I'm not sure how it works in Europe but in the United States it would be hard to make a case for libel (libel is written, slander is spoken) when the falsehood was about a group, especially a group so large and amorphous as the Polish nation. My reading of the article is that he said Poles generally, not a particular Pole or even group of Poles who could be identified as being libeled.

This sort of thing is a disgrace. If the guy's numbers are wrong or his research is flawed then that's for other scholars to expose and dispute but even the threat of prosecution serves to stifle inquiry. The Polish government needs to put on its big boy pants.

I see your point but I still think it rests on big assumptions about who the Johns are. My suspicion is that the ones who really have a lot to lose aren't seeking the services of desperate street walkers and the Johns who do have their own issues with addiction and poverty. Under the Swedish model high class hookers who could leave the game any time are treated as victims with no agency. Meanwhile across town some junkie gets arrested and harshly punished for giving another addict 10 bucks for a blow job under the bridge.

I think treating this as a criminal issue is the wrong approach to begin with so any policy that relies on it doesn't have my support.

[Cr5] is my biggest fear about self-driving vehicles along with the inevitability that they'll be one more means of tracking people's movements and private activities. My view is that the police should not be given the power to stop vehicles. Allowing it is based on the assumption that the police are always in the right and would never engage in misconduct or abuse the power.

Regarding Sweden I think it depends on what you consider "success" to be. My opinion is that the policy is sold as progressive and feminist but in reality is based on a lot of really patronizing and backward assumptions about female sexuality.

@j-r There's a whole movement out there online dedicated to unmasking the 'law school scam'. The dearth of information about things like rates of enrollment and post law school success is probably their biggest gripe. It's gotten a bit better over the past few years due to people like Paul Campos taking their criticisms mainstream. The problems that effect law school are the same that effect higher education generally, just magnified due to the cost.

Again anecdotal but there are/were a lot of people who ended up in law school because it seemed like a good way of making their humanities degrees more practical. Whenever people ask me if they should encourage their kids to go I say very likely no. Maybe if they work at a law firm for a few years, love it, and make some connections it's worth it but otherwise they're likely to take on a small mortgage for the luxury of temp work clicking doc review software or maybe nothing at all.

@kazzy she still hasn't responded to my friend request.

This is anecdotal but number 2 definitely rings true based on my Facebook feed. I can't tell if it's a testament to America's challenges with childcare or if it's something sociological (or something else) but I'm consistently astounded at how many women I graduated law school with who now appear to be stay-at-home moms.

@densityduck I think youre wrong. It would be accurate to say that it's gotten more complicated from there. What you're referring to is a lack of support and in some instances resistance to policies which would force integration. Thats not the same as mainstream political parties advocating for a return to separate but equal.

While we have become more racially segregated than we were immediately post Brown due to a mix of socioeconomic and cultural factors (of which I'm sure racism plays a part) its absurd to say that its worse than when we had de jure segregation. I mean, do you really think it's worse now than when black people had to use separate bathrooms and couldn't eat at the same restaurants as white people? If so I think you lack perspective.

My point was the the prohibition on discrimination based on race is well established in numerous federal and state laws and legal precedent and I'm not aware of any realistic effort to change that. On the other hand, if Roe were overturned quite a few states would establish burdensome restrictions on aborion. The challenge we have now with race is tougher because it comes mostly from things like disparate impact, the cycle of poverty, and choices freely made about association. Thats a much harder nut to crack.

I think it was probably the worst type of victory the pro-choice side could have won, in that by attaching the right to votes on the Supreme Court it's made it virtually impossible for the country to reach a compromise most people can live with. That said I don't want to criticize taking the path of the courts universally. There are times like Brown v. Board where, after an initial cultural and political battle, support for racial segregation was removed from the political mainstream. Roe on the other hand resulted in total war and entrenched positions. There's a good book to be written on why that is.

I will cop to being in the position @el-muneco describes below. I'm pro-choice in the sense that I think it's better policy for abortion to be legal and generally available but have serious misgivings about the morality of the practice. I'd prefer it happened less often and am on board with expanded access to education, birth control, and whatever else makes women feel less like they have no other choice. Nevertheless I'm uncomfortable with the state determining whether a woman can terminate a pregnancy and even more uncomfortable with the foreseeable results of making it a criminal matter.

This gets at what I think the real issue is, that being that our baseline legal norm is established by the Supreme Court as opposed to legislative debate and compromise. Pro-choicers don't feel they can sufficiently trust pro-lifers because of the suspicion that the real goal is prohibition or extreme curtailment of the ability to obtain an abortion. There's a similar dynamic in the debate over gun restrictions. All concessions are a stepping stone to your side's eventual defeat.

