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Throwing in a quick post because I'm surprised it hasn't been discussed here (unless I missed it!), Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago sets up "ICE-free zones" in Chicago.
This comes on the heels of Trump sending in the national guard after Chicago PD apparently wouldn't help ICE agents under attack. I haven't read all the stuff about this scenario, but on the surface level it seems pretty bad, I have to say.
There's a video clip where that mayor is saying that Republicans want a "redo of the Civil War," amongst other incredibly inflammatory things. The Governor of Illinois is apparently backing the mayor up.
This refusal to help ICE and even outright claim that you're fighting a war with them I mean... I suppose Democrats have been doing it for a while. This seems... bad. I mean sure you can sugarcoat it and point to legal statues and such, but fundamentally if the local governments of these places are going to agitate so directly against the President, I can't blame Trump for sending in the national guard.
Obviously with the two party system we have a line and such, but man, it's a shame that our politicians have fully embraced the heat-over-light dynamics of the culture war, to the point where they really are teetering on the brink of starting a civil war. Not the social media fear-obsessed "civil war" people have been saying has already started, but real national guard vs. local pd or state military type open warfare. I just don't understand going this far, unless the Mayor of Chicago thinks that he can get away with it and Trump will back down.
Even then, brinksmanship of this type seems totally insane!
I suppose Newsom in CA has been doing it too, now that I mention it. Sigh. I hope that we can right this ship because man, I do not want to have to fight in a civil war I have to say. Having studied history, it's a lot more horrible than you might think.
Oh no, the perfidy of the woke left truly knows no bounds. And to attack such an upstanding citizen as president Trump, who started his political career with his very nuanced ad about the central park five (about whose guilt he was factually wrong, sadly), based his bid for the presidency on another unfortunate misunderstanding of his and proceeded to win the hearts and minds of Americans by always maintaining decorum and treating his political opponents with respect. Always a voice of moderation and compromise, as well as a great husband and fine human being and an upholder of the highest epistemic norms.
Let me be blunt. Falsehoods are always bad, but if there is one party which has forsaken the high ground here, it is Trump's party. Given all the shit Trump has been spewing over the years, I would not particularly upset on his behalf if the Democrats were to spread a rumor that he has an Olympic swimming pool filled to the brim with the eyes of murdered babies in which he likes to go skinny-dipping with his cabinet.
Besides, "Trump wants a civil war" is far-fetched, but not maximally far-fetched. There is a notable community of preppers and 'militias' for whom "another civil war" has long been a favorite masturbatory fantasy. (Of course, they did not expect to fight on the side of the federal government!)
It is established case-law that the duty of the police to protecting individual citizens is fuck-all. I do not know if relevant local or case law has decided if local police forces owe any service to the feds, but I would default to "no".
Letting the BLM riots happen was actually bad. Deciding that you have more urgent police priorities than helping ICE, which Trump likely ordered specifically into Chicago to punish the people who voted against him, and whose whole mission is to score cheap political points in a rather farcelike manner -- "we get rid of all the illegals, except for the ones in the hotel sector (where Trump is involved) and the ones in the agricultural sector (whose deportation would make the food prices skyrocket even more)".
Why should the local mayor lend Trump the PD for his political stunts? Let him at least waste federal funds for it.
Are you saying that you know that the Democrats are treasonous because Trump sent the national guard to deal with them? Then DC must have turned treasonous already weeks ago!
Here is my take. This is a clown-show. Trumps masked goons try to kidnap illegals to help him score political points (and own the libs). I imagine that local PDs will in turn try to hamper ICE as much as they can. Perhaps their unmarked cars get towed while they are illegally parked mid-arrest, or they are subject to frequent 'random' traffic checks. This is probably likewise not the best use of police resources.
I can not speak for the random people Trump gave a bonus, a badge, a mask and a gun to act as his muscle, but my priors are that both the national guard and the local PDs really really do not want to shoot at each other. If they clash about specific questions which enforcements of local strictures which just so happen to impede ICE are allowed, both sides will refer to the court system to figure it out, and the court system will do this in very short order. Few national guard commanders would be stupid enough to trust Trump to pardon them if they break the law in his name, and approximately zero police chiefs have any delusions about defeating the federal government once the courts have decided in its favor.
At the end of the day, this is mostly a pointless dick-measuring contest.
Excuse me? Those men are guilty as sin, and obviously so. They did, in fact, rape and murder that woman. The fact that they are still breathing is an affront to justice, and one of Trump's best qualities is that he was right on the money about them decades ago.
