So is your contention that religions should be required to adopt any legislatively-mandated social convention so long as it is not targeted at a religious organization in particular then? I am still not sure where you are actually drawing your particular line in the sand.
I shouldn't have said "charge," I should have said "sue," as it is a civil proceeding. In a suit against property, the owner of that property may mount a successful defense only upon presenting a preponderance of evidence that it is not subject to forfeiture. The property is legally considered subject to forfeiture unless it is proven otherwise, contrary to the typical burden of proof in both civil and criminal proceedings against persons.
Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant, as it has been occurring for years in the United States. I don't recall any of the case citations offhand, so I'm going to go the easy route and link an article about the process. Even some cursory research will show it is true. The Forfeiture Racket
I'm not sure how to reconcile the things you say you are advocating with those you disclaim advocating.
If a religion may be forced to adopt social customs which are viewed by society at large as newly requisite, how do you argue the 1st Amendment provides any protection to religious worship at all?
No, because it would only happen if they actually managed to also impersonate the person at the deal as well, so as to lead anyone to think they were actually truly at fault following the subsequent arrests.
Even were the police to circulate the lie that it was they suspect who arranged the meet and gave the other party up for leniency, they would not be liable for the retaliatory actions of other parties who remained at large. It would require a reasonable expectation that their actions would have a very specific result, and that usually would require objective proof that incident X would occur. If a cop is holding you over the edge of a building and lets go, they can reasonably expect you to fall to your death. If a cop busts a drug ring and free actors believe, based on incomplete information, that it was another person's doing and subsequently kill their family, they could not reasonably anticipate the killing as a matter-of-course reaction (barring Minority Report-style advancements in precognition).
Actually not necessarily. The police have a habit of charging property with a crime. Since the property, as such, cannot defend itself in court it is convicted and seized. That's the heart of civil asset forfeiture, and why it is such a pernicious evil.
Quite true, I would consider it a violation of the suspect's rights to incur costs on an account without reparation. As I stated below though, even in the case that the police refused to pay any charges they incurred it would not taint the integrity of the evidence they gathered in relation to the incoming text message and subsequent drug deal setup.
If you're going to argue financial harm, that's an entirely separate issue (which the police would be liable for if such financial harm actually occurred). In all likelihood, it would take nothing more than a single request from the suspect's lawyer to get any resultant charge paid by the law enforcement agency responsible.
In no way does the financial harm taint the evidence obtained from the receipt of the text message while in their possession, nor would the financial harm taint the further evidence gathered from setting up a drug deal through an outgoing text message.
If it is an issue greater than financial harm, then explain how it is different than the police getting a warrant to move the number to another device and doing the same thing? After all, a person may switch a phone number at any time, and nobody sending to that number or receiving from that number has any reasonable or legal expectation otherwise. The only possible issues are financial harm and evidentiary harm (regarding the data on the phone itself). As said repeatedly, neither taint the evidence gained against others.
Berate me for not understanding what self-incrimination means all you like, but it has never been accepted that the 5th Amendment protects anything but a defendent's right to refuse to aid in his/her own prosecution. Legally seized items and documents have always fallen entirely outside that scope. If they were included in the scope of self-incrimination then "papers" would not be implied as a target for reasonable seizures in the 4th Amendment.
Not at all, though the simplification on the duress could render it not entrapment (a potential argument regarding my example as well, since I did not expound on the lengths to which the agent went to get a deal to happen which would otherwise never have been considered, much less agreed to).
Being guilty of one crime does not preclude entrapment for another crime.
Re-reading my post I think I can see how that happened. The first "This" was meant to refer to the parent post, when it could be construed to mean the subsequent example I gave later in the post.
I didn't ignore it, though the address was implicit rather than explicit.
That take on the Establishment Clause fits the definition of the redundancy of non-right assertion I described earlier. If it meant that they were to have a place neither above nor below the exercise of a non-right it would not fit with the spirit of the Bill of Rights, which was intended quite clearly to specifically enumerate certain things over which Congress should have no power (or specifically limited power).
