Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
23hr ago
Otherwise you can give anyone life in prison for any crime if you can find someone to claim bad irrelevant hear-say at their sentencing date.
That's not even close to what happened. It wasn't just anyone, it was an FBI agent. And he didn't even get life in prison, so I don't know where that came from. It also was not irrelevant. I think the fact that he raped children is very relevant to him being sentenced for fictional depictions of child sex.
Keep reading. Booker says guidelines are not binding, in other words that the legislature has no right to set true sentencing ranges; they are merely suggestions for judges which have literally no binding properties. Therefore it is not good common law to refer to the statute sentencing guidelines as if they are binding or necessarily not violating the 8th amendment.
Ok, yes, for the sake of argument, they're not binding. So... if a judge follows them anyway... then what's the problem? The law isn't that you can't follow them, the law is that you don't have to, but you still can. I don't understand this argument. I also don't understand why you bring up the Eighth Amendment. Booker only dealt with the Sixth Amendment. Do you have another argument that sentencing guidelines violate the Eighth?
Funny you say something so severe («collapses instantly» as opposed to just, looks weaker) specifically after the part where you're the one whose rebuttal on Booker is fatally flawed thanks to not reading the entire Wikipedia introduction on the topic.
Well, I rebutted your rebuttal and I did it quite easily. This time I didn't even have to look up anything new, just noticed that the conclusion doesn't even follow from the premise.
They did not consider it fully and their reasoning is about as air-tight as Swiss cheese.
This is quite a weak argument for something as serious as "violation of the right to appeal". How do you know they did not consider it fully? In the legal system, we generally assume honesty and good faith until proven otherwise. There's no guarantee that an appeal will go in the defendant's favor, so you or the defendant disagreeing with the reasoning doesn't mean the right to appeal was violated. It's like saying "the jury gave me a guilty verdict, so my right to a jury trial was denied." I just don't understand this kind of logic.
I am definitely reasonable
American Heritage Dictionary definition is not arbitrary.
I wasn't making any determinations about whether you were reasonable in the colloquial sense, and anyway, that is irrelevant and besides the point. My point was that that's not how applying the obscenity standard works (or really, any standard of law that requires some subjectivity). No judge is going to look at you (or anyone else) claiming that "X is obscene" and rule based on that alone. Instead, they look at whether a reasonable person would.
I guess I should explain this a bit more. Why do we have the reasonable person standard? Well, the problem is that all sorts of things in law have to be inherently subjective. For example, assault is defined as the fear of bodily harm. So if someone is mentally ill enough that dog hair gives them fear of bodily harm, does that mean dog hair is always assault now? Obviously not, because most people aren't terrified by dog hair. So this means that whatever standard we have, we can't tie it to any one particular person. We would also like a standard that is consistent and as close to "objective" as one could get with something subjective.
The solution is the reasonable person standard. The question is whether an ordinary average person placed in the same circumstances would feel the same way. This gets used all the time in claims of self-defense. If someone shoots (and kills) another because they thought he was going to summon Bigfoot, I'm sure that the defendant truly and genuinely believed that he was going to die because of Bigfoot, and so if the standard for self-defense was that if anyone subjectively feels like they are in fear of their life, they're allowed to shoot, then he would be in the clear. Unfortunately for him, the standard is actually if a reasonable person in his circumstances would feel the same, and a reasonable person wouldn't, so that's murder, and he goes to jail. Tough luck.
Otherwise, you could just kill anyone you wanted and claim that you were fearful. That may be true from your point of view, but from everyone else's point of view, it just looks like you're murdering people for no reason. There must be some way to tie claims of self-defense and fearfulness to reality, and the reasonable person standard is how we do it.
And so it goes with obscenity. Your tactic of claiming that you personally find the judge's opinion obscene, and therefore he should be jailed for life, is... if I called it "clever", I would be giving you too much credit. But it's also just not how the standard is applied. To put it bluntly, it doesn't matter what you think, only whether a reasonable person would find it obscene. Most people don't find a judge's opinion obscene and abhorrent in the same way you do, unfortunately.
Objectively, this guy went to prison for speech. Obscenity is supposed to be an exception to free speech. But there is no point to that exception, and people who are against free speech will always add more exceptions, since one arbitrary exception is already permitted.
You're betting on the unprincipled exception never eating you alive, instead of simply embracing principle.
