Comment by lelanthran
1 day ago
> 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.
There was a system for the witch trials as well; the accusations were just the starting point for the sham trials, torture, and executions. Are you okay with that because it was a system, even if imperfect?
Our justice system doesn't fail 1 in a 1000 times, particularly when talking about sex crimes. It fails far more frequently than that, given the prevalence of sexual assault and the rarity of convictions [1]. Additionally, there's an aspect that justice must be seen to be done: high profile repeat offenders walking free damages confidence in the system out of proportion to their frequency.
As above, if you want people to use a system, the system has to work.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/07/the-s...
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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."
Do you have a solution to that that doesn't involve limiting freedom of association and speech?
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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.