The increasing stupidity of hate crimes laws

NYT reports on how hate crimes laws are now being used to ramp up prosecution efforts against people who defraud the elderly. Setting the scene:

In the public’s imagination, the classic hate crime is an assault born of animus against a particular ethnicity or sexual orientation, like the case of the Long Island man convicted in April of killing an Ecuadorean immigrant after hunting for Hispanics to beat up.

But in Queens since 2005, at least five people have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, committing a very different kind of hate crime — singling out elderly victims for nonviolent crimes like mortgage fraud because they believed older people would be easy to deceive and might have substantial savings or home equity.

Got your barf bag ready?

The legal thinking behind the novel method is that New York’s hate crimes statute does not require prosecutors to prove defendants “hate” the group the victim belongs to, merely that they commit the crime because of some belief, correct or not, they hold about the group.

So if John goes around punching teenagers because John think teenagers are stupid, can John be convicted of a hate crime? He doesn’t hate them, he just believes they are stupid. Do you see how fraught with peril  this could be?

On a more general scale, hate crimes laws are well-intentioned, but so arbitrary to judge and difficult to enforce that they should probably go away. If person A of race A beats up person B of race B, who determines whether person A did it because person B was of race B or because person B was being a jerk? To me, a crime is a crime. The law should be blind to anything but the readily determined facts. If you murder an old person because you hate old people, you would be more morally repugnant to me than the average murderer, but no more or less guilty of the crime.

Read Full Post »

Peter Orszag’s defense of public sector pay rates

I didn’t really care about Peter Orszag’s decision to step down from OMB, but Veronique de Rugy had a good post at the Corner about it. Namely, just this OMB blog post done by Orszag that she linked to. Money quote from Orszag:

Especially in these difficult economic times, everyone is understandably concerned about the performance and salaries of our federal workers (which is one reason why the President is freezing salaries and bonuses for all political appointees).  And if, as some media reports claim, federal workers were earning roughly $8,000 more than private-sector workers in occupations that exist both in the government and private sector for no reason at all, that would be troubling. But the truth is that a comparison of federal and private-sector pay, even by occupation, is misleading because the employees hired by the federal government often have higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector – even within the same occupations.

That’s such a stupid, overly simplistic thing to say. Are all degrees created equal? Just because a federal employee has a degree from University of Phoenix makes him better than another worker without a useless piece of paper from a degree mill? Furthermore, does that include the college degrees obtained on the job by federal employees that we the taxpayers helped pay for? I could tell Peter Orszag some great stories from my seasonal gig at the IRS about my boss and her stories of barely passing freshman writing courses at a local community college; barely passing them, of course, because the federal government doesn’t pay if you fail.

Read Full Post »

Faisal Shahzad and blowback

Faisal Shahzad, the idiot who tried to blow up a car in Times Square with some firecrackers, has plead guilty. In the same Corner post that tipped me to that story, Daniel Foster focuses on Shahzad’s statement that attacks will continue until the U.S. abandons Muslim lands. I think Ron Paul had a particularly good grasp of that in the 2008 GOP primary debates when he advocated for the blowback theory against the shameless scaremongering of Rudy Giuliani. This “the terrorists hate us for our freedoms” stuff is just silly; the terrorists hate us because we are throwing drones at them, blowing up wedding parties and operating bases in Saudi Arabia.

Glenn Greenwald takes up the same claim. Money quote:

This proves only what it proves.  The issue here is causation, not justification.   The great contradiction of American foreign policy is that the very actions endlessly rationalized as necessary for combating Terrorism — invading, occupying and bombing other countries, limitless interference in the Muslim world, unconditional support for Israeli aggression, vast civil liberties abridgments such as torture, renditions, due-process-free imprisonments — are the very actions that fuel the anti-American hatred which, as the U.S. Government itself has long recognized, is what causes, fuels and exacerbates the Terrorism we’re ostensibly attempting to address.

It’s really quite simple:  if we continue to bring violence to that part of the world, then that part of the world — and those who sympathize with it — will continue to want to bring violence to the U.S. […]

[Bonus: Andrew Sullivan quotes Spencer Ackerman noticing that Shahzad’s bomb and training only cost $12,000. I’d bet the NYPD has probably spent more money than that for photocopies related to the case alone.]

Read Full Post »

Headscratcher

The Globe and Mail reports that a court in Quebec has ruled in favor of a Jesuit high school in Montreal that had been forced to replace its Catholic ethics course with a secular one. More after the jump.

Read Full Post »

McChrystal’s MacArthur moment?

Newsrooms and blogs went a bit wild today with the release of Rolling Stone‘s new profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, overseer of NATO’s war in Afghanistan. The profile itself is here. It’s not too long and it’s a good, classically Rolling Stone sort of read, so I recommend it. Full rundown of reactions, mine and others, after the jump.

Read Full Post »

Update

Updates will be along later tonight. The blogosphere has been as active as any day in recent memory today with the news of Rolling Stone‘s McChrystal interview. As a result, the winnowing process has taken a bit longer than normal.

Read Full Post »

School choice

NYT ran a pro-charter schools op-ed. My analysis after the jump.

Read Full Post »

A trip into the “ugh” zone

Lucky you, you get a double-dip today. The flavor is largely the same, though, since both have to do with the vile ways America is treating suspected terrorists. Full coverage after the jump.

Read Full Post »