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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This feels like it was not an intended reply to my post as it seems to be dealing with entirely different subject matter , are you sure you are replying to the correct person?

    If your point is that intentionality of harm is required for law to be enacted then that isn’t particularly true either. Things like manslaughter charges exist because intention isn’t always nessisary when determining criminal fault for harm. Negligence, lack of adherence to pre existing law or willful ignorance are still criminal factors… And they have their own individual criminal burdens of proof that must be met to stick a conviction in court.

    It is simply a nature of law that intent is always considered and proof of it is nessisary to bring forth particular types of charges that are weighted more heavily based on proof of premeditated knowledge or intent. Lack of intent does not always mean no damages are criminaly found to be your fault that must be answered for. Law makes allowances in many cases for the potential of the purest of pure accidents.

    However since the UK has hate speech law, libel law and laws against provoking violence or harassment and damages are now measurable the person in the original article can be proven to have violated a law and damages happened as a result meaning that she cannot claim pure accident. Knowingly or not she broke a pre-existing law and people and property was damaged as a result.

    Just like a charge of vehicular manslaughter only really sticks if you were speeding or broke a traffic law. If you are truely blameless and followed all law it is ruled " actions leading to accidental death" which is not a punishable crime. Speeding in a school zone is usually a pretty mild punishment if one is caught doing it and no one gets hurt usually it is a pretty mild fine… But if someone dies as a result of your speeding you go to jail. Same premise here just different laws.


  • Agreed, but you also said :

    I’m okay with this phrase except for the word “intent”. If we give someone the power to try to assess our intent, it can easily go the way of totalitarian states where they say you have a bad intent any time you criticize the government.

    And I am pointing that the power to assess intent is actually a norm in the justice system. Too many people on here are very quick to catastrophize things that are actually very culturally normal and stable in systems of law. Your point is not the same one I was making, hence why I referenced your likely intended point in my post.


  • We have always lived with exceptions to freedom of speech. Libel, slander and obscenity law as examples. The sanctity of medical records is another.

    The UK also technically does not and never has had any freedom of speech enshrined in law and the government has always been able to squash print and media publications that post things deemed a danger to security.

    Russia on the other hand holds a constitutional freedom of speech and the press… But will also send you to prison for publishing “LGBTQIA propaganda”

    Americans treat this misplaced concept of freedom of speech as this full access pass as a universal good that is the only thing holding us all back from totalitarian regimes. In reality however speech has both never been totally free even in America as plenty of exceptions have always existed and having those protections is way more optional in other democratic nations then they would believe. It also does not protect from abuse on it’s own.

    Remember that any and all tenants of free speech aren’t nessisarily a universal good. If there are measurable harms being done to people your nation is allowed to carve out an exception. It’s on you to critically evaluate the individual exception for potential issues but not specifically on the basis of a dogmatic adherence to an idea of free speech. Totally free speech itself could actually be harmful to a society and in fact has already proven to be hence libel/slander laws.


  • But all criminal law already has a concept of Mens rea (guilty mind) baked in. The reasonable proving of intentions is nessisary for the severity of the sentencing in almost all cases under review and has been at least as long as anyone here has been alive. It isn’t the sole factor of creating a criminal charge because - as you stated you also need to prove harms but saying people are not punished for intent and treating that as only the tool of strictly authoritarian government is factually untrue.


  • The issues with the US bulling their way in here is that while they set themselves up as the arbiters of free speech… these are not your counties. These are democratic institutions who have made independently made these decisions based on their concepts of what constitutes safeguarding the welfare of their citizens. They have determined that repeat targetted provably untrue propaganda based out of intellectual dishonesty that is designed to leave people angry at minorities creates conditions where people logically come to the conclusion that the killing, oppressing and subjugation of people to the point they see death as preferable to life is not okay.

    The version of “free speech” that constantly gets toted as a universal good is essentially an experiment. When you see how something is functionally shaping your society and you see that while aspects of it are very healthy and cause additional stability and protection to people but a misuse is causing some people to be treated as subhuman then it’s time to amend the rules. A government should be held accountable for the welfare of all it’s citizens and those non-citizens whom it has temporary sovereignty over. Each country has the right to determine how best to initiate that directive. You are very welcome to defend your version of free speech as defined by American sensibilities on American ground, but American meddling in the ethics of countries whose value systems deal in more nuance would be very unwelcome. Quite frankly since the application of “free speech” under American terms has caused so much political stratification in their own homeland to the point where civil war or a breakdown of other democratic norms are snowballing they need to see to their own house before they can critique other nations.


  • As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

    The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.




  • Oh no… She doesn’t like any of us. The transphobia she levies at FtM is just different. Rowling is notorious for Championing the works of Abagail Shrier who is famous for her work trumpeting the very discredited but viral “social contagion” theory that frames trans men and non binary trans masc people as being misguided lesbians and women fleeing from misogyny who spread transness to their friends who need to be protected from making terrible decisions and undermining the worth of femininity.

