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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Why should storming the capital building be any different than when rioters stormed the White House?

I agree that rioters in general (and those rioters in particular) should be punished much more harshly than they have been, but there is a distinction to be made with Jan 6. In the case of Tarrio in particular, he didn't even storm the capital! But he did engage in a seditious conspiracy to overturn the election, and that's what he copped the 22 year sentence for.

The BLM riots, bad though they were, were not the exact same flavour of bad.

  • -11

I await with bated breath the Russia-gaters and 2016 faithless electors getting 22+ year sentences then.

‘Lying about your political enemies’ and ‘casting foreseeably meaningless protest votes in a way that is specifically foreseen by the constitution’ are not the same thing as interrupting official proceedings while making terroristic threats(which the J6er’s did, they were chanting ‘hang Mike pence’).

Yes, there’s too much focus on J6 and ‘our democracy’. But dissimilar things are dissimilar.

Yes, I should stop getting into specific comparisons because we have many resident lawyers who will gish gallop around with liberal § characters proving that case A is never exactly like case B. And they’re probably right but I simply don’t care. I have eyes that can see that the law is applied unequally and in one direction more often than not. So whatever § says is irrelevant to me because I view it as illegitimate.

There’s no correcting this within the bounds of “the law” because anything approaching effective dissent is functionally illegal, so I won’t pretend to care about the minutiae of “the law”.

I'm afraid "hang Mike Pence" is simply shorthand for "put Mike Pence on trial for a capital crime and execute him by hanging", so it's not a terroristic threat? Ridiculous? Sure. But no more ridiculous than claiming ordinary hyperbolic political chants are "terroristic threats". BLM protestors famously chanted "Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon", referring to police and not S. domesticus, and while distasteful that clearly wasn't a terroristic threat either.

There you go again - focusing exclusively on elements of an offence and acting like that's the offence in its entirety.

Let's get into the detail. Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, 18 USC 2384, which says:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

So let's apply this to the 2016 faithless electors. Can we convict them of the same crime?

Two or more persons conspire? Yep, that threshold was met. They agreed on the scheme, and committed overt acts in the furtherance thereof.

In any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? Definitely.

Conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States? Nope.

By force prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States? Nope.

By force seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof? Nope.

Similarly, the Russiagaters do not fall foul of this statute.

So, whatever crimes they may have committed, they were not the same ones as Tarrio, and there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence - leaving aside that there are many reasons why two people convicted of the same offence may be subject to different sentences anyway.

  • -10

there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence

They will not attract any sentence. That’s the whole point.

In at least some cases, they have attracted sentences - the guy who cast his electoral vote for Faith Spotted Eagle instead of Hillary Clinton got fined $1000, for example.

Now, you may argue that was a manifestly inadequate sentence - and you may be right. But it's insufficient to simply compare it to Tarrio's sentence because he did not commit the same crime that Tarrio did.

If you want to argue that there has been an unfair application of justice, a good starting point would be to specify the particular crime you think particular people should have been convicted of.

the guy who cast his electoral vote for Faith Spotted Eagle instead of Hillary Clinton got fined $1000, for example.

lol. lmao even.

If you want to argue that there has been an unfair application of justice, a good starting point would be to specify the particular crime you think particular people should have been convicted of.

Nah. I won’t do that. It’s your job (assuming you’re a lawyer, if not you probably should be) to find US Code §42.a.5.h.65.z “ackshually this crime doesn’t apply because of some tortured logic”. I just don’t care. Whatever “justice system” can result in the manifestly unfair decisions we’ve seen over the past several decades is entirely illegitimate and I won’t legitimize it by citing its scriptures.

Protest votes that would foreseeably do nothing except draw attention to some Native American activist and telling political lies are not the same thing.

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