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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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The London Met Chief Commissioner had an interview last week, where he said:

We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.

I'm not sure I understand this last bit. How exactly is the London Met going to "come after" Elon Musk? Or is this some weak-sauce "we'll charge him with a crime if he ever comes here"?

He means “further afield” than the streets where the riots were happening, not out of the country. Only the US is powerful enough to extradite people for crimes they committed abroad (as with Mike Lynch or the LIBOR traders).

Yeah, he was asked specifically about Elon and pivoted to talking about "keyboard warriors" in general. People just ran with it because he didn't explicitly admit there was little he could do.

Which would be accurate but kind of unproductive and humiliating when you're trying to discipline the kids who're still gonna be in school next semester.

That doesn’t make sense. The first limb specified “in this country.” The next specified “further afield.” The clear implication is outside of this country.

If you were merely talking about crimes IRL on the streets, you wouldn’t specify in the first limb “in this country.”

Theoretically, the UK has pretty expansive options for trying someone in absentia, often on expedited means. It would be possible to issue 'notice' that was never possible to read, find Musk guilty in a day, and then set a whole mess of fees and penalties after his accounts, or even use it as a previous conviction in a more serious claim later against either Musk or Twitter's UK branch.

But that's only a little more likely than WhiningCoil's "Harris okays extradition of a US citizen for yucks" option.

It's a threat to be a threat to everyone else; if the Met police are willing to risk US retribution, they're absolutely going to fuck over some nobody in the EU.

I mean, England can request the extradition of US citizens all they want, and it makes foreign travel much more complicated for them.

It would be phenomenally stupid to demand the extradition of citizens of your security guarantor over a crime which isn't illegal in that country, so you have to expect that the UK foreign ministry will stop things from getting to that point. One furthermore has to expect that even a Kamala Harris administration won't extradite a US citizen over hate speech. But the met can make foreign travel much more complicated all the same.

It would be phenomenally stupid to demand the extradition of citizens of your security guarantor over a crime which isn't illegal in that country, so you have to expect that the UK foreign ministry will stop things from getting to that point.

"demand" implies one party trying to secure something from an unwilling second party. What we have already seen a number of times is "friendly" nations laundering hostile actions against their own disfavored citizens through their allies. I'd agree that it's unlikely to look like an extradition order against Musk for hate speech, but the federal government offering prompt cooperation on trumped-up charges or absurd fines targeting central examples of first-amendment-protected speech seems probable, if it hasn't happened already.

One furthermore has to expect that even a Kamala Harris administration won't extradite a US citizen over hate speech.

I thought the same thing about how Jan 6 protestors would be treated given all the "fiery but mostly peaceful" protest all summer. Then they started sending grandmas who got waved through to pound me in the ass prison, and everyone went "Duh, obviously this was going to happen to regime enemies." Now I expect much the same. Everyone will act like there is no way Kamala would allow the UK to extradite Elon for hate speech, until she fucking does, and then they'll act like it was obvious and Elon was a moron for going against the regime.

There’s several relevant differences. To start with, the J6 protestors committed actual minor crimes in a high profile way, Elon hasn’t done anything illegal here. Secondly, Elon is the richest man in the world. Thirdly, the political blowback from extraditing someone for hate speech would be intense, while most Americans agreed the J6 protestors should get the book thrown at them at the time.

I can't imagine a circumstance where the Harris government has it out Elon bad enough to extradite him to the UK for hate speech where it doesn't just kill him. Cleaner and easier that way

Because she can get rid of an enemy without the blowback of being guilty of doing the deed herself. Julian Assange faces much the same — he’s charged in the USA so Britain can simply say “he’s accused of terrorism of course we’re sending him to America if he leaves the embassy. If they try him themselves he can be sympathetic to the public causing people to not like the regime as much.

Britain didn't really care that much about Assange, so it's not a great analogy.

There’s less to gain from a political killing. Being cooperative with extradition has a chance of being accepted as the ‘new normal’ and so an effective deterrent in future, political killings can’t be scaled up for every domestic enemy unless you want to bring things to a crisis.

I don't think it's likely at all, but more for internal legal reasons : we've had dumber. Sometimes messy is the point.

are wide ranging parole conditions that look to violate 1st amendment rights unconstitutional? i found united states vs chaker which the ACLU/Cato/EFF joined but the court dodged the constitutional question. https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-chaker-2

It... depends. The big SCOTUS decision on the matter is Puckingham (cw: sexual assault of a child), where a near-blanket ban on social media or website use by convicted sex offenders who had served their sentence was not compatible with the First Amendment, and instead such bans must be narrowly tailored. While SCOTUS itself has not brought this to cover parolees as well, some circuit courts of appeals have. But those restrictions had to be extremely broad before the courts considered them unconstitutional; there is a general rule that parolees have highly restricted rights in general.

((Pretrial release, without a conviction, is even messier, not least of all because such matters are hard to contest before they are mooted.))

That all seems very wacky. Its not immediately clear in that wiki why anyone would want to do all of that.

Nakoula was a pretty generic grifter, but this happened right before President Obama's reelection. Having someone local to act on as an utmost priority meant that Benghazi was a Solved Problem in November 2012; it was only well after the election that anyone could start unraveling the loose threads.

My understanding is that the Commissioner was directing his comment generally at people overseas breaching UK's online laws regarding hate speech and incitement. Which seems like massive overreach and ultimately an empty threat.

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