    Transphobia is best described as framing trans people as a problem for other people. Naturally the problem framed is different for the two groups. In this instance trans men are still framed as being dangerous but rather dangerous by association

    "If we let them exist then they will tempt our perfectly healthy daughters into pursuing surgeries to make themselves into sterile parodies of men! We must stop them! Save the children! " Clutch pearls, repeat.



  • Honey. We know our shit and we often know it young. I had to go through puberty knowing as I was experiencing it every moment was taking me further and further into a body horror I knew I would never come to terms with. Other trans people my age are very much the same and you know what? A lot of us live with deep lifelong regrets knowing that we have less options to travel the world or exist comfortably in public because of that puberty we knew bone deep right from the get go we never wanted.

    Being trans isn’t subtle. It screams at you, gnaws at your insides how wrong everything is. Particularly when pre-puberty you are able to perfectly pass… And then every minute puberty slowly takes that away from you by inches like a slow bleeding wound until you ache to have what you know you will never effortlessly experience again.

    Ignorance fucking doomed me. Yours will do nothing but doom others.


  • It is an odd adoption but the Punisher skull is a known alt-right symbol particularly amongst the “Three Percenters”, Proud boys and a certain age range of Neo Nazis.

    The alt right continuously does this thing where they adopt symbols to recognize each other in a pack but the shit they choose is purposefully ridiculous and childish so you sound like an absolute moron trying to explain to an authority that pepe the frog is actually potentially construable as sexual harassment in certain situations because it’s essentially a short hand for rape… It’s inane but it is very effective.

    Completely off topic but I gotta rant it out…

    There’s also this thing that the Canadian Conservatives are great at which is controlling the media coverage by lies of omission. My hometown had this whole “scandal” where someone’s mic was shut off during a town council for “bringing legitimate concerns about trans people.” and papers ran it like that… But what actually happened is the mic shutdown happened because the person in question kept using the mic to be vile about trans people on every open mic opportunity. Open mic portion regarding adding speed bumps : " nope I am gunna talk over the allotable time about pronoun policies in schools." Oh you want to talk about changes to funding structures of municipal trash collections? " Nope mic time to use the t-slur and rant more about woke teachers." One could pretend that they just don’t understand the basic Roberts rules of order but their aim is always to spin anything they can as oppression.

    They are doing the same here. The articles are not providing proper context that the patch is not just a Star of David patch… It’s a black and white version of the Israeli flag with the bars thay mark it as thus. It’s not depicting a specific religious stance, it’s depicting a political regime. But it creates a fine opportunity for religious bigots to banging the drum about headscarves and turbans and how we should strip government officials of their comfort for daring to have visible markers of their religious beliefs as though these are somehow the same.

    Like I get it. Not understanding what counts as hate speech or legitimate targets of criticism is probably very confusing and alarming when you feel like people shut you down at seemingly random … But they could just assuage their anxieties by just LEARNING the rules. Like we have actual laws about what counts here.


  • I mean… I don’t know if that’s gunna be the complete answer. The Boy Scout leaders had no expectations of celebacy but they had an endemic issue with child molestation. The idea that it’s the lack of adult access to sex that creates these situations ignores a lot of the realities of predators.

    Personally I think the best thing to do is to actually mandate age appropriate sex ed. They piloted that program in our district when I was a kid. For a youngster of the tender age of 1st grade all this needs to be is "Here’s the proper names of the different genital types and if someone wants to touch in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable it’s okay to tell a parent, a teacher a doctor or an adult you trust where and how you have been touched to help make it stop.

    You would be quite frankly shocked how many kids in the district blew whistles on adult some right out the gate from that first briefing. Preserving some nebulous children’s “innocence” isn’t worth even one child suffering in ignorance.


  • Ditto. Not a particularly a religious person (spiritualist more generally) and generally pretty critical of the Church but bloody tired of people who have been religion burned taking it out on others who are just clinging to comfort to get by in a hard world. Lemmy has a rather large Christian Atheist community. You know the sort, the “I don’t believe in God but the God I very stridently don’t believe in is the Christian God” type of person. It does come across as fairly insecure at times. I am reminded of the way I used to behave as an angry teen.

    I think we are seeing a historic waning of faith and a reassessment of cultural values…but looking at the cycles of things that generally means there’s a backlash which might be still building or we might be facing it right now. I think it’s far better for those traumatized atheists to build solidarity with people inside the faiths who are pushing for and building the foundations for changes as “enemy of my enemy is my friend” alliances. Sadly a lot of them seem way too busy trying to attain personal catharsis by just scalding anyone who treats religion with respect.


  • I dunno if religion is strictly to blame. The assumption is that the source of bigotry towards trans people is religion but that hasn’t jived with my experiences. A lot of it comes more from people framing us as a logistical or social “problem” that is being encouraged rather than " solved" by the current model of care that places it’s focus on the ultimate well-being of the individual. A lot of that is secular in source.