That is a very Constructionist view on the Establishment Clause, wherein it is a reading of semantic exactness absent any context. From such a view follows that no law may mention an establishment of religion, nor may a religious argument be used as a defense in any matter. As a result, what further follows is that any religion may be outlawed, or any other religion may be supported, by careful crafting of legislation absent particular key words. This was clearly not the intent, and the Absurdity Doctrine should be used liberally when such a view is taken. A good read on that particular subject is United States v. Kirby, 7 Wall. 482, 74 U. S. 486 (1868). While it does not address absurdity in the strict reading of legislation in religious terms, it may be generally applied to any strict reading of legal wording and why such interpretations should be viewed, at best, with suspicion.
I believe your views on religion have clouded your perspective to the same degree that a Christian fundamentalist, who would argue for the Establishment Clause not allowing the promotion of a particular brand of Christianity, but allowing for the promotion of Christianity in general as it is not a "particular religion."
I am not saying that religious rights should overrule legitimate issues of public safety, as I've said before, because that does not violate the neutrality principles of doing the least harm in the pursuit of protecting the rights of all. However, when specific behavior is targeted which was not previously illegal, it amounts to using the legislature to pressure the religious to change their practices to satisfy societal mores. It is an undue burden, even if a religion is not specifically mentioned, and has no compelling societal interest which mandates those people give up a previously legal practice. If you eliminate the undue burden test, it becomes trivially easy to play religious favorites with legislation, and runs directly counter to the concept of neutrality.
Wish I had a more concrete answer, but I imagine I'd be much better known if I actually could truthfully make the claim to have that answer.:)
As for groups leaving a political body, you don't deport them. If you did, they wouldn't actually be disjoined as they'd always be reliant on a current dominant group for shelter. They keep their assets in their entirety, except those held as part of a public trust. Therein lies the disadvantage: The primary group loses real power and influence, and most political groups are willing to go to war to prevent any loss of status. The incipient group loses the benefits of membership in the larger group, including rights of common identification, external diplomacy, shared infrastructure maintenance, production and generation resources, etc. They must either have or bargain for those resources as with any independent political constituency. You are entirely right, it would create a lot of problems. However, those problems weigh inordinately heavily on the group leaving, which is what would mitigate the use of the process a great deal after an initial societal re-alignment.
Even were we to get past the idea that it is acceptable to force a non-violent group to submit to a given society for no reason aside from tradition (and it is truly nothing more than that), which would solve the civil war aspect, ponder on the nature of the disadvantages to the incipient group as stated above. I do not believe there would be many, at least in proportion to the world's population. Certainly there would be a number of large countries which would break apart, most notably China and India, and likely several hundred minority ethnic groups which already operate defacto independent countries in all but name. However, after the reorganization, life would go on. Borders would shift every so often as populations changed, but the likelihood of a group smaller than several hundred thousand breaking away and possessing the resources (in both materials and knowledge) to remain independent is vanishingly small.
Of course, all of this presupposes that a large number of people give up the idea of nationalist attachments as a legitimate aim which supersedes all others. The idea that people have some higher claim to control a population they have little or no direct role in is archaic, but is heavily ingrained in human social psychology. Simply put, I argue for the right to political self-determination, with all the benefits and pitfalls that entails. It should not require conditions to get as bad as, say, the Balkans, before others recognize that self-determination is to the benefit of any significantly disaffected peoples.
Yes, I would quite agree. I retained the scope I did because the matter of jury nullification in general is an issue requiring a larger investiture of time. In the case of Oregon, the facts are much more plainly stated and require little in the way of referencing to support the conclusion I asserted.
In general, yes, it should be overseen by someone adept in the matters of law. However, the point of that passage is that it always remains open as an option which the jury may visit at their discretion.
The removal of discretion is the point of contention, nothing more.
As am I. There are many things I enjoyed about living in Oregon, and that was one of them even though it was systematically ignored.
More than likely the judge decided to make it not worth the defendant's time to essentially tie up court resources for the purpose of publicity, yes.
All in all, a shrewd move, since at worst he would face a civil suit against the State which would be immediately subject to a bench trial (unless the guy stupidly asked for a remedy other than a jury trial), and the jury trial would take place as normal.
Ah, okay. I thought you were trying to underscore the assertion of the arbitrariness of the concept of States' Rights rhetorically. Apologies.
