So chinese people who are proud of their heritage and promote it can be discriminated against because being proud of your race is just a view one can hold?
There's a difference between celebration of heritage and white supremacy. Please don't conflate celebration of Oktoberfest with calling for an ethnostate. They're different goals.
Good point there most certainly is. And Facebook recognizes that:
>Going forward, while people will still be able to demonstrate pride in their ethnic heritage, we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism.
However, Facebook even now is ok with white people advocating for seperation. They claim there is a connection of white seperatism to white supremacy that made them ban it, while not banning other groups like the Basque from wanting independence.
>We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
>But over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.
However, Facebook even now is ok with white people advocating for seperation. They claim there is a connection of white seperatism to white supremacy that made them ban it, while not banning other groups like the Basque from wanting independence.
Basque is a political state in Spain defined by geographical boundaries, not an ethnic identity. Basques can be white, black, or brown.
Facebook is okay with voters wanting self-governance. This is not even remotely the same thing as white nationalism. If you can't see that, you're clearly a troll and there's no point in further discussing this with you.
Ez, ez gara. Maybe, 100 years ago, but the Basque Nationalism shifted away from the alleged far right, traditionalistic and outdated politics (Sabino Arana) to the cultural, civic, values related nationalism about 70 years ago. Call us chauvinistic, but not racist, because even Black people speak better Euskara here than most non-Basque Spaniards.
And, OFC, they are considered as Basque as anyone else.
I'm referring to the modern Basque independence movement, not the historical Basque ethnicity or ethno-nationalization movement of the early 1900s that has been subsumed by the geopolitical independence campaign of the 21st century.
Not even in the 21th Century. The late 20's had Socialistic shifts on what could be defined as Basque. Arana's mindset went downhill fast as the Romanticism theories were replaced with shared culture traits to define a country.
Custom traditions and the language had far more weight than how did you look. Specially here, where, in Iberia itself, had multiple-way Religion conversos since several millenia.
Maybe the Americans are used to Race = Ethnics = culture. Here it doesn't work like that. It's the surrounding culture what defines you in the end.
If your parents came from Africa you are African-descendant, but if were born and lived in the Basque Country you are Basque and not African, period.
You may want to do more research into the whole Basque thing. It definitely is a culture with a language and identity and whatnot. And I'm pretty sure most Basques wouldn't accept non-white person as truly Basque in a cultural sense.
Sure, witness the many "Latino Pride" or "Black Pride" types of groups or festivals. Most of these don't promote a notion of supremacy. I'm not sure why anyone is really proud of something they had no choice in, but that's probably a separate issue.
C'mon, that's an absurd misreading of those comments.
> He says he rejects nationalism, independence, and sovereignty for Other Races. He thinks the Aryan Race, being a conquering and wandering global people, must destroy and dominate all the world.
"I'm not a white nationalist because I want the entire world to be white-only" is a nonsense quibble on the terminology.
White nationalists are a subset of white supremacists who believe not only that whites are better than non-whites, but that this means they should kick the non-whites out (or exterminate them, in many cases).
This is an excellent point ablut collusion. The Alex Jones debacles proves conclusively the media giants act in concert to censor political dissonants.
His point was not about left being more educated on average, but more of about ideology and propaganda (both sides have propaganda) being explicitly opposed to science and education. Plenty of people who argue against those are educated themselves.
You may disagree with that point, but it is not the same point as judging average education of this or that voter.
>Everyone has something to provide, on many different levels.you are failing to see that, and that is your problem.
Totally false. Some prople are really bad at their jobs and gang up with other unproductive people to rag on those who are carrying the team. If you cant see that, you are probably insecure and rationalizing your hostility to people who are better and make you look bad in comparison.
Hold up.. there are "gangs" of bad employees who team up together just rag on those carrying the team.. (you... right?)
Man.. so glad Im insecure enough to rely on these gangs to fight my battles for me. Millions of bad employees but only 5 rockstar developers like yourself.
I know you're saying this sarcastically, but in the context of the rest of your comments, it sounds a lot more like self-pity. Take a second to read the comments you're responding and realize how much you're projecting your own complexes onto comments that are saying nothing close to what you seem to think they are.
