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My only real take on this is that I wish Republican politicians talking about Trump's civil liberties had the same energy for the rest of us.
"He was convicted on the testimony of a felon! Who only turned on him for a plea deal!" Cry me a river dickhead. This is a routine dance across the country in courtrooms from coast to coast. When a normal citizen's defense attorney tries that, the prosecutor gets up and gives the same line about "I wish I had nicer witnesses, but the defendant hangs out with felons, so felons are the people who know what happened." Every damn day. Trump has a very limited ability to gain credibility by accusing his lawyer he chose of being a slimeball.
Prosecutorial overreach has impacted thousands of Americans, where's this energy for them? Where was Mike Johnson when Aaron Swartz was hounded to death? When Assange was pinned on bullshit charges? When our prisons were filling up with people who plead down to felonies when cops lied about having witnesses, and prosecutors told them to take this deal or risk dying in prison?
Don't take your political movement that's spent decades building a state with the power to imprison citizens on a whim, and get all shocked Pikachu when one of your oxes gets gored.
This is a good bit of who/whom.
The truth is our entire system falls apart if jury trials and evidence mattered. It’s very difficult to prove reasonable doubt. Except for very stupid defendants like this guy:
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1795966422826238110?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Who did his zoom court day for a suspended license while driving. He actually seems 100 IQ.
One reason why we use to jail people for a while for being a felon with an illegal gun is because that is a very good proxy for murder when murder is hard to prove.
We could never actually try every case. So this guy is bad and convict him is about the standard we need.
It is. Republican Politicians want one rule of law for the poor, and another for the powerful. I have trouble feeling sympathy for them when they were mistaken about being the powerful.
I remain hopeful, but not optimistic, that Trump's Trials and Tribulations will lead to a future where some portion of the American people coming to a consensus that centering all power in the Imperial Presidency was a Bad Call, that enabling prosecutors to jail any American was a Bad Call, that enabling the National Security state to spy on everyone all the time was a Bad Call. So far, it seems that both Republicans and Democrats have taken the lesson that it means that we need Our Guy in charge. C'est la vie.
This is the usual process for democracies sliding into authoritarianism; the Greeks literally had a word, στασις, describing escalating tit-for-tat political prosecutions until one side rules(the one with more guns) forever.
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Real civil liberties I think are no-longer possible in America. If every criminal defendant got Saul Goodman (make him a little less of actual criminal) as their defense attorney and fully taking advantage of civil liberties our entire economy would need to be criminal justice.
If we were like Japan with low crime we could implement the US civil liberties by the letter of the law. Unfortunately, we are not.
I hate it. But who/whom is necessary. And in NYC Donald Trump is the who.
I want the system you want because I am basically honest and try to do right. But lower class and upper class both break aren’t.
It’s funny because I know rule breakers. I understand why industries have a thousand regulations where workers spend half their time just being legal and probably still aren’t. SBF is a big example who I think is a proper “who”, but catching him requires a lot of regulations. And now we have a financial system with a thousand rules because at some point someone did something bad and each rule catches one of them. But as a whole it grinds the entire system to a halt.
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Oh please. Your contention is that our prisons are full of innocent people, imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, as a result solely of lies told by police? What percentage of incarcerated people do you think can accurately be described this way?
Plea bargaining constitutes something like 98% of convictions, even though it's a hilariously flagrant infringement of the Sixth Amendment. America mostly doesn't have trials.
Our local lefty defense lawyer has pointed out before that a completely negligible number of people facing charges are innocent.
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Yes, obviously I’m aware of that. What I’m disputing is that any significant number of the people taking those plea bargains are innocent, or that their “civil liberties are being violated” by lying cops trying to railroad them.
Their civil liberties are being violated by being pushed through a system that de-facto requires them to confess without trial, regardless of whether they are actually guilty or not.
I expect a not-insignificant amount of people were in fact innocent though. I was arrested for trespassing once, and urged to take a plea deal because they had video footage of me committing the crime. I knew they didn’t because I never committed the crime, but I was under enough pressure that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in my shoes took the plea deal anyway.
There are many issues with the criminal justice system. Excessive leniency for actual criminals can be true at the same time as corrupt, aggressive prosecution against innocents. It’s the core of the whole idea of anarchotyranny.
