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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   870 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 4, 2026

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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being out on bail for a different stabbing at the time.

This isn't really addressing the core of your post but something I don't understand is why so many legal systems seem to allow clearly dangerous people like this to be allowed out on bail. What's the argument supposed to be?

Frankly, at this point I'd be all in favour of only allowing bail for defendants charged with non-violent offenses.

Unfortunately, knowing the UK, I'm fairly sure "violent-offense" would quickly be redefined to mostly mean "people posting non-governmental approved memes on social media".

It's a combination of resource stewardship and modern day politics, as everything is.

A few things make this vaguely feasible though - the criminal underclass is the criminal underclass, these people are out there "safely" being repeat offenders without causing significant issues, we just notice the fraction that do cause problem and not the 9 others who don't. Likewise a large fraction of people causing trouble are mentally ill or behaving in a way that gets them in front of the healthcare system, if you decarcerate you hope they head over to medicine and get managed that way.

The steelman is that two- or even three-year delays between initial arrest and actual trial are common for any nontrivial crime, especially in Blue Tribe spheres; that restricting bail makes arrests into a serious punishment, sometimes even the full breadth of any plausible punishment, and thus police officers into judges; and turns the jails into psuedo-prisons and final adjudication of charges into advisory opinions.

I'd argue that's more of a reason we should fix the fucking trial system, or, failing that, do a better job of separating dangerous alleged criminals from nondangerous ones than a judge squinting. But it's not a fake argument.

That makes sense. I agree with you though that this seems like a reason to streamline other parts of the process; having violently criminals just wandering around seems like a pretty blatant societal failure mode.

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