>Instead, I went with a free phone app called Move. It buzzes every 45 minutes and assigns me a random exercise: say, 20 body-weight squats or 15 push-ups. These alerts initially drove me crazy. (Again?!) And their commands can be cloyingly phrased: “It’s time to move it, move it.” But eventually I welcomed the interruptions. I noticed that I felt refreshed when I returned to my desk, like I’d rebooted my clogged circuitry.
A poor person's car takes up the same number of parking spaces as a rich person's car, and a rich person has already paid a huge amount of their income to the poor person in the form of income taxes and welfare.
This is totally incorrect. The high conviction rate is a result of extremely high maximum sentences. People who are 100% innocent often plead guilty after being threatened with a 30-year prison sentence that would be only 1 or 2 years under local law.
Many federal crimes are unconstitutional and deliberately vague, like "lying (not volunteering incriminating evidence) to an investigator" and "mail fraud" which is just a way to charge you in federal court where the odds are stacked against you.
The US federal judicialry is a kangaroo court. 99% of federal crimes should be repealed and maximum sentences reduced to be in line with state laws.
Federal jury selection is also suspect, especially in cases involving "national security".
> like "lying (not volunteering incriminating evidence) to an investigator"
This is literally the purpose of the 5th amendment. If you get asked a question where the answer would incriminate you, you are well within your rights to refuse to answer the question. Taking the path of deliberately attempt to mislead investigators is most certainly a crime and it should be.
In principle I agree with you. In practice however, the FBI just uses this to harrass people. Look at what happened to Marth Stewart. She was totally innocent, did not say anything factually incorrect, but the feds thought she exagerated in some of her answers. That level of subjectivity shouldn't be involved in determining a criminal offense.
He's probably being down-voted for saying erroneous things like
> The high conviction rate is a result of extremely high maximum sentences. People who are 100% innocent often plead guilty after being threatened with a 30-year prison sentence that would be only 1 or 2 years under local law.
That's erroneous because very few federal defendants actually face such long sentences, so those that do so pleading guilty is not a plausible explanation for high conviction rates.
Federal sentences for a particular instance of a crime are based on the class of the crime and on the details of the particular instance. The class sets an upper limit, which often is long, up to 20 years, but it is the details that determine how much you can actually get. To actually get anywhere near that 20 years you have to have a lot of the details against you. Typically this means you caused a lot of damages or harm, had multiple prior convictions for similar crimes, where doing it as part of organized crime, and similar things.
Swartz is a good example. A lot of reporting said he faced 30 years or 50 years or similar big numbers. Actually, he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors.
The DOJ bears a lot of the blame for that bad reporting. They make no attempt in the press releases announcing indictments to actually compute the maximum sentence for the particular instance of the crime. They just give the maximum that it is possible for the worst possible instance of that crime committed by the worst possible defendant.
Here's a good article on federal sentence length [1].
When you say "he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors"
Do you know this for a fact?
Because the way I understand it is, he was facing multiple decades in prison IF all charges stuck. And once you got to trial, all charges can stick. It has happened. So he was facing 35 years. So saying he wasn't is just wrong.
Your 6-7 years is 'probably'.
I think what your saying is: The federal government doesn't threaten you with 35 years, they threaten you with 10x3.5 years, and since it is possible that not all 10 will stick... it's not really a 35 year threat?
I mean, if I threaten to punch you 10 times but I might stop at 1,2,3 or any number and I probably won't get to 10, but we can negotiate before I start, is it not a 10 punch threat?
To me it seems like you are splitting hairs in order to defend the indefensible. The practice of tacking on as many charges to get people to plea bargain is unethical and fascist.
There's no way to know it as a fact because the judge is legally allowed to apply any sentence up to that maximum. His link shows that most judges follow the guidelines, and vary rarely go over them. Intelligent decisions are ones that are made after understanding probabilities. Unfortunately Aaron decided to take the guaranteed outcome of suicide over the small chance that he'd serve multiple decades. I think we all can agree that that was not the right choice.
We see this sort of "up to" crap all the time in our culture. It's still misleading. Accurate, but fundamentally misleading and wrong.
So you are saying: Judges never convict people to the maximum sentence? I'm sorry, your point isn't very clear. It's a bit muddled.
Or are you saying that his probably of being sentenced to the maximum was low? If so, how low? And when does it stop being 'intelligent' to consider a small probability with a horribly outcome? I mean, in your intelligent opinion.