Nobody is forced to take a plea deal. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question - as in, there’s no murky questions of intent, evidence that could be interpreted either way, etc. - taking a plea deal strikes me as a very poor choice. The fact is that the vast majority of people who take plea deals do so because they are in fact guilty, or at least they’re adjacent enough to a crime that a reasonable jury could assess them as guilty.
Why? It sounds like you didn’t take a plea deal because you were certain there was no evidence of your guilt. Why would someone in that type of situation take a plea deal, short of being a person who lacks good judgment?
"If you're not guilty you have nothing to fear from the system, even though they have already proved their lack of scruples by pressuring you."
"If you're innocent you have nothing to hide."
"Comrade Stalin, there must have been a mistake!"
How does that indicate a lack of scruples on the justice system’s part? If they believe that you’re guilty, and that getting you to take a plea deal is a more reliable way to ensure that you’re punished rather than risking the possibility that a sympathetic/gullible jury makes a poor choice, it’s entirely reasonable for them to lean on you to take the plea deal. This isn’t unscrupulous at all.
This but unironically.
By that logic if I believe I'm not guilty, it's not unscrupulous at all to kill the cops and try to get away with it, or at least ensure I'm imprisoned for a good reason.
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This is most people in stressful situations.
Depends on the details. For example, I once took a deal to have something I didn’t do negotiated down to a fine. If I had been found guilty in court, 1/2 year in prison was the minimum. This seems to me like demanding money with the threat of prison if I exercise my rights.
Even if I had been found innocent, I likely would have been jailed for an unspecified amount of time, which would have been a larger hassle, and more costly, than the fine anyway.
Additionally, things which are a poor choice but alleviating in-the-moment stressors basically make up half the economy, and most people partake in them. The government should not be participating in such predatory behavior against its own citizens.
This describes effectively 0 cases. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question. Any situation where you don’t have video evidence of you being somewhere other than the crime scene comes down to he-said-she-said, but one of you is a cop.
For example, in my trespassing case: - I was found on the sidewalk adjacent to the property I was supposedly trespassing on (I was going for a walk for no particular reason, far from my home)
All this in a case where I was 100% factually innocent. The fact there even was a camera on the building is what saved me, or else I might have actually ended up in prison. This isn’t the only instance either. There have been at least 4 times in my relatively short life that I have been falsely accused by police, and one of those led to an arrest. I’m fairly good at navigating those situations, but there are many who I’m sure would fair worse
I have made it well into my thirties without ever being arrested nor ever even receiving so much as a traffic ticket. I live my life in an upstanding manner and do not involve myself in situations that could lead to me being suspected of criminal activity. The two times in my life that I’ve been questioned by police officers, I calmly and respectfully explained what was happening and allowed them full leeway to obtain all the information they needed in order to ascertain my innocence, after which they let me go on my way without issue.
I had been seen peering through the slots in the walls surrounding the property (it was a cool building and I am a curious soul).
This is shady behavior. When taken in combination with the fact that you had visible scrapes on both your body and clothing consistent with having hopped a wall, I think it’s entirely reasonable and proper for the police to have arrested you and assumed your guilt.
I think you should probably consider making better decisions and acting less shady/suspicious.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to have. Unfortunately, it's not one that makes for an easy defense of Trump. We're talking about a guy with a history of questionable business behavior who surrounds himself with the kind of people who, if not exactly operating within the criminal world, were squatting near the margins of it. He's been sued numerous times, and lost quite a few of those suits. Whether or not he actually did what the New York DA says he did is irrelevant in your world because he's already proven himself to be the exact kind of person who would do something like that. There's debate above on whether the hush money payments were campaign expenses and how was Trump supposed to proceed without getting into hot water but that's irrelevant; whether they were improper campaign contributions or not, I can tell you that what you don't do is have your attorney make the payments out of his own pocket and then create phony invoices and ledger entries as part of a reimbursement scheme. According to your logic, that alone should be enough evidence of suspicious activity regardless of his past. I'm personally not in favor of getting rid of plea bargaining because I don't think it's going to have the effect some people think it will, but if you're going to take the position that people who engage in suspicious activity deserve what's coming to them, I don't see how you can defend Trump in this situation.
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I’ll continue following the law, but to place the onus of “don’t be suspicious” while following the law onto the citizenry is exactly the sort of infringement on rights that I’m talking about. The state has no right to arrest citizens for doing things that aren’t illegal, even if they look bad. If staring through a wall is arrestable, make it a crime.