Honestly, I don't claim to know. I don't think anyone can, though I'm sure with enough data a pretty close range could be modeled mathematically (though it would probably differ to some degree or other by group, depending on certain predominant cultural influences). I believe it should be within the power of those who feel sufficient disconnect with their membership in a current political body to disjoin themselves from that body and constitute their own, with all the advantages and disadvantages attendant to that decision.
While many would consider that extreme and come to the conclusion it would end society as we know it (As Venkman says, "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!"), I would argue that the disadvantages are drastic and the smaller the group the larger those grow in proportion to that group's means.
On the first point, we'll agree to disagree. Fortunately for me, the law is increasingly on the side of my interpretation.
On the second, they made the implicit explicit, in that there were certain classes of behavior the government were to have no power over. Yes, the concept of the Bill of Rights was a redundancy. However, that's not the same redundancy to which I was referring. More of a corollary, since your assertion implied that, rather than being protected activities, they are actually not rights at all.
Even though the topic was speech rather than religion, both are covered in the same manner under the First Amendment. As such, I'll use Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) as an appropriate reference covering both of the above general points.
Rights are, by their very definition, unequal in treatment before the law when compared to non-rights. There are matters which may be treated by the law and matters which may not. To argue those classes are the same is absurd. Your assertion that rights of worship are to be treated as any other ordinary activity before the law implies that they have no superior protection. In that they are mentioned specifically in the Bill of Rights, the assertion further implies the Bill of Rights is no further protection over any other ordinary activity. This is what makes it a redundancy, based on the extensions of the logic presented. Since I'm guessing that wasn't your intent based on what you've said in your most recent response, I'm not sure what you actually were intending. However, the extended logic based on what you said makes it appear as though there is inconsistency in how you view different rights, or pe
On the third point, I was not referring to a specific law, but rather to a large body of religious exceptions to laws which have none written into them. All as a result of successful suits brought by the Amish which have resulted in USSC decisions invalidating them from being enforced on religious grounds. I'll pick a random one and go with Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), though there are many others I'm familiar with and likely dozens more I'm not. Much of the religious case law in newer, since during the earlier years of the Republic there were relatively few uses of Federal legislative power attempting to force religious behavior to align with legislative goals. More often those were State laws or extra-judicial actions. The conflicts started occurring as society progressed further and certain groups did not. This is most notable among the Amish in regard to both their relatively large numbers, large land ownership, absolute refusal to integrate with outside society any more than they absolutely must, and willingness to fight legally when their way of life is threatened. It's only been relatively recently that the divergence has become large enough to cause civil society to put pressure on them to change, and the courts have decided that their rights to worship as they have for as long as they've existed are to be impinged only to the extent that public safety dictates. I could follow the chain of controlling cases back to the beginning of the USA, but this has become long enough already.
I agree with you in regard to the over-reach and abuse in many aspects, but this is not in any way one of them. It's not even a Constitutional issue. In cases where it is, there is no right to be free from indecency, since indecency is in the eye of the beholder. It is by its very definition based on societal mores, which are subject to change over time. The ability to say and do shocking things in protest, however, has always been respected as protected as long as people have been discussing legal theory in the USA.
I'm also well aware of the patchwork nature of US case law, but once it reaches the Supreme Court level the inconsistencies tend to become mu
I was commending the poster on the great simplification but pointing out that there are overly-complex cases which don't always fit so easily. As such, I decided to give an example of one such.:)
The fact the person is a suspect is irrelevant. The police legally seized the item.
Your hypothetical is illogical in the extreme, unless you are assuming the issue includes the authority to create a body double as well.
As for your assertion that such action requires a conviction first, I've pondered a bit and come to the conclusion it's so flawed as to not even warrant a cursory response. Maybe someone else here will take you up on it, but it's not worth my time.
Slashdot Mirror
So is your contention that religions should be required to adopt any legislatively-mandated social convention so long as it is not targeted at a religious organization in particular then? I am still not sure where you are actually drawing your particular line in the sand.
