Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
18hr 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.
Markass
Not the worst
21hr ago
Thanks for letting me know. So, this is pretty interesting. From the hearing you linked, it sounds like the FBI was still unsure of if the images he possessed were child pornography or not, and that was because he had browsed known CP sources, but the links were expired and so couldn't be immediately verified.
I think the moral of the story is that if you are going to engage in fictional child fucking, you should not engage in real child fucking, or you might get nailed on the fictional stuff. Just like Al Capone and his tax evasion. On second thought, maybe don't engage in child fucking, real or fictional, at all.
Markass
Not the worst
23hr ago
When hate speech laws come to America
They won't. They are plainly unconstitutional, if any politician proposed them they would not be re-elected, and courts would strike it down immediately.
You keep saying "when" but you provide no evidence of such laws being an inevitability.
Example: this man sentenced for obscene speech acts
You conveniently left out and did not address at all:
Additionally, according to court documents and statements made at the sentencing, Arthur sexually assaulted two females who came forward during the investigation of this case. Court documents and statements made in court showed that in approximately 1992, Arthur drugged an adult woman living with him, sexually assaulted her and video recorded it. In another instance, in the early 1980s, Arthur molested a girl when she was four or five years old, who was the daughter of a friend and business associate.
His case was borderline, but this seals the deal for me. Unless I'm missing something, I think this guy is a dirtbag and deserved 40 years for literal child rape.
There's a tactic I despise where people cry foul over convictions that are supposedly only just about fictional stories/media, but every single time you look at them, it turns out the defendant was also a literal child rapist and that's why he got nailed. I don't know for sure why this happens, but the best theory I've heard is that prosecutors don't want any obscenity laws thrown out on First Amendment grounds, so if they have a case against a dirtbag, it better include actual physical acts of harm or else they have no case. In fact, I thought this was the stance that lolicons supposedly held--that fiction is separate from reality and as long as things are kept fictional you shouldn't judge or shame them. For whatever reason, it's the exact same lolicons who then cry about cases like Thomas Arthur's while conveniently leaving out that he acted on his desires in real life.
he couldn't call experts to argue that his speech-acts had artistic merit. So, he got no fair trial.
I am skeptical that even if he called experts, the outcome would have been different. He also doesn't seem to have raised this issue in his appeal, so that's his (or his lawyer's) fault.
amounting to the violation of his right to appeal
I don't see the violation. Isn't this opinion literally a response to his appeal? They didn't just deny an appeal flat out. They let him submit an appeal, considered it fully, and then denied it.
Rummel did not deserve a life sentence. Given he got life for about $800 of fraud
You conveniently leave out that he was convicted under the three strikes law, i.e. it was his third time committing the same crime after already being caught and convicted twice. He didn't get life for "just" $800. You seem to give him a far undeserved amount of charity. There are simply some criminals who won't learn, who won't stop stealing or defrauding even when told very sternly, even when they have free government assistance for everything from food to housing. Without a three strikes law, they would just get a rap sheet a mile long and would continue to wreak havoc on society. And it's a minority of criminals who do this. We can reduce crime drastically just by permanently jailing those who keep reoffending.
you could just as easily argue producing such a wrong opinion as this ought to constitute a crime which warrants a life sentence (and frankly, this speech is obscene § to me). So, it is incredibly hypocritical of these judges to write this stuff.
Are you seriously making this argument? This is just a non-sequitur. It's a major and unjustified leap in logic that reads like parody.
There was even a case on the unconstitutionality of guidelines themselves. US v. Booker in 2005. Given this opinion was written by a federal court in 2024, how are these judges even still on the bar?
only facts admitted by a defendant or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury may be used to calculate a sentence exceeding the prescribed statutory maximum sentence
So... sentencing is unconstitutional if it uses unproven facts? Duh, that sounds obvious to me. You summarized it vaguely by saying "a case on the unconstitutionality of guidelines themselves", as if all guidelines are unconstitutional, when they're not. So I'm really unsure how US v. Booker applies here, and again this seems like a non-sequitur.
I'm beginning to notice a pattern here, where you conveniently leave out details that are detrimental to your argument in the hopes that I don't look into the details, then when I look into the details anyway, your argument collapses instantly.
When the US government starts prosecuting racist hate speech in 10 years, expect this.
The US government is going to prosecute racist hate speech... because some child rapist got jailed? This is not a convincing argument.
This guy went to jail for 4 years for going on a substance-less rant. Clearly way too much prison time. It violates the 1st amendment, nobody cares, even has hate speech elements because it was racist. This is a sign of how hate speech laws will work in the United States.