I don't think they're saying never. If you look at the recommended guidelines[1], for a crime like Schwartz's the maximum could theoretically be many years, but the guidelines would suggest a sentence between 0 and a few years (he'd be in the first column assuming he didn't have any criminal history. Depending on what modifiers come into play his "offense level" could be as low as 6[2]. Maybe it would be more than that, but he certainly wouldn't hit level 40, which is what it would take to get a 30+ years sentence. Even though a judge can technically give a higher sentence than the guidelines, it's fairly rare— it happened less than 3% of the time in 2017.[3]
Remember the original comment only said that people plea because of the big threat. It is a big threat. And given the fact that you probably wouldn't take a 1:33 chance on Russian roulette, it seem it is a big threat to you.
But not when it is on others. Then it's fine 'because low probability'. In fact, many of the apologists for what happened go as far as to conflate in a single post low probability with no probability.
The 3% who were sentenced above the guideline amount were not chosen at random. They were people who had specific factors in their cases that allowed for an above guideline sentence.
These are factors such as causing a death, causing significant physical injury, causing extreme psychological harm to your victims beyond that one would expect from the crime, abducting people, causing property damage beyond what is taken into account by the guidelines, using weapons during the crime, or torture.
Swartz did not have any of the factors that could end one up in the 3%.
"lot of reporting said he faced 30 years... Actually, he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors."
So let me ask again, last time you didn't answer: Is the chance of a 35 year sentence for Aaron 0%?
No? Then do the intellectually honest thing and admit you are wrong. Your correcting somebody by saying wrong things. And then doubling down on it.
Low probability is not 0%. Whatever the probability was, it was real that they could have given him 30 years. Unlikely? Yeah. But I'll bet you wouldn't play Russian roulette at those odds; whatever they may be.
>Low probability is not 0%. Whatever the probability was, it was real that they could have given him 30 years. Unlikely? Yeah. But I'll bet you wouldn't play Russian roulette at those odds; whatever they may be.
But that's the question. The probability is not 0%. It may be %0.01, or %0.001. Can either of us find any existing cases where a defendant with Aaron's background received a 33-level sentence increase? I would propose that that has never happened in cases with similar circumstances to Aaron's. If you can find one, I'd be interested in the citation.
In the absence of any examples, my argument is that the chance of a 35 year sentence is not functionally different from 0%, and Aaron (and any other defendant in this situation) should have made decisions based on the 99% of sentences they were actually likely to receive.
One last note: you mentioned playing Russian Roulette at those odds. Russian Roulette normally has a 16% chance of death. I wouldn't play RR at 16% odds. Would I play it a 0.001% odds? Probably, presuming the benefits of playing RR were of significant value to me.
Aaron's chance of a 35 year sentence was not 16%. It was also not 0.0%. It's somewhere in-between, and unless you have evidence that shows otherwise, I'd personally guess it was below 0.01%, and his choice of suicide remains a tragic one. YMMV.
Read the other apologists. They quote a 3% deviation from sentencing guidelines.
Sentencing guidelines for Aaron were 6-7 years. A single wire charge on max penalty could be 20. All you need is one judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid.
I don't know what the probability is. You don't either. Likely no one did. But that probably has weight.
It's disturbing: the callous indifference to that weight by those who question the exact kilos from an arm chair expert point of view.
This whole thing has parallels to other situations:
A Powerful Group is responsible for a system that perpetrated an injustice.
Members of the powerful group are confronted with the injustice. Members have the following reactions:
Denial (high dissonance)
Disgust
Apologists
Apologists do the same thing: They minimize, deny, question and speculate.
What apologists of all kinds don't realize is that even if they are right, they are wrong.
The callous indifference shown, instead of the guttural understanding of something wrong being needed to be made right... is what is so hard to understand. Even if your argument that the official numbers are overblown by x%.
> Read the other apologists. They quote a 3% deviation from sentencing guidelines
In any given year, around 4% of women in the US will get pregnant. Suppose Alice is a sexually active woman in the US who uses the pill religiously, and who requires her sex partners to wear condoms.
Do you think that because 4% of women will get pregnant this year, and Alice is a women, Alice has a 4% chance of getting pregnant?
