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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25824 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.

From another case:

“Mr. Khant [accused of arranging sex with a 15-year old] is a permanent resident seeking Canadian citizenship and professional licensing,” wrote the judge. “A conviction would not only delay his citizenship by four years but could also prevent him from sponsoring his wife and obtaining his engineering licence.

To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.

If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.

Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.

From your 2nd link

he did show “some response to younger females” in phallometric testing, but he agreed to take therapy in light of the finding

TIL.

We have discussed this before. As Scott writes when describing US sex taboos:

Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery.

Personally, I suspect that a majority of men are hard-wired to be attracted to any fertile-looking female. Some might be more into teen porn and some might be more into MILF porn, but very few will say that B cups or D cups are a hard no in the same way a beard and a cock are for most men.

So I do not think that measuring if the perp gets a boner from the average 15yo female is going to be very crucial information. If he has two brain cells to rub together, the next hooker he will hire will be of legal age. Who gives a fuck if it is a 19yo who could pass for 15 or if she is a 30yo MILF?

Personally, I also do not think that we should take all the information which affects re-offending probability into account. If the perp was sexually abused as a child, has a brother who is serving time, comes from a bad neighborhood, was raised by a single parent, has a father with a criminal record, is black, is unemployed, or is irreligious, that could all be statistical risk factors for re-offending.

But criminal sentencing is not only about preventing re-offending (even if harsher lower the risk of re-offending after release -- which may or may not be the case). It is also crucial for a stable society that it is seen as broadly fair. In fact, this very discussion is about a way in which it is unfair!

In my opinion, besides the specifics of the case, sentencing should only be based on prior convictions. Of course, the defense is free to argue that the accused has found god or is really into MILFs or whatever.

Also from your 2nd link:

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.

So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.

I certainly think that the SC ruling is bad. I mean, it is good that courts can take into account consequences outside of criminal law when determining what punishment is appropriate. If someone has spent a decade on the run in shitty conditions, or had his marriage or professional life destroyed by his deed, that might be factors to reduce their prison sentence compared to someone who experienced no negative feedback. If you know that the defendant will get deported after his sentence either way, you might shave off a year off the sentence (on the assumption that most citizen criminals would not take that trade).

However, doing this proactively -- to avoid issuing a prison sentence because it would have further unpleasant consequences -- seems silly. I mean, I can construct a case where the predictable consequences of a 90 day prison sentence are deportation to Afghanistan and getting beheaded by the Taliban, and I can see that a judge would be unwilling to sentence someone to their death for a minor crime. But this is not the case here. Staying in Canada as a permanent resident for another four years before getting his citizenship does not seem like undue harshness.

the value of a sex-offender-free workplace

Hard disagree here. If you really think that workplaces should not employ convicted sex offenders, are you then willing to pay them unemployment benefits for the rest of their lives? Or do you think they should just get the death penalty, or be forced to beg in the streets?

The idea of criminal rehabilitation requires people to find employment. After an offender has served their sentence, they should join the workforce again.

For professional licences, there are sometimes higher standards, because these come with a lot of additional responsibility. You do not want a habitual drug dealer as an officer of the court, or drunk driver as a doctor. Because of the privileges offered by such jobs, we want to filter for people who take laws extra serious, on the presumption that if they do not take general laws serious, they might also cut corners in professional regulations.

So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.

There's actually an interesting question there: if something is not legislated, but a judge sets a precedent (particularly without apparent basis), is that "the law"?

Yes, if the judge is high enough in the food chain. This is called case law.

For example, Roe v. Wade was case law made by the SCOTUS which made abortion legal in the US on a flimsy interpretation of the 14th amendment, and that stood for 50 years.

I'm getting at the philosophy-of-law question, not current custom. Lots of non-Anglo countries reject precedent. The philosophical question is mostly reliability vs. justice (after all, a bad precedent is literally judges getting a decision wrong; following that precedent is getting it wrong again).

