Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I reject the characterization of my comment as a low-effort hot take. Considered in isolation, perhaps, but when seen in the context of a long conversation in which I also made a number of high-effort, sophisticated arguments in favor of my position, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize one particular comment that way. I’m extremely willing to defend my positions at length, which you can see, since you picked out a comment that was deep into a thread where I was doing so.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What do you think is the difference between a leftist and a progressive?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
We're talking about the system famous for pickpockets working the crowd of the hanging of a pickpocket, right?
This sounds bad until you compare it with how much worse levels of criminality were in England before this. Banditry basically disappeared in the country by the end of this period.
Lindy, yes, but lindy doesn't mean "good".
No doubt! I’m anything but a doctrinaire conservative. There’s plenty of lindy practices and beliefs I’d be happy to consign to the dustbin of history. I was responding, though, to a post which accused me of conjuring fanciful hypotheticals rather than building on existing time-tested practices that worked. I submit that my ideal model of justice is very much built on proven practices from the past.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
But I’m appealing to a model of justice that has recurred over and over throughout history. I’ve referenced England’s Bloody Code before. Whatever else you want to say about it, it did a phenomenal job of reducing crime. The inquisitorial system is very lindy, even if not in a specifically American context. And someone like Nayib Bukele (see my flair) is demonstrating that the type of justice I’m advocating can work in a 21st-century context.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
And then in this comment you explicitly said that you were suggesting that he was also a left-winger. I don’t know how much more clear you could have been in this conversation.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
And without making any moral judgements about pop music, I'm still very sure children should be exposed to the occasional string quartet.
A string quartet is not comparable to a brutalist building. While children might find a string quartet boring, I think few if any would find it unpleasant. String quartets generally adhere to traditional norms of harmony and beauty; chamber music is often used to provide pleasant background ambience for social events - a testament to its qualities as inoffensive music without any notably dissonant or anxiety-inducing elements.
Brutalism, in contrast, is, if nothing else, designed to be visually jarring and arresting. It does not fade pleasantly into the harmonious backdrop of life. If you want to compare it to a music genre, compare it to industrial metal or dubstep or something like that. Beautiful to some; but actively (and intentionally) grating to others.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I mean this is the same guy who believes that John Wilkes Booth was a progressive, so I think he might be suffering from a serious case of whatever Hlynka suffered from, which renders the sufferer unable to recognize distinctions between the various alternatives to American-style Christian conservatism.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
- Because our jurisprudence has established a million little procedural tripwires for a prosecutor to accidentally stumble over, which can lead to a retrial or vacation of judgment.
- Because it allows for jury nullification.
- Even if it doesn’t reach a different result, it is far more expensive and time-consuming affair, and turns things into a public spectacle/media event.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Our justice system was designed as an adversarial system for a reason. Don't go looking to tear that fence down before you demonstrate that you understand why it was built.
I already explained in another comment that I believe the adversarial design of the American justice system made sense in an era where it was far more difficult to ascertain guilt. No video, no photography, no DNA, not even things like fingerprinting. Unless the police literally caught somebody in the act, they had to rely almost entirely on witness testimony and extremely rudimentary investigative techniques. Under such constraints, it’s very understandable to impose an adversarial model, to balance against the natural unreliability and possible ulterior motives of witnesses.
In the 21st century, it is incomparably easier to ascertain guilt based on far more solid evidence. My contention is that this obviates the need for adversarial justice in the case of most crimes.
Now, there are of course types of crime where the inquisitorial model is still inappropriate. The kangaroo courts that sprung up on college campuses to adjudicate rape accusations are a great example. Rape, at least of the “date rape” variety rather than the “prowler pouncing out of the bushes” variety, is inherently far harder to assess because the physical evidence nearly always accommodates multiple competing explanations. The physical evidence establishes that two people had sex, but rarely indicates whether that sex was consensual in the moment or not. In that scenario, adversarial justice is preferable. For a robbery caught on camera, or a murder where the killer’s fingerprints are on the knife and his DNA is on the scene? What is there to argue about? Why is a defense attorney necessary? What do we gain by pretending that going through the (expensive, time-consuming) motions is valuable?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
You’ve pointed to one of the lowest-crime societies in the world, and attempted to present it as a cautionary tale. Seems like they’re doing a ton of things right over there that we may want to consider emulating.