ETA:
The woman was in a coma, left for dead, but didn't die. I am wrong about details, and can and do quibble about direction below, but she didn't die, there was no murder, and I should have let go of my annoyance instead of shooting off a contrary reply.
Had I come to my senses earlier, I'd have cancelled, or deleted swiftly. I didn't.
See my reply here.
Again, it is technically possible that they aided Reyes in raping the victim alone, then killed her, and for some reason decided to shield him (and only him) in their confessions by claiming he was not present. Perhaps he was a member of the illuminati, and the defendants who were afraid enough to betray their buddies were nevertheless more afraid of him than of a murder sentence, and had taken the steps to coordinate a false version of events -- which lead to them spending decades in prison -- so they did not have to implicate him.
Or it could be that Reyes is psychic and edited himself out of the memory of his accomplices after the deed.
Or perhaps a bunch of forensic experts formed a conspiracy to falsely exonerate a bunch of murderers and get them millions in restitution instead, and falsified the DNA evidence after convincing Reyes to confess. Perhaps they did it to make Trump look bad a decade later when he would start to become a political force.
Here is what I think likely happened. CP5 was a big, political case. Trump published his attack ad on the mayor. The mayor knew that he needed a conviction, and made it clear to the police that he wanted a guilty verdict. For a cop, this is the kind of case which will make or break your career. They found the likeliest suspects that they could find and convinced themselves that they were guilty, which was easy because it was in their personal best interests to believe it (as opposed to telling the mayor that they had been unable to find the killer). Confirmation bias did the rest.
They did not follow good epistemic protocols, like having different cops get confessions from different suspects, and then check the confessions for consistency, or determining if the suspects had perpetrator's knowledge.
In their mind, there was no need, because they already knew that they were guilty ("police instinct" and all that), and their job was simply to paint a picture which would convince any bleeding heart jury.
They very likely cut corners in the process, skipped legally mandated safety checks. Even if you are a cop who will mostly play by the book, this case was to important to leave it up to chance if the real, circumstantial evidence would convince the jury. So you 'forget' to give your suspect the Miranda warning. Perhaps you beat a few of them up to get them to confess, after all, these scumbags just murdered a girl, and you are not even breaking their bones. Or you prompt them with the same story which they should confess. Who cares if you find out in which order they raped her, the important thing is that you present a version of the story which will get them sent to prison, not contradictory confessions which will confuse the jury. Simulacrum level two, not one. Perhaps you even plant a bit of evidence to help justice along.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it were not for the fact that the boffins developed a new forensic technique which is far more reliable than any amount of confessions.
In a way, the case exposed the whole rotten underbelly of the US criminal justice system. I wonder how many other 'criminals' are still sitting in prison because the same dirty cops played the same dirty tricks on them. (While I believe that most convicts are in fact guilty, I also believe that US cops do not have a culture of good epistemics and calling out the ones who use illegal shortcuts to paint a nicer picture.)
The reason why every kid learns that the only thing you say when arrested is "I will not answer any questions and I want a lawyer", no matter if you are innocent or guilty, is because US citizens can not trust the police to be interested in determining the truth, especially if they are already detaining you.
Oh come on. Now every state that does not execute prisoners is inherently unjust?
You skipped an important part in your haste to come to a conclusion. What do you think they were doing that night, when a woman was raped and beaten nearly to death? What do you think happened to her?
It's kind of important to have an idea of what did happen before you start imagining things about the response to what happened.
I think they were there, attacking and robbing people, maybe indiscriminately, maybe targeting whites, along with about 25 other people. I think all 30 deserve a short trip from a high place, and I think these 5 in particular are in fact guilty of the assault on this woman because of their confessions which implicated each other.
I also think the response to that response was a pretty good one.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Once more for those in the cheap seats:
HELL YES.
A state that exercises a monopoly on violence but doesn't put anyone to death is abdicating their duty and denying victims their due justice. Some people deserve to die for what they've done. Many people, in fact. Delaying this is the same as denying it, and denying it outright from the start is cruelty to the victims.
So you support the death penalty for attempted felony murder for 14yo perpetrators (given that you are annoyed that the CP5 are still breathing).
Our different ideas about standards of evidence aside, do you have a lower limit on the age a perpetrator in a similar situation? If an 8yo brother of one of the CP5 had tagged along and taken a minor part in the act as you believe it took place, would you also hang him? What about a 5yo who just finds an unsecured pistol, says "bang, you are dead" and shoots someone?
