There are lots of crops that are purchased from seed year after year. That long predates transgenic products. The idea that patents and reseeding agreemtents are new is just nonsense propaganda, not to mention the fact that there are just some crops that are more practical to purchase seed for year after year. The farming industry hasn't collapsed and those terrible predictions haven't come true.
Take a close look at those cases. The lawsuits have only been people who were obviously intentionally selecting for the trait to grow their own roundup ready seeds. People who get cross-pollinated by accident have never been sued. The lawsuits generated a lot of press, so there's a pretty good amount of information in the public record about what actually happened, and it's nothing like what the anti-GMO activists have claimed.
anytime a company holds a patent on our craps and can one day charge $1000 per seed or hold everyone hostage by not producing the seeds unless political or financial agreements is made is a BAD thing.
Why would you think that this could happen? There are tons of companies that produce seed. The only reason a farmer would pay a ton of money for their particular seed was if it was a really profitable seed that they couldn't get anywhere else. And farmers have been buying seeds anually forever for lots of crops. Agreements not to replant specialty varietals long predate the modern transgenic era. A lot of the time, they're just buying a particularly useful hybrid that doesn't breed true (or doesn't produce seeds at all), so it makes sense to buy seeds year after year anyway.
Never mind the potential for increase pesticides that then drain into our water supplies or stay in the food for us to digest.
This doesn't actually seem to be happening, though. Glyphosate use is way up, but that seems to be primarly because it's replacing other (much nastier) herbicides. And insect resistant crops actually reduce insecticide use.
1) I think the word "often" is a bit of a stretch here. "Sometimes" would be a much more accurate.
2) I'm all for doing away with ridiculous, impractical clothing mandates and the engineering problems they cause. If we were asking why office ceilings have to be 15 feet high and the answer was, "Because of the outstandingly fashionable 7 foot tall hats that managers are required to wear, of course," I think we all know what the next suggestion to solve the problem would be.
100% agreed. I fight with family members on this one all the time. I try to share this basic piece of wisdom with them. Consumer-grade inkjet printers are designed to do one thing and one thing only: Turn full inkjet cartridges into empty inkjet cartridges. If any printing happens during that process, that's fine, but it's completely incidental. These machines are not your friends.
"But what if I need to print pictures?" they ask. Don't print pictures. Unless you're a pro graphics shop doing proofs (in which case you won't be buying a $69 inkjet), use one of the million excellent photo printing services that are online these days. If you need them same day, use one that's attached to a brick-and-mortar store. Very few people print photos on a really regular basis anyway, and those who do would find that they quickly ran out of money if they printed them at home on expensive consumer photo paper/ink.
Get a workhorse network laser printer. Even color lasers are cheap these days. With normal family usage, you shouldn't be surprised to find that you only replace the toner cartridge once before the printer is obsolete and you replace it with something better. It's an appliance that just works and is there when you need it to be.
Wait a minute. That piece of resarch is from 1988. Now that it's almost 30 years later, how has that experiment worked out in reality? If it's correct, we should be in a Mad Max sort of world with rapists and crossbows everywhere. I'm looking out my window and...
It is the first time in human history that pornographic material is so readily accessible to us.
That's sort of the point, though. Over the past 20 years, the availability of porn has gone up, what? 10%? No, that's not right. It's orders of magnitude higher. The graph would need to be put on a logarithmic scale and it would dwarf most of the other variables you tried to plot with it. So we're doing that experiment right now. Has sexual violence gone up proportionally? Has it even gone up? No. That's a pretty serious counterargument to any thought experiments claiming causation in the other direction.
This seems like an artificially constructed situation designed to make a comfortable workplace impossible. Truly bizarrre. As sombody else once said, "It's like requiring dehumidifiers all over the place to keep the suits of armor that HR requires middle management to wear from rusting." They might as well just require that the office also be decorated with ice sculptures while they're throwing together incompatible variables.
Good, because we aren't saying it to be amusing. We're saying it because it's true. You can always put on more clothing, but I can only take off so much.
That's true at the absolute extremes, but I don't think anybody is proposing 82 degrees as the standard temperature. As it stands, we have people donning hats and gloves to deal with the temperature. Bumping the temperature up a couple of degrees to get the lower tail out of that range would probably be a net win. If anybody is lying in a pool of their own sweat while wearing only a thong at that temperature, there's probably a medical condition that needs to be addressed.
