reconnaissent
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User ID: 3188
That's certainly a defense. But, "My actions were totally in the interest of New York State and had nothing to do with the millions of dollars my husband's business earned after meeting with Chinese government officials or the thousands of dollars of gifts and travel compensation I got and didn't include on my ethics report" may not play particularly well with a jury.
I agree that if there really exists an financial arrangement whereby money is exchanged for political favor, then that completely changes the nature of her actions. However, the way it's presented in media and in the indictment is as if those actions on her part (such as blocking the meeting) constitute illegal activities in and of themselves, as if she can be convicted for simply being politically chummy with the Chinese, with or without the alleged kickbacks.
The listing of "travel benefits", "tickets to events" and "salted ducks" as instances of kickback is particularly odd. It makes you wonder why they felt the need to appeal to such ambiguious evidence if they had actually solid evidence proving the financial quid pro quo.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
Well, it goes like this (I've added numbers to label the 3 conjuncts)
If one or both of the parents are Chinese citizens and the individual is born in a foreign country, he or she shall have Chinese nationality; however, if (1) one or both of the parents are Chinese citizens and (2) resides in a foreign country and (3) the individual has foreign nationality at birth, he or she shall not have Chinese nationality.
There's no reference to "permanent residence", as I suppose that's a concept that's only meaningful in some countries, like the US. In your scenario, I would imagine that her being a resident alien is enough to satisfy (2), so it shouldn't create a conflict situation.
It's also worth noting that clause 3 explicitly rules out dual nationality ("The PRC does not recognize dual nationality for Chinese citizens.").
That child would, by virtue of automatically acquiring US citizenship via being born on American soil, fall under the 5th clause of China s nationality law (specifically the part following the semicolon in the 5th clause) and so would not automatically acquire Chinese citizenship.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中華人民共和國國籍法
I mean, if one wants to be philosophical, one could worry that there might exist some sort of problematic race condition situations where it all depends on how "fast" the two countries' laws respectively kick in (metaphysically speaking). It also depends on your conception of personhood. If e.g. US law recognizes an infant as a person even as she's sliding down the vaginal canal but hasn't emerged yet, but Chinese law only recognizes after the baby has emerged (this is just a silly example for illustrative purposes), then the US law will always kicks in earlier and therefore (per the exception created by the 5th clause of China's nationality law) preempt the China law from giving her automatic Chinese citizenship.
There is an explicit clause (the 3rd clause) that says they don't recognize dual citizenship involving China and a different country.
Also, the second sentence of the 5th clause basically creates an exception for cases where a child (i) is born abroad to a Chinese parent and (ii) acquires citizenship of that country in the process. It rules that in such cases the child does not have Chinese citizenship.
There are no US/China dual citizens. China (like Japan, India, Singapore) doesn't recognize dual citizenship.
Also, is it just me, or do a lot of the individual items under Summary of Criminal Conduct in the indictment (items 9 to 15) come across as nothingburgers? Blocking a meeting? Getting the governor to post a thank you tweet for donated respirators? These are things a politician's chief of staff does, & it's not like she did it in secret and gave no reasons why it's not in the interest of the governor to e.g. have those meetings. And the "visa fraud" is ... so they can get a letter of invitation so some Chinese government officials can visit NY to talk business?
Also:
In a 65-page indictment, prosecutors laid out a yearslong scheme in which Ms. Sun blocked Taiwanese officials from having access to the governor’s office, eliminated references to Taiwan and Uyghurs from state communications and quashed meetings with Taiwanese officials, all in an effort to bolster Chinese government positions.
Are "blocked Taiwanese officials from having access to the governor’s office" and "quashed meetings with Taiwanese officials" not the same thing in different words? Why list the same item twice?
In return, Ms. Sun, 40, and her husband, Chris Hu, 41, received payoffs that included millions of dollars in transactions with China-based businesses tied to Mr. Hu, prosecutors said. They also included travel benefits, tickets to events, a series of Nanjing-style salted ducks prepared by a Chinese consulate official’s private chef and employment for Ms. Sun’s cousin in China, officials said.
What does "millions of dollars in transactions" mean? Is it a million dollar bribe? Or is it that the China based business did million dollar worth of business transactions with customers?
Are "travel benefits" and "tickets to events" not perfectly normal things to for one government to give another government's representatives in the normal course of business?
reconnaissent
2mo ago
Direct link to the transcript (click the spoiler):
https://kiwifarms.st/threads/audrey-e-hale-a-k-a-aiden-e-hale.159272/page-119#post-19252781
reconnaissent
2mo ago
It's not that those people have shorter attention spans. It's more that most people just don't take politics all that seriously. Because let's face it: electoral politics is not serious business. Voters do not think of themselves as board members trying to pick a new CEO, even though the two situations are structurally analogous. The huge difference of degree has resulted in a difference of kind. For most people, discussing politics is similar to watching sports: an amateur hour time when intellectual rigor is out of place, a time for letting one's hair down and cracking silly jokes (kind of like the Friday Fun threads. "This is for fun!")
reconnaissent
2mo ago
What's the pecking order among subfields of (pure) mathematics? Is algebraic geometry more prestigious than geometric algebra? What about geometric topology vis-a-vis topological geometry? Do group theorists look down upon ring theorists? Are number theorists generally considered the smartest? What about combinatorists? Is set theory and/or foundations of mathematics low status?