I shouldn't have said "charge," I should have said "sue," as it is a civil proceeding. In a suit against property, the owner of that property may mount a successful defense only upon presenting a preponderance of evidence that it is not subject to forfeiture. The property is legally considered subject to forfeiture unless it is proven otherwise, contrary to the typical burden of proof in both civil and criminal proceedings against persons.
Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant, as it has been occurring for years in the United States. I don't recall any of the case citations offhand, so I'm going to go the easy route and link an article about the process. Even some cursory research will show it is true. The Forfeiture Racket
Minus the development of capital costs of mass production facilities and the engineering to make the internals readily production-capable.
There are actual issues involved in a production product which homebrew doesn't solve, but you'd never know that to read Slashdot.
I'm not sure how to reconcile the things you say you are advocating with those you disclaim advocating.
If a religion may be forced to adopt social customs which are viewed by society at large as newly requisite, how do you argue the 1st Amendment provides any protection to religious worship at all?
No, because it would only happen if they actually managed to also impersonate the person at the deal as well, so as to lead anyone to think they were actually truly at fault following the subsequent arrests.
Even were the police to circulate the lie that it was they suspect who arranged the meet and gave the other party up for leniency, they would not be liable for the retaliatory actions of other parties who remained at large. It would require a reasonable expectation that their actions would have a very specific result, and that usually would require objective proof that incident X would occur. If a cop is holding you over the edge of a building and lets go, they can reasonably expect you to fall to your death. If a cop busts a drug ring and free actors believe, based on incomplete information, that it was another person's doing and subsequently kill their family, they could not reasonably anticipate the killing as a matter-of-course reaction (barring Minority Report-style advancements in precognition).
Actually not necessarily. The police have a habit of charging property with a crime. Since the property, as such, cannot defend itself in court it is convicted and seized. That's the heart of civil asset forfeiture, and why it is such a pernicious evil.
Quite true, I would consider it a violation of the suspect's rights to incur costs on an account without reparation. As I stated below though, even in the case that the police refused to pay any charges they incurred it would not taint the integrity of the evidence they gathered in relation to the incoming text message and subsequent drug deal setup.
If you're going to argue financial harm, that's an entirely separate issue (which the police would be liable for if such financial harm actually occurred). In all likelihood, it would take nothing more than a single request from the suspect's lawyer to get any resultant charge paid by the law enforcement agency responsible.
In no way does the financial harm taint the evidence obtained from the receipt of the text message while in their possession, nor would the financial harm taint the further evidence gathered from setting up a drug deal through an outgoing text message.
If it is an issue greater than financial harm, then explain how it is different than the police getting a warrant to move the number to another device and doing the same thing? After all, a person may switch a phone number at any time, and nobody sending to that number or receiving from that number has any reasonable or legal expectation otherwise. The only possible issues are financial harm and evidentiary harm (regarding the data on the phone itself). As said repeatedly, neither taint the evidence gained against others.
Berate me for not understanding what self-incrimination means all you like, but it has never been accepted that the 5th Amendment protects anything but a defendent's right to refuse to aid in his/her own prosecution. Legally seized items and documents have always fallen entirely outside that scope. If they were included in the scope of self-incrimination then "papers" would not be implied as a target for reasonable seizures in the 4th Amendment.
Not at all, though the simplification on the duress could render it not entrapment (a potential argument regarding my example as well, since I did not expound on the lengths to which the agent went to get a deal to happen which would otherwise never have been considered, much less agreed to).
Being guilty of one crime does not preclude entrapment for another crime.
Re-reading my post I think I can see how that happened. The first "This" was meant to refer to the parent post, when it could be construed to mean the subsequent example I gave later in the post.
I didn't ignore it, though the address was implicit rather than explicit.
That take on the Establishment Clause fits the definition of the redundancy of non-right assertion I described earlier. If it meant that they were to have a place neither above nor below the exercise of a non-right it would not fit with the spirit of the Bill of Rights, which was intended quite clearly to specifically enumerate certain things over which Congress should have no power (or specifically limited power).