    People will find any manner of sources of justification to reinforce their “ick” response. Science (or a limited understanding of surface level science) and “common sense” is often more the rhetoric that gets splashed around and are often the most brazen objectors to my identity. The “you’ll burn in hell” types are actually decently rare by comparison… Generally heartbreaking to hear of don’t get me wrong but only a fraction of the whole problem.


  • I know it’s a minor point and food security is an actual very practical concern and valid reason to protest, but I feel like one of the tenants of a successful protest is very much like advertising : make the target directly relevant to the message. “Art and historical conservation efforts aren’t worth your concern as much as (blank)” feels like it’s a muddy message when the whole point of art culture is that it is kind of frivolous. Quite frankly you could throw anything at a beloved historical conservation peice and make the news even if your reason was “I felt like it”. People are probably gunna treat it as a bare faced stunt for attention because it’s already been done and the response is predictable. Our society wide fascination with historical preservation is immediately hostile to anything that seems to be spontaneous. It’s the opposite of exploiting a weak spot in people’s thinking.

    I understand and am sympathetic to their cause but I am pretty sure there’s some property damage or mischief stunt that could have been immediately more effective by being somehow tied more directly to food, convenience culture or contemporary targets.



  • The reason this is a genocide where Ukraine is more of a warcrimes but not Genocide situation has to do with how international relief for civilians is handled. Routinely blocking international relief efforts to evacuate or treat the wounded, provide food, water and fuel for civilians tends to threaten the bit of genocide ruling that marks “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Making " reasonable" provision keeps that off of the table. Russia has been cagey about relief efforts but has always fallen short of a full blockade.

    But when you look at Israel they have a situation set up where prior to this conflict they had a system in place that put a lot of paperwork in place for Pallistinians to use Israeli hospitals. If you then remove the hospitals that are open for unrestricted Palistinian use and then allow the pre-existing system to become choked with paperwork for a problem you aren’t really interested in solving you aren’t fulfilling your duty of care. The Israeli government has also outright said it’s intention is to block food, water and fuel going to Palistinian civilians. Fuel sounds like a lesser consideration but it is key to keeping sanitation at reasonable levels.

    So you have a civilian population starving, likely fighting outbreaks of cholera, dysentary, typhoid intestinal parasites and hepatitis with no viable place to seek treatment and international aid in the form of food, water and medical supplies has been stopped, the intention being made baldly clear by statements made by high ranking officials that this is a deliberate tactic.

    Thusfar Egypt and Jordan have blocked refugees from entering the country because of concerns of damage to their Israeli peace treaties which means the dominos are set to cause massive loss of life for Palestinian civilians where help is held out of reach by Israeli interests. Hence, a genocide.


  • I imagine the Genocide claim will be aided by the targeting of hospitals which are highly restricted targets in wartime which even if their protected status is removed requires a lot of very specific measures to be taken to not be a warcrime. Since the permit system allowing use of Israeli hospitals to Palistinian patients has not relaxed and has for the most part closed up shop it is a bad look.

    Not to mention the Israeli government had made outright statements that they intend to starve the civilians of food, water and fuel (fuel being fairly key to sanitation ). In fact they have actively attempted to block international relief efforts in the region so wouldn’t that mean they are :

    “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”

    After all if you starve people in unsanitary conditions and take any medical care options effectively off the table I would imagine a fairly large part of the group would die as a consequence. I imagine the actual brief will have many counts as to why this is specifically a Genocide but all they need to do is fail one.


  • What isn’t mentioned is that there’s a kind of tit for tat norm in politics. If you damage the soft negotiation power that comes from co-operation retaliation is normal. Forcing a group to do something completely against their interests because you took advantage of the size of your resources (hard power) isn’t actually difficult… It’s just that you destroy goodwill and open the door to future “screw you” style retaliation.

    “Stomping our head of State” isn’t exactly difficult when there as many Canadians in the world as there are Californians. He basically tanked steel trade because it would cause outsized harm to a smaller country the costs of which which ended up being borne by the US industries to force milk onto a market where it generally isn’t wanted. American milk contains artificial growth hormone which domestic milk doesn’t and threatening to tank our domestic food security because Canadian milk isn’t Government subsidized like American milk is means that we can’t compete on price is a dick move.

    Since then that coercive deal has been taken apart by the courts and that Milk deal has all but been rescinded as of November last year. The Biden admin did their best to make it stick but Trumps abysmal understanding of the law extends to international trade law and the flaws were there from the beginning.

    Trump damaged a lot of America’s good diplomatic standing for temporary victories and there was a lot of America’s long standing dirty laundry that other nations were already overlooking due to soft goodwill policy. The only advantage Trump had was that people were banking on him being a temporary nuisance. If he returns to power he does invite a lot of opportunities for international retaliation. Canada is a notorious soft diplomacy country. A future Trump lead US might not like what closed door handshakes may be in it’s future.