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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1036 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 27, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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BBC: [UK] justice secretary wants [English and Welsh] jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases

The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that [Justice Secretary David] Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.

The proposals are an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in courts, and do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

The MoJ presentation, produced earlier this month, says Crown Courts are facing record backlogs, with more than 78,000 cases waiting to be completed.

In practice, this means that suspects being charged with serious crimes today may not have a trial until late 2029 or early 2030.

Officials predict in the document that the caseload will grow to more than 100,000 before then, unless there is further action.

Earlier this year, retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Brian Leveson recommended that the government end jury trial for many serious offences, saying they could be dealt with by a judge alone or sitting with two magistrates.

This would be done by creating a new intermediate tier of criminal court, dubbed the "Crown Court Bench Division" (CCBD), sitting in between magistrates' courts and Crown Courts, where juries decide cases.

The CCBD would hear cases involving defendants facing sentences of up to three years, Sir Brian recommended.

The "DPM's [deputy prime minister's] decision", according to the leaked MoJ document, is to "go further than Sir Brian's to achieve maximum impact".

Under current law, only certain "indictable offenses" require trial by jury. This is cognate with the US's indictable offenses, which generally carry sentences of more than one year.

Compare the US's system, in which trial by jury is presumptively guaranteed for any crime carrying potential punishment greater than six months (separate from whether the crime is a felony), but this is sidestepped by pushing more than 90 percent of defendants to plead guilty. Plea bargaining apparently is not common in the UKGBNI.

House of Commons debate

Sarah Sackman, Minister for Courts and Legal Services: The vast majority of cases in our courts are already heard without juries. Around 90% of all criminal cases are dealt with robustly and fairly by magistrates, with no jury.

Sarah Sackman: I spoke to a victim of child sexual abuse who had waited years for his day in court. A couple of weeks before his trial date, he was given the devastating news that the trial had been adjourned for another year. I regret to say that he sought to take his own life upon hearing that. Luckily, his attempt did not work, but if we ever needed a more graphic illustration of the weight that these intolerable delays place on victims —on real people’s lives—that is it. That is why we have to do whatever it takes to bring down these backlogs.

Jeremy Corbyn: This is, I think, the third attempt by successive Governments to reduce the right to trial by jury. It is a fundamental right in our system that should not be undermined, and particularly not because the Government have a current and, hopefully, temporary problem with capacity. In answer to the hon. Member for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson), the Minister recognised that the Lammy inquiry of 2017 found that jury trials are more objective than judge-only trials, less likely to be racially biased and likely to give a fairer outcome. Is the Minister really content that we should be walking away from the jury trial system because of the current problems? Instead, is the answer not, as other hon. Members have suggested, to invest more in the system to deal with the appalling backlog, which she rightly says we have?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c058lp086zvo

Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies have begun searching the apartment of President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff Andriy Yermak.

One of the two agencies, anti-corruption bureau Nabu, confirmed that its investigative searches had been authorised and said further details would follow.

A corruption scandal has engulfed several figures close to Zelensky, though neither he nor his right-hand man Yermak have been accused of any wrongdoing.

Yermak has played a crucial role in Ukraine's response to Russia's full-scale war, and he is Kyiv's lead negotiator in peace talks with the US. However, his position has become increasingly under threat from critics calling for him to go.

Yermak, 54, confirmed on social media that both Nabu and the specialised anti-corruption prosecutor's office (Sapo) were "conducting procedural actions at my home" and had full access to his apartment, with his lawyers on site.

"From my side, there is full co-operation."

The searches come at a very awkward moment for Zelensky and his chief of staff, with US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll due to arrive in Kyiv by the end of this week as US President Donald Trump pushes ahead with a draft peace plan. US officials are heading to Moscow next week.

That is definitely a foreign directed strike against Zelensky - but I always thought that the anti corruption services were EU puppets and US, so not sure what and why is behind it, and why exactly in this moment.

There seems to be great pressure mounting to force Ukraine leadership to sign whatever rag of a document is presented to them and let the whole thing be over.

There seems to be great pressure mounting to force Ukraine leadership to sign whatever rag of a document is presented to them and let the whole thing be over.

Or they need fall guys to blame if Ukraine collapses. It wasn’t Europe or America’s fault, it was these corrupt oligarchs!

Update: Yermak has resigned. That was unexpected. I really want to see the hottakes of the kievologists about what that means and why

What other options did he have? Standing your ground works in "he said, she said" cases, not when the feds have been successfully collecting evidence against you.

I always thought that the anti corruption services were EU puppets and US, so not sure what and why is behind it, and why exactly in this moment.