If we're doing this to deal with offices that require everybody to wear suits, that's another matter. Sure, it's a bizarre waste of resources, but it is what it is in that case. But most offices aren't full of people in suits these days.
I think this illustrates the absurdity of the situation. We blast the AC down to the point where people are wearing gloves in order to function normally.
The amount of energy wasted to make that happen as opposed to floating the temperature up from 68 to 70 must be staggering. The counter "can only strip off so much clothing" argument seems to assume that people would be completely nude at 70 or 71 degrees, which seems like a stretch. IIRC, the productivity research seems to indicate that 71 is about the sweet spot.
You can't be serious! If you are willing to lie about science then there is a HUGE fortune to be made selling your services to energy companies and conservative think-tanks.
That was the joke. Unfortunately, I meant to aim that reply at the post you were responding to.
These folks seem to have a model in their head where the climate scientists all get together and say, "Yeah! We got those cows eating that new additive! It's all going according to our master plan! Government money, here we come!" The reality is that if you're a climate scientist who wants to make tons of easy cash by promoting bullshit, it's a lot easier to get on the Exxon payroll than to battle for government grant money.
Whether they're trying to do "green" things out of the kindness of the hearts our because they can make money by doing it doesn't really change the fact that they're doing "green" things. It's not really hypocrisy. Just incentives.
Tradeable pollution credits are not a counterexample. They're a way to set a certain amount of "greenness" for an entire industry and induce the businesses most capable of achieving those goals to improve first while allowing other players with more difficult changes to make to move more slowly, which is exactly what's happening. If we had tax credits for reducing pollution and fined the most polluting companies, the result would be the same, minus the accusations of hypocrisy (and minus a certain amount of economic efficiency).
Those government grants are *huge* money when compared to the pittance the oil and gas industry will pay you to do research that supports them, right? Those scientists really chose the gravy train on that one. Clever bastards.
And if Microsoft actually "cared" about their customers, they'd give all of their profits away in free pizza and concert tickets. Businesses don't "care" about things. They do thte things that they have incentives to do. The right to sell pollution credits gives businesses an incentive to decrease pollution. That's it.
Also, did you know you can vote for stuff instead of just talking about it on slashot and that we're silly (not him, of course) for not doing that instead? It's another thing he taught me.
Don't bother. The "law" and the "process" are totally different things according to him, so he's scoring points on his private definition. If the law says, "Nobody gets to make arguments at trial," the trial is still fair because it follows the law. Laws on how trials are run have no bearing on whether the trial itself is fair.
Unfortunately, we've now defined the term "fair trial" in such a way that it's 100% meaningless. As a completely innocent man with the evidence on my side sitting in prison, God Himself could appear in my cell and say, "Fear not, My Son. You shall receive a fair trial," and I'm afraid it would not comfort me in the slightest. "What does that mean, Father? Is it one of those fair trials where I get summarily executed before the opening arguments, or is it one of the ones with evidence and stuff?"
Like I said, I'm not arguing with you about the fairness of the law.
No, I recognize that. You're just restating your premise over and over again and not engaging any responses or questions about your position. We've established that your definition of a "fair trial" is one that follows any set of written laws and is held in America (yay!) regardless of what actually happens in that trial. By that definition, I fully acknowledge that Mr. Snowden would receive a fair trial. It's a wonder that he doesn't rush back to avail himself of one. Or maybe two!
What you NEED to be doing is to stop yammering about how unfair all this is and start working to change the law you think is so unfair.
Ah, the argument from incomplete civic engagement. My favorite! You start by pretending that you're on Slashdot to educate the uneducated masses while the person you're arguing with is a hopeless idiot who genuinely believes that arguing with random yahoos on Slashdot is how you change laws and who never actually engages in any political activity. Once that's established, you can change the subject, extricate yourself from the conversation, condescend to your interlocutor (Really, Thunder? There are people you vote for who make laws? Tell me more!), all while pretending to somehow be above the fray even after you just spent a bunch of posts arguing with random yahoos on Slashdot. It's a quality gambit every time I see it, even if it's not very original.
