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Comment by Peritract

2 days ago

What about when the courts don't do the job?

A lot of people are understandably low on trust for a legal system that doesn't do anything about multiple highly-public sexual offenders.

> What about when the courts don't do the job?

Well, then you'd presumably fall back onto the old witch hunt; plenty of puritanical mobs are still around to say something like "What about when the courts don't do the job".

Good thing we don't live in those unenlightened days, eh?

  • MLK famously said 'a riot is the language of the unheard'; if you want people to avoid social pressure (note: not a lynch mob -- no physical harm), you have to give them a better, fairer alternative.

    A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.

    • Doesn't matter how you dress it up, persecuting someone on the basis of absolutely no evidence other than victim testimony is, for all practical purposes, the modern equivalent of pointing at the witch and shrieking.

      > A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.

      They have no valid reasons. No system is perfect. Claiming that the system getting it wrong 1 out of every 1000 times is a valid reason is just stupid; no system is perfect.

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    • There are a good number of what many would consider heinous behaviors that are not crimes. Even if our current system of justice worked perfectly, we would still be left with a basket of people who no one wanted to be associated with, but whom had, legally at least, "done nothing wrong."

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    • Alternatively you could identify the minority of people who tend to start riots and exclude them from society since they're almost always outsiders who resent being outsiders.

"Do the job" depends a lot on what the facts are. Unfortunately, unless you were actually there, you can't know perfectly.

It's a matrix: a perfect system would always punish the guilty and refuse to punish the innocent.

Without perfect information, you have to choose: will you bias the outcome punish the innocent, or to not punish the guilty?

Truly naive to think that the legal system that is currently shielding an offender as nefarious as Epstein is the place to turn to for reasonable treatment of sexual abuse victims.

Not saying people should leap to letter signing, but it also misses the mark to suggest that the US legal system will resolve the issues these kinds of actions cause.

  • who said anything about the US? the article isn't even talking about the US?

    it seems that the author lives in Germany and that he went to court in Britain: https://pretty.direct/consentorder.pdf

    • I did. In response to the thread starter, who made a generalized statement.

      If I've missed an implication that limited their suggestion to specific regions, them I'm happy to retract. But what I'm seeing is a general suggestion, so I've extrapolated that out and tried to apply it to a hypothetical where the advice might be appropriate.

      Feels like maybe you've assumed that the thread starter was scoping the suggestion to the regions where this offense occurred. Again, I don't see that implication in the text, but I feel like it's an entirely reasonable assumption. That being the case, I don't fault anyone for thinking only in those terms. But I also don't think I was out of line to engage with the thread starters points in the way that I did.

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    • The UK justice system has its own issues, and its own high-profile offenders without consequences. I'm not as familiar with Germany, but I imagine it has the same.

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