages.
If you can't afford to deal with the consequences of laws you either need less laws or put more money into the system.
Also, sending innocent people to prison because of please bargains costs a lot of money. It's very possible that having real trials and not sending innocent people to jail is cheaper overall.
Of the 200 or so countries in the world, most of them do not have an effective, fair justice system, available to all. Without that as a minimum, have a defined process is largely meaningless.
If one dimension is limited compared to others, it makes sense to call it psudeo 3d, because all planes are not fully realized. But it is still clearly invoking a 3rd dimension, maybe a 4th if you consider movement in time.
Because in English the way it's spelled seems entirely orthogonal to its pronunciation.
"pseudo" basically sounds like "sudo".
Compare to German where the way it's spelled is exactly how you'd spell it if you first heard it (and speak German). We don't drop the "p" and we pronounce "eu" as a diphthong as in other Germans words (sounding like "oi" in English).
As a German this is why I almost never misspell it in English. It looks the same as in German and is a loanword in both languages, so I tend to sound it out the German way even when thinking in English.
I can't agree more. I grew up next to a theater and it was the thing to do. The last decent movie experince I can recall was the film print showing of the hateful eight. I didnt even like the movie itself a whole lot, but the quality, and experince were amazing. I would love to have a movie to get excited about. It all just seems like such low effort drivel now.
That argument just lowers the bar. It can be a shallow movie and also not insult my intelligence and cram product placements into every other shot. Bad filmmaking is bad. Do not make excuses for it.
I am all for free speech, but excusing murder based on race is where I may have to draw the fucking line. Feel free to post this on a board relevant to your hopefuly unique interests.