I'm not a fan of the "hate crime" enhancements, but just like obscenity charges w.r.t child rape or possession of CP, they are only applied when an actual crime has been committed. I can call whoever I want a nigger on the Internet and I'm never going to get charged with a hate crime because saying nigger isn't a crime. (Incidentally enough, this "package deal" reasoning is also why I detest gay/trans activists claiming there is a gay/trans "panic defense", as if it can let you get away with murder, when at most the only thing it can do is remove the hate crime part, because as it turns out, murder is murder and murder is still a crime.)
But anyways. Yeah, no, I don't buy it. Hate speech laws are not going to pass just because people get convicted for fedposting. For one thing, fedposting laws have been around for a long while (you yourself cited examples from Wilson and FDR's era) so why haven't these hate crime laws been enacted already? For another, since you specified a specific timeline of doom (hate speech laws in 10 years), I am willing to make a bet saying that, in 10 years, I will still be able to say nigger on an American-hosted Internet forum and will receive zero legal consequences for it.
Obviously the court's writing is massively offensive to at least some serious and worthy accepted standard of decency.
I would argue seriously that the writing is morally repulsive and disgusting. It certainly makes me feel that way inside.
The standard isn't whether you or even one person considers it obscene, but whether a reasonable person would. You can't just claim arbitrary definitions of obscenity and then argue that they violate your obscenity standard, determined by you alone.
I do think they should be recalled from the bench over this decision (which is impossible, but would be possible in a superior country).
Which superior country would this be? As far as I am aware, none such country would recall judges over this (quite reasonable) decision. I sincerely doubt that it would be Belgium or any other country in Europe that you seem to think is somehow better than America when it comes to free speech, due process, etc.
Shameless is when you never think for a second your own reasoning could be turned around on you
I don't see how any of the reasoning you detest could be "turned around" on innocents. None of these opinions set any dangerous precedents or anything. They are all quite reasonable in my opinion.
Shameless is when you're so proud of yourself and your «justice» that you don't see why the hell every sentence shouldn't be life. Clearly, you are a god and this guy who stole $800 before you is just some peasant and will never be good. Life in prison.
This is uncharitable and you are making an unjustified assumption. No judge thinks every sentence should be life. Again you omit the fact that Rummel was convicted under the three strikes law. You make it sound like he was given life for his first offense, which is not the case.
eroding civil liberties from the pulpit is far far worse than some creepy pedo writing disgusting stories on his own seedy website
And he also, you know, raped children, but who's keeping track?
Markass
Not the worst
1d ago
Where I think Europe as a whole probably has a comparative advantage versus the United States is in consumer rights.
By the tiniest of margins. They at least considered Stop Killing Games, but still rejected it. The bar is extremely low.
Markass
Not the worst
1d ago
Dries Van Langenhove
Why do you think this case helps your argument? As far as I can tell, his "crime" is purely political speech. If he did it in the US, we have the First Amendment, so he would never even be charged, much less investigated for it. He would definitely not get 10 years in prison for it as you falsely suggest. If he got even a 1 year sentence, we would consider it an abhorrent affront to the constitution and to the ideals of liberty and justice that the country was founded upon. Yet you think this not only looks good for Belgium, but Belgium is better than the US, because "[h]e is getting plenty of due process and the sentence is relatively light" as you say (which seems like missing the point entirely).
Am I missing something? I'm struggling to understand your reasoning here.
Markass
Not the worst
1d ago
At this point Europe may be poorer but it is substantially freer.
Only on this one axis (of dubious value IMO). They don't have free speech, guns, or a Fourth/Fifth Amendment.
Markass
Not the worst
1d ago
It's a shame that we don't shame, mock and bully school shooters even harder. If we did, there wouldn't be as many. Nobody wants to be remembered as a loser or be seen as uncool, and committing a school shooting is possibly the least cool thing you could do.
Markass
Not the worst
2d ago
A good argument for making casual sex taboo again. Or at least informing people that it doesn't live up to the hype.
Markass
Not the worst
2d ago
Deleting the Claude app from my phone presumably doesn't also delete all my chats.
Did you check if this is true? Use a different phone if you can, or back up all your chats first before testing.
Markass
Not the worst
2d ago
Why would deleting the program itself also nuke all of your chat history. That does not make any sense. No other app behaves this way.
You should not use any mobile device then. Deleting all data associated with an app is standard procedure on phones.
Markass
Not the worst
3d ago
Thanks for the correction on pro se.
