Three teens involved in vicious hate crime to be given probation

there are 2 unrelated topics being discussed in this thread.

the first is regarding general crime, and what can be done to combat it - imprisonment is deemed too expensive, so perhaps we need to look at removing some of society's "carrots" temporarily when someone breaks the law, as well as cheaper forms of punishmment.

the second topic is that the state/society needs to recognise when it's own existence is under threat, and punish more severely when this is so. "hate crimes" are a threat to society - if you want to know where it leads, you can look at the Rwandan genocide of 1994. People basically started identifying themselves as "Hutu" or "Tutsi" and hacked each other to pieces. It doesn't need to be about ethnicity, or religion, or anything really - the wikipedia page on Hutu goes as far as to say "There is an ongoing debate as to whether the Hutu and Tutsi are really separate groups or not".

"hate crimes" threaten to eventually divide society and destroy the state, if left unchecked, by creating a "them and us" mentality within society, and should be recognised and reacted to with this in mind. It is the same way that we try to punish murder with harsher sentences than manslaughter, or an accidental death.


For those people who still don't get it - how come it's OK for a soldier to shoot an enemy soldier in wartime, even before the enemy soldier has committed a crime? hint: the state is reacting to a threat to it's existence

No, my solution to the possibility of an us and them mentality is to decide that attacks which are motivated by specific things deserve more punishment.

In fact, this isn't even "my" solution, this is already how the law behaves when it differentiates between murder and manslaughter. I'm just pointing it out.

K4t wrote: »

Hate crime legislation is a hypocrisy of epic proportions and your earlier comparisons to Rwandan genocide are laughable if you think they would in any way have been prevented by hate crime legislation. Hate crime legislation is the closest thing to thought crime we're potentially ever going to see in our life time.

To think that properly enforced hate crime legislation in Rwanda in the years before the genocide would not have helped at all is ridiculous and stupid.

It is like saying that having "anti-burglary" laws does not result in less burglaries in society.

Let's do away with the burglary laws here, and see if the nation is ravaged by a mass of burglaries within a few years or not? Of course burglary will become rampant, if it's not illegal.

K4t wrote: »

Yeah, I don't want a guy who burgles my house facing more time in prison if I happen to be gay or black thanks. Hate crime education and awareness might have helped, legislation would not and does not.

And that is precisely why "burgling a house" isn't considered a "hate crime".

I introduced it as an unrelated subject (a thought exercise) which shows that properly enforced laws can and do have an effect.

A burglary is not the same a a robbery. If a gay or a black guy gets robbed by a white guy because they are gay or black, then yes that is a hate crime.
The key element here is a threat to society - if you somehow formed a big enough group who thought that, for example, "old people" should be treated differently and not allowed to live in some areas, and then you proceeded to systematically abuse "old people" who you came across in high enough numbers that it affected the behaviours of a lot of "old people" who heard about your behaviour, then the state has to take action to prevent this perceived polarisation occurring within it's own borders - the state has to protect itself - by penalising those responsible more heavily.
It's kind of like how the state (when it's at war) penalises enemy soldiers extremely heavily (shoots them) just for being "in the wrong gang/army", because the gang/army has become a threat to it's own national security.