A crime is only premeditated if you plan it out beforehand. Consider these situations:
1) Joe, a white member of the KKK, is in a bar drinking. Toward closing time, he, and most of the other patrons, are pretty drunk. On the way out, Joe bumps into Jack. Jack is black. Joe demands that Jack apologize and get out of his way. Jack refuses. They start fighting, Joe pulls a knife, and stabs Jack in the neck, killing him.
2) Joe, a black man, is in a bar drinking. Toward closing time, he, and most of the other patrons, are pretty drunk. On the way out, Joe bumps into Jack. Jack is black. Joe demands that Jack apologize and get out of his way. Jack refuses. They start fighting, Joe pulls a knife, and stabs Jack in the neck, killing him.
If, in the first scenario, you consider pre-existing racial hatred as justifying greater punishment, then white Joe should get a harsher sentence than black Joe. Yet both individuals committed the same crime for roughly the same motivation. So the greater punishment is not for the actions of white Joe, but for his beliefs. Right?
It's the idea that the government should not be given a legal basis on which to punish individuals for their beliefs. If you can double the penalty for murdering out of racial hatred, why can't you punish someone simply for being racist? If you can punish someone for racism, why can't you punish them for any other beliefs they hold that are dangerous or disruptive?
Actually, it's psuedo-Greek. (The -us ending is a convention from Latin.)
amorphê = shape, form
phallos = penis
If they wanted to really say "badly shaped penis", it should have been something like Kakomorphophallus. Oh well.
The same thing happened at my school this weekend. At the beginning of the year, ITS required that anyone with a Windows machine install this Trend Micro program and give them the password to an administrator account*. By "securing" all the Windows machines, network outages would be prevented. Ironic, eh? Those of us who use other OSs, of course, were unaffected. And best of all, when they sent out a notice about fixing the problem, they didn't explain what had happened - we had to wait for one of the students who works there to tell us.
*They wanted me to give them my root password before they would turn on my network connection. I told the nice woman that if ITS expected me to trust them with my password, surely they would trust me with the password to one of the servers. She rolled her eyes and activated my connection.
I didn't say it applied here. I just meant that it's wrong to interpret the absence of an amendment guaranteeing a right to pivacy as the absence of a right to privacy.
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A crime is only premeditated if you plan it out beforehand. Consider these situations: 1) Joe, a white member of the KKK, is in a bar drinking. Toward closing time, he, and most of the other patrons, are pretty drunk. On the way out, Joe bumps into Jack. Jack is black. Joe demands that Jack apologize and get out of his way. Jack refuses. They start fighting, Joe pulls a knife, and stabs Jack in the neck, killing him. 2) Joe, a black man, is in a bar drinking. Toward closing time, he, and most of the other patrons, are pretty drunk. On the way out, Joe bumps into Jack. Jack is black. Joe demands that Jack apologize and get out of his way. Jack refuses. They start fighting, Joe pulls a knife, and stabs Jack in the neck, killing him. If, in the first scenario, you consider pre-existing racial hatred as justifying greater punishment, then white Joe should get a harsher sentence than black Joe. Yet both individuals committed the same crime for roughly the same motivation. So the greater punishment is not for the actions of white Joe, but for his beliefs. Right?
It's the idea that the government should not be given a legal basis on which to punish individuals for their beliefs. If you can double the penalty for murdering out of racial hatred, why can't you punish someone simply for being racist? If you can punish someone for racism, why can't you punish them for any other beliefs they hold that are dangerous or disruptive?
Actually, it's psuedo-Greek. (The -us ending is a convention from Latin.) amorphê = shape, form phallos = penis If they wanted to really say "badly shaped penis", it should have been something like Kakomorphophallus. Oh well.
Yup.
Would your school happen to be in Iowa?
*They wanted me to give them my root password before they would turn on my network connection. I told the nice woman that if ITS expected me to trust them with my password, surely they would trust me with the password to one of the servers. She rolled her eyes and activated my connection.
I didn't say it applied here. I just meant that it's wrong to interpret the absence of an amendment guaranteeing a right to pivacy as the absence of a right to privacy.
Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.