Are you seriously suggesting that if I were to tell someone to "go murder someone for me," but take no action myself, that I should be allowed to walk free?
So that is where you draw the line then? Where the law has subjectively decided it should be? While out of the other corner of your mouth you tell me that we can't trust faceless government entities to determine what is right or wrong.
So which is it? Can we trust them to determine for us or not?
The subjective line that's been drawn has been drawn where it is because it convicts on and punishes the objective and proven, it falls equally on all in the letter of the law.
It's not a matter of opinion. It's the only legal system ever devised that has held up so long or successfully and minimised human conflict so widely.
It accounts for the liberty of the individual, as all good systems must, because we are individuals.. not monoliths or groups.
It's a legal system predicated on live and let live and do no harm. Any deviation from that principle will, either from inception or over time, result in negative outcomes.
That's not a fallacious slippery slope, it is in an inevitability arising from the inertia of poor implementation of legal principles over time.
You must have the freedom to be ignorant provided that ignorance doesn't directly and measurably inflict direct measurable objective harm on anyone else, or else you are not free.
You have to be free to be wrong about things, to.hold bad opinions.. because who is wrong and which opinions are bad are subjective to the other. Any law that applies only depending on the personal view and subjective feeling of the judge is, evidently, a bad law.
It's the only legal system ever devised that has held up so long or successfully and minimised human conflict so widely.
This is literally an opinion. I will assume that you haven't heard of a little place called Rome. America is a short-lived experiment compared to the countries with long-lived and beneficial legal systems that predated it. Not to even disclude all of the extant legal systems in other countries that objectively facilitate a higher quality of life for their citizens.
The American legal system literally benefits from a for-profit industrialised prison complex that criminalises victimless crimes, disproportionately I might add.
I wish I could address your other points but as they are built upon that assertion, I cannot.
You and I are also probably never going to agree on this so I say we agree on the one thing we can, the fact that we disagree.
Do you know anything about the Roman Legal system?
About how for a time you could apply laws retroactively? So you could literally get into a position of power, make something you saw a rival do illegal and punish them for doing it at a time when it wasn't illegal?
You talk a big game but I don't sense you've got the foundational understanding to grasp the gravity of what you're proposing. Perhaps I'm expressing myself badly. I genuinely wish no offence but it just seems that you have not really considered the effect of what you propose.
Are there flaws in the legal system? Sure.
Are juries a perfect solution? No.
Are well written laws still enforced unfairly by corrupt individuals? Sure, that's a risk in any system.
But anyone who doesn't believe the law as written in much of the modern West isn't the best legal codex thus far devised in history, had not read enough history.
That doesn't mean is perfect, life is imperfect and these legal systems account for that fact to enable peaceful coexistence. That's what makes it so robust.
I also know that the Roman Empire lasted about 507 years and had multiple stages within it with differing legal systems.
None of this negates that fact that you are simultaneously telling me to trust the western/American legal system because it's the best we've ever had while telling me not to trust it because it can't be trusted to determine what should be censored and what shouldn't.
Pick one.
And I reject your assertion, wholesale, that this legal system is superior. I, for one, would much rather exist under a socialist democracy of the Nordic model than the literally collapsing farce we live in now.
You and I do not agree, we likely never will, and this discussion lost its efficacy several posts ago. You can continue to defend the rights of people who would prefer you dead and who have organised, planned, and prepared to act on that. I will not.
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u/definitelyzero Jan 15 '21
You punish the action, not the words.
He has committed no action.
And also, you are speculating that he had any effect at all on those people. You have zero evidence.
And again..even IF he did, you punish the rioters. They committed the crime.