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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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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.

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