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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Remember the Alt-Right march in Charlottesville in 2017? Feels like forever ago. Today several people were indicted on felony charges for "intimidation" related to the tiki torch march:

An Albemarle County grand jury issued indictments of burning an object with the intent to intimidate.

According to a release, these indictments allege an offense date of Aug. 11, 2017.

The charge is a Class 6 felony and anyone who is convicted may face up to five years in prison.

These indictments are part of an ongoing, active criminal investigation connected with the march and the violent Unite the Right rally that occurred the next day.

There is no statute of limitations on felonies in Virginia.

Here is Section 18.2-423.01-B of the Code of Virginia:

ยง 18.2-423.01. Burning object on property of another or a highway or other public place with intent to intimidate; penalty.

A. Any person who, with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons, burns an object on the private property of another without permission, is guilty of a Class 6 felony.

B. Any person who, with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons, burns an object on a highway or other public place in a manner having a direct tendency to place another person in reasonable fear or apprehension of death or bodily injury is guilty of a Class 6 felony.

Apparently this case was the subject of a minor debate in the campaign of the sitting prosecutor and his challenger:

But in Virginia, prosecutors come and go and a felony lives forever. In an October 2019 debate between then-sitting prosecutor Tracci and his challenger, Jim Hingeley, Tracci again scoffed at the idea of indicting these cases, saying Hingeley's belief that it was even possible was a sign he was inexperienced and wrong for the job. A month later, in November 2019, Hingeley won the election. Now it seems he's trying to make good on his campaign promise of proving Robert Tracci wrong.

It goes without saying that this is a political persecution, a few years ago I would have assumed First Amendment protections would still hold even for the far right but I think that ship has sailed. I am confident they will be able to get convictions or guilty pleas for a lesser sentence. Who would want to face five years for holding a tiki torch at a political rally?

I am a pretty law and order guy. But there is something untoward about running for office on the idea of prosecuting person X or persons Y for activity Z performed prior to becoming DA. It is side we prosecute crimes; not men. This seems the opposite.

The basic premise of 'rule of law' is that the law/justice is 'blind' and every person is therefore 'equal' before it.

Even if we carve out certain practical exceptions the general shared delusion is that anyone who breaks a law is prosecuted for it and given the same treatment as anyone else breaking the same or similar law.

Due process and all that.

Making the law an explicitly politically biased institution is... well it breaks that shared delusion to the point where law is just another cudgel for hitting the outgroup. And since the law is dependent on that shared delusion (that and men with guns) to actually operate, it's fair to say we cease to be a 'nation of laws' in the scenario where nobody actually believes law is blind and people aren't treated equally before it.

Anarcho-Tyranny is a useful term for this, but doesn't quite express how corrosive this is to some very fundamental assumptions undergirding our nation.

Making the law an explicitly politically biased institution isn't anarcho-tyranny; it's unadorned "tyranny".

It's not "tyranny" it's anarchy, a return to the state of nature.

Certainly not. A Hobbesian absolute sovereign who applies (or makes) the law to favor those who support him and disfavor those who oppose him is still protecting his subjects from the state of nature. Just not from himself.

Sort of?

Tyranny tends to assume that everyone is still equal under the law, they're just all equally oppressed by the tyrant. If littering is punished by summary execution, at least you know that EVERYONE who litters gets the same punishment.

Anarcho-Tyranny captures the part where the tyrant in question almost entirely relaxes the rules around certain groups that have, for some reason, attained favorable status in the tyrant's eyes, whilst still claiming to vigorously enforce them for everyone else.

The tyrant isn't equal to everyone else under the law, otherwise he's not a tyrant. I'd say the tyrant's ability to decide on a personal basis who to oppress and who to favor is what makes him a tyrant in the first place.

If littering is punished by summary execution, and the law is enforced in a fair manner, it would be a very harsh law but not necessarily tyranny. In principle a democracy could have such a law if the populace voted for it.

Yes yes there has to be a tyrant for any of this to make sense.

The littering example is just to suggest the disproportionality of punishment.

Real petty tyranny makes it illegal to, e.g. insult or otherwise demean the tyrant, or requires housing of the tyrant's soldiers in your personal home, or seizes private land for the tyrants personal use, all under color of law.

Where the law is unfair and unjust on it's face.

Anarcho-tyranny requires that the law appears fair and legitimate (e.g., you have guaranteed "freedom of speech' under the law) whilst in reality the tyrant declined to enforce whenever it would be inconvenient to do so.

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