Complying with the law would be a good start
The position of Motherless and many others is that the law is unethical and too burdensome. It's also unconstitutional, though SCOTUS may disagree. Personally, I've seen too many data breaches of people's personal information to think that "just comply with the law" is a good idea. It's arguably a severe privacy and security risk, because a data breach is always a question of when, not "if". Doxing yourself is bad enough for a regular site but it's even worse when it's the literal-murder-rape website of Motherless (or whatever reputation it has), and then when the data breach happens everybody knows you browse the literal-murder-rape site.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
The people making these arguments and saying there's no such thing as a slippery slope don't seem to consider at all what incentives are or how people respond to them.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
What's wrong with slippery slope arguments? Would you also dismiss concerns of global warming ("climate change") as a slippery slope argument? Or the Nazi bar argument? It's just arguing from basic causality. It shouldn't be taken less seriously to argue that if X happens, then Y, and then if Y, then Z. Especially when there doesn't seem to be a consistent limiting principle that would stop the chain of causality from continuing to Z. You are free to disagree on the specifics on X, Y and Z, but just dismissing arguments of this form out of hand doesn't seem conducive to discussion.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
It worked well enough for Kiwi Farms to lose its domain registrar circa 2021, DreamHost.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
You're correct. Sympathy for suicide victims only works for people of a particular political valence. When Alec Holowka killed himself in part due to Zoe Quinn, the people who pushed theories of harassment=suicide suddenly stopped applying that standard. Or an even better example, Mike Adams.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
He pushed his luck too far, that's why. His conduct was so egregious that nobody could defend him without also losing all credibility themself. It's quite impressive to be such a bad liar to that extent.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
I cannot understand it. Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI? Is his Wikipedia article being updated as we speak to reflect that narrative?
Yes. They will rewrite history to fit their narrative. They did this to Kiwi Farms after Byuu killed himself over a tiny thread. They reward suicide victims by martyrizing them, creating a huge incentive for people to kill themselves.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
Maybe I've been exposed too much to people who have been the victims of their own decisions, but I find that if I had to be sad or care about people who fall victim to consequences that are entirely their fault, that would be worse for my soul than otherwise. There are plenty of people who have had completely undeserved things happen to them to weep for instead.
Markass
Not the worst
6d ago
Contesting the case would require funding a lawyer to stand in a highly disfavored setting, in a jurisdiction willing to write laws specifically targeting the company, in a civil case with correspondingly low standards of proof and no right to court-appointed representation for the indigent.
I agree. And yet, I think there's something sad about being unwilling to fight. The bare minimum they could have done was file, pro se, one page saying "I deny everything and reserve all rights." They can even handwrite it. That at least gets them away from being handed a default judgment for not showing up. And it's not like they have zero allies either. I'm sure free speech orgs like the EFF, ACLU or similar would have loved to take up the case for free. I think if they had fought, they had a decent chance of finding age verification unconstitutional, since age verification laws in other states have already been struck down (although those only applied to social media).
Yes, I know a fight is costly in many different ways, but what's the alternative? Playing domain registrar whack-a-mole and hoping you end up with a registrar sufficiently immunized from US attacks? Wait for someone else to be targeted and to fight? There's no one else, laws like these always go after maximally unsympathetic targets first before being used on the rest of the population.
Markass
Not the worst
6d ago
I think part of the problem is that when these norms were challenged, the people defending them didn't have anything legible to use. For example, homosexuality. They might say that it's a sin, and I don't think they're lying or coming up with an excuse, I think that's what they legitimately believed and they just didn't know the real reason was that gay promiscuity would lead to an extremely deadly STD being spread. In other words, they were right for the wrong reasons. So if you argued with them, it was very easy to win the argument and convince people there was no good reason for homosexuality to be taboo. But then you get the AIDS epidemic and millions of otherwise healthy young men dying in droves.
Markass
Not the worst
6d ago
I can think of very few things, but I guess the biggest pro-user thing they are still doing is that even if you have an ancient circa-2006 YT account for whatever reason, and you haven't migrated it yet, you can still to this day log in and migrate it to a Google Account. This was pointed out in a video SalC1 made criticizing Mojang and Microsoft for not doing the same thing with Minecraft account migrations. For whatever reason, they put a time limit on migration, and if you didn't do it by the deadline your account is permanently inaccessible. It's even worse compared to YT because you wouldn't have paid any money for YT in 2006, but Minecraft is a game you have to pay money for. It's quite sad to see an instance where Mojang manages to do worse than YT, and a good indication of the direction Microsoft have taken the game in.
And you get no compensation if you didn't migrate your account, so effectively, the $20-$30 you spent on the game has just been permanently stolen from you with no recourse. That's why it put a smile on my face to see that Valve accepted a Steam refund for Battlefield 6 after EA removed significant features, and why I absolutely detest people who seem far too eager to jump in to defend the multibillion dollar corporation. As it stands, corporations have way too much power over consumers.
Markass
Not the worst
6d ago
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Most likely not. The rate of justified-vs-unjustified shootings is about the same before and after bodycams. Moreover, there are still plenty of policemen who commit unjustified shootings knowing full well they are being recorded.
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No? To my knowledge there have been vanishingly few cases of this, if it has ever happened.
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.
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