With that, I don't look forward to your likely reply.
Why? It's so little effort to simply restate your priors, ignore every line of argumentation presented and skirt any questions asking you to defend your definitions. It's not like you spend a lot of time on this stuff. I suppose you're too busy running Senate campaigns and reviewing constitutional law journals to engage with little people who don't even understand how voting works.
All I can say to you on that front is, good luck, you are going to need it because I get the feeling the majority of people who vote in this country don't support a change in law big enough to get Snowden off the hook.
You're assuming that I want him "off the hook." I think that with a fair trial, he'd likely do some time, albeit not the same amount of time as a genuine spy who acted against our interests with no justification. What I don't accept is the notion that in a country that supposedly values due process and freedom of speech, we think a trial that doesn't allow the defendant to speak in his own defense is "fair," much less good enough to live up to the standards we supposedly set when we defined what due process meant to a democracy.
Shesh.. Look, the trial would be "fair" as in done by the rules. Let it go...
I can't help but notice that you didn't answer the question. If the rules stated that he wasn't allowed to speak in his own defense, is the trial still fair just because that's how the rules are written? If your definition of "fair trial" means that honest people apply ridiculous rules equally to all, then yes, it's fair. But that definition of "fair" would apply to a system that simply executed every defendant without hearing any evidence either way. As long as it's done by the book and nobody gets special treatment one way or the other, why not?
Again, if you want to claim the LAW is not fair, fine, but don't confuse the LAW with the trial.
The law and the trial are not separable in this case. The law determines what arguments can be made at the trial, so treating them as two totally unrelated things is nonsense. I'll clarify that I'm not impugning the motives of the jurors or the judge. But the "trial" is more than just people. It's people and rules, and those rules are a mix of written law, tradition and precedent. Unfortunately in this case, those rules come together in such a way that one of the basic principles of a fair trial, the ability to speak in one's own defense, is missing.
He is innocent until proven guilty, will be afforded an attorney, will be given a trial before his peers, face his accusers and present evidence at his trial. This is NOT a kangaroo court.
This is where we disagree. If he's not allowed to present the best evidence in his defense, then he's not by any reasonable standard being allowed to "present evidence" at his trial. "You can present evidence, but not the evidence that might convince a jury," is a meaningless guarantee. Without the ability to present true, relevant statements in your own defense, it is a kangaroo court. The fact that it was set up that way by law and the fact that it's offensive to call it so doesn't make it any less of a kangaroo court.
That's not how we've done criminal justice for centuries. It's a mess that we've slowly allowed our courts to evolve into by steadily adding rules for excluding evidence and arguments. For example, strict liability in criminal cases only really started in the late 19th century, and its liberal application to serious crimes (as opposed to regulatory violations) is much more recent.
Just like the slow stripping away of due process for suspected drug offenders, all branches of government have been complicit including the courts. New laws were written, new court precedents were set, and before we knew it, we had a system that allowed asset forfeiture without a trial and prevented criminal defendants from presenting true evidence in their defense. This is just another example of exactly how far we've drifted from those traditions you reference. Those are traditions that we should be proud of, and we should be screaming bloody murder at every step away from them.
What you can and cannot argue as a defense to a crime is spelled out in the law.
If the law said, "The defense is not allowed to make any arguments," would it still be a fair trial simply because the rules were spelled out beforehand and applied equally to every defense? If not, how much of a minimal defense must be allowed before you'd consider it fair?
Defense is usually given wide latitude in what kinds of arguments they try so I see no reason why the argument wouldn't be tried, but I do see where it wouldn't be successful.
That's not how the courts work. If you start bringing in "irrelevant" evidence, the prosecution objects that it's irrelevant. The judge says, "Yup, that's not relevant according to the law. You can't say that. Move along." For example, in medical marijuana cases, you'd think that the dispensary owner would be able to say, "Look, it's legal in my state and I'm selling it only to people with medical need," to at least mitigate the crime. Nope. You can't mention those facts. They're irrelevant to the federal case. The only question before the federal court is whether you sold marijuana in large quantites. Off to prison wtih you, Scarface. This happens all the time.