I think there's a legitimate question as to how dangerous the KKK even is as an organization in 2016. This isn't to say a group of them couldn't corner and harm someone but this isn't the 1860s or even the 1960s. They have no sympathy from the general public nor would law enforcement collaborate or cooperate with them. Even if there was a lone KKK member on campus reacting with terror inflates the threat into something it just isnt. A better response is mockery and derision. As others have noted on the thread I don't think all of this learned helplessness serves anyone well, including those who want a less racist society.

My suspicion is that, in addition to the culture of fear and moral panic that's always been with us, a lot of this stuff at university comes from the realization that helplessness implicitly relieves one of responsibility. As jr noted we really only have ourselves to blame.

I think there's a lot more historical and cultural unpacking that needs to be done if you want to argue a parallel. This isn't to say that American nationalism has never been used for anything bad or that no one has ever wrapped themselves in the American flag to promote ugly policies. However there's also a sort of civic religion around immigration and assimilation in America that doesnt exist in most old world countries.

Thats without getting into the 20th century political movements that occurred in Europe that are the root of discomfort with displays of national flags.

Groups of Oath Keepers did indeed go to Ferguson armed and with the intent of keeping journalists and, at least in some cases, protestors from being harmed by the police. I know some were advocating that black protestors exercise their right to carry firearms under Missouri law. I have very ambivalent feelings about the politics of the Oath Keepers but, to the extent they were raising the potential cost of police violence, I think they did the right thing.

Anti-gun right progressives I don't think realize that they're played by the state and establishment media with images of gun toting rednecks the same way conservatives are by conservative media with images of armed minorities in the ghetto. The winner in each case is those forces of the state that would prefer we all had a lot less leeway to exercise our rights generally.

We're in complete agreement, I think I may have misread the intended breadth of your comment. I was talking about the larger and ongoing debate Freddie has been in with internet/social media leftism, not just this particular post.

I'm a fan of Freddie but I don't think it's so much about right and wrong as it is he insists on intellectual honesty. It's his best trait and why I like him. However, in a world where a lot of political writing falls either into the view from nowhere or full throated affirmation of the audience intellectual honesty can come off as really harsh. I see a similar dynamic in a lot of the criticism of Glenn Greenwald from the left.

As we all know, raising that question is strictly prohibited. Even considering it results in expulsion from the league of the politically serious.

Well the difference would be I'm skeptical of seeing those types of state guarantees as rights. I see them as benefits we can chose to create or not through the state using the democratic process. From my perspective no one has a right to a pension but I find the argument for social security convincing, or at least more convincing than any politically plausible proposed reforms of which I am aware.

Can't speak for Saul but, despite my own libertarian tendencies, I've come to make peace with the welfare state (or at least some type of social safety net) as necessary for a small 'r' republican form of government to survive in the modern world. I don't think we can let the bottom drop out in a highly specialized post industrial economy and not expect a populist reaction. We're already seeing a form of it in the Trump campaign, and to a lesser extent the Sanders campaign. I also don't think we can let economic inequality become so extreme that equality before the law is actually or perceived to have been eliminated, and still have something lIke a free society where the state adheres to the rule of law.

The idea of positive rights as proposed by some left wingers are intellectually juvenile but too many libertarians fail to identify how fragile the old school civics class style of government is. It requires a certain level of shared and widespread prosperity. We let that die in the name of intellectual purity at our own peril.

I'm so spent on all these serious super hero movies (or really super hero movies in general). No doubt the next fad will get equally annoying but can we please get started on that sometime soon?

Understood and I appreciate the clarification regarding juries versus the judiciary. That is a different beast and you're right, to the extent it isn't necessary to get at the facts, judges should be diligent about not bringing stereotypes or biases into questioning.

@damon I think your point about people doing what they perceive to be in their best interest regardless of what is right or wrong is true. However, I also think there are a lot of assumptions about what third parties really do and don't know about things that happened behind closed doors when this argument is made . My suspicion is that these decisions are really coming down to popularity contests.

You and I are certainly in agreement regarding investments in the war on drugs and police militarization. That is money that could be much better spent. As I stated earlier in the thread, I agree that the incentives need to be changed to prioritize investigation and prosecution of violent and other serious crimes, instead of high volumes of arrests related to vice and quality of life issues.

The rape kit issue is a complicated problem and I do agree that it needs to be addressed. That said, every untested kit is untested for a different reason. Sometimes it really is an issue of prioritization (which needs to be fixed), but other times it's because there isn't a suspect, and there are quite a few instances where the fact that sex occurred isn't in dispute (the issue at trial is consent) and therefore there isn't a reason to do the test. The state needs to be able to prioritize cases it is most certain it can win and to the extent some kits remain untested for that reason I am not disturbed by it. Again, that doesn't mean that there isn't a problem here but I don't think that the volume of untested kits in itself tells the whole story.

