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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?
This is ... not what he was convicted of. I think it's hear-say, which is ... not how sentencing should be determined. Otherwise you can give anyone life in prison for any crime if you can find someone to claim bad irrelevant hear-say at their sentencing date. It might be a prior conviction, in which case maybe the sentence is less egregious since he's a multiple felon, but the conviction itself is suspect and I can't find any confirmation that he was in fact already a sex-offender.
He was definitely a dirtbag, but I know lots of dirtbags and I don't get to put them in prison for 40 years because I generally look down on their character. Likewise, it's not enough for a guy to feel like a dirtbag to violate his freedom of speech and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.
Unfortunately I feel the same way. I have been defending people like this on the internet for a long time now and the more I look into it, the harder they are to defend as people. I still do it because bad law hurts innocent people much more than just letting these people off sometimes when they aren't actually harming anyone else directly. His conviction is another brick in the wall that separates the United States, and by extension the West, from liberty and reason. It's an offense to freedom of speech and proportional, reasonable punishment. No one respects this man but people are still busy making excuse after excuse for the government in this case and all the rest, and someone has to be the one to say that the government is acting wrongly. It doesn't matter how nasty the defendants are. There's always a nasty defendant that can be used to sympathetically attack human rights. You can't let them do that unnoticed. If no one says it because they are scared to look like they are sympathetic towards pædophiles, the enemies of liberty will exploit that until there is nothing left. There is always another pædophile to use in the crusade against free speech, privacy, proportional punishment, due process, and so on.
Allegedly. In the 20th century. This happened during COVID. Like I said, there's always another pædophile that allegedly raped a kid 40 years ago that can be used as a front to throw out good law like statute of limitations, due process, proportional punishment for a specific crime, and free speech.
Keep reading. Booker says guidelines are not binding, in other words that the legislature has no right to set true sentencing ranges; they are merely suggestions for judges which have literally no binding properties. Therefore it is not good common law to refer to the statute sentencing guidelines as if they are binding or necessarily not violating the 8th amendment.
Funny you say something so severe («collapses instantly» as opposed to just, looks weaker) specifically after the part where you're the one whose rebuttal on Booker is fatally flawed thanks to not reading the entire Wikipedia introduction on the topic.
They did not consider it fully and their reasoning is about as air-tight as Swiss cheese.
I am definitely reasonable, certainly more so than an average, 100 IQ jury, and any claim otherwise is basically a war declaration, or a cross over to Enemy territory in Schmitt's famous distinction. It's an argument stopper -- it's a violation of contra principia negantem non est disputandum where one of the few fundamental principles I debate on is that, this is worth time because I am fundamentally reasonable. I might be wrong, but I certainly am at least as reasonable as some random pal or lady on his jury. So, I don't know where you thought you were going with that.
American Heritage Dictionary definition is not arbitrary.
Naturally. I led with
Objectively, this guy went to prison for speech. Obscenity is supposed to be an exception to free speech. But there is no point to that exception, and people who are against free speech will always add more exceptions, since one arbitrary exception is already permitted. You think it seems okay because he's just a pædophile, but not too long ago it was just a Protestant, or just a Jew, or just a capitalist, or just a sympathizer-with-the-enemy... You're betting on the unprincipled exception never eating you alive, instead of simply embracing principle.
That's not even close to what happened. It wasn't just anyone, it was an FBI agent. And he didn't even get life in prison, so I don't know where that came from. It also was not irrelevant. I think the fact that he raped children is very relevant to him being sentenced for fictional depictions of child sex.
Ok, yes, for the sake of argument, they're not binding. So... if a judge follows them anyway... then what's the problem? The law isn't that you can't follow them, the law is that you don't have to, but you still can. I don't understand this argument. I also don't understand why you bring up the Eighth Amendment. Booker only dealt with the Sixth Amendment. Do you have another argument that sentencing guidelines violate the Eighth?
Well, I rebutted your rebuttal and I did it quite easily. This time I didn't even have to look up anything new, just noticed that the conclusion doesn't even follow from the premise.
This is quite a weak argument for something as serious as "violation of the right to appeal". How do you know they did not consider it fully? In the legal system, we generally assume honesty and good faith until proven otherwise. There's no guarantee that an appeal will go in the defendant's favor, so you or the defendant disagreeing with the reasoning doesn't mean the right to appeal was violated. It's like saying "the jury gave me a guilty verdict, so my right to a jury trial was denied." I just don't understand this kind of logic.
I wasn't making any determinations about whether you were reasonable in the colloquial sense, and anyway, that is irrelevant and besides the point. My point was that that's not how applying the obscenity standard works (or really, any standard of law that requires some subjectivity). No judge is going to look at you (or anyone else) claiming that "X is obscene" and rule based on that alone. Instead, they look at whether a reasonable person would.