Precedent also potentially worsens the "rogue judiciary" problem, since it allows a few rogue justices to control their inferiors more easily and their successors at all.

so the presumably if we follow this logic a CEO of a company would get a shorter custodial sentence than an unemployed person because the extra consequences will be much larger for the CEO. if you have special circumstances that will make punishments extra costly then you should make extra effort to not break the law.

Of course, this is not the actual logic. What's actually going on is plain old sympathy.

Directionally, I am okay with that, provided that the long term consequences for the CEO are real, which seems doubtful. On the other hand, having a fat bank account allows for a much nicer prison term ('work' release etc), and having a nice life despite a criminal record.

As another example, suppose someone kills a kid in a DUI crash. If it is their own kid, then it seems very likely that the killing will haunt them for the rest of their days. If it is some unrelated kid, it will not affect the median person as much. So I am fine with giving the filicide a shorter prison sentence.

The problem being that except for a fairly small number of jobs, there’s no way to prevent this person from having contact with children. Warehouses might be about the only low-skill job available where you could guarantee that at no time is he in contact with a child. As far as professionals, most of them are public contact jobs, so again he’ll be able to contact children.

Well, he was trying to hire what he believed to be a 15yo sex worker, not luring 8yo's into his van.

While I think that putting him in a person with authority over minors (e.g. teacher, youth pastor, pediatrician) would be a bad idea, I also think that jobs where he just might have occasional contact with minors seem non-problematic. Car mechanics typically do not spend a lot of time alone with kids, for example. Nor do construction workers.

In most jobs, you have fewer opportunities to groom minors during working hours than you have once your shift is over. Even working in a supermarket would be fine. Sure, there is some chance that he ends up with another 15yo alone in the market, but "trying to get random 15yo girls to do sex work" is much stupider than "trying to hire a 15yo sex worker".

If the individual is allowed to be out in public unfettered he will have some non-zero contact with children. For example if he gets sent to do community service picking up trash in a public park, there likely will be children playing in the park at some point. The bigger issue is making sure that someone like that is not in a position of trust or authority over minors that they could leverage inappropriately. If they can't be trusted in public spaces at all, they should be incarcerated. Obviously this guy should have been deported though.

Do we have to guarantee that absolutely zero contact with children of any kind is had by that person to be reasonably sure they don't have opportunities to diddle them?

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.

Both are insane. The former perverts the intent of the legislative branch of government, and the latter is some form of bizarro judicial equivalent of jury nullification.

It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.

Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.

Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.

1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.

I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both.

Don't get my hopes up, and don't you dare be wrong about it.

Also, even if - the far right is known to bungle it.

The left just won another majority.

Small comfort lies in that it was not in fact a majority -- nobody else is keen to force an election at the moment, and Carney is vulnerable on way too many fronts to easily juggle.

Unless he's a lot more competent than he looks, I give him 18 months.

We're probably still fucked (2019 was our "let's roll" moment, and we... did not roll) but there's still faint hope.

This assumes that there will be a Canada in the future, which is increasingly doubtful- Alberta and Saskatchewan hate their status as provinces that pay all the bills, and Quebec only stays in because of bribes paid for with their money, and discontiguous states fighting over a shrinking pie have a way of dissolving.

Has there been a non-Baltic Western state that dissolved in the last couple of centuries? I can't think of any offhand. Austria-Hungary was dissolved by force post WW1, as was Germany post WW2.

Dissolved as split into smaller states, or dissolved as abolished?

If the latter, numerous small (but very ancient) small German and Italian states vanished during 19th century.

Has there been a non-Baltic Western state

Did you mean non-Balkan — meaning to hold the breakup of Yugoslavia as an exception — or did you really mean non-Baltic? Because I'm not familiar with any of the Baltic states having "dissolved."

Because you really shouldn't confuse those two.

Because I'm not familiar with any of the Baltic states having "dissolved."

They got invaded and conquered by the USSR, and then the USSR-including-them dissolved.

Sorry :) I meant Balkan, I was trying to exclude Yugoslavia.

Ireland and the vast majority of the British empire, including Western countries like Canada, Australia...

Czechoslovakia, and if you include them as western, the Mexican Empire and Yugoslavia.

Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.