That is a very Constructionist view on the Establishment Clause, wherein it is a reading of semantic exactness absent any context. From such a view follows that no law may mention an establishment of religion, nor may a religious argument be used as a defense in any matter. As a result, what further follows is that any religion may be outlawed, or any other religion may be supported, by careful crafting of legislation absent particular key words. This was clearly not the intent, and the Absurdity Doctrine should be used liberally when such a view is taken. A good read on that particular subject is United States v. Kirby, 7 Wall. 482, 74 U. S. 486 (1868). While it does not address absurdity in the strict reading of legislation in religious terms, it may be generally applied to any strict reading of legal wording and why such interpretations should be viewed, at best, with suspicion.
I believe your views on religion have clouded your perspective to the same degree that a Christian fundamentalist, who would argue for the Establishment Clause not allowing the promotion of a particular brand of Christianity, but allowing for the promotion of Christianity in general as it is not a "particular religion."
I am not saying that religious rights should overrule legitimate issues of public safety, as I've said before, because that does not violate the neutrality principles of doing the least harm in the pursuit of protecting the rights of all. However, when specific behavior is targeted which was not previously illegal, it amounts to using the legislature to pressure the religious to change their practices to satisfy societal mores. It is an undue burden, even if a religion is not specifically mentioned, and has no compelling societal interest which mandates those people give up a previously legal practice. If you eliminate the undue burden test, it becomes trivially easy to play religious favorites with legislation, and runs directly counter to the concept of neutrality.
Dogs and cats living together?!
Wish I had a more concrete answer, but I imagine I'd be much better known if I actually could truthfully make the claim to have that answer. :)
As for groups leaving a political body, you don't deport them. If you did, they wouldn't actually be disjoined as they'd always be reliant on a current dominant group for shelter. They keep their assets in their entirety, except those held as part of a public trust. Therein lies the disadvantage: The primary group loses real power and influence, and most political groups are willing to go to war to prevent any loss of status. The incipient group loses the benefits of membership in the larger group, including rights of common identification, external diplomacy, shared infrastructure maintenance, production and generation resources, etc. They must either have or bargain for those resources as with any independent political constituency. You are entirely right, it would create a lot of problems. However, those problems weigh inordinately heavily on the group leaving, which is what would mitigate the use of the process a great deal after an initial societal re-alignment.
Even were we to get past the idea that it is acceptable to force a non-violent group to submit to a given society for no reason aside from tradition (and it is truly nothing more than that), which would solve the civil war aspect, ponder on the nature of the disadvantages to the incipient group as stated above. I do not believe there would be many, at least in proportion to the world's population. Certainly there would be a number of large countries which would break apart, most notably China and India, and likely several hundred minority ethnic groups which already operate defacto independent countries in all but name. However, after the reorganization, life would go on. Borders would shift every so often as populations changed, but the likelihood of a group smaller than several hundred thousand breaking away and possessing the resources (in both materials and knowledge) to remain independent is vanishingly small.
Of course, all of this presupposes that a large number of people give up the idea of nationalist attachments as a legitimate aim which supersedes all others. The idea that people have some higher claim to control a population they have little or no direct role in is archaic, but is heavily ingrained in human social psychology. Simply put, I argue for the right to political self-determination, with all the benefits and pitfalls that entails. It should not require conditions to get as bad as, say, the Balkans, before others recognize that self-determination is to the benefit of any significantly disaffected peoples.
USB has host controllers. Always has.
Just wanted to point out that the statement wasn't that USB don't (or didn't) have host controllers, so this is irrelevant as a response.
I think you meant MB/s for the last two. :)
They wanted to standardize fragmented browser support.
In Soviet Russia, here's you.
Apologies. For the pedant, "Hispanic" is an ethnonym denoting a certain group comprising a shared heritage, culture, and language.
In this case, the racial component is not entirely universal, but is large enough for most practical purposes.
Yes, I would quite agree. I retained the scope I did because the matter of jury nullification in general is an issue requiring a larger investiture of time. In the case of Oregon, the facts are much more plainly stated and require little in the way of referencing to support the conclusion I asserted.
In general, yes, it should be overseen by someone adept in the matters of law. However, the point of that passage is that it always remains open as an option which the jury may visit at their discretion.
The removal of discretion is the point of contention, nothing more.
As am I. There are many things I enjoyed about living in Oregon, and that was one of them even though it was systematically ignored.
More than likely the judge decided to make it not worth the defendant's time to essentially tie up court resources for the purpose of publicity, yes.