Regarding juries my experience is different and we will, I think, still need to agree to disagree. I started my career as an attorney interning with a circuit court judge then at a small firm where the bread and butter was criminal defense (for clarity this was a very brief stint that barely registers in what I do now so I do not want to give the impression I spent years in the trenches as a trial lawyer, I have not). However I would wager that I've spent more time than most in court rooms during (and participating in) criminal proceedings. While every jury and juror is different, the prevailing bias in my experience is in favor of the state. The vast majority of defendants are not wealthy, socially connected, or particularly sympathetic. Your average person tends to think that if the defendant didn't do something wrong then the police never would've picked him up in the first place.

The dynamic may (and I stress the word may) be a bit different in something like the Ghomeshi case where we're talking about someone with wealth and celebrity, but those cases are not the norm. In an environment where we already criminalize too much and incarcerate too many (a disproportionate number of whom are poor and/or black) I can't get on board with attacking the presumption of innocence. Even the privileged shouldn't be punished if the state can't prove their guilt, but as always the real burden of it would (and already does) fall on the disadvantaged.

This seems about right. Official Washington is off the map and culturally inaccessible for most of us who live in the metro area.

@maribou Ok, I'm going to go point by point (and if I miss something please feel free to call me out, I've asked tough questions on the thread and have no intent from shying away from yours).

Regarding whether or not the courts protect women, I think that depends greatly on the context and the woman. However, when it comes to victims of crimes I think that expecting criminal courts to act as instruments of vindication is asking something that they aren't set up to do and probably can never do. Courts exist to make a determination as to whether or not sufficient evidence exists for the state to enforce an outcome of some kind. In the criminal context, it's whether or not the state has sufficient justification to deprive someone of their freedom (and down here south of the border, sometimes their lives). The victim is not a party to these proceedings, and though they're often the trigger for a prosecution and present evidence, given the larger considerations of due process, the law cannot treat victims as an interested party in the legal sense. There's a long history of arbitrary and horrible abuse at the hands of the state in the name of enforcing criminal law and for that reason I think we need to be very careful about undoing the protections we inherited from the Enlightenment, no matter how heinous the accusation, lest we unleash other types of injustice.

This notwithstanding, I do not think that victims of crime should be without assistance and recourse. There are civil avenues where many victims are able to recover from their attackers, even where there was not sufficient evidence to convict criminally. I also think it's important to have robust public services to allow people who need it an avenue of escape. I don't think those services should be contingent on anyone being convicted of a crime. We do, at best, a very inconsistent job of this now, and I am in favor of efforts to make them better.

Regarding how people should treat someone who is acquitted or who can't be convicted of a crime, I am indeed skeptical of efforts to establish a social norm in which people who aren't convicted of a crime are still treated as pariahs (this is how I read the post you linked to). I think establishing such a norm is more likely to create a lot of Boo Radleys than it is, to say, force a powerful person out of public life in disgrace. I also think (as I stated above) that setting such a norm harms our ability to have a fair criminal justice system by de facto destroying impartiality, to the extent there even is any.

That said, I do think people (as the author does), must be free to advocate for others to disassociate with anyone for any reason. If people want to listen that's their business, and in some instances it may well be completely justified. She's in the right to do it, but I don't think people who chose not to listen are any less in the right (absent some other inside information).

Regarding the Ghomeshi case itself, it sounds like the state lacked evidence, and all of the victims had serious credibility problems (the e-mails disclosed would seem to me to render conviction, at least at this particular trial virtually impossible). Does that mean he's innocent? Of course not, but it could all just as easily be gossip and hearsay. The fact that there are multiple accusers and a history of rumors doesn't mean anything (again, my understanding of the e-mails is that the accusations at issue in this trial were at least somewhat coordinated). Now, maybe he is really a bad guy who has managed to get away with some horrible things, but there's also the lessons from the Crucible, or for a more recent, real life example, the McMartin preschool trials. Without convincing evidence I give the benefit of the doubt.

Lastly, regarding my tone and posting style, I did not intend to say anything about your personal life, past experiences, or otherwise, and I am sorry for appearing that way. I try to be as direct as possible, especially with viewpoints that differ from my own. I do that because I've always thought that was the best way to show that an argument is being respected and taken seriously. I only used the word "anecdote" in the sense that I was looking at your story as anecdotal evidence about the broader topics. It was not meant to imply that I didn't take it seriously or as a slight. I like to debate policy and can see how that approach might seem insensitive when it comes to this subject matter. Again I did not (and do not) intend to be mean-spirited or have any ill-will.