domain:pedestrianobservations.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I often edit my posts after writing them (a short while after, before anyone can read them). Sometimes I cancel the edit, or alter something else and leave a thought unfinished. On balance it wasn't a good line of argument and should've been deleted.
Sometimes it's the legislative branch assuming that a court should interpret this reasonably and then the court going all the way, other times it's just bad politics that makes bad law and then that ties the judges hands so they have to make bad decisions.
Some irony in me criticising others and failing to finish the very sentence where I bemoan, though my opinions on this thrice derived rationality forum don't matter at all.
hanikrummihundursvin
1d ago
I don't see the connection between 'being a person' and therefor automatically being inclined to give foreign rapists light sentences.
To me it doesn't seem reasonable or humane, just cowardly and sick. Being so wrapped up in and simultaneously so blind to ones own twisted moral intuition that it becomes practically impossible to differentiate between the person raping a 15 year old and the person calling them a pig is not 'normal'.
I think it would be a lot more pertinent for people like this to examine their state of mind and how it has managed to drive them towards results such as this. But it seems like we've managed to build an impervious wall that keeps people away from exploring the true extent of the problem and just what feeds these 'outgroup sycophants' to do what they do.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
From your 2nd link
he did show “some response to younger females” in phallometric testing, but he agreed to take therapy in light of the finding
TIL.
We have discussed this before. As Scott writes when describing US sex taboos:
Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery.
Personally, I suspect that a majority of men are hard-wired to be attracted to any fertile-looking female. Some might be more into teen porn and some might be more into MILF porn, but very few will say that B cups or D cups are a hard no in the same way a beard and a cock are for most men.
So I do not think that measuring if the perp gets a boner from the average 15yo female is going to be very crucial information. If he has two brain cells to rub together, the next hooker he will hire will be of legal age. Who gives a fuck if it is a 19yo who could pass for 15 or if she is a 30yo MILF?
Personally, I also do not think that we should take all the information which affects re-offending probability into account. If the perp was sexually abused as a child, has a brother who is serving time, comes from a bad neighborhood, was raised by a single parent, has a father with a criminal record, is black, is unemployed, or is irreligious, that could all be statistical risk factors for re-offending.
But criminal sentencing is not only about preventing re-offending (even if harsher lower the risk of re-offending after release -- which may or may not be the case). It is also crucial for a stable society that it is seen as broadly fair. In fact, this very discussion is about a way in which it is unfair!
In my opinion, besides the specifics of the case, sentencing should only be based on prior convictions. Of course, the defense is free to argue that the accused has found god or is really into MILFs or whatever.
Also from your 2nd link:
At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.
So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.
I certainly think that the SC ruling is bad. I mean, it is good that courts can take into account consequences outside of criminal law when determining what punishment is appropriate. If someone has spent a decade on the run in shitty conditions, or had his marriage or professional life destroyed by his deed, that might be factors to reduce their prison sentence compared to someone who experienced no negative feedback. If you know that the defendant will get deported after his sentence either way, you might shave off a year off the sentence (on the assumption that most citizen criminals would not take that trade).
However, doing this proactively -- to avoid issuing a prison sentence because it would have further unpleasant consequences -- seems silly. I mean, I can construct a case where the predictable consequences of a 90 day prison sentence are deportation to Afghanistan and getting beheaded by the Taliban, and I can see that a judge would be unwilling to sentence someone to their death for a minor crime. But this is not the case here. Staying in Canada as a permanent resident for another four years before getting his citizenship does not seem like undue harshness.
the value of a sex-offender-free workplace
Hard disagree here. If you really think that workplaces should not employ convicted sex offenders, are you then willing to pay them unemployment benefits for the rest of their lives? Or do you think they should just get the death penalty, or be forced to beg in the streets?
The idea of criminal rehabilitation requires people to find employment. After an offender has served their sentence, they should join the workforce again.
For professional licences, there are sometimes higher standards, because these come with a lot of additional responsibility. You do not want a habitual drug dealer as an officer of the court, or drunk driver as a doctor. Because of the privileges offered by such jobs, we want to filter for people who take laws extra serious, on the presumption that if they do not take general laws serious, they might also cut corners in professional regulations.