All in all, a shrewd move, since at worst he would face a civil suit against the State which would be immediately subject to a bench trial (unless the guy stupidly asked for a remedy other than a jury trial), and the jury trial would take place as normal.
Ah, okay. I thought you were trying to underscore the assertion of the arbitrariness of the concept of States' Rights rhetorically. Apologies.
Honestly, I don't claim to know. I don't think anyone can, though I'm sure with enough data a pretty close range could be modeled mathematically (though it would probably differ to some degree or other by group, depending on certain predominant cultural influences). I believe it should be within the power of those who feel sufficient disconnect with their membership in a current political body to disjoin themselves from that body and constitute their own, with all the advantages and disadvantages attendant to that decision.
While many would consider that extreme and come to the conclusion it would end society as we know it (As Venkman says, "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!"), I would argue that the disadvantages are drastic and the smaller the group the larger those grow in proportion to that group's means.
On the first point, we'll agree to disagree. Fortunately for me, the law is increasingly on the side of my interpretation.
On the second, they made the implicit explicit, in that there were certain classes of behavior the government were to have no power over. Yes, the concept of the Bill of Rights was a redundancy. However, that's not the same redundancy to which I was referring. More of a corollary, since your assertion implied that, rather than being protected activities, they are actually not rights at all.
Even though the topic was speech rather than religion, both are covered in the same manner under the First Amendment. As such, I'll use Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) as an appropriate reference covering both of the above general points.
Rights are, by their very definition, unequal in treatment before the law when compared to non-rights. There are matters which may be treated by the law and matters which may not. To argue those classes are the same is absurd. Your assertion that rights of worship are to be treated as any other ordinary activity before the law implies that they have no superior protection. In that they are mentioned specifically in the Bill of Rights, the assertion further implies the Bill of Rights is no further protection over any other ordinary activity. This is what makes it a redundancy, based on the extensions of the logic presented. Since I'm guessing that wasn't your intent based on what you've said in your most recent response, I'm not sure what you actually were intending. However, the extended logic based on what you said makes it appear as though there is inconsistency in how you view different rights, or pe
On the third point, I was not referring to a specific law, but rather to a large body of religious exceptions to laws which have none written into them. All as a result of successful suits brought by the Amish which have resulted in USSC decisions invalidating them from being enforced on religious grounds. I'll pick a random one and go with Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), though there are many others I'm familiar with and likely dozens more I'm not. Much of the religious case law in newer, since during the earlier years of the Republic there were relatively few uses of Federal legislative power attempting to force religious behavior to align with legislative goals. More often those were State laws or extra-judicial actions. The conflicts started occurring as society progressed further and certain groups did not. This is most notable among the Amish in regard to both their relatively large numbers, large land ownership, absolute refusal to integrate with outside society any more than they absolutely must, and willingness to fight legally when their way of life is threatened. It's only been relatively recently that the divergence has become large enough to cause civil society to put pressure on them to change, and the courts have decided that their rights to worship as they have for as long as they've existed are to be impinged only to the extent that public safety dictates. I could follow the chain of controlling cases back to the beginning of the USA, but this has become long enough already.
I agree with you in regard to the over-reach and abuse in many aspects, but this is not in any way one of them. It's not even a Constitutional issue. In cases where it is, there is no right to be free from indecency, since indecency is in the eye of the beholder. It is by its very definition based on societal mores, which are subject to change over time. The ability to say and do shocking things in protest, however, has always been respected as protected as long as people have been discussing legal theory in the USA.
I'm also well aware of the patchwork nature of US case law, but once it reaches the Supreme Court level the inconsistencies tend to become mu
Actually, the complexity was my point.
I was commending the poster on the great simplification but pointing out that there are overly-complex cases which don't always fit so easily. As such, I decided to give an example of one such. :)
The fact the person is a suspect is irrelevant. The police legally seized the item.
Your hypothetical is illogical in the extreme, unless you are assuming the issue includes the authority to create a body double as well.
As for your assertion that such action requires a conviction first, I've pondered a bit and come to the conclusion it's so flawed as to not even warrant a cursory response. Maybe someone else here will take you up on it, but it's not worth my time.