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My take is that he was just stupid. Norms were different. The girls consistently say they claimed to be 18. He was reckless and didn't check IDs well. Often they brought fake IDs. I think he thought he wasn't going to get caught. Then when he did he correctly predicted he would get a reasonable, survivable sentence, since it was 2008 and nobody was woke yet. He then failed to predict the government would betray him after radical feminism leveled up over the next 10 years. Ghislaine Maxwell failed to predict she would be the next target. As a French citizen, all she had to do was fly to France when Epstein was arrested and move several million to a French account and be content to hang out with Polanski for the rest of her life. Nope. She thought the media was the only thing to fear so she hid out in New Hampshire with some security guards. She must have been surprised when she found out the United States is no longer the «free country» she grew up in through the harsh reality of the cuffs going on and never coming off. My only conclusion is they were boomers that thought they had freedom and still lived in 1976. At this point Europe may be poorer but it is substantially freer.
Only on this one axis (of dubious value IMO). They don't have free speech, guns, or a Fourth/Fifth Amendment.
I believe this is a big part of the axis we are discussing, and they have better privacy and due process in most countries than the US now. Many European countries have guns (as if that's important), and they have almost as much free speech as the US. I will say the US wins on free speech due to only the topic of HBD and no other topic, although that can be done remotely so doesn't matter. Just do your free speech in English from US servers while living in Europe if talking about race is really that important (That's the only topic they lose on in free speech). Fun fact is most of the HBD intellectual sphere is based in Europe and, there are no hate speech arrests, in part because they do this.
Which countries are you thinking of? The big ones the US hears about are UK/Germany, and they both seem harsher on natives committing speechcrime, such as liking a meme or calling a violent criminal a mean name, than immigrants committing gang rape. Is it the Netherlands that keeps convicting that right-wing politician for saying unpleasant but true things about Islam?
UK is way worse than the US. I'm talking about continental Europe (I think Anglos are the problem -- the rest of the Anglosphere is mostly worse than the US). I think it is Belgium which persecutes Dries Van Langenhove (he is from Flanders). He is getting plenty of due process and the sentence is relatively light. When these laws come to the United States it will be ten years for the «very serious crime».
As far as I know they've been after him for 5 years and thanks to due process he might do 1 year in a decent quality of life European prison. If it were the United States after him for posting the wrong bytes on the internet he'd already be in prison and he'd have 10 years left, and good 'ol Americans would joke how much he is probably getting raped by black men inside.
Why do you think this case helps your argument? As far as I can tell, his "crime" is purely political speech. If he did it in the US, we have the First Amendment, so he would never even be charged, much less investigated for it. He would definitely not get 10 years in prison for it as you falsely suggest. If he got even a 1 year sentence, we would consider it an abhorrent affront to the constitution and to the ideals of liberty and justice that the country was founded upon. Yet you think this not only looks good for Belgium, but Belgium is better than the US, because "[h]e is getting plenty of due process and the sentence is relatively light" as you say (which seems like missing the point entirely).
Am I missing something? I'm struggling to understand your reasoning here.
No, you wouldn't. When hate speech laws come to America, it'll be because, thanks to demographic shifts, people will now consider the speech to be out of bounds, like all of the currently illegal speech that is harshly punished in the United States right now.
Example: this man sentenced for obscene speech acts to 40 years of prison in 2021. Somebody involved in his defense posted on Bluesky about how he wasn't allowed to mount a defense at all; he couldn't call experts to argue that his speech-acts had artistic merit. So, he got no fair trial. His 8th amendment appeal produced one of the worst opinions I have ever seen, amounting to the violation of his right to appeal, another massive violation of due process:
Fallacious reasoning. Rummel did not deserve a life sentence. Given he got life for about $800 of fraud, and that conspiracy to violate rights is a type of fraud (if this was done on purpose), or getting to a judge seat one is not intelligent enough to hold is also a type of fraud against society (if they truly believe this pablum), and a life sentence costs far more than $800, you could just as easily argue that producing such a wrong opinion as this ought to constitute a crime which warrants a life sentence (and frankly, this speech is obscene § to me). So, it is incredibly hypocritical of these judges to write this stuff.