That's the kind of reasoning you are using with the 3% figure for upward deviations in sentencing. You are assuming that because 3% of sentences are above guidelines, everyone who is sentenced is equally at risk for an above guideline sentence.
> Sentencing guidelines for Aaron were 6-7 years. A single wire charge on max penalty could be 20. All you need is one judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid.
A judge cannot just arbitrarily exceed the guidelines like that. There are specific factors and considerations that a judge must cite to justify an upward deviation, and they are not applicable in Swartz's case. A judge who just arbitrarily decided to apply his own criteria to come up with 20 years would have that quickly overturned on appeal as an abuse of discretion.
You want to know what happens to someone in Swartz's situation if he gets a judge that wants to throw the book at him? He gets 7 years. That's the result of a hard line judge accepting an exaggerated damages claim and not applying any of the factors that would allow lowering the sentence. That's why his lawyers, the prosecutors, and outside lawyers all said he would probably actually get at most a few months--the 7 year number is the "judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid" number.
I literally said the exact opposite of what you claim I said. Sometimes when I get riled up online it's helpful to take some deep breaths and come back to it later.
We know his own lawyer said that he was unlikely to get more than a couple years, and was plausibly looking at a non-custodial sentence even if convicted.
We also know that the absurd sentences you're referring to would be departures from the federal sentencing guidelines, which spell out where in the range of possible sentences each specific case lands.
Suppose I toss a brick through the window of a government office overnight when no one is inside, causing $101 worth of damage. I could be charged with felony destruction of government property, a crime with the statute says has a maximum sentence of 10 years and a $250k find.
Am I facing 10 years in prison? No! That's because the way sentencing works under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is that the sentence range is looked up in a table whose rows range from short sentences up to the maximum (10 years in this case). The biggest factor in that lookup is how much monetary damage I caused. At $101 I'm going go get a row with a sentencing range that is something like up to a year or so.
To push it up to where my sentencing row actually includes 10 years I'd have to have done a lot more damage, such as blown up the building.
(There are other factors that also go into picking the row, such as if I have prior convictions for similar crimes).
When I'm indicted, though, the DOJ press release will tout that I've been charged with a crime with up to 10 years and $250k fines as penalties. They'd say the same thing when indicting someone who blew up the whole building. Their press releases make no attempt to convey the sentence the person is actually facing based on the facts the DOJ is alleging about that person's alleged crime.
In the case of someone charged with multiple crimes there is another factor that leads to inflated numbers. The same underlying acts can often support more than one charge. Similar crimes are grouped together for sentencing under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and if you are charged with and convicted of more than one crime from the same group based on the same underlying acts, you are only sentenced for one of them.
Unfortunately, this grouping is often ignored in press releases and reporting about potential sentencing.
In most cases, those multi-decade numbers you see people talk are due to one or both of the aforementioned issues: (1) not taking into account what the person is actually alleged to have done, and (2) ignoring grouping if the person is charged with more than one thing.
Here is a detailed analysis of Swartz's possible sentencing [1]. The earlier article by the same author looking at what he was charged with is also interesting [2].
Your 6-7 years is 'probably'. PEOPLE DO GET MAXIMUM. It happens. Therefore you saying it doesn't won't change anything. Your equating low probability with no probability. This is a false equation.
Have some intellectual honesty and admit you were wrong.
Did you read the link? See popehat [0] as well. The prosecutors said he should get the 6 or 7 years. And, if the judge went crazy and ignored the guidelines, this is what appeals are for. You seem to be the one lacking intellectual honesty here!
People are risk averse. The maximum sentences exist to scare people into irrationally pleading guilty when they are innocent. Federal maximum sentences are out of line with state sentencing because the federal government is less local and less accountable. Many federal crimes exist solely to trump up this maximum possible sentence. Politically connected people use this system to protect themselves against whistleblowers and political activists like Swartz and Snowden. I dont think you have addressed any of these points.
... or they know about the time a woman in Pennsylvania was able to seek justice by getting her murder-attempting neighbor on mail fraud when the local cops wouldn't do anything.
Or Wen Ho Lee - charged with 59 counts of espionage (stealing nuclear secrets). Eventually was convicted/plead to one count of mishandling data and went on to get a $1mil settlement.