I guess I should explain this a bit more. Why do we have the reasonable person standard? Well, the problem is that all sorts of things in law have to be inherently subjective. For example, assault is defined as the fear of bodily harm. So if someone is mentally ill enough that dog hair gives them fear of bodily harm, does that mean dog hair is always assault now? Obviously not, because most people aren't terrified by dog hair. So this means that whatever standard we have, we can't tie it to any one particular person. We would also like a standard that is consistent and as close to "objective" as one could get with something subjective.
The solution is the reasonable person standard. The question is whether an ordinary average person placed in the same circumstances would feel the same way. This gets used all the time in claims of self-defense. If someone shoots (and kills) another because they thought he was going to summon Bigfoot, I'm sure that the defendant truly and genuinely believed that he was going to die because of Bigfoot, and so if the standard for self-defense was that if anyone subjectively feels like they are in fear of their life, they're allowed to shoot, then he would be in the clear. Unfortunately for him, the standard is actually if a reasonable person in his circumstances would feel the same, and a reasonable person wouldn't, so that's murder, and he goes to jail. Tough luck.
Otherwise, you could just kill anyone you wanted and claim that you were fearful. That may be true from your point of view, but from everyone else's point of view, it just looks like you're murdering people for no reason. There must be some way to tie claims of self-defense and fearfulness to reality, and the reasonable person standard is how we do it.
And so it goes with obscenity. Your tactic of claiming that you personally find the judge's opinion obscene, and therefore he should be jailed for life, is... if I called it "clever", I would be giving you too much credit. But it's also just not how the standard is applied. To put it bluntly, it doesn't matter what you think, only whether a reasonable person would find it obscene. Most people don't find a judge's opinion obscene and abhorrent in the same way you do, unfortunately.
Question: How do you determine that something is an arbitrary exception? Is porn free speech? And if so, isn't criminalizing possession of child pornography an arbitrary exception? My point being, I don't quite buy this slippery slope argument when one exception has been around for decades and it's not like we're heading into a dystopia where I can't say nigger.
Speaking of which, my guy, the conviction of Shiloh Hendrix for saying nigger is right there, and you haven't even brought it up yet. Pointing to her case would be a far more convincing argument than whatever pedophile nonsense you've brought up.
If they consider it a full consideration I would consider them not intelligent enough to hold their position. The writing had no substance, just that copy-and-paste fallacy that Wikipedia says is used frequently. That indicates to me either the writer is very unintelligent and unsuited mentally to handle appeals in general, or just copied and pasted bad reasoning in an effort to not let a pædo get a reasonable sentence.
That's worse. An FBI agent is, at a minimum, before considering all character flaws people in the FBI and similar organizations tend to have beyond the average person, someone who is being paid to put this guy in prison for a long time. When Arthur goes to prison longer, an FBI agent on the case gets a career boost. In performance reviews he will always point to that case: «look how I put that guy in prison forever with my hard work. Make me the outpost Kommandant.» It's rewarded. That's called conflict of interest. So it's that on top of laundered hear-say. That means they sought out someone to say to them in an interview that Arthur raped them. They weren't even speaking under oath when they made the statements like they would testifying at a court. The agent testifies under oath merely that some other person said X while not under oath in some interview the tax payer paid way too much for that had nothing to do with the case at hand. You know, it even sounds like improper police work ... why would they be interviewing people from before he made the website instead of just focusing on his behavior on the website? It sounds like fishing to me. But anyways, the claim in court from the agent is much weaker than that person coming into court and risking perjury personally. On top of the fact that the agent is not objective. I mean, this is just terrible law here. It's a travesty of real law frankly, the more I find out about it.
The problem is that the guidelines or where the sentence in the particular case landed within the guidelines might violate the 8th amendment. On an 8th amendment appeal, it is circular reasoning to say that the sentence is within the guidelines, so it does not violate the 8th amendment. That assumes the very principle that is being disputed.
Now, you are struggling here I think because a lot of my criticisms are what I would call based on high law. High law is prior to particular national law. Low law is whatever happens in a court. But that leaves middle law, which are the national ideals for law. It's close to a high law criticism to say that the principle of free speech is paramount and that maybe even the US supreme court is too soft on it. But here's a middle law criticism of Arthur's sentence: child porn laws are usually justified in courts because they have specific victims. Most people convicted of child porn are also ordered to pay restitution out to these victims. Then they are usually sentence to 5 to 15 years in prison. Arthur's case has no victims. If we assume the sentence is a function of the social harm plus the individual harm, and we know Arthur's individual harm is 0, then his sentence should come out lighter than in these cases. It's hard to see how he should do more than 10 years in this case. 5 years would be quite reasonable; 10 is cutting it under this reasoning.
Porn is not speech. Videos and images may contain speech, but they also contain things not reducible to speech. Having sex is not speech and neither is filming something real. Filming sex therefore is not speech and does not even contain speech. Drawings and writings are speech in the same way poetry or miming is speech. They are producible autonomously and are ultimately the result of skilled expression.