The government can bypass the Courts even on issues of fundamental rights. Poilevre threatened this as a way to get round judges blocking penalties for criminals.

So, theoretically, a Canadian PM could come in and just hit ignore every time the judiciary tries to interfere with their immigration law. But this has never happened and I don't even know how people would react if it did.

In Lieu Of Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie, American Just Watching News From England. I've been unironically doing this for a few weeks now.

Canada is even worse. It's time to start building a wall to the north, and thinking about how we're going to handle it when that expanse of desolate wasteland fully devolves into a third world shithole.

Building a wall is a little silly. I'm pro-immigration, but in this case that l means I think the amerian military should immigrate into ottowa and annex it. Canadians are very aware that they aren't a real country-- this is the obvious solution to that.

As a Canadian, I would be in favor of this on the condition that you get your own shit under control before you start messing with ours. When I make a list of possible solutions to Canada's political dysfunctions, "Invasion by US military under Donald Trump" does not rank highly.

I mean, also as a Canadian - I’d definitely take “Invasion by US military under Donald Trump” over “Liberals import 3% of our population per year.”

YMMV.

The problem is that judges are people.

For example, it used to be the procedure in the Netherlands that, assuming good behaviour, you only served two thirds of your sentence. The remaining third you'd normally be on parole.

This was removed in order to be tough on crime, and this changed pretty much nothing, because: judges are people. They're using their judgement. They also know the laws and procedures, including this one. So under the old system, if you really wanted to put someone away for ten years, you'd give fifteen. And now, if they want to put you away for ten years, they just give you the ten.

We also have that same law that foreigners who are sentenced to two years or more in prison, should be deported afterwards. This seems on the face of it like a very reasonable law. If you've done something that bad, we'll probably be better off without you around.

But again: judges are people. If the judge doesn't think someone should be deported, they are not going to hand out a sentence that automatically comes with deportation. They are going to hand out a lighter sentence. So now we're having Afghan rapists sentenced to 20 months.

The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work. If a judge doesn't want to give a sentence, he won't. If he has to acquit the criminal entirely in order to avoid it, he will.

If you want tougher judgements you need to appoint tougher judges.

I don't see the connection between 'being a person' and therefor automatically being inclined to give foreign rapists light sentences.

To me it doesn't seem reasonable or humane, just cowardly and sick. Being so wrapped up in and simultaneously so blind to ones own twisted moral intuition that it becomes practically impossible to differentiate between the person raping a 15 year old and the person calling them a pig is not 'normal'.

I think it would be a lot more pertinent for people like this to examine their state of mind and how it has managed to drive them towards results such as this. But it seems like we've managed to build an impervious wall that keeps people away from exploring the true extent of the problem and just what feeds these 'outgroup sycophants' to do what they do.

Judges are people in the sense that they have the ability to do what they want. Judges can just change what they do(remember, they're on average very intelligent individuals). This makes bossing them around complicated.

Considering what's on display, it doesn't seem very complicated to boss them around. As they look to be captive by the same process that most others are captive by. The belief is that the ingroup needs to sacrifice to make amends with the outgroup.

People who hold this belief feel it is their moral right to sacrifice other peoples children to make the bigger picture come together. And considering it has been decided as an economic policy to move vast amounts of third world browns around, and Europe has built a justice system based on European peoples and their comparatively more peaceful and redeemable criminals, what else is there for these judges to do? Just like the government and journalists in Sweden who hide the knowledge of race based crime statistics from the public in the name of solidarity and progress. It's literally the only play that makes sense when holding oneself to egalitarian priors.

Judges being people doesn't seem to be a problem at all. It actually looks like a perfectly functioning limb of an unassailable system that one can't be against without being literally Hitler.

It's also hard to overrule a judge and even harder to get rid of one. They aren't vulnerable to the normal ways of forcing public servants to follow instructions from above. Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.

Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.

Which is yet another reason "Western democracy" needs to go. Bring in an Augustus who will solve this swiftly and decisively.