I guess this isn't "culture war" per se but more "sociology of mathematics", but it seems to belong here.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
You raise a good point. It's tricky to come up with a foolproof way of drawing the speech versus act ("words speak louder than actions", "practice what you preach") distinction.
Here's another example. Let's say someone is gifted with a thunderous voice and that when he shouts, he shatters the eardrums of people in a 10 feet radius. Should he be free to shoot in public? Presumably not. But that's because clearly this scenario has more in common with typical cases of physical violence. Here the physical quality of sound (rather than the meaning of sound) is what is playing a decisive causal role. So it's no longer pure speech, but something one might call a "sonic act".
Notice that the fact a shout is not per se meaningful speech is not the decisive consideration here. After all, imagine that our protagonist instead of letting out a meaningless shout, choose instead to recite the Constitution in public at the top of his volume. Then the sounds he make are meaningful, but still even a free speech absolutist shouldn't want to allow that. Why? Because by reciting the constitution he's simultaneously doing two things. The first is exercising his free speech. The second is an act of sonic terrorism. If due to the peculiar constitution of his physiology, these two things cannot be cleanly separated unfortunately (at least when he chooses to speak at the top of his volume), then he should not be allowed to perform the one because he can't help but also perform the other as well.
In your scenario ("one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians") I'm inclined to say even a free speech absolutist shouldn't allow that. But I will need to find a different basis (than "sonic terrorism") on which to exclude that kind of speech from protection. It seems that this is clearly an action and no longer just speech, in the same way that, say, taking money out of someone's pocket is action rather than speech (even though no one is directly hurt in the process intrinsically speaking). But it can be tricky to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions that give the correct verdict in all cases.
Many people will be opposed to this move on Brazil's part, but for the wrong reasons, chief among which is national pride. As a free speech absolutist, I'm opposed to this move because I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted. This includes not just "wholesome" speech, but:
- true threats, including to the head of state/government of one's country
- deliberate defamations
- shouting fire in a crowed theatre - even if this leads to a stampede, even if the stampede causes a mass casualty event
- bullying speech, including telling someone to commit suicide — even if this leads to their suicide — even if they are minors
- advocacy for the violent overthrow of government
- advocacy for preemptive nuclear strikes against any entity whatsoever
- and so on, provided it's just a speech, and not an act (speech act counts as speech for my purposes).
The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation. There is no such thing as non-physical pain, the kind people talk about when they talk about e.g. losing someone they love. That talk of 'pain' is merely a figure of speech. ". To which the reply may be: "but phantom limb pain is non-physical". To which the reply is: "no it's physical in my sense. For pain to be physical it's not necessary that it's triggered by a physical stimulus. It suffices that it's experienced as physical, i.e. it has the distinctive qualia associated with pain and is locatable in some specific part of the body or a generic region of the body. And phantom limb pain meets those conditions."
reconnaissent
2mo ago
You are trying to remake politics in the image of academia. That won't work. Politics is a much more important and foundational human institution than academia. What is needed here are hustlers and grifters, the Saul Goodman types, not scientists or engineers.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
I'd go one step further and say that everyone should be free to defame, simpliciter. I should be free to spread vicious rumors about my neighbors without fear of legal consequences. (The only things that could hold me back are social and/or moral concerns).
As a free speech absolutist, I'd be even in favor of allowing people to issue true threats against each other without fear of legal consequences, as long as they don't make good on those threats.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
Is there any sense of "scam" in which essential oils are scam but, say, broccoli is not a scam? Has any claim of health benefits on behalf of broccoli been rigorously established? If not, perhaps broccoli only avoids being labeled a scam by not making any promises. If you don't make any promises, you can't be accused of scam. But then neither do most essential oil products make any promises.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
Why are black people so bad at organized crime?
A common stereotype of black people is that they have violent and/or criminal tendencies. Yet there are no black equivalents of Italian Mafia, Mexican Cartels, Chinese Triads, or the Irish Mob. "Gangstas" are known more for their music and breakdancing than for their scary, ruthless ways. No black organized crime groups have ever managed to capture popular imagination. Why is this?
I mean, that would be good news from my point of view! After all, I hope it's clear that what's being aimed for here is not an actual "true threat" but something that is just as effective as one in terms of psychological impact on the recipient. After all, someone who actually intends to issue a true threat to someone would simply choose the most direct language ("I will do X unless you do/stop doing Y") available. There's no reason for such a person to care about "plausible deniability".
