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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.
Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]
Links:
About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)
Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)
Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)
The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)
Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)
Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)
Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)
Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25
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Notes -
One follow up question I'd add for the authoritarian (I think Hoffmeister?). Are you actually sticking to your position that there are no crimes on the books (generally) you wouldn't repeal? We have federal felonies for lots of paper crimes, crimes for lying to the FBI, the myriad of arcane laws the J6 defendants were charged under, and their state equivalents. Illinois has strict fireworks laws, as a local example. These are mostly petty, but can be upgraded to misdemeanors or felonies under certain conditions. Its also illegal to drive pickup trucks on certain roadways, even if they are just being used as a civilian vehicle. Fishing while wearing pajamas is also somewhat famously illegal.
The question Yassine asked me is: do I think there are any felony crimes that I think should not be felonies? I am perfectly willing to believe that there are an array of ticky-tack misdemeanor crimes on the books all over this country; the more obscure and rarely- or never-enforced ones are known collectively as “mopery laws”, which I explicitly mentioned on the podcast. I have no strong opinion on any of them in particular, as I don’t have comprehensive knowledge of them, and I’m sure I could be persuaded that any number of them ought to be repealed.
When it comes to felonies, though, we’re talking pretty much universally things that are really bad and really serious, and there are none, to my knowledge, which I would like to see made not-felonies. I did call out marijuana laws as a class of felonies that I won’t vociferously defend, although that’s more because public opinion has turned so strongly against them that the horse has already permanently fled the stable.
If we’re talking about the laws that the J6 people are being charged with, those are completely valid and important laws, which are being (mostly) misapplied in this particular instance. It actually is really bad to attempt to violently overthrow the government, and to the extent that any group of people actually does do so, the government has every right and every reason to bring the full force of the state down upon such people. Whether or not any particular J6 defendant is actually guilty of doing so - in other words, whether or not a just law is being applied unjustly - has no bearing on whether such a law ought to exist and to be enforced appropriately.
Yassine brought up Kyle Rittenhouse as another example, asking me if I think the government was wrong to prosecute Rittenhouse. I replied that while I’m very glad that Rittenhouse was acquitted, I still believe that shooting multiple people in public is the sort of thing that the courts are very much empowered to prosecute, and that it’s the particular extenuating circumstances surrounding why Rittenhouse shot those people that makes his acquittal appropriate. The justice system can, in fact, make mistakes, and prosecutors do sometimes try individuals for crimes which they did not commit, or for which the totality of the circumstances demands their acquittal. This does not mean that the laws themselves are unjust.
Common law felonies, for sure, but we have lots of regulatory felonies in the US. Importing some foods is a felony. Its a felony to be a Pinkterton-style strikebreaker. Various laws relating to birds, such as possessing a bald eagle feather have felony escalators as an option. Hunting Canada geese without a permit.
I'd like to agree with this, but as we see anytime the Logan Act is brought up, the purpose of these laws is abuse. They are rarely, if ever, used appropriately.
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