NunoSempere
1d ago
Yes, I'm quoting Chinese military news
Magusoflight
1d ago
There ARE ways to deal with bad judges in Canada. For instance we had a case where a judge asked a raped women why she didn’t simply shut her legs harder. Iirc the law society basically got him off the bench for that, a big No No. if we wanted the public could pressure similar measures, but we probably won’t. Canadians are addicted to being Nice but even moreso to being Not Like Americans. If America is deporting foreigner criminals., why, we’ll just NOT deport them and maybe even give them a reward for it too. See how not American we are? Such moral superiority is truly a reward on its own.
It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.
Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.
1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
I’m generally not interested in “fluffy” romance, where the romance is literally the only thing going on. But as long as there’s something else going on in the plot then I enjoy those types of stories quite a bit.
Quite a few anime and VNs fall into this category, but you already said you don’t like things that are “too Japanese”, so, yeah, unfortunate.
Spiked has a lengthy write-up about the Zizians, whose intended readership is normies who've never heard of rationalism, Eliezer and so on. I'm glad that people are still talking about this story, I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
Yes this problem is everywhere.
Judges were originally given a tenure-like 'life' appointment to protect them from short term blowback from their sentencing, but by doing so the system can't deal with them if they repeatedly hit the defect button against community expectations.
There needs to be a way to indict, recall or otherwise censure judges that do this. Maybe an oversight sentencing board that can be appealed to by victims to review sentencing. And have members of that board be elected for a term of 2-3 years.
gafpromise
1d ago
Let's talk about sources of information. GDP, CPI, Employment data, Inflation - important economic indicators of how the US is doing. Trump fired the BLS head after they published numbers he didn't like. I don't care about the real reason, the point is the perception. If for some reason, people decide the economic data has partisan spin (or is incompetent because it's being done by seriously underqualified people) and is no longer reliable, then what data will economic forecasters begin to rely on? Will they just shrug, report the Trump administration numbers with a giant asterisk? Will other independent orgs spring up to publish similar data but this time it's unbiased?
And are there any of you who think, "Good, the data was biased all along, it was never free from partisan meddling, it's just that now people are aware of it"? In which case my question still stands, what data do you trust and how do you get the right decision makers to use the right data to make sound decisions?
I feel like the question is most pressing with regard to medicine. If RFK's HHS and the CDC formally make recommendations that absolutely go against what the rest of the developed world considers settled science, what are doctors to do? Will insurers stop insuring proven interventions or procedures because the HHS is putting pressure against them? Will doctors no longer be allowed to administer medications even though they know they would work? Or would people instead start citing UK or the EU data on the subject? I guess really my question is, if US economic and public health guidance is no longer seen as trustworthy, which is seeming increasingly likely, where else would that data come from?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January.
No--it would reject as false the statements "smoking always causes cancer" and "at no point during summer is it ever cooler than at any point in winter." Remember, you did not say "Violating a custody order is itself a sign of irresponsibility," but "no responsible adult would violate a custody order." Pedantic precision is a virtue, here.
The larger problem, though, as was already explained, was your lack of effort to explain and engage. If you want to talk about the "least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet" then "people who drop a low effort, single-sentence sneer instead of engaging the substance of your comment with a thoughtful and amicable reply" is not only high on the list, it's high enough that we have rules against it. This was explained to you, and you largely rectified the situation, which really would have been the end of it had you not also continued to defend your overstatement to multiple commenters, in persistently dismissive tone.
The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work.
America ran this experiment. Did it fail?
My impression is that the subversion of the punishment now happens when prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting, not judges failing to deliver the legally mandated minimum.
The problem is that judges are people.
For example, it used to be the procedure in the Netherlands that, assuming good behaviour, you only served two thirds of your sentence. The remaining third you'd normally be on parole.
This was removed in order to be tough on crime, and this changed pretty much nothing, because: judges are people. They're using their judgement. They also know the laws and procedures, including this one. So under the old system, if you really wanted to put someone away for ten years, you'd give fifteen. And now, if they want to put you away for ten years, they just give you the ten.
We also have that same law that foreigners who are sentenced to two years or more in prison, should be deported afterwards. This seems on the face of it like a very reasonable law. If you've done something that bad, we'll probably be better off without you around.
But again: judges are people. If the judge doesn't think someone should be deported, they are not going to hand out a sentence that automatically comes with deportation. They are going to hand out a lighter sentence. So now we're having Afghan rapists sentenced to 20 months.