From what I've heard, they used to be US-guided, but the gutting of foreign aid and interference initiatives under Trump forced the EU to pick up the reins.

I always thought that the anti corruption services were EU puppets and US, so not sure what and why is behind it, and why exactly in this moment.

If they're US puppets, this is pretty much something you'd expect given [people in US administration have been explicitly advising Putin aides how to get the most favorable response from Trump.

I was never able to understand what the issue with that advice thing was. Except that it has Trump in the sentence. As if no one has ever advised Zelensky how to talk with Trump.

Or just people have invested so much of their identity and prestige in the whole Ukraine situation that for them any deal that is good for Russia is treason towards US.

As if no one has ever advised Zelensky how to talk with Trump.

Maybe they did, but it certainly looks like he didn't listen. If Trump indeed were so easy to manipulate - I'd expect Zelensky, having not many other levers, to solicit every advice in existence on how to do that and manipulate the heck out of him. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

During this holiday season, are you interacting with any far-flung relatives who speak strange creoles/patoises/pidgins of your language? Do you think that such modes of speech should be considered proper languages in which their inhabitants can take pride, or merely disgusting bastardized dialects suitable only for reassimilation into the mother tongue? As a USAian with several relatives (mostly from Trinidad and St. Croix) who speak English with a very thick accent, and at least one (IIRC, from Antigua) who probably can be considered a speaker of creole rather than of English proper, I am inclined toward the latter opinion.

(I'm putting this in the Thursday thread rather than in the Friday thread because it seems like a culture-war topic. See, e. g., the laughs that /pol/ extracted from BBC Pidgin a while ago.)

I am interacting with Paraguayans, which have a simplified and in a sense more rational version of Spanish with consistent verb endings. Despite being landlocked, it does have a navy, which patrols its rivers.

I have relatives who speak three kinds of Chinese. Growing up, they spoke one only with family, another was the local vernacular, and they learned Mandarin at school. In all likelihood I will be the last person in the family to (barely) speak our ancestral tongue, but if I'm lucky one day I will have children who can deploy a few choice insults, like Sopranos characters spouting broken Sicilian phrases. Otherwise I appreciate the benefits of linguistic standardization, up to a point i.e. everyone being monolingual anglophones would be boring as hell to me.

No, although I have a few cousins and uncles and stuff who can speak cajun. I think cajun deserves to be preserved as a distinct language and not just parisian french in Louisiana schools, but that's probably not going to happen.

Fascinating things are going to happen with near dead languages in the age of generative AI. I'm fairly certain I could already choose to have an AI translate the wall street journal every morning into Pennsylvania Dutch. Or AI create music and videos in Pennsylvania Dutch. Once such a choice becomes cost effective, language in media becomes an aesthetic choice.

Do you speak PA dutch well enough to know if the generated language is accurate? I know a little from my grandparents and great grandparents, but not enough to be fluent, or judge the skill of others.

Irrelevant possibly but I was given a stack of essays in Japanese recently, some of them handwritten, that I was supposed to be able to understand. I asked ChatGPT 5.1 to translate one based on an image (it was handwritten) , which it did. In reading the translation I was startled by what appeared to be an alarming misapprehension of the person who wrote the essay. I asked ChatGPT about the word choices used and where the writer was going, as well as several follow-up questions about it, and the LLM agreed with my assessment that the person was grossly uninformed.

I then decided to look myself at the essay (which I should have done to begin with but had been lazy.)

Nothing in the translation was in the essay.

On confrontation ChatGPT crumbled, apologizing, saying "because the text was hard to read" it simply pattern-matched the writing with similar writings it had been exposed to and extrapolated the entire remainder from that. In other words a massive hallucination.

I haven't had anything this wrong from ChatGPT in a while and it definitely gives me pause when it comes to requesting translations without scrupulously double-checking it.

The most annoying thing? It then requested I reupload it, promising to "really be careful and be sure only to translate accurately" and....it then gave me what passed for a much more accurate translation. Why this didn't happen to begin with was a mystery, but asking it that just got the usual "You're right to be annoyed" type groveling.

edited for typos

On confrontation ChatGPT crumbled, apologizing, saying "because the text was hard to read" it simply pattern-matched the writing with similar writings it had been exposed to and extrapolated the entire remainder from that.

That's what happens every time it hits some complication. LLMs are psychopaths, they are trained to give you what you expect to hear from them, so if they can't give a satisfactory answer they will invent some lie that sounds plausible because something similar happened in their training corpus. If you catch them, they'd say "you are absolutely right, let me try again!" - and you can't even be mad, there's nothing there to be mad at. You can force it to make any kind of apology you want to hear, but it's all pointless because there's nothing in there that could apologize - it's just an engine whose whole purpose is to produce an answer you'd most likely expect to receive. If that's where they are looking for GAI what they will find if they succeed is just a lie machine that is lying in so sophisticated ways that nobody is smart enough to catch it.

