State of the Discussion

Did I say we should do nothing? In fact I said the opposite multiple times. I'd just prefer a solution that will do more good than harm.

I spend a lot of my professional life thinking about housing affordability, and I don't think inequality is the main issue - for one thing inequality is really only growing in the US and housing affordability is a problem all over the place.

The culprit I would finger is urban planning laws - the problem with letting the voters decide how land will be used is that the median voter is a home owner and is therefore indifferent to the problem of insufficient supply. There are ways of remedying this, they involve constraining the ways local governments can restrict development, and moving away from needing government permission for development to more of a tax-based system where doing something that's disruptive to your neighbours requires you to compensate them.

We shouldn't be asking how we can classify the writer; we should be asking whether his position holds water. I don't care what his background is. He lays out his position sufficiently clearly that we don't have to decode it. If Le Pen had written this, should we reject the argument on that alone?

Social security as it actually exists is not a Ponzi scheme in any meaningful sense of the term. It's a pay-as-you-go social transfer. We just need to be honest about what that means.

This is another issue where the rhetoric on either side makes it much more difficult to clearly assess the issue and find a way forward.

...it’s “what’s wrong with the Rust Belt?”. That’s an important question, and one that deserves an answer...

It is. Some of the problems the Rust Belt faces, trivial and otherwise: the weather sucks, on average; lots of relatively-isolated medium-sized cities; infrastructure problems (eg, regionally there's most of a trillion dollars needed to fix the sewer systems); plenty of metro areas where the urban core's population crashed and has never recovered; relatively shrinking population (the states in an extended Rust Belt are on pace to lose 7-8 seats in the US House after the 2020 census); years of talent (human capital) drain.

This is a region with the population of a good-sized European country where, with a limited number of exceptions, the economy has been suffering for decades, pulling other things down with it. There's no obvious or easy way out.

The rape kit showed she had sex, presumably. And her willingness to testify is not much, these days. Do I think it's possible she is lying? Absolutely. And so would many others, which is possibly why the DAs offer these deals.

" The idea that the law there shouldn’t count – or, worse, that she was overcharging for the sexual slavery she was forced into – is bonkers."

That's a bizarre interpretation. I said nothing about whether or not the law "should" count, only that it doesn't seem to be a typical charge. Statutory rape was not designed for prostitution. If it were, every john hiring an underage hooker would be charged with rape and tagged as a sexual offender, which I'm pretty sure is not happening.

Nor did I say she was overcharging, simply that in a country where sex can be obtained for far less, she was setting a fairly high price for her services. But it may be that she only pretended to prostitution, but in fact was always stealing from her johns. Who knows?

Am I sympathetic? No. But I do think 51 years is excessive for a 16 year old.

Doesn't SocSec still pay out to marrieds? That always seemed something that should go by the wayside. Or perhaps it did and I missed it.

Any woman who hasn't worked for 40 years and is now expecting to live off her husband's contributions--and being paid beyond that--is who should be working at Walmart.

It is only a ponzi scheme if the money paid in is treated as a supposed investment. But its not, it is a tax and tax monies are, rather explicitly, used to pay current retirees. The so-called social security trust fund is a fairly transparent accounting fiction. It is no more a ponzi scheme than any other tax and transfer program. It would be rather silly to object to any given public retirement policy on the basis that the amount paid to retirees is funded by current earners.

So we're going to solve it by making it impossible for her to argue what was going through her head when she pulled the trigger in the first place.

And we can not only call it "justice" we can question the bona fides of any who disagree with us that it is.

@jaybird Nothing mattered when it came to her: not that she was 16, not that she was being forced into prostitution, not that she had endured significant abuse, not that she was being routinely raped, nothing. Prosecutors dismissed all of that and pursued the most maximum penalty possible.

Meanwhile, in two other cases, prosecutors said, "Ahh, no big deal, let's go easy on these guys," for no obvious reason beyond an apparent desire to go extremely easy on them.

That's the fundamental difference here.

@jaybird Right, which is part of the law's failing that I'm criticizing. She wasn't afforded anything for her situation. Prosecutors pursued the maximum available punishment for her.

I find I'm still thinking about it all this time later. I am often very squeamish about watching movies with a lot of death in it but for whatever reason in this case it felt like it was worth it, for what I got out of it.

I hope you're feeling better soon (if not already)

@jaybird It already is. (Although, in her case, extenuating circumstances ought to be considered: she was an abuse victim forced into sexual slavery, being routinely sold to adults.) In the case of an abuser, the extenuating circumstances are that the abuse was not intended to kill, which ought not be any excuse at all.

I so totally agree with this statement.

Every time after I hear it, it wakes me up going through my head in the middle of the night for days afterwards.