There ARE ways to deal with bad judges in Canada. For instance we had a case where a judge asked a raped women why she didn’t simply shut her legs harder. Iirc the law society basically got him off the bench for that, a big No No. if we wanted the public could pressure similar measures, but we probably won’t. Canadians are addicted to being Nice but even moreso to being Not Like Americans. If America is deporting foreigner criminals., why, we’ll just NOT deport them and maybe even give them a reward for it too. See how not American we are? Such moral superiority is truly a reward on its own.

Yes this problem is everywhere.

Judges were originally given a tenure-like 'life' appointment to protect them from short term blowback from their sentencing, but by doing so the system can't deal with them if they repeatedly hit the defect button against community expectations.

There needs to be a way to indict, recall or otherwise censure judges that do this. Maybe an oversight sentencing board that can be appealed to by victims to review sentencing. And have members of that board be elected for a term of 2-3 years.

The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work.

America ran this experiment. Did it fail?

My impression is that the subversion of the punishment now happens when prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting, not judges failing to deliver the legally mandated minimum.

I think the overt politicization of the American judiciary makes it better in this case. Each individual judge may be biased, but since both sides get to appoint judges, and fight over it, the justice system as a whole ends up fairly representative.

In most of Europe on the other hand the justice system is treated as an apolitical, bureaucratic organization. The judges should be professionals, and leave their biases at home. The public shouldn't care about the judges, in the same way that we shouldn't have to care about minor functionaries in other random government departments, who are just hired on the basis of their skill set and are there to do a job.

So in the Netherlands: the Minister of Justice appoints the head of the Council for the Judiciary. This council in turn appoint the heads of the courts. The courts then hire judges. In practice even the ministerial selection is done based on a shortlist, and the courts too make shortlists. The minister could maybe ram through a political appointee if he really wanted (and get everyone to yell InDePeNdEnT JuDiCiArY), but that political appointee would have no institutional support and get nothing done.

This all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice everyone (except, depending on how the election went, the minister) is a fairly serious progressive by now, and they will always make progressive rulings, and hire more progressives. And there's no way to change that except by going full Orban.

prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting

I don't actually have much of a problem with this in the American context. The laws are made democratically, and almost everywhere in the US, the district attorney is also an elected position.

If a DA gets elected on the promise not to charge criminals, then indeed doesn't charge criminals, then gets reelected, then clearly the people actually want this. At that point I can't really disagree with it. I disagree with the stance, but not with implementing the results of the vote. If the median voter of e.g. Portland really is this progressive, then yes, so should the government of Portland be.

The problem comes when these people are appointed by "the system" and cannot be removed.

Judges do all kinds of dubious things beyond their social remit. Just today I was reading a long book-screenshot thread from arctotherium that touched on this: https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/1956872568637739354/photo/1

"Racially and socially homogenous schools damage the minds of children who attend them" per the judge. And so there was all this white flight and bussing because some judge was allowed to run rampant.

In Australia we had a judge ruling that a minister handling approvals for a coal mine had a duty of care to teenagers who would be affected by the 'climate crisis'. This was later overruled as the Federal Court decided that this was really a matter for legislation and the government rather than judges. But the fact it was even considered is bad. Judges should be limited to obviously legal cases like crimes and straightforward application of law. You can introduce a duty of care argument for any policy if you really try. Duty of care should be restricted to more direct, obvious examples like making sure that stairs in a supermarket aren't slippery and hazardous, not social or economic engineering.

In the Netherlands, courts order Shell to reduce emissions under duty of care and EU human rights regarding 'right to life and the right to family life': https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57257982

Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a

Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a

He must have died while writing this. Perhaps he was dictating?

It's been a longtime since I've seen Candle Jack, maybe he did i

I often edit my posts after writing them (a short while after, before anyone can read them). Sometimes I cancel the edit, or alter something else and leave a thought unfinished. On balance it wasn't a good line of argument and should've been deleted.

Sometimes it's the legislative branch assuming that a court should interpret this reasonably and then the court going all the way, other times it's just bad politics that makes bad law and then that ties the judges hands so they have to make bad decisions.

Some irony in me criticising others and failing to finish the very sentence where I bemoan, though my opinions on this thrice derived rationality forum don't matter at all.

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