The law is unconstitutional. Laws can violate not only the 1st amendment, 14th amendment, but also the 8th amendment by making good behavior a felony and so on. There was even a case on the unconstitutionality of guidelines themselves. US v. Booker in 2005. Given this opinion was written by a federal court in 2024, how are these judges even still on the bar?
The law is unconstitutional, but so is the United States judiciary. The constitution is dead-letter. When the US government starts prosecuting racist hate speech in 10 years, expect this.
Another one of my favorite violations to the 1st amendment is the law against threatening the President.
It obviously violates the 1st amendment unless there is evidence of actual action related to the alleged threat. Nonetheless, here's a recent example where someone Said the Line:
This guy went to jail for 4 years for going on a substance-less rant. Clearly way too much prison time. It violates the 1st amendment, nobody cares, even has hate speech elements because it was racist. This is a sign of how hate speech laws will work in the United States.
§ And I mean literally that I find it obscene. American Heritage Dictionary defines obscene:
Obviously the court's writing is massively offensive to at least some serious and worthy accepted standard of decency. That is, the only outline in the US constitution, although maybe not the one around the court today. I would argue seriously that the writing is morally repulsive and disgusting. It certainly makes me feel that way inside. I cannot imagine the writers to be good people and I do think they should be recalled from the bench over this decision (which is impossible, but would be possible in a superior country). And obviously the opinion is so extreme that it is outrageous and objectionable. I think maybe I have strong visualization powers so something that would help would be to make a very realistic life in Texas prison movie that spares no details. Including the details many Texans hope happen off the books to the defendant. We could show that up close and see if it's obscene or not. To me when they write that opinion, they make that film, just as how the defendant was convicted for both writings and drawings.
My point is I see in this system almost no shame. I think Europeans have shame. Shameless is when you never think for a second your own reasoning could be turned around on you, because you think you are a god among men, because you sit in the high seat right now. Shameless is when you're so proud of yourself and your «justice» that you don't see why the hell every sentence shouldn't be life. Clearly, you are a god and this guy who stole $800 before you is just some peasant and will never be good. Life in prison. The petty self-worshiping god in the seat fails to see how this is an innately depraved and violent act, which calls into question his own character just as he so severely goes beyond the letter of the law to judge the character of the man who stands before him, even if he only bangs a hammer on a table and says some words as he gets guards to do the physical part for him. They commit obscenity in my eyes while persecuting someone for being obscene in a slightly different way, although a way that is significantly less harmful to civil society. Which sounds objectionable to these people, but eroding civil liberties from the pulpit is far far worse than some creepy pedo writing disgusting stories on his own seedy website. I think a main problem with Americans is that they have no conception of that fact any more which is why they are always throwing away civil liberties to persecute hated classes of people whose actual measured damage potential is quite low. Nothing was ever so harmful as a tyranny.
They won't. They are plainly unconstitutional, if any politician proposed them they would not be re-elected, and courts would strike it down immediately.
You keep saying "when" but you provide no evidence of such laws being an inevitability.
You conveniently left out and did not address at all:
His case was borderline, but this seals the deal for me. Unless I'm missing something, I think this guy is a dirtbag and deserved 40 years for literal child rape.
There's a tactic I despise where people cry foul over convictions that are supposedly only just about fictional stories/media, but every single time you look at them, it turns out the defendant was also a literal child rapist and that's why he got nailed. I don't know for sure why this happens, but the best theory I've heard is that prosecutors don't want any obscenity laws thrown out on First Amendment grounds, so if they have a case against a dirtbag, it better include actual physical acts of harm or else they have no case. In fact, I thought this was the stance that lolicons supposedly held--that fiction is separate from reality and as long as things are kept fictional you shouldn't judge or shame them. For whatever reason, it's the exact same lolicons who then cry about cases like Thomas Arthur's while conveniently leaving out that he acted on his desires in real life.