Or take the severity of the crime. Most of the other 25 were not accused of crimes as severe as the CP5, WP talks of muggings. So the 14yo mugger gets the noose, should the 14yo pickpocket hang next to him? Or the copyright infringer? At what point should society decide that a kid is beyond redemption?
Adult perpetrators get adult punishments. That society is abdicating its duty to train its young men and women and delaying -> denying them a significant chunk of the prime of their life does not change this basic biological fact.
The reason why society does that is related to the reason society generally fails to punish criminals- redistributing resources (intangibles like virtue and intelligence are just as real a resource as physical goods are, though I understand this is a fringe view) from the useful and decent to the useless and evil under a belief that being useless or evil could be solved if the community simply loved them more (that it imposes real costs on everyone else is not material to that analysis).
Thanks to the relatively unbalanced rise in political power of those whose evolutionary biological specialization leads them to solve problems that way, that's the approach we most often see in modern times. And in fairness, there is something to that approach; keeping humanity's natural biological tendencies in check can be greatly beneficial to mankind. That being said, though...
At the point where means, motive/desire, and opportunity become relevant factors (we treat those who are sufficiently mental defective in the same way- they just go to an institution until they are fixed or die). It's very rare- like, once-in-a-generation rare- for actual children to pull off capital crimes in the first place, but I really don't have a problem with the sentence for the once-in-a-lifetime case of tweenagers luring and murdering a toddler for kicks being death. Probably unwise to parade them through the streets before the gallows, though.
Are you arguing that 14yo's are adults, and society should treat them as such in legal matters?
So they should also be old enough to buy smokes, weed and vodka, own guns, drive cars, have full control over their finances, shoot porn, vote, enlist, gamble in Vegas, make medical decisions without their parent's consent (think transgender surgeries), supply and use sperm banks, hold political office, perform for Epstein?
From a physiological perspective, 14yo's are not adults. the median 14yo guy fighting the median 18yo guy will be a lot more one-sided than 18yo-vs-22yo. Still, that is not very relevant to the legal aspects: we generally do not bestow rights based on how good you are at beating people up.
As far as mental development is concerned, 14 is still in the throes of puberty. Some people will, for better or worse, be as wise at age 14 as they will ever be. Personally, I was not prone to life-ruining bad decisions (except for avoiding bad decisions), but I was not certainly stupid about lot of things. Still, I think that plenty of 14yo's would be prone to making life-ruining bad decisions if we let them, which is why we limit the decisions they can take.
Of course, the 18th birthday cutoff point is completely arbitrary. an 18yo will still be more prone to bad decisions than a 25yo, but we can hardly deny people the benefits of adulthood until then. Still, the worst youthful bad decision tendencies will be over by age 18. Personally, I would support the Terra Ignota majority exams. If you are some wunderkind who can convince society at age 10 that you should be allowed to drive a car and own a gun, then by all means let society also punish you for your crimes as an adult.
In order:
They already do, they already do, this was fine in 1960 so why isn't it fine now?, they're nearly there anyway, what finances?, what else do you think 14 year olds use Snapchat for?, no taxation without representation, if they can pass for 18 they lie about it and we didn't much care in the past, welcome to Counter Strike unboxing video #99999, they already do, when they act as sperm banks they owe child support, this would be worse than the current crop of politicians... how, exactly?, meanwhile, in Rotherham...
Oh yeah, and we already try teenagers "as adults" anyway, especially when they break the above laws, so clearly this is just ageism.
Rights are not "bestowed". Men have those rights because they are capable of the organized violence required to force their recognition. Every one was fought for.
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Not the one you responded to, but it appears obvious to me that 14yos are more adult than the law treats them, in many cases. Things like drinking should be acceptable in moderation under parental supervision, if only to teach the teens the limits so that they don't have to learn them getting blackout drunk among similarly clueless but eager peers at 18. (Of course, we then arrive to the issue of many parents being prone to bad decisions.)
Really, the law on drinking age appears now to be designed to account for negligent parents. What is a properly parented 14yo gonna do if they're able to buy alcohol? Get illicitly drunk once?
Regarding crimes, at 14 a human should have enough moral knowledge to know that beating a human being while they're down is unacceptable and enough self-control to stop themselves from doing it. They can be excused to some extent for crimes of passion, but there's a point where "passion" no longer cuts it.
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