Another example is any crime with strict liability rules. Those are crimes which have no requirement to prove intent. The flip side of the coin is that you can't prove that you did it by accident. Statutory rape, for example. If you have sex with an adult-looking minor, it doesn't matter if she produced a perfect US passport for you to check, that you followed up with her friends and family, and everybody told you she was 18. The very fact that she truly wasn't 18 is all that matters and your efforts at screening are no defense. Not a "weak" defense that might not work. They're not a valid defense for the jury to consider. I don't know of any test cases where the defense was not allowed to make the point, but that's how the law actually works and it's totally valid for the judge to prevent you from arguing it.
Also, comparing our legal system to that of North Korea is very unfair.
It's not a direct comparison. It's an analogy and it works precisely because the direct comparison is so unflattering. Your argument seems to be that something is "fair" just because the rules are written down in advance. My argument is that you can construct any number of perfectly consistent laws, write them down, and apply them without bias and still have a completely unfair system. The analogy works unless you can come up with a sensible answer to my first question in this post: Is it OK to write a law that says that no defense may be presented in court? If not, how much of a defense should be allowed? Should the single best argument for the defense ever be disallowed?
If this was a matter of Snowden making a Hail Mary pass at the jury and hoping for some sympathy, I could understand your position if not necessarily agree with it. But that's not the situation. He'd be expected to sit in court and smile and nod because the single best (and only) argument for what he did isn't admissable and can't even be discussed. That's a total departure from the notion of arguing your case before a jury of your peers. You might as well not have a jury at that point.
If there was ever a valid case for it, this seems like it. But you're going to have to hope that the jury hears those arguments before the trial starts, because Snowden certainly won't be allowed to make them to the jury during the trial. Choose your jurors carefully so they don't know anything about Snowden, what he did, or why he did it and you're going to have a very short trial with a very predictable outcome.
He stabbed his immediate managers in the back, for sure. But I as one of his ultimate employers don't feel stabbed in the back. I feel stabbed in the back by his bosses. I feel more like a company owner whose janitor has just pointed out that middle management has been stealing from me for years.
How much harm is Putin really able to do to us by parading Snowden around? Conversely, how much good did Snowden's revalations do? I think that what little aid and comfort he gave to Putin was a worthwhile exchange, and I'm pretty sure he would agree.
What you don't like is the law... Fine, just don't keep saying he won't get a fair trial because according to the LAW he will. Saying he won't get a fair trial is wrong. The courts are there to fairly apply the law and for the most part, that's what they do.
That's a little bit of a dodge, though. If by "fair" we simply mean "consistent with local laws" then you're 100% guaranteed to get a fair trial in North Korea or under ISIS. It simply means that trials are fair by definition.
I think that there's a good argument to be made that there are some features that need to exist in a truly fair trial, one of which is the ability to present your case regarding mitgiating circumstances for the jury to hear. More broadly, I'd argue that a defendant should be allowed to say anything he wants in his own defense, provided it's the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of crops that are purchased from seed year after year. That long predates transgenic products. The idea that patents and reseeding agreemtents are new is just nonsense propaganda, not to mention the fact that there are just some crops that are more practical to purchase seed for year after year. The farming industry hasn't collapsed and those terrible predictions haven't come true.
Take a close look at those cases. The lawsuits have only been people who were obviously intentionally selecting for the trait to grow their own roundup ready seeds. People who get cross-pollinated by accident have never been sued. The lawsuits generated a lot of press, so there's a pretty good amount of information in the public record about what actually happened, and it's nothing like what the anti-GMO activists have claimed.
Why would you think that this could happen? There are tons of companies that produce seed. The only reason a farmer would pay a ton of money for their particular seed was if it was a really profitable seed that they couldn't get anywhere else. And farmers have been buying seeds anually forever for lots of crops. Agreements not to replant specialty varietals long predate the modern transgenic era. A lot of the time, they're just buying a particularly useful hybrid that doesn't breed true (or doesn't produce seeds at all), so it makes sense to buy seeds year after year anyway.
This doesn't actually seem to be happening, though. Glyphosate use is way up, but that seems to be primarly because it's replacing other (much nastier) herbicides. And insect resistant crops actually reduce insecticide use.
1) I think the word "often" is a bit of a stretch here. "Sometimes" would be a much more accurate.
