Jiro
2d ago
At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.
Singh was found guilty of sexual assault at trial. But he wasn’t convicted. Instead, in January, he was given a discharge by Justice A. J. Brown. The judge explained that a conviction would automatically result in deportation without a right to appeal
A lenient sentence is not the same thing as no conviction.
Jiro
5d ago
In practice, I'm routinely bombarded with images created by people trying to get me to give them my money
I specifically mentioned that if there's a profit motive, it's different.
Catcalling in theory has targets who would like the compliment, even though this may not always be true. No panhandler thinks his targets like being panhandled. Furthermore, the panhandler has a profit motive and incetives for annoying people are very different where a profit motive is involved.
Jiro
5d ago
With catcalling, it seems to me pretty unreasonable in 2025 to imagine catcalling might be welcome, so even if a given catcaller wishfully thinks it will be taken as flattery
Society is not uniform. For instance the incident that naraburns alluded to when most of the catcallers weren't white. I wouldn't be surprised if there are sections of society where catcalling is acceptable. They just don't overlap with friends of Internet geeks very much.
For example, if I was in a jury, you would have a hard time convincing me that someone who wolf-whistles intends to humiliate the recipient
This gets into questions of constructive intent. If you know or should know that your actions result in X, did you intend X?
This is the same problem as I have with open borders proponents: If you want to have open borders, then make your case for it and get laws passed which say that we have open borders. But don't have laws which say that we don't have open borders, but then work to make it easy as possible to not follow the laws.
If you really want there to be no conditions for assisted suicide, then have policies (and laws if necessary) saying "there are no conditions for assisted suicide". But if you can't or won't do that, don't have policies that say that there are conditions, but then set things up so that they are trivial to work around.
Arguments like "what if we compare various possibilities a djinn might give you and what if we ask the 70 year old", etc. are arguments that there shouldn't be conditions, or at least not the conditions we have now. They are not good arguments for "we should have conditions but since conditions are bad let's make sure they don't work".
If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it,
If you are a refugee from Iran, and Iran won't let you have documents, the other country should try to determine that you actually are a refugee and from Iran, even if it is not as easy to determine this as it would be if you had an ID. If the other country says "Iran doesn't give out IDs, so we'll just accept everyone who claims to be an Iranian refugee", that's a bad policy which is forseeably going to be abused. (In fact, similar policies are abused in real life by "refugees" that aren't really refugees.)
Also, it's a lot easier to revoke a bad refugee status (or a marriage, or your other examples) than to revoke a suicide.
Jiro
6d ago
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.
The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".
Jiro
6d ago
I was under the impression that the indigenous people were one of the problems with the current deal--they aren't from Mauritus and if you're going to return the islands to anyone, you return it to them, not to Mauritus, which the deal specifically didn't do. (And if you check a map, the islands are nowhere near Mauritus either.)
It's true that they aren't ancient, but they were expelled against their will, so they should still have some right to the islands.
Jiro
8d ago
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Your argument also included "What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted" which is a much easier case. They should have a policy of dealing with such requests, and they should be able to describe this policy in advance of it actually happening.
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If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents. If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.
If she hires an actor, you're probably stuck, but then, she didn't.
Jiro
8d ago
When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them?
If it is not possible to do what they advertise, they shouldn't be advertising it. False advertising doesn't cease to be false because the thing you advertised was impossible, but you really wanted to do it.
And if truthfully advertising what they actually do leads to bad publicity, so be it.
Jiro
10d ago
If keeping blacks from voting caused no harm to blacks, why did anyone even bother keeping them from voting?
Jiro
10d ago
Arguments about ‘abuse’ are unconvincing. If “the government” or “the powers that be” want to kill me, they can and they will.
The main problem isn't that someone in the government wants you dead. It's that incentives will lead to bad decisions that end up with you dead. Nobody has to specifically want you dead as a terminal goal (no pun intended) for incentives to have an effect.
Jiro
10d ago
The object level is important. Geeks have an easily exploited habit of trying to make rules that are agnostic to circumstances.
What's a good way to treat criminals? Put them in jail. What's a good way to treat accused criminals? Figure out if the accusation is correct, and put them in jail if they are. What's the best way to treat accused criminals if you don't want to figure out if they're correct? There isn't one. Anything you do has to have the step "figure out if the accusation is correct".
If Hlykna is unjustly accused, almost anything he does in response is okay. If he's justly accused, almost anything except submitting to jail is wrong. If he's justly accused and thinks he isn't, that doesn't change what responses are right and wrong, which depend on the true situation, not on what's in his head.
Jiro
11d ago
As people have pointed out, the crime rate of people who legally carry is extremely low. Your scary scenarios do not describe reality.
Jiro
11d ago
Come on. You've never heard of literacy tests and grandfather clauses used to keep black people from voting?
Jiro
12d ago
People get upset about restricting voting rights because in the real world, doing so has a really bad record.
pointing out that "voting is just pointing guns at people with more steps."
Voting is also used to keep other people from doing things to you. I suppose you could say that is still pointing guns, but it's the self-defense style of pointing guns. Everyone who wants to restrict the franchise on this basis talks about using the vote to take from others. Using the vote to keep bad things from being done to you usually gets handwaved away.
Jiro
12d ago
Not only would I not count Communist "elections", I'd point out that if Communist countries had had genuine free elections, most of them would be gone pretty fast. Which makes all the deaths caused by them attributable to not having universal suffrage.
Of course, this means that even counting Germany, the deaths from not having suffrage exceed the deaths from having it (especially if you count the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as starting WWII and making some of the deaths the fault of lack of suffrage.)
Jiro
12d ago
I'd say most of the same things for voting. Specifically, the only people who shouldn't be allowed to vote are people we don't trust with much of anything. Which isn't that controversial among the general public, but for some reason it is among rationalists.
You can't build a Constitutional test that is just your imagination of what some hypothetical people might think.
All laws are going to require some amount of common sense to apply. "What do (sincere) people think" is an inherent part of having laws.
People have gotten this stupid idea in their brain that the spending clause authorizes literally any spending that the government chooses to do.
If you think that the government shouldn't be funding media anyway, then ask the question on a more general level: Could the government claim that anything whatsoever counts as the press, and then apply freedom of the press to it? Could it do so for religion or speech, for that matter? If the government could not apply those to anything whatsoever, why wouldn't similar reasoning prevent them from considering the Price Force to be like an army or navy?
Jiro
13d ago
This is nothing but an argument from personal incredulity.
No, it's an argument "people don't think that". It is possible to observe people and draw conclusions about what they might think. "People don't think this" isn't an argument from personal incredulity.
No.
Yes. The government can spend money on lots and lots of things. Consider that the government actually has things like the Voice of America, subsidies to NPR, etc. The Price Press isn't all that different from that.
"I would like an illustration for my fanfiction/roleplaying character. No, I'm not hiring an artist--I'm doing this for free, after all."
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