Hate Crimes
 

I see this as politically correct bullshit.Hate crime laws have no legal reason to exsist. This is the worst kind of political and legalistic wrangling that i loathe. For example, if a white guy walks out of a straight bar and gets the shit kicked out of him, the offender would be tried for assault and battery. If the offender beat the shit out of a black guy walking out of a gay bar not only would the offender be tried for assault and battery but also hate crimes. This leads me to ask a few questions. What is the purpose for this superfluous law? The "Hate crime" is against who, the individual, those who are like him, a gay/black, jew, fill-in-the-blank group? This also shows favoritism: If you arn't a member of a certain caste, crimes against you just don't matter a lot. This is a load of garbage and screen mugging grandstanding if you ask me.

Hate crimes recognise that social minorities exist and that they're often the subject of persecution. I think it makes perfect sense that the scum who prey on certain groups be judged according to their intentions.

Why. Why should the same crime be treated differently because of someones motivation. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

It makes no sense to simply punish, punish, punish when the roots of the problem are left intact, but that's an entirely seperate issue.

If a black man is murdered because he is black, it's an extremely different situation to if a black man is murdered because he had an affair with the killer's wife.

Why? Because if the perpetrator is parolled that means that the perpetrator will kill again. Baloney. The offender should be in jail for one long ****ing time, maybe be executed or in the big house for life

This world is messed up!:fuzblink:

Point 1:

Someone beating up a Black Person is not a Hate Crime.
Someone beating up a White Person is not a Hate Crime.
Someone beating up a Black Person because he is black IS a Hate Crime.
Someone beating up a White Person because he is white is a Hate Crime.

Point 2:

Of course the Motive should affect the Sentence:

If someone kills a person because (to use Syd's example) they slept with his wife, then the killer is not likely to reoffend, since it isn't particularly likely that someone else will then sleep with his wife again. Therefore, the Sentence does not need to be expecially long, as there is no real need for Rehabilitation.

If, on the other hand, someone kills a person because they are Black, then the killer is VERY likely to reoffend, as people go around Being Black all the time. Therefore, the Sentence must be very long, until the person is rehabilitated and unlikely to reoffend.

Do you understand now?

The likely to reoffend argument doesn't hunt
 

Well, it wouldn't be too hard to stretch the repeat offender argument to career criminals. But we wouldn't be getting to the root of the problem if we did that, would we? I would like to see examples of a person killing someone over race/sexual orientation etc, and being paroled and the statistics of commiting the same crime. I think what this law does is merely go Oh, he killed a gay person, five more years for him" Well, I guess we will never know until we get some stats. I go look for them unless you have some links for me or whatever.

ouch
 

Another thing is religious discrimination. I think both things are hard to properly apply, mostly because there are hate crimes/"crimes" commited by people even in the executive branch.

There's a popular story on the CoS website of Satanists trying to get to Canada, being stopped and interrogated on the airport and accused of things they had no intentions of - nearly being arrested, if my memory does not deceive me. They were kept for quite a while. Can't remember if they missed the flight or not, but on the way back they made sure to make use of their right of a religious minority and threatened to sue the people at the airport. Which worked. *grinning*

In South Africa, there were a lot of corrupt boer policemen, even in the time I lived there. They would let their anger out on black people - even though law prohibited that. Yet most of the time no one said anything, and the one time they did, it was a nation-wide scandal... like it should be.

Oh well, it's like that with every law, I guess. There will always be gliches in the system, little corruptions, conspiracies... hey, remember, they're all after you and the government is hiding the fact they know of aliens... erm... lol.


- TyA

Re: The likely to reoffend argument doesn't hunt
 

Yes. And Career Criminals also get long sentences.

No. The law says "Oh, he killed a gay person because that person was gay, five more years for him"...

I would have responded to the rest of the post as well, but it made little sense.

No. career criminals DO NOT get long sentences, which is precisely why they are career criminals. The ballpark number for hate crimes is 8,000 or less a year, and a bout twenty percent of these are for sexually motivated reasons.

Statikk, don't you agree that hatred and intolerance is far more damaging to society than single, sudden bursts of anger?

Statikkk's problem with hate crimes laws is that he sees them as "preferential treatment" for minorities.

Really, is an ad hominem necessary? Talk about the issue, not the guy who broght it up.

All I did was clarify the viewpoint your were advancing. If I misconstrued that viewpoint, then set me straight. If I didn't, what's the problem; you don't want anyone to know that's what you think?