There’s so much low hanging fruit for police to deal with it’s absurd that this should even be an issue. This was in a major city where I saw shoplifting on a daily basis! A car in front of me got shot up in a drive-by shooting! Entire sections of the city were defacto no-go zones! The fact they took time to arrest me, at the time college student working two jobs, was absurd.
Sounds terrible. I’ve been ticketed for things as simple as picking up a rock in the wrong jurisdiction. I can’t imagine how little you must do for this to be possible.
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Reminder that the USA has the largest incarcerated population in the world. Beating out even China and other such jail happy and/or third world nations.
In fact, at its height the USA has a greater prison population, at times, than the USSR under Stalin and GULAG. No, not just in raw numbers because the USA is bigger. In per capita rates too.
If you really believe there are no significant innocent people caught between the cracks of the system. That such an idea is an impossibility. Would you bite the bullet and say the same of the Stalin's prison state? Or is it that Americans are just sooo much more criminal than Soviets or really anyone else.
What percentage of the population in the USSR or China is African?
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How so? We live in an era wherein technological advances such as DNA testing, GPS tracking, and ubiquitous video surveillance have made the ascertainment of guilt trivially easy for most crimes. Certainly there exist crimes for which those technologies are insufficient for adjudicating guilt - for example, “date rape” where the physical evidence will allow for multiple competing interpretations based on testimony and subjective judgment - but such crimes comprise a very small percentage of what people in the U.S. are imprisoned for.
The problem with the gulags wasn’t how many people were imprisoned; it’s what they were imprisoned for. Large numbers of Soviet prisoners were there because they criticized the government. That’s bad, and appears not to bear much resemblance at all to the American justice system. To the extent that the gulag system included a very large number of non-political prisoners - murderers, burglars, fraudsters, etc. - that’s a perfectly reasonable outcome of how large the Soviet population was.
Yes, this is just manifestly true. America has a very large criminal underclass - mostly, but not entirely, non-white. Demographically alone, our country is so radically different from China and Europe to make such comparisons functionally meaningless. If anything our country has an underincarceration problem, wherein large numbers of individuals with long criminal records are out walking among us, instead of in prison or in the grave where they belong. If you’re freaked out by how large our carceral system is, you should join me in supporting a considerable expansion of the death penalty and its efficient usage.
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I mean, I'm quite confident that Americans are much more criminal than Chinese.
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Doesn't the US also have a much bigger problem with violence? I seem to recall lots of complaints about high gun violence rates. The correlation we want is between crime and prison.
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf
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My impression is that cops usually pick minor criminals and use pressure and lies to inflate their charges. Just because it's not an angel who's going to prison doesn't mean it should be happening.
These minor criminals usually accept the plea deal offered to them and go to prison on minor charges. The real problem is that the police go after easy crimes and famously refuse to investigate other minor crimes like shoplifting.
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What is the impression based on?
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The reason Trump exists is because conservatives are dissatisfied with the fruits of the last decades of conservatism. Your post reads to me like, "Trump supporters claim to hate bad things, but if that were true, they'd hate these other things that are also bad!"
Nowhere did I address Trump voters, I specifically called out Republican Politicians.
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Trump voters I know of speak glowingly of Nayib Bukele's law and order in El Salvador, which is to say, arbitrary roundups on police discretion.
Whether supporting uncuffing the police for crackdowns on violent crime can coexist rationally with opposing selective prosecution of political enemies is difficult to say. I'm not sure. It seems it should be possible to square those two stances, but I can see why @FiveHourMarathon sees it as obvious hypocrisy.
El Salvador went from a lawless shithole run by cartels to the safest country in Central America. What does locking away murderous criminal gangs have to do with what we're talking about? FHM's comment is about the growing power of the state to imprison anyone. The El Salvador case is simple, don't join a gang that kills people!
The point is that El Salvador achieved that by not stressing too much about absolutely proving that the people they were locking up were in fact murderous criminals.
I think that's a perfectly fine public policy choice - the old saw about "better to let ten guilty go free than punish one innocent" is a nice line but it's completely reasonable for a country with extreme crime problem to say "actually no, we're not gonna let the ten guilty go free".