The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work. If a judge doesn't want to give a sentence, he won't. If he has to acquit the criminal entirely in order to avoid it, he will.
If you want tougher judgements you need to appoint tougher judges.
sohois
1d ago
I recall something similar in another web novel. It was otherwise quite an interesting story, blending cyberpunk with a fantasy litrpg: earth was a cyberpunk dystopia, but got visited by aliens who gifted them access to a shared litrpg world.
Now, you expect some progressive politics to insert themselves in cyberpunk just by it's nature, but it was the fantasy litrpg part which embarrassed the novel. One of the aliens was from a race which was agender until a certain age, when they would become male or female. This was a great excuse for the author to show his MCs progressive bonafides, referring carefully to "them" and acting shocked when other characters - including other alien races - didn't.
But this was alien race. Calling a woman "sir" or vice versa is insulting for humans with a large amount of sexual dimorphism, but it makes zero sense that this race would have the same issues. To them, it would be completely "alien" to worry about someone using different pronoun.
Even worse, they weren't even speaking English. Every race had their own language filtered through a perfect universal translator. Did their language even have pronouns? Would the translator not just switch anything to the correct pronoun? It was a complete failure of world building
quiet_NaN
1d ago
There were certainly Amish people around in 1920. Most certainly, they did not have credit card processors or antibiotics or solar panels.
Of course, even in 1920 the Amish likely depended on outside trade for a few crucial supply chains, because their shtick is rejecting technology, not insisting on 100% autonomy. I suppose they did not refine their own iron, for example.
This is why I said a few million of them could exist independently rather than saying they could be autark on the level of a few villages.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The etiquette about displaying and acknowledging sexual desirability is certainly complicated. Outside of bedrooms and strip clubs, either is normally clad in plausible deniability.
Walking down most streets in the daytime is not a place most people intend to be judged sexually desirable.
I think that plenty of women (and some men) spend quite a lot of effort on looking hot in public spaces. Of course, one could also argue that the causation is the other way round -- they know that they will be judged either way, and find it preferable to be judged hot than to be judged not hot.
Normally, the judging -- which I think is done both by men but also by other women -- is of course more subtle than a wolf whistle or an outright remark on one's tits. More stuff like "nice top", or even non-verbal, I think.
Your houses seem much more generous than the IPMC.
In terms of dining/living space, yes, as explained above. In terms of sleeping space, no—the minimum is 50 ft2 per occupant under § 404.4.1, and I have kept as close to that minimum as possible. I make a bedroom larger than 50 ft2 per occupant only when I am forced to do so in order to keep the house rectangular.
Is there a reason you have a bathroom per bedroom?
I personally have found it quite annoying to live in a house with three bedrooms and one bathroom.
(In a dwelling unit, IPMC § 502.1 requires only one bathroom, regardless of the number of bedrooms. However, in a "rooming house" (defined in § 202; an apartment building with bathrooms shared between units), § 502.2 requires a minimum of one bathroom per four "rooming units", and that requirement can be pressed into service for houses as well.)
Lol, indubitably based. Are you aware of the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) and the results that have been derived when comparing the sexes? Here is a post by Emil Kirkegaard talking about it (note a higher total CART score implies higher performance on the test).
A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."
There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.
In other words, the supposedly "misogynistic" traditional belief that women are less rational and more flighty than men... is probably entirely correct.
Markass
1d ago
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
they foul up any actual investigation
This doesn't make sense to say when Schlep (the banned "vigilante") has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested in real life.
intentionally antagonize existing users
I'm not aware of any instances of this happening.
"Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes"
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency. I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example but then you spend a lot of words elaborating on exchanging nudes for Vbucks. In any case, it is extremely oversimplified to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so.
your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met)
That "unless other conditions are met" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. In most cases it's not as simple as blocking the predator precisely because of conditions like: the fact that minors are easily impressionable and manipulated into doing what predators want them to, the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want. The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
A U.S. destroyer illegally entered the territorial waters of China's Huangyan Island; the Southern Theater Command lawfully and according to regulations warned and expelled it.
This is the PRC government line.