2) I'm all for doing away with ridiculous, impractical clothing mandates and the engineering problems they cause. If we were asking why office ceilings have to be 15 feet high and the answer was, "Because of the outstandingly fashionable 7 foot tall hats that managers are required to wear, of course," I think we all know what the next suggestion to solve the problem would be.
100% agreed. I fight with family members on this one all the time. I try to share this basic piece of wisdom with them. Consumer-grade inkjet printers are designed to do one thing and one thing only: Turn full inkjet cartridges into empty inkjet cartridges. If any printing happens during that process, that's fine, but it's completely incidental. These machines are not your friends.
"But what if I need to print pictures?" they ask. Don't print pictures. Unless you're a pro graphics shop doing proofs (in which case you won't be buying a $69 inkjet), use one of the million excellent photo printing services that are online these days. If you need them same day, use one that's attached to a brick-and-mortar store. Very few people print photos on a really regular basis anyway, and those who do would find that they quickly ran out of money if they printed them at home on expensive consumer photo paper/ink.
Get a workhorse network laser printer. Even color lasers are cheap these days. With normal family usage, you shouldn't be surprised to find that you only replace the toner cartridge once before the printer is obsolete and you replace it with something better. It's an appliance that just works and is there when you need it to be.
Wait a minute. That piece of resarch is from 1988. Now that it's almost 30 years later, how has that experiment worked out in reality? If it's correct, we should be in a Mad Max sort of world with rapists and crossbows everywhere. I'm looking out my window and...
That's sort of the point, though. Over the past 20 years, the availability of porn has gone up, what? 10%? No, that's not right. It's orders of magnitude higher. The graph would need to be put on a logarithmic scale and it would dwarf most of the other variables you tried to plot with it. So we're doing that experiment right now. Has sexual violence gone up proportionally? Has it even gone up? No. That's a pretty serious counterargument to any thought experiments claiming causation in the other direction.
This seems like an artificially constructed situation designed to make a comfortable workplace impossible. Truly bizarrre. As sombody else once said, "It's like requiring dehumidifiers all over the place to keep the suits of armor that HR requires middle management to wear from rusting." They might as well just require that the office also be decorated with ice sculptures while they're throwing together incompatible variables.
That's true at the absolute extremes, but I don't think anybody is proposing 82 degrees as the standard temperature. As it stands, we have people donning hats and gloves to deal with the temperature. Bumping the temperature up a couple of degrees to get the lower tail out of that range would probably be a net win. If anybody is lying in a pool of their own sweat while wearing only a thong at that temperature, there's probably a medical condition that needs to be addressed.
If we're doing this to deal with offices that require everybody to wear suits, that's another matter. Sure, it's a bizarre waste of resources, but it is what it is in that case. But most offices aren't full of people in suits these days.
I think this illustrates the absurdity of the situation. We blast the AC down to the point where people are wearing gloves in order to function normally.
The amount of energy wasted to make that happen as opposed to floating the temperature up from 68 to 70 must be staggering. The counter "can only strip off so much clothing" argument seems to assume that people would be completely nude at 70 or 71 degrees, which seems like a stretch. IIRC, the productivity research seems to indicate that 71 is about the sweet spot.
That was the joke. Unfortunately, I meant to aim that reply at the post you were responding to.
These folks seem to have a model in their head where the climate scientists all get together and say, "Yeah! We got those cows eating that new additive! It's all going according to our master plan! Government money, here we come!" The reality is that if you're a climate scientist who wants to make tons of easy cash by promoting bullshit, it's a lot easier to get on the Exxon payroll than to battle for government grant money.
Whether they're trying to do "green" things out of the kindness of the hearts our because they can make money by doing it doesn't really change the fact that they're doing "green" things. It's not really hypocrisy. Just incentives.
Tradeable pollution credits are not a counterexample. They're a way to set a certain amount of "greenness" for an entire industry and induce the businesses most capable of achieving those goals to improve first while allowing other players with more difficult changes to make to move more slowly, which is exactly what's happening. If we had tax credits for reducing pollution and fined the most polluting companies, the result would be the same, minus the accusations of hypocrisy (and minus a certain amount of economic efficiency).