I don’t disagree; I think a case with this level of ambiguity merited an adversarial jury trial. However, it also happened more than 25 years ago, when video surveillance was far less ubiquitous than it was now, and forensic technology was less advanced. Cases which would have merited a jury trial in 1998 no longer do, because our methods of reliably adjudicating guilt are so much more powerful. The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the absolutely paradigm-shifting advances in criminology and technology that would exist in the future, and if they had I don’t believe they would have shackled us with this onerously pro-defendant criminal justice system.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
An adversarial system is manifestly retarded when guilt or innocence can be easily adjudicated by viewing photo/video evidence, and/or by assessing DNA/forensic evidence. Leave the adversarial justice system for the much smaller percentage of crimes wherein guilt is genuinely in dispute, or where evidence is genuinely incomplete, as judged by a professional panel of disinterested parties.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Right, I’m not even saying most of them have done anything morally wrong or worthy of prosecution or anything like that. I’m saying that in my ideal justice system most of their jobs would simply be obviated. They wouldn’t be needed anymore, because there would no longer be a need for trials for most criminal proceedings, and therefore no need for this whole process of haggling over plea deals. Many criminals would also not be entitled to legal representation, so there wouldn’t need to be this mass of public defenders.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
When the based regime takes over, mass disbarment of probably 75% of defense attorneys needs to be a priority. They know they’re getting guilty people released and they think that’s just great. Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The "what if I" question can be flipped on its head: what if you or a loved one was railroaded by the state?
The odds of this are astronomically low, even in a hypothetical state that is significantly more authoritarian than the one in which we currently live. I, like every member of my family, is a productive and law-abiding citizen. Nobody in my living extended family, so far as I’m aware, has ever been arrested, ever charged with even a minor crime, etc. There just isn’t anything about their or my behavior that would incentivize the government to go through the trouble of railroading them, not anything that could be credibly pinned on them that a government could use to railroad them or me.
Ultimately that’s the calculation that underpins my rejection of slippery slope arguments about harsh justice. It’s the same reason I reject John Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance. I know who I am, I know what my family is like, I am very confident that the risk to me and mine presented by a loosening of prosecutorial standards is extremely low, so it doesn’t worry me. Any knock-on effects created as a result of reducing the number of hoops prosecutors need to jump through are unlikely to redound onto normal citizens, but are likely to redound onto the sort of people who deserve it anyway. In other words, I do trust the justice system to keep the welfare of normal law-abiding people in mind, and to appreciate the natural disincentives against corruption and malice built into the psyche of conscientious and intelligent individuals.
Many commentators of a more libertarian bent are, I’m sure, going to implore me to consider the possibility that the current “woke” regime will use the powers I’m recommending to persecute random white men and bend the rules for guilty blacks. They’ll point to the treatment of J6 defendants, or to the prosecution of right-wing demonstrators and Twitter users in the UK and Europe.
Well, while those things are bad, I still believe the tradeoff is still worth it. I believe that it’s more important to preserve state and law enforcement capability so that people with my politics can seize it and use it for our purposes, than it is to dismantle or hobble state and law enforcement capability to ensure it doesn’t fall into the hands of my enemies.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I don’t think I am “upset”, nor do I think things are getting “heated”. I would hope I haven’t said anything yet that will get me a mod warning. I think I’ve been very civil, or at least as civil as one can be while accusing an interlocutor of being dishonest.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
A culture of prosecutorial fair play benefits the public in global ways that the earlier incarceration of some lowlife at the margin does not.