@michelle-kerr You're describing Jacob Anderson as, potentially, a victim here? And "little support for the charge" means what exactly? What more would you have her provide exactly, beyond the immediate rape kit (which showed what she said) and her willingness to testify?

As for your comments regarding Cyntoia Brown: she was a 16-year-old girl. The idea that the law there shouldn't count - or, worse, that she was overcharging for the sexual slavery she was forced into - is bonkers.

@jaybird If you make an intentional decision to do something to another person, you don't get to claim that the resulting outcome was an "accident" or "unintended" or anything else. That seems extremely obvious and easy.

Not the worst article I've ever read. There's plenty to disagree with, though.

What strikes me most is the attitude that history just happens. Something inevitable (hence not worth specifying) happened in 1945, and something else in 1989. Now the US is leaving the scene, and at some point China will do the same. History dictates such things. Military affairs have nothing to do with it. Russia will not be a threat to Europe for the same yet to be mentioned reason. What to do about Muslim terrorist countries is anyone's guess; free trade only requires that sailors abandon ship under threat; France probably never had colonies and Charlemagne and Napoleon are just rumors.

I agree with much (not all) of what jaybird sez (I can't figure out how to quote people here), but in general, I'm struck by the vast differences between the cases and the absurdity of linking them.

The Justin Schneider case was widely recognized as outrageous, receiving coverage everywhere. The local community has responded. Like the Stanford case, I can't even accept the argument that the judges and lawyers subscribe to the "boys will be boys" defense--I mean, stupid much? These aren't 90 year olds.

The Jacob Anderson case, on the other hand, could be easily viewed as an injustice from either end. If Anderson had had consensual sex while slightly drunk, any lawyer would have told him to take this deal. And that'd be terribly unfair, given what happened. There's very little support for the charge. Consider him innocent, and what happened next seems incredibly unfair. I simply don't have much sympathy for the "girl is at a party, drinks something, and then is raped repeatedly by a guy who otherwise has no history of doing this" charge anymore. Sorry. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. I distrust any rendition that doesn't make this clear.

The Brown case seems completely normal. She shot a guy in cold blood and stole his considerable property. This after being paid a fairly exorbitant chunk of money for sex. I have no sympathy. Pretty sure it's not normal to charge men having sex with 16-year-old prostitutes with statutory rape, even if it's technically correct. 51 years seems excessive. It's also pretty obvious that her case, which is 12 years old, is being revived as a celebrity cause.

So there really doesn't seem to be any connection, certainly not enough to make the case. there are countless cases of injustice of every race, religion, gender, color, immigration status. Kind of like "pick 3 cases at random and pretend trend."

Buy a house where? San Francisco, California? Plymouth, Michigan? Hey, you can get a nice 2 bedroom, 1 bath in Grand Forks, North Dakota for only $139,300! (You can probably talk them into paying the closing costs for you!)

For the same reason any country would agree to a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

You want to buy and sell with us, you negotiate on what is important to us.

I don't know if you have to be a Ravelry member or not (it's free) to view patterns (I'm a member) but I'm just gonna leave this here for all of those who grew up with "Classic" Sesame Street.

(There is also a knitted version for those who prefer to knit, but my experience knitting on chenille yarn have told me I'd rather crochet with it)

I also have something like a dozen My Little Ponies made off of a crochet deer pattern I lightly modified....I am a little, um, weird, about amigurumi.

@Chip-Daniels
If minimum wages are to be adjusted to the different standards and costs of living in each nation, what makes you think that the wages in currently low wage countries would be high enough to the stem the flow of jobs to those countries and why would any of those countries agree to such an arrangement?

Revisiting our understanding of intent would still allow for distinction between the two while not rewarding abusive murders savvy enough to claim that her death was an accident.

Please. I would love to see your proposal for a new understanding of intent. Please make it technical, however. Something that we can write in legislation that will make it interprable by judges and will result in the outcomes that you want.

I would love to see a new and improved "Malice Aforethought". It's time, after all.

We know why the law doesn’t allow for those sorts of things: because it would empower the wrong people.

Yeah, now I *REALLY* want to see your new definition.

The people of the US? Sure. The Rust Belt specifically? No. And make no mistake just about everyone who doesn't work for (or own a lot of shares in) those old steelbelt industries is better off for freer trade.

And I would be all in favour of getting those special provisions taken out of the deal too. It irks me that such provisions are included in what should be quite straightforward deals.

Monsieur Houellebecq identifies as a Marxist that believed the Far Left took a wrong turn during the 1960s. Despite being a Marxist, he is strangely drawn to religious groups because of their strong communal identities. So pretty much, what you wrote. An anti-liberal broadly defined.