Those government grants are *huge* money when compared to the pittance the oil and gas industry will pay you to do research that supports them, right? Those scientists really chose the gravy train on that one. Clever bastards.
And if Microsoft actually "cared" about their customers, they'd give all of their profits away in free pizza and concert tickets. Businesses don't "care" about things. They do thte things that they have incentives to do. The right to sell pollution credits gives businesses an incentive to decrease pollution. That's it.
Also, did you know you can vote for stuff instead of just talking about it on slashot and that we're silly (not him, of course) for not doing that instead? It's another thing he taught me.
Don't bother. The "law" and the "process" are totally different things according to him, so he's scoring points on his private definition. If the law says, "Nobody gets to make arguments at trial," the trial is still fair because it follows the law. Laws on how trials are run have no bearing on whether the trial itself is fair.
Unfortunately, we've now defined the term "fair trial" in such a way that it's 100% meaningless. As a completely innocent man with the evidence on my side sitting in prison, God Himself could appear in my cell and say, "Fear not, My Son. You shall receive a fair trial," and I'm afraid it would not comfort me in the slightest. "What does that mean, Father? Is it one of those fair trials where I get summarily executed before the opening arguments, or is it one of the ones with evidence and stuff?"
No, I recognize that. You're just restating your premise over and over again and not engaging any responses or questions about your position. We've established that your definition of a "fair trial" is one that follows any set of written laws and is held in America (yay!) regardless of what actually happens in that trial. By that definition, I fully acknowledge that Mr. Snowden would receive a fair trial. It's a wonder that he doesn't rush back to avail himself of one. Or maybe two!
Ah, the argument from incomplete civic engagement. My favorite! You start by pretending that you're on Slashdot to educate the uneducated masses while the person you're arguing with is a hopeless idiot who genuinely believes that arguing with random yahoos on Slashdot is how you change laws and who never actually engages in any political activity. Once that's established, you can change the subject, extricate yourself from the conversation, condescend to your interlocutor (Really, Thunder? There are people you vote for who make laws? Tell me more!), all while pretending to somehow be above the fray even after you just spent a bunch of posts arguing with random yahoos on Slashdot. It's a quality gambit every time I see it, even if it's not very original.
Why? It's so little effort to simply restate your priors, ignore every line of argumentation presented and skirt any questions asking you to defend your definitions. It's not like you spend a lot of time on this stuff. I suppose you're too busy running Senate campaigns and reviewing constitutional law journals to engage with little people who don't even understand how voting works.
You're assuming that I want him "off the hook." I think that with a fair trial, he'd likely do some time, albeit not the same amount of time as a genuine spy who acted against our interests with no justification. What I don't accept is the notion that in a country that supposedly values due process and freedom of speech, we think a trial that doesn't allow the defendant to speak in his own defense is "fair," much less good enough to live up to the standards we supposedly set when we defined what due process meant to a democracy.
I can't help but notice that you didn't answer the question. If the rules stated that he wasn't allowed to speak in his own defense, is the trial still fair just because that's how the rules are written? If your definition of "fair trial" means that honest people apply ridiculous rules equally to all, then yes, it's fair. But that definition of "fair" would apply to a system that simply executed every defendant without hearing any evidence either way. As long as it's done by the book and nobody gets special treatment one way or the other, why not?
The law and the trial are not separable in this case. The law determines what arguments can be made at the trial, so treating them as two totally unrelated things is nonsense. I'll clarify that I'm not impugning the motives of the jurors or the judge. But the "trial" is more than just people. It's people and rules, and those rules are a mix of written law, tradition and precedent. Unfortunately in this case, those rules come together in such a way that one of the basic principles of a fair trial, the ability to speak in one's own defense, is missing.
This is where we disagree. If he's not allowed to present the best evidence in his defense, then he's not by any reasonable standard being allowed to "present evidence" at his trial. "You can present evidence, but not the evidence that might convince a jury," is a meaningless guarantee. Without the ability to present true, relevant statements in your own defense, it is a kangaroo court. The fact that it was set up that way by law and the fact that it's offensive to call it so doesn't make it any less of a kangaroo court.