But of course if you're happy to be gung-ho about locking up the people who seem bad and not being super-meticulous about making sure they get the absolute duest of process, it does seem hypocritical to complain when that standard gets applied to the con man heading your party.
I was with you, and then you lost me. There is obviously a world of difference between locking up a bunch of gangsters who run cartels that kill people in the streets, and supporting an FBI state that spies on everyone and arrests you for praying in front of an abortion clinic, or "mislabeling" records.
Besides, your characterization of Trump as a "con man" is doing a lot of work here. Which of your politicians do you want to hold up as honest and good? You know good and well what the double-standard is here, and that nobody else is being charged for these non-crimes. Maybe if Hillary and Obama and Biden were also facing jail for writing the words "legal expenses" you would have a point.
I think it is worth noting that both the Democratic President's son and a Democratic Senator are also currently being prosecuted. Many other Democrats have been prosecuted for crimes, often successfully. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was prosecuted in a case very similar to the one Trump has just been convicted in. So I don't buy any of this nonsense about how Trump has to get a free pass to make it fair.
Of course, it's entirely reasonable to think these prosecutions do not capture the full spectrum of criminal behaviour within the Democratic party, and I would agree with that proposition. I think it would be wise and just for state level officials or federal officials in a future republican government to aggressively investigate and pursue charges against corrupt Democrats. Politicians should be held to a higher standard rather than a lower one, and vigorous enforcement against them is a good thing. That goes both ways.
Hunter Biden had the DOJ doing everything they could to ward off actual crime (he clearly inter alia committed knowing tax fraud). It was so unusual we had IRS whistleblowers. The senator from NJ basically was getting bribed by a foreign government.
These are real crimes; not fake ones.
Trump's crimes are also very real.
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That and the gangs helpfully announce who they are by putting a bunch of distinctive tattoos on their bodies. I’d wager that for every 1000 incarcerated there might be one innocent person
There was an old trope on neoreactionary forums, I don't know if it was common in rationalist spaces, that went like this: First Peace, then Order, then Justice, then Law. They form a hierarchy, you can't have one without first having those that came before. Trying to have Law when you don't have Justice first doesn't work, for example, because without Justice the Law is just a series of rules. And likewise, you don't have Justice without Order, because how could any secure justice be acheived if people are fighting in the streets?
By this argument, I think it's perfectly fair to support draconian state brutality in El Salvador, and worry about state brutality in the US.
Totally agree.
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Also, murdering anyone who wears those tattoos without going through the necessary gang initiations. I could see the false-positive rate being a little higher, and I'm skeptical that El Salvador's actual murder rate has dropped as far as the reported murder rate, but a lot of the due process concerns are... misplaced or based on poor understandings of the environment (or, conversely, what due process looks like in the United States).
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Bryan Caplan speaks positively of Bukele’s “round em up” policy on the basis that given what is known about the gangs the false positive rate is crazy small and the gangs are very dangerous.
That criteria doesn’t appear here.
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Yeah, the plain fact is that most of them don't care about civil liberties in a broad and principled way. They're not classical liberals or libertarians. They're conservatives. They're the kind of people who think that the government should be able to put me in a cage for putting recreational drugs in my body. A significant minority of them would probably institute peacetime conscription if they could because they like the idea of how being in the army transforms young men. In other words, they are social engineers, their primarily goal isn't individual liberty, it is to shape society on a large scale into their vision of it. It's just that their vision is different from the vision of leftist social engineers.
Thank you, AAQC’d. This is an outgroup-written description but it’s one I find myself agreeing with.
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In a just world both conservatives and leftists would be forced to live each other's vision of society.
I think in a just world conservatives and leftists would live in their own vision of society absent of the benefits of the other's vision of society and suffer the consequences of their own beliefs.
As it stands you one can just blame all bad things on the other side and believe all good things to be from their side.
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Or in other words, they're temporally-embarrassed progressives (in the "Americans all believe themselves temporarily-embarrassed millionaires" sense.)
This is why I think a better name for this group is "traditionalist", to separate them from the classical liberals, since liberalism happens to find itself a conservative position but has different motivations for being that way.
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I think they just have ideals but when facts meet reality of having a lot of people who can’t function in society change their views.
I don’t think a white nationalists would have problems running on libertarianism in a society that is all European. This is a big reason why the right doesn’t want immigrants because they can’t function in the society this nation was founded on.
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