Question: How do you determine that something is an arbitrary exception? Is porn free speech? And if so, isn't criminalizing possession of child pornography an arbitrary exception? My point being, I don't quite buy this slippery slope argument when one exception has been around for decades and it's not like we're heading into a dystopia where I can't say nigger.
Speaking of which, my guy, the conviction of Shiloh Hendrix for saying nigger is right there, and you haven't even brought it up yet. Pointing to her case would be a far more convincing argument than whatever pedophile nonsense you've brought up.
What would a response with substance look like, in your opinion? How else is one supposed to say "that's not the law" if it is, in fact, not the law? The judge doesn't have to explain the entire legal theory to a layperson understanding, they just have to accurately understand and rule on what is before them. If you disagree with the ruling, then you just disagree. That doesn't mean the right to appeal was violated.
This proves too much. He would also still get paid even if the defendant didn't go to prison. By this standard, every prosecutor has a conflict of interest and therefore no cases can be successfully adjudicated to this rigorous standard, so we would have to let everyone go.
That's not fishing. A fishing expedition is when you investigate someone with zero probable cause for a particular crime. Interviewing people related to the case is just investigation. How else are they supposed to investigate? Just make shit up?
Ok. Please enlighten me as to how they violate the Eighth.
I have no idea what "high law" is and you don't explain it or "low law" very well. Then for good measure you throw in "middle law" later down the paragraph and you don't even attempt to explain that. What does it mean to be "prior to particular national law"?
I fail to see the difference between saying "this is bad and violates high law" versus "this is bad and violates the constitution".
That's not good enough to not be some sort of arbitrary exception. Sure, production of CP directly harms victims, but mere possession of it doesn't.
That's even more of an arbitrary exception than what I was talking about.
Again, I have to tell you: No, you can't. By the reasonable person standard, saying nigger is not an offensive obscenity that should result in jail time. Otherwise, I would be enjoying prison along with every other Kiwi Farms user for how many times we have said nigger on the Internet.
No? In general, though, criminals usually have their rights taken away after due process.
I bring up Shiloh Hendrix because that's the kind of stuff I see a legitimate argument for worrying about. As a nigger sayer, I would like to be able to say nigger however and whenever I want. I have no interest in child fucking, so if bad things happen to child fuckers, I don't worry unless they could affect me. There's things like age verification laws you could talk about that directly affect everyone regardless of how many children they've fucked. All this stuff about how this child fucker got jailed and maybe there's some dirty stuff that happened in the legal proceedings is just not very convincing to me. You might as well be telling me how Anders Breivik didn't get PS5 privileges in his Norwegian prison or whatever.
I can grant for the sake of argument that the child fucker's case maybe had some problems and he may or may not be entitled to legal relief. That doesn't really have any implications for me. The things you have pointed out don't make me worried about my ability to say nigger. They are nowhere near the list of my concerns for free speech and freedom on the Internet.
The actual things I see being a huge problem are payment processors (who can debank anyone with zero due process or appeal) and the DMCA (already a terrible piece of law that effectively mandates censorship before due process, it's also a very good doxing tool). There are other things as well, but the common thread is that one problem originates from there not being enough law (payment processors are basically entirely unregulated on top of being a monopoly that would make Standard Oil blush) and the other originates from an entirely different area of law (copyright, already known to be extremely terrible). I really don't see any threats or problems that originate from the obscenity exception alone. You're just saying that they could, but they haven't, and I think it's very unlikely.
Oh and by the way, things are 10x worse in Europe, where they arrest (more) people for social media posts, especially when those posts talk about being raped by grooming gangs. You claim that Europeans feel shame and Americans don't, and Europeans consider how the law might be used against them and Americans don't, and I just don't see it! There is no possible way a site like the Kiwi Farms could ever be hosted in Europe! Ever! Your entire argument for why America is somehow worse and will have hate speech laws in 10 years is to ignore Europe's hate speech laws, point to an arrest for political speech that would never have happened in the US, then wax poetic about an American pedophile being jailed. I really don't get it.
You can argue whatever you want. That doesn't mean that your argument is correct on its legal merits.
No one's insulting you.
I'm sure I could find a lot of people horrified and offended by the nigger word. Yet saying nigger is not illegal in the United States, and I am not in jail for saying it. Nor do I expect it to be illegal anytime soon, or even any time in the next 10 years. So no, my argument is not that "quantity makes right" either. Try again.
More options
Context Copy link