First off, I’m not actually certain this is true. I think that a lot of this country’s jurisprudential traditions - particularly the ones introduced from the time of the Warren Court up until the present - create unnecessary and harmful obstacles for prosecutors. In other words, they make it far too easy for guilty men to walk free. I’m far more concerned about this than I am about prosecutors maliciously persecuting innocent normal Americans. You can make slippery slope arguments all you want, but frankly I think we’re so far up the “make things easier for criminals and give prosecutors more hoops to jump through and more chances to accidentally screw up” hill, and therefore so far from the hypothetical “tyrannical and capricious authoritarian hellscape” bottom - that I’m perfectly willing to overlook and forgive prosecutorial errors if it means keeping another worthless scumbag felon behind bars or on the gallows.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Why do these reasons justify punishing the public for the mistakes of the prosecutor? If a guilty man gets released and then immediately victimizes another person (as so frequently happens) am I supposed to believe this is a good outcome because the prosecutor was (hopefully) chastened by this outcome? What if I or a loved one was the person who was victimized? Should I see this as worth it in order to incentivize diligence by prosecutors? Why should I have to suffer for their mistakes?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I would say not brutalism, most concretely.
I’m not sure if the placement of “brutalism” and “concrete” next to each other was intentional, but if so it’s quite clever.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Who said I’m “pissed off”? What I’m saying is that you’ve outed yourself as a liar. You’re willing to cynically lie to your interlocutors about this issue because you have an axe to grind. Therefore, we can apply considerable skepticism to any “evidence” you bring to bear to try and trick us into supporting your position. You bring some statistics purported to demonstrate that executing prisoners instead of enslaving them is a net economic negative? Okay, why should we trust that your statistics aren’t doctored or misrepresented?
Again, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t actually care if that reason is true, because it’s not your actual reason for opposing the death penalty. It’s just something you latched onto because you thought we would care about it. So if it’s not true, it doesn’t move the needle for you at all. It’s not like you’re going to switch to supporting the death penalty if you discover that whatever study you’re citing isn’t accurate or replicable.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
It seems like you started with the moral presupposition from your last paragraph, and then reverse-engineered a convenient argument that you can attempt to use on people who don’t share that moral presupposition. In other words, you would still oppose the death penalty even if it was cheap and we could demonstrate to you that it is a net economic benefit. Your stated concern is not your actual concern; therefore, you are concern trolling.
If your concern is that we spend too much money raising children to adulthood, how would you feel about a regime in which we attempt to identify, as early as possible, juveniles who will turn out not to be worth the investment, and begin a quickly-escalating regime of corrective punishment on them once they first start misbehaving, such that if they fail to shape up we stop devoting said resources to them? Most of the guys on death row started their life of crime in their early teens. It was pretty clear from an early age what sort of adults they would amount to. Why let them stick around long enough to escalate their level of criminality into full-blown murder? Start flogging them in the public square, denying them access to the internet and other services, cut off pinky fingers and move up from there - see if that’s enough to get them back on course to a productive life. If it’s not, end it before it gets too bad for the rest of us.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Once again you have proudly and eagerly presented some of the ugliest, least evocative art I’ve ever seen, and expected us to share your judgment of its quality. The first piece is inoffensive, if unremarkable, but the other two are laughable.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I’m very glad he’s dead, and that would be the case even if it somehow turned out he was innocent of the particular crime he was executed for. His long rapsheet is full of crimes which, if we lived in a sane country, would be punishable by death - particularly when committed in succession by the same individual. Marcellus Williams deserved to die a long time before he did, and if it wasn’t for this robbery it would have been for a different one; consider this one a make-up call for all the times he unjustly evaded execution before now.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I vaguely recall a scene from a civil war movie where an immigrant on a pier in NY was first given a certificate of citizenship and then a draft order, which is IMHO the proper way to do it.
I believe you’re thinking of Gangs of New York.
Yes, actually that’s pretty much what I’m suggesting. Putting up a spirited defense to help a guilty person escape justice is a bad thing. I am not accusing all public defenders of intentionally committing acts which they believe to be immoral; I’m saying that the moral hazard created by forcing them to do this is a terrible thing. I cannot understand what value is created for society when a defense attorney concocts elaborate arguments and exploits loopholes in order to stop somebody from being punished for something that person did.
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