I am skeptical that even if he called experts, the outcome would have been different. He also doesn't seem to have raised this issue in his appeal, so that's his (or his lawyer's) fault.
I don't see the violation. Isn't this opinion literally a response to his appeal? They didn't just deny an appeal flat out. They let him submit an appeal, considered it fully, and then denied it.
You conveniently leave out that he was convicted under the three strikes law, i.e. it was his third time committing the same crime after already being caught and convicted twice. He didn't get life for "just" $800. You seem to give him a far undeserved amount of charity. There are simply some criminals who won't learn, who won't stop stealing or defrauding even when told very sternly, even when they have free government assistance for everything from food to housing. Without a three strikes law, they would just get a rap sheet a mile long and would continue to wreak havoc on society. And it's a minority of criminals who do this. We can reduce crime drastically just by permanently jailing those who keep reoffending.
Are you seriously making this argument? This is just a non-sequitur. It's a major and unjustified leap in logic that reads like parody.
US v. Booker says:
So... sentencing is unconstitutional if it uses unproven facts? Duh, that sounds obvious to me. You summarized it vaguely by saying "a case on the unconstitutionality of guidelines themselves", as if all guidelines are unconstitutional, when they're not. So I'm really unsure how US v. Booker applies here, and again this seems like a non-sequitur.
I'm beginning to notice a pattern here, where you conveniently leave out details that are detrimental to your argument in the hopes that I don't look into the details, then when I look into the details anyway, your argument collapses instantly.
The US government is going to prosecute racist hate speech... because some child rapist got jailed? This is not a convincing argument.
I'm not a fan of the "hate crime" enhancements, but just like obscenity charges w.r.t child rape or possession of CP, they are only applied when an actual crime has been committed. I can call whoever I want a nigger on the Internet and I'm never going to get charged with a hate crime because saying nigger isn't a crime. (Incidentally enough, this "package deal" reasoning is also why I detest gay/trans activists claiming there is a gay/trans "panic defense", as if it can let you get away with murder, when at most the only thing it can do is remove the hate crime part, because as it turns out, murder is murder and murder is still a crime.)
But anyways. Yeah, no, I don't buy it. Hate speech laws are not going to pass just because people get convicted for fedposting. For one thing, fedposting laws have been around for a long while (you yourself cited examples from Wilson and FDR's era) so why haven't these hate crime laws been enacted already? For another, since you specified a specific timeline of doom (hate speech laws in 10 years), I am willing to make a bet saying that, in 10 years, I will still be able to say nigger on an American-hosted Internet forum and will receive zero legal consequences for it.
The standard isn't whether you or even one person considers it obscene, but whether a reasonable person would. You can't just claim arbitrary definitions of obscenity and then argue that they violate your obscenity standard, determined by you alone.
Which superior country would this be? As far as I am aware, none such country would recall judges over this (quite reasonable) decision. I sincerely doubt that it would be Belgium or any other country in Europe that you seem to think is somehow better than America when it comes to free speech, due process, etc.
I don't see how any of the reasoning you detest could be "turned around" on innocents. None of these opinions set any dangerous precedents or anything. They are all quite reasonable in my opinion.
This is uncharitable and you are making an unjustified assumption. No judge thinks every sentence should be life. Again you omit the fact that Rummel was convicted under the three strikes law. You make it sound like he was given life for his first offense, which is not the case.
And he also, you know, raped children, but who's keeping track?
The 40-year sentence was solely for the porn. He was not charged with or convicted of rape in this proceeding.
As far as I can tell from a quick Ctrl-F of the court documents, the only mention of actual rape is in this transcript (starting at page 18 line 21), where an FBI agent testifies that a third party told him that she was raped as a child by the defendant. This third party did not herself testify in court.
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