So if the people who interpret the rules can "see what I'm doing", they should rationally decline to "crack down on me" (at all, much less "more"), because they can see no "true threat" is intended, only a very hateful message.
(Think of it this way. When someone becomes notorious for some controversial political position we often hear their claims to receive "death threats" in the mail or via phone. We all know that the vast majority of people sending such messages do not actually intend to make good on their threats, yet by wording their messages in the outward form of a "true threat" they make themselves vulnerable to criminal prosecution. They merely want to say something very hateful, very violent towards the recipient.)
reconnaissent
2mo ago
There is no particular person I have in mind (although I don't mind if people assume otherwise). The question is mostly technical, an intellectual exercise. If you want to know the real motivation behind me asking the question, it's largely this: that I believe that free speech laws should not outlaw "true threats" (i.e. people should be legally permitted to threaten each other with death, as long as they don't practice what they preach, so to speak) because if I'm right, it's trivially easy for a would-be issuer of a "true threat" to reword his message so that, while the overall psychological impact on the recipient would be nearly the same, the language used has near perfect plausible deniability.
"you are worth less than a cockroach" would be safer, but less effective in my view. For one thing, it is more formulaic, and for that reason less "powerful" in the same way that dead metaphors are less powerful than live metaphors: readers of such sentences immediately take cognitive shortcuts to get at the underlying sense, so they no longer evoke vivid mental imagery in the mind.
Secondly, the version with the extra cruft explicitly brings in the concept of death, and therefore can come across as more threatening, whereas "You’re worth less than a cockroach" does not.
You are right that social risks are unavoidable, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it as a desideratum. The point is not to "dog whistle" (to have one message for the intended recipient, and a different one for everyone else). The point is rather to have the hateful and/or violent intent behind the message be transparent to everyone involved, yet the message be couched in language that allows for the highest degree of gloat-worthy plausible deniability, leaving B with as little recourse as possible. Given that these two properties pull in different directions, I'm interested to know whether there's any way to strike the best balance as it were.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
Let's say that, for whatever reason, A wishes to publicly tweet some extreme hate speech about B. A wants the language used to be effective, i.e. to get as much hate as possible across to B, but A also wants the language used to be safe, i.e. A wants, as much as possible, to minimize any legal risks and preferably any social risks for himself. These desiderata trade off against each other: The maximally effective language would be a "true threat", but this would be entirely unsafe, because true threats aren't protected by any free speech laws.
What are some examples of language that A can use which best balances the competing desiderata of effectiveness and safety?
One idea that's occurred to me is language along the following lines: "If I'm crossing a bridge and see that B is drowning in the river, I will absolutely rescue B — but only after I've made sure any drowning cockroach within a 5 mile radius has been rescued, for though I value B's life, I value those of cockroaches more."
It seems clear that the language used here would be highly effective (A is saying that the life of a merely theoretic cockroach is more important to him than that of A). But it seems that it'd also be reasonably safe, since A did not express any wish for B to die (if anything, A says he will "definitely rescue B", only he needs to prioritize (the lives of cockroaches); perhaps his priorities are screwed up, but it's difficult to imagine legal troubles for having screwed up priorities).
Am I missing something here? Are there even better ways for A to get as much hate publicly across to B without overly exposing himself to legal and/or social risks?
Can anyone explain to me why the standard arguments for criminalizing consumption of child pornography don't generalize also to the consumption of terrorist "beheading videos" that were very popular several years back?
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The revictimization argument (that consuming child pornography revictimizes the victim) obviously applies also to beheading videos. (Some might argue that as the beheaded are deceased, they can't be victimized again, so such videos should be permitted— which would lead to the absurd conclusion that a CP video that also depicts murder of the victim should be permitted, since, by their own logic, dead children can't be revictimized!)
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likewise for the argument "by consuming it you incentivizes the further production of such videos and hence further victimization".
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as for the argument that "consuming such videos makes one more likely to commit the crime depicted in them", I can see some intuitive plausibility in the idea that consumption of CP is more likely to turn the consumer into a criminal than consumption of beheading videos. If I know nothing else about someone X except that X consumes CP, then other things being equal I find myself perceiving X to be more dangerous, and more disinclined to associate with X than if I know nothing about X except that X consumes beheading videos. However I do wonder how much of this asymmetry is due to the fact that consumption of CP is already a crime, so it's difficult to imagine someone who does it but who doesn't have dangerous criminal tendencies.
reconnaissent
2mo ago
Drawing the line at "incitement of crimes" only serves to reward people smart enough to know how to incite crimes with sufficient plausible deniability as to make it not worth any prosecutor's while to go after them.
I think you are running together MeToo the movement and MeToo as a type of event (as in: "he's been me-tooed"). The fact that MeToo events are no longer occuring with regular frequency doesn't mean the movement has sizzled out! On the contrary, the fact that new creases are no longer forming only means that you've finally broken into a pair of shoes!
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