nomenym
6d ago
The standard is not “was she crazy.” The standard is did she know what she was doing was against the law and did she have the capacity not to do the act. There is ample evidence she knew what she was doing was not legal and that she had the capacity to not act.
I think these two standards are very slippery, especially when you're dealing with a jury of people who habitually default to an external locus of control. They take "mental health" very seriously, by which they mean that aberrant behavior is, in general, best understood as a kind of mental malfunction that is in some sense external to the true self of the person who is suffering from it. When you adopt this frame, it's very easy to satisfy those standards, especially if motivated by ulterior goals.
nomenym
6d ago
By MA law, the women were probably in the right to find not guilty by reason of insanity, but that doesn't seem to be their motivation for finding her not guilty. The law just happens to conveniently work in their favor in this instance, but they would very much want to find her not guilty anyway. This significantly complicates the story.
nomenym
7d ago
The very crime itself would be prima facie evidence of insanity. By reversing the burden of proof, it effectively makes acts of sufficient horror unprosecutable as crimes. The incentives this creates are disturbing, but it's also a backdoor way of displacing traditional crime and justice with deviant behavior being treated legally as a medical condition--a trend we see throughout society in many seemingly disparate domains.
I am too, in an ideal world, a Reaganite libertarian, but that almost feels like some quaint dream from a former life. It has little or nothing to do with the world as it now is. Do you think there can be a return to a politics with Reaganite libertarianism is successful? Is Reaganite libertarianism sustainable? Personally, my "black pill" was realizing that libertarianism really is only marginally more compatible with human nature than communism, albeit for different reasons. I could argue for Reaganite libertarianism, but it feels rather like trying to convince people to close the barn doors after the horse, pig, sheep, and even the donkey have already bolted, and the people I'm trying to convince are denying there was even a barn to begin with. We lost. Reaganite libertarians are like downed Japanese fighter pilots still fighting world war 2 into the 1970s. Condemning Trump for these actions feels merely philosophical, but it's all so obvious as to not be especially philosophically interesting. Of course it's stupid and wrong, and yet it's also necessary and inevitable.
One of the major problems is the enormous amounts of immigration fraud. Likely a majority of naturalized citizens and legal residents in recent years have lied on their applications and interviews and such. There is practically an industry in helping them lie, and the government has been tacitly endorsing that. This is quite aside from the other issue that governments have been granting more and more citizenship and legal statuses despite the fairly clear will of the democratic polity for decades. There is a very real way in which the whole process of naturalization, asylum, and immigration in general has been rendered illegitimate in the eyes of the public. The system has been abused, defrauded, and twisted into a mockery of what it was intended. It's like a charity that has begun enslaving its old donors when they start to object to its practices.
The fence was already torn down from the other side. The damage has already been done.
I hope the slope is slippery, or else we'll never get where we need to be. In the meantime, I will accuse anyone who objects to this of the slippery slope fallacy. Is this a risky move in danger of going to far? Yes, obviously.
You can't go handing out citizenship like candy and also claim that it should be treated like some sacred rite that cannot be undone--that is merely a strategy to undermine borders and should be regarded as enemy action (because it is).
The case of Leah Charlton from 1890 Liverpool is interesting.
nomenym
15d ago
The law, as you describe it, is so transparently absurd that it renders itself moot. No case will actually be decided by any such law, since evidence can be arbitrarily interpreted any which way a jury intuits. It simply amounts to asking the jury whether they feel like the defendant is a bad person that they want to punish.
nomenym
20d ago
While I don't especially like the prequels, they do have a kind of child-like earnest charm that I enjoy.
nomenym
25d ago
that reddit atheist meme
Old experiment with mice. Giving them abundance led to inversion of ordinary mouse behavior and collapse of mouse civilization.
nomenym
26d ago
A propensity to have a psychotic break in the first place should be viewed as an aggravating factor. It is part of who a person is. I would find the "demon possession" defense more honest.
nomenym
26d ago
My main concern is not about the object level rights and wrongs of the case, but that mothers killing their children in a psychotic break will become the next social contagion.
nomenym
29d ago
And when these tech companies do give something back to the community or go above and beyond to mitigate externalities, they too often just don't tell anybody what they're doing. It's highly frustrating.
nomenym
29d ago
I can only speak for the data centers I've been involved with, but it has amazed me how little effort has been put into trying to counter or at least mitigate the most excessive claims of critics. Frankly, the complacency of these tech companies is kind of driving me crazy, though I have some ideas I want to push. We don't need to make people like data centers, we just need more people to utter the words "I don't like data centers, but..."
I don't feel sad for him, though I'd prefer he not be dead. I feel sad that Cambridge has fallen so low, but I knew that already.
Many will now claim that trollish insults and ridiculing memes are responsible for this, rather than the truth about his lies stated plainly and reasonably, even though the latter was by far the more devastating. Presuming he killed himself, it was likely because his sins were so egregious that even his own tribe could not overlook or excuse them. Nasty and vicious jeers from the outgroup are merely badges of honor, but the disappointed glances from the ingroup hit like a freight train. People like Arday don't kill themselves when they are exposed to the outgroup; they kill themselves when they are exposed to the ingroup. He lost status hard and fast. The only injustice here is that many of his colleagues should also be brought down a few pegs.
He should never have resigned.
nomenym
1mo ago
Musk is not stupid, but he often acts foolishly. Even a very skilled driver may drive recklessly.
The real alignment problem always was other humans.
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