In some sense all exceptions are arbitrary. Either the principle is sound or it isn't. Once any exception is permitted more can always be argued for. Maybe an exception is stable if it can't be stretched further, but rather you need a new kind of exception to further dilute the principle. Non-obscenity exceptions are almost always violence-related. Obscenity is fundamentally an exception of a different kind; one based on offensiveness and not violence or direct harm. That opens a whole can of worms. Taken to the limit, you can apply the logic of offensive obscenity to just about anything. Direct violent speech is completely different. You could call an exception arbitrary if it is not stable. I believe the present exception is arbitrary and stabilizing it will mean letting Arthur go or else going down the slippery slope of banning whatever the median person finds offensive enough. Which is not free speech. That's just juries voting on what the overton window is. It's Democracy in the lowest sense, not Liberalism.
Do you think that pædophiles are an exception to human rights?
I am a reasonable person. I would even call myself one of the few, or else a super-reasonable person. I guess I have to be super-reasonable if Americans insist on calling l'homme moyen «reasonable». Anyway, I think you miss the point by assuming I'm missing the point. The point was not that a grand jury would in practice indict the judge that wrote that opinion which I called obscene. The point was that it's too easy to argue it is obscene to at least some reasonable people. The only replies I can think of this is to deny it by insulting me or to double down and say quantity makes right. Quantity or commonality does not make right, and I am reasonable.
What would a response with substance look like, in your opinion? How else is one supposed to say "that's not the law" if it is, in fact, not the law? The judge doesn't have to explain the entire legal theory to a layperson understanding, they just have to accurately understand and rule on what is before them. If you disagree with the ruling, then you just disagree. That doesn't mean the right to appeal was violated.
This proves too much. He would also still get paid even if the defendant didn't go to prison. By this standard, every prosecutor has a conflict of interest and therefore no cases can be successfully adjudicated to this rigorous standard, so we would have to let everyone go.
That's not fishing. A fishing expedition is when you investigate someone with zero probable cause for a particular crime. Interviewing people related to the case is just investigation. How else are they supposed to investigate? Just make shit up?
Ok. Please enlighten me as to how they violate the Eighth.
I have no idea what "high law" is and you don't explain it or "low law" very well. Then for good measure you throw in "middle law" later down the paragraph and you don't even attempt to explain that. What does it mean to be "prior to particular national law"?
I fail to see the difference between saying "this is bad and violates high law" versus "this is bad and violates the constitution".
That's not good enough to not be some sort of arbitrary exception. Sure, production of CP directly harms victims, but mere possession of it doesn't.
That's even more of an arbitrary exception than what I was talking about.
Again, I have to tell you: No, you can't. By the reasonable person standard, saying nigger is not an offensive obscenity that should result in jail time. Otherwise, I would be enjoying prison along with every other Kiwi Farms user for how many times we have said nigger on the Internet.
No? In general, though, criminals usually have their rights taken away after due process.
I bring up Shiloh Hendrix because that's the kind of stuff I see a legitimate argument for worrying about. As a nigger sayer, I would like to be able to say nigger however and whenever I want. I have no interest in child fucking, so if bad things happen to child fuckers, I don't worry unless they could affect me. There's things like age verification laws you could talk about that directly affect everyone regardless of how many children they've fucked. All this stuff about how this child fucker got jailed and maybe there's some dirty stuff that happened in the legal proceedings is just not very convincing to me. You might as well be telling me how Anders Breivik didn't get PS5 privileges in his Norwegian prison or whatever.
I can grant for the sake of argument that the child fucker's case maybe had some problems and he may or may not be entitled to legal relief. That doesn't really have any implications for me. The things you have pointed out don't make me worried about my ability to say nigger. They are nowhere near the list of my concerns for free speech and freedom on the Internet.
The actual things I see being a huge problem are payment processors (who can debank anyone with zero due process or appeal) and the DMCA (already a terrible piece of law that effectively mandates censorship before due process, it's also a very good doxing tool). There are other things as well, but the common thread is that one problem originates from there not being enough law (payment processors are basically entirely unregulated on top of being a monopoly that would make Standard Oil blush) and the other originates from an entirely different area of law (copyright, already known to be extremely terrible). I really don't see any threats or problems that originate from the obscenity exception alone. You're just saying that they could, but they haven't, and I think it's very unlikely.
Oh and by the way, things are 10x worse in Europe, where they arrest (more) people for social media posts, especially when those posts talk about being raped by grooming gangs. You claim that Europeans feel shame and Americans don't, and Europeans consider how the law might be used against them and Americans don't, and I just don't see it! There is no possible way a site like the Kiwi Farms could ever be hosted in Europe! Ever! Your entire argument for why America is somehow worse and will have hate speech laws in 10 years is to ignore Europe's hate speech laws, point to an arrest for political speech that would never have happened in the US, then wax poetic about an American pedophile being jailed. I really don't get it.
You can argue whatever you want. That doesn't mean that your argument is correct on its legal merits.
No one's insulting you.
I'm sure I could find a lot of people horrified and offended by the nigger word. Yet saying nigger is not illegal in the United States, and I am not in jail for saying it. Nor do I expect it to be illegal anytime soon, or even any time in the next 10 years. So no, my argument is not that "quantity makes right" either. Try again.
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