Back in reality, this is one of the many islands in the South China Sea that the PRC claims but is not recognised as owning. A day prior, two Chinese ships had attempted to physically obstruct a Philippine Coast Guard ship from approaching the island. Fortunately, they only crashed into each other. Then, as often following these kinds of incidents, a US ship sailed into the waters that the PRC insistently claims belong to it (to demonstrate that the US disagrees, to show its support for others ignoring the claim, and to make the PRC look weak when they invariably do not, in fact, enforce their claimed territory).
I'm not going to follow a .cn link due to the Great Cannon, but I've heard that the Chinese media is censoring the fact that two PLAN ships crashed into each other, presumably because it's a massive pratfall. And, well, of course they're parroting the insistent PRC line that "this island belongs to China and how dare anyone else go near it". They're also falsely claiming they "expelled" the US destroyer, because they're trying to save face.
Here is an Australian article about the incident. Here is the Wikipedia article about it.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
When I was an undergrad I was a runner and would sometimes run through campus. I would occasionally get hot enough that I'd remove my shirt and tie it around my waist. More than once, cars of females would hoot at me with varying degrees of fervor. I never quite believed that they were seriously going for any sort of praise --more like taking the piss. I wasn't sure. I have never related this to anyone. But this was a long time ago. Today if we were in the UK I wonder if those sorority girls would be arrested.
Markass
1d ago
Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator.
The second says:
Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).
I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.
It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it
Unless it updated recently to ban "vigilantes", this is quite a novel interpretation of the terms of service.
if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?
Liability for what? The "vigilante" they banned, Schlep, didn't do anything remotely near what NBC did to Bill Conradt. Schlep was just somebody who collected evidence and reported pedophiles to law enforcement.
Arguably, Roblox has just as much liability if not more for the pedophiles they do know about but never ban. Schlep and other so-called "vigilantes" have consistently reported them to Roblox, but they refuse to act in most cases, even if the pedophile has been arrested, and only rarely actually bans them if there is a highly publicized video made about them. Remember that Louisiana's lawsuit isn't the only one Roblox is facing as a result of their refusal to ban pedophiles.
Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now.
Consider the fact that there is an arbitrary limit of 100 games that parents can block for their child before they can't block any more games. This isn't sufficient to prevent their child from being exposed to sex games because there are way more than 100 sex games on the platform and Roblox seemingly does nothing to ban them.
But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.
If the platform they visit actually bans pedophiles when they are reported, there will be much less of a predator problem compared to Roblox.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1d ago
It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
Why? This behavior chain is quite comprehensible once you're willing to put the associated emotions aside.
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can, but if you do that the ability for users to interact with each other more generally is severely curtailed. Once that happens, and they jump to other less-secure platforms like IRC[1], now all bets are off- and if you consider "it started here and then it moved to [X] platform" to still carry a risk of reputational damage (and we'll note the article validates this perspective) you're likely going to decide to thread the needle by attempting to keep your chat platform just functional enough that your users stick to yours, where you at least have control of content filtering (and again, you can't turn it up to max because if you do your users are more likely to take the cues and leave or find parallel methods of communication, so you're not going to put many resources into this and are going to focus on keeping a low profile).
saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators
Well, they kind of are- they foul up any actual investigation, intentionally antagonize existing users, and they actively encourage the bad behavior. "Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes" is not a meme I [as a platform] would want to encourage, because there are obviously plenty of kids willing to make that trade if prompted![2]
(The same argument can be made for not glamorizing mass killers/shooters- it puts the meme in public consciousness, much like "hey kid, want a ride in my van/some candy/to help me find my dog?" is, which is why even though kids are heavily inoculated against it those lines still get used by predators today.)
So then, in an environment of such inoculation, what could they possibly be doing? Well, about that...
It appears to me that there are a couple of pathways this stuff typically follows. Most of this is obfuscated for reasons- some honest, some not, but examining the nature of what happens is important if you actually want to reduce incidences of the actual problem.
The first one is the OnlyFans model, which works on anyone literate enough to read a DM. This can take a few forms- the "send me nudes and I'll send you Vbucks" one perhaps the most common, but can extend into non-monetary goods like gaining access to more exclusive social groups as well. This is a standard commercial transaction, and any kid who's ever run a lemonade stand understands how that works.