That's not how we've done criminal justice for centuries. It's a mess that we've slowly allowed our courts to evolve into by steadily adding rules for excluding evidence and arguments. For example, strict liability in criminal cases only really started in the late 19th century, and its liberal application to serious crimes (as opposed to regulatory violations) is much more recent.
Just like the slow stripping away of due process for suspected drug offenders, all branches of government have been complicit including the courts. New laws were written, new court precedents were set, and before we knew it, we had a system that allowed asset forfeiture without a trial and prevented criminal defendants from presenting true evidence in their defense. This is just another example of exactly how far we've drifted from those traditions you reference. Those are traditions that we should be proud of, and we should be screaming bloody murder at every step away from them.
If the law said, "The defense is not allowed to make any arguments," would it still be a fair trial simply because the rules were spelled out beforehand and applied equally to every defense? If not, how much of a minimal defense must be allowed before you'd consider it fair?
That's not how the courts work. If you start bringing in "irrelevant" evidence, the prosecution objects that it's irrelevant. The judge says, "Yup, that's not relevant according to the law. You can't say that. Move along." For example, in medical marijuana cases, you'd think that the dispensary owner would be able to say, "Look, it's legal in my state and I'm selling it only to people with medical need," to at least mitigate the crime. Nope. You can't mention those facts. They're irrelevant to the federal case. The only question before the federal court is whether you sold marijuana in large quantites. Off to prison wtih you, Scarface. This happens all the time.
Another example is any crime with strict liability rules. Those are crimes which have no requirement to prove intent. The flip side of the coin is that you can't prove that you did it by accident. Statutory rape, for example. If you have sex with an adult-looking minor, it doesn't matter if she produced a perfect US passport for you to check, that you followed up with her friends and family, and everybody told you she was 18. The very fact that she truly wasn't 18 is all that matters and your efforts at screening are no defense. Not a "weak" defense that might not work. They're not a valid defense for the jury to consider. I don't know of any test cases where the defense was not allowed to make the point, but that's how the law actually works and it's totally valid for the judge to prevent you from arguing it.
It's not a direct comparison. It's an analogy and it works precisely because the direct comparison is so unflattering. Your argument seems to be that something is "fair" just because the rules are written down in advance. My argument is that you can construct any number of perfectly consistent laws, write them down, and apply them without bias and still have a completely unfair system. The analogy works unless you can come up with a sensible answer to my first question in this post: Is it OK to write a law that says that no defense may be presented in court? If not, how much of a defense should be allowed? Should the single best argument for the defense ever be disallowed?
If this was a matter of Snowden making a Hail Mary pass at the jury and hoping for some sympathy, I could understand your position if not necessarily agree with it. But that's not the situation. He'd be expected to sit in court and smile and nod because the single best (and only) argument for what he did isn't admissable and can't even be discussed. That's a total departure from the notion of arguing your case before a jury of your peers. You might as well not have a jury at that point.
If there was ever a valid case for it, this seems like it. But you're going to have to hope that the jury hears those arguments before the trial starts, because Snowden certainly won't be allowed to make them to the jury during the trial. Choose your jurors carefully so they don't know anything about Snowden, what he did, or why he did it and you're going to have a very short trial with a very predictable outcome.
He stabbed his immediate managers in the back, for sure. But I as one of his ultimate employers don't feel stabbed in the back. I feel stabbed in the back by his bosses. I feel more like a company owner whose janitor has just pointed out that middle management has been stealing from me for years.
True, but it should at least mean, "Gets to present the best argument in his own defense."
How much harm is Putin really able to do to us by parading Snowden around? Conversely, how much good did Snowden's revalations do? I think that what little aid and comfort he gave to Putin was a worthwhile exchange, and I'm pretty sure he would agree.
That's a little bit of a dodge, though. If by "fair" we simply mean "consistent with local laws" then you're 100% guaranteed to get a fair trial in North Korea or under ISIS. It simply means that trials are fair by definition.
I think that there's a good argument to be made that there are some features that need to exist in a truly fair trial, one of which is the ability to present your case regarding mitgiating circumstances for the jury to hear. More broadly, I'd argue that a defendant should be allowed to say anything he wants in his own defense, provided it's the truth.
Life in prison, then. With that prospect, I'm shocked that he doesn't come back!