Well, what tthe hell do you mean? Were you trying to knock me or what?

Paranoia strikes!

The story so far:

Doug reiterates Statikk's argument in a way that makes more sense.

Faced with a post not actually openly disagreeing with him, Statikk becomes convinced that Doug is after him, and uses this as an excuse to ignore good points made by everyone else.

Everyone else becomes all the more convinced that Statikk is a nutcase.

Well, then. Why i hate hate laws is that they are totally irrelevant and are stupid. Why tack on extra years and make a crime to be more than it really is? It makes no sense to me.

The answer is simple: Extra years are tacked on if a person is likely to reoffend. We've stated this point several times, and you have yet to respond to it...

You guys are all frigging hilarious, you know that? It doesn't matter what the subject is, no matter how serious or stupid, important or random, you manage to turn it into a battle of personal insults and beratements. You have no idea how badly it reflects on you and the validity of your arguments when every third post is just an attack on somebody's grammer or something stupid like that.
And, as for hate crimes, everybody seems to grasp a piece of it- yes, the laws are in place to deal with crimes motivated purely by discrimination against race, religion, etc, and, yes, the increased time of punishment is because the amount of time required for the rehabillitation of those people is greater, but, just like so many other laws and policies, it has proven far too hard to distinguish these certain circumstances in every case. All too often, a law meant to duly punish someone who assaults, say, a black man because he is black, is used to over-punish someone who assaults a black man for sleeping with his wife.

Damn, big D you truley are a levelheaded voice of reason and shwayness

You, in sharp contrast, are not amusing at all, but rather a pompous, self-righteous, condescending, know-it-all windbag.

How's that for ad hominem, guys?

Now look, I'd like you to scroll up and find a single criticism of anybody's spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. You won't find any. That is because in this topic everybody has behaved perfectly reasonably, and presented their views in an insult-free manner. Just read the topic, and you'll see. Even Statikk has stayed reasonable here... ;)

Oh, thank you for your endorsement, oh high enlightened one... Usually you seem quite a nice guy, but (whether he meant it as a joke or not) Doug is right; here you just seem patronising and arrogant.

Doug, that was brilliant.

Okay, okay, I'm sorry. It's just been getting a little... overt lately, is all, and I thought discussing it openly might help. But my argument came out sounding all stupid and pompous, so I guess it was pretty self-defeating. And, as for making such a self-important statement as I did about the topic, yeah, that was dumb, too. I feel very passionate about this particular subject, but that's no excuse for being rude. Again, I apologize.
So, how's this? Can we all promise to leave the personal jibes, no matter what the prompting, to a minimum, and just stick to the topics from now on? I don't mean to sound like I'm above it or something- heck, I just did what I was telling people not to by telling them, how stupid is that? But I don't think I'm the only one who's noticed how much more hostile things have gotten around here lately (case in point these last four or five posts, including my own), and it doesn't seem to help anybody.
And if this post seems just as stupid and thoughtless as my last one, then I guess I'm simply in over my head and should leave before I piss off anybody else.

Ian... If you want to get the aggression out in the open, do it in a new topic, or do it in a topic where there is actual aggression going on... I know what you're trying to do (I've tried it myself on many an occasion), but I can't see any reason to do it here, when the debate was perfectly civilised until you asked people to be civil...

Another point: You say that the hostility has increased recently. I say that you are new, and you don't know how bad it was before... There have been whole weeks of nothing more than me and Pinky at each other's throats... (Not that I was even partially responsible for that, of course... ;)) You just happened to join during a quiet time...

But I forgive you for your tactlessness (if not for your poor choice of topic to post it in). I can hardly complain to someone else about their lack of tact, can I? (Well, unless it's Tom, Chris, or Dave, of course, but their tactlessness is their distinguishing feature...)

Ian, that last post was very shwayness. So, what was the agreement we came to? Oh yeah, sometimes the law is a good thing but it is often overused. I think I am down with that Ian.

Cool. I'm glad that all worked out.

Okay, here's something kind of funny. According to my handy little civics textbook, a hate crime is "any infraction of the law instigated in the name of or motivated by hate". Is that not the lamest definiton you've ever heard? Yeesh.

I know beating the shit out of someone is illegal, what about slurring them?
 

If i went off and said a whole bunch of things about the jews and indians that weren't ahem, nice, would that be a hate crime? Say I went into a campus on speech nite and said, "Goddamn raghead muslims. Torpedo them to hell" I know that wouldn't get me friends but could I go to jail for that?