Now, how does that go wrong? Well, either the goods aren't ever delivered (and I'm more concerned about the contract violation than I am about what's being transacted), or the 'price' of entry to that club is raised (either 'send more nudes to continue' or 'because I know who you are, I'll tell everyone you know about this business') and the calculus now being made is 'send the nudes or lose all my friends'. The problems with that should be obvious- everyone hates getting ripped off that way.
Obviously the way to avoid that is simply by teaching kids to practice safe SECS with the end goal of making sure that, should they engage in this business, they retain the ability to disengage without further cost. You'll recognize that as the conceit of the "meh, sex isn't a big deal" point of view, and that's not an accident. The other way to do it is simply ensure your child artificially puts a price on their nudes that's so high there's no risk of them selling it, but this abstinence-only method tends to disappoint parents with its effectiveness. (Which, naturally, is why it's only these people that ever go pedo-hunting.)
The second one is the "secret romance"/"special friend" model, which only seems to work on young adults (13-16) and not actual children (<12), probably because their biology isn't demanding that from them yet. It's naturally more prevalent here than it is anywhere else because this is basically the only place left that age group can interact with older people with some low-barrier common cause and with relative safety to disengage.
Hardening your targets against that is... more complicated.
[1] Discord is literally just IRC, so the same complaints we had back in the 90s remain true today. The same mitigations do too- "don't use your real name or give out your address because if you do, your ability to control the engagement goes out the window"- but whoring for favors (and just... general stupidity) is pretty clearly perennial.
[2] One man's victim blaming is another man's disregard of obvious agency, and online is, perhaps paradoxically, obviously the most difficult place to try and rape someone specifically because your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met) in a way that really doesn't exist when they're right in front of you. This interaction takes two in a way most other environments do not, and ignoring that truth is not doing one's analysis any favors.
In a fight against "preventing pedophilia at all costs" and "making sure de facto freedoms for the under-18 set are not sacrificed on the pyre of protecting the stupid from themselves", I'm picking the latter. Bearing witness to the horrors that have been unleashed upon (and by) my generation that destroyed everything except for the Internet as that frontier has hardened my heart against those that would destroy that too.
so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures
They were going to do this anyway.
It's never about reducing kid-fucking, literally nobody cares about that, it's all about paying your supporters with the right to fuck kids (the "drain the swamp" people are directionally correct here). Quite literally, when we're talking about the UK.
Markass
1d ago
I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
The "vigilante" that Roblox recently banned is Schlep, and I take issue with him being described as a vigilante. It implies that he is imposing justice on the pedophiles himself, when he is not. All he is doing is collecting evidence and reporting them to law enforcement, as he should. He also reports them to Roblox, but Roblox has consistently refused to ban the predators from their platform, even after they've been arrested, until he makes widely publicized videos about them.
I think the overt politicization of the American judiciary makes it better in this case. Each individual judge may be biased, but since both sides get to appoint judges, and fight over it, the justice system as a whole ends up fairly representative.
In most of Europe on the other hand the justice system is treated as an apolitical, bureaucratic organization. The judges should be professionals, and leave their biases at home. The public shouldn't care about the judges, in the same way that we shouldn't have to care about minor functionaries in other random government departments, who are just hired on the basis of their skill set and are there to do a job.
So in the Netherlands: the Minister of Justice appoints the head of the Council for the Judiciary. This council in turn appoint the heads of the courts. The courts then hire judges. In practice even the ministerial selection is done based on a shortlist, and the courts too make shortlists. The minister could maybe ram through a political appointee if he really wanted (and get everyone to yell InDePeNdEnT JuDiCiArY), but that political appointee would have no institutional support and get nothing done.
This all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice everyone (except, depending on how the election went, the minister) is a fairly serious progressive by now, and they will always make progressive rulings, and hire more progressives. And there's no way to change that except by going full Orban.
I don't actually have much of a problem with this in the American context. The laws are made democratically, and almost everywhere in the US, the district attorney is also an elected position.
If a DA gets elected on the promise not to charge criminals, then indeed doesn't charge criminals, then gets reelected, then clearly the people actually want this. At that point I can't really disagree with it. I disagree with the stance, but not with implementing the results of the vote. If the median voter of e.g. Portland really is this progressive, then yes, so should the government of Portland be.
The problem comes when these people are appointed by "the system" and cannot be removed.
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