As an aside, this is the biggest source of my AI skepticism. AI will not be able to be useful at scale unless it is truly reliable, which the current state of the art emphatically is not. The problem is not merely that it can fail to complete a task, but that it confidently pretends to have succeeded. In fact the models do not seem to be capable of differentiating on their own between success and pretend-success. This puts a hard limit on what kind of tasks they can perform and at what scale. People like to talk about working with an LLM assistant as like having a fast-working junior employee always at your beck and call (you can offload your tasks but you’ll need to check its work), but for most applications it seems more like having a dodgy outsourcing firm on-call. Not only do you have to check its work, its errors are bizarre and can be deeply hidden, and it will always project total confidence whether the results are perfect or nonexistent.

The lack of progress on this front by any of the major LLM companies makes me think it’s going to take a fairly significant breakthrough to fix, not merely “moar compute,” which makes the aggressive push for AI-everything seem… premature, shall we say. Certainly it does not seem to me that AGI is just around the corner.

In fact the models do not seem to be capable of differentiating on their own between success and pretend-success.

Of course! If there were a way to evaluate the quality of the result, the hyper-smart people earning billions of dollars would think about a thing as trivial as inserting "if the result is of low quality, try doing better" at the end of the AI pipeline. If we, as the end users, see low quality results, it is a hard evidence that their best effort at evaluating the quality of the results are failing. Otherwise they'd build a perfect AI chat and move from billions to trillions.

The configuration "Never fabricate for any reason" in my personal set of instructions (along with "Call me Loretta") doesn't seem to work very well.

Joking about the Loretta.

I put something like that in my custom prompt, and it helps to some measure. But I'm not sure it's introspection capacities are strong enough to even know it's fabricating.

I don't have an answer to your question because its framing is foreign to my way of thinking, but it reminds me of the fierce reaction to when BEV/AAEV (Black English Vernacular) got its 15 minutes of fame in the 90s as "Ebonics."

The point of linguists was/is that BEV has its own sets of rules and even a consistent grammar (in the same way as other dialects). Once this hit the media, however, the appalled reaction by many in the mainstream was that the eggheads were arguing that we should teach Black English in schools. Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

As I'm sure you're aware, both "pidgin" and "creole" are neutral, descriptive linguistic terms.

Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

There was a time where "not anyone was actually arguing" for open borders, welfare for illegal immigrants, on-demand access for men to women spaces and women sports, teaching in elementary schools about gay sex, declaring "whiteness" a root of all evils and many other things that we are observing today. Slippery slope exists, and is very slippery. So if some people saw this discussion and thought "if we don't object, in a short time we'd have public schools with Ebonics as primary teaching language" they may be right or they may be wrong, but they certainly weren't out of line to suspect a possible trend.

I understand how it may be frustrating to actual linguists that didn't want to play politics, but the reality is the science is now serving the politics, not the other way around. And the science community, in the search for power and influence, largely made it so. So now those are the rules by which they'd have to live - the rules of politics.

the science is now serving the politics, not the other way around

This certainly seems on the face of it to be where we are--to some degree since COVID but probably well before that (e.g. the politicization of climate change and to what degree it is anthropomorphic.) I'd suggest that if we don't turn this around there is no way we aren't all completely fucked.

Well, not to worry, very soon all the teaching and sciencing will be done by LLMs, and nobody will remember it was ever otherwise, so it will all be ok.

Once this hit the media, however, the appalled reaction by many in the mainstream was that the eggheads were arguing that we should teach Black English in schools. Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

This slippery slope should not be totally written off. Creoles have been made co-official languages by a few Caribbean governments (Haiti and the Dutch "constituent countries" of Aruba and Curaçao), and politicians have seriously proposed doing the same in the most populated Anglophone Caribbean country, Jamaica.

In the case of Papiamento at least, it seems perfectly reasonable to me. It is the mother tongue of pretty much everyone in Aruba and Curacao. It's also not readily mutually intelligible with any other language. Aruba and Curacao have devolved governments - which other language should they pick? It's not as if they don't learn other languages in school.

You can't really compare it to 'Ebonics', which is mutually intelligible with standard English and which is only spoken by a minority, and an already politically fraught one at that.

Though it probably helps that it is a Portuguese-based creole spoken in Dutch territory. Not being a Portuguese colony or ex-colony, they have no specific attachment to standard Portuguese, and it not being a Dutch-based creole means that nobody can pretend it's merely broken Dutch.

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