From Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) accepted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948
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Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
I get that the political system could be better, but having been to places that actually are not governed by the rule of law, I can assure you that the US is doing quite well on that front. When there is actually no rule of law, consequences include:
+ entire regions / areas where merely visiting those areas invites a highly non-trivial (think, more than 10% chance) chance of being kidnapped or murdered
+ every neighborhood and business has substantial, often military-grade private security
+ if credit exists at all, it exists outside of any formal banking structure and will have interest rates that are north of 30% APR, sometimes north of 100% APR. I've genuinely seen interest rates on credit as high as 2% *per day*, and these are rates that the local population is willing to pay for certain short term expenses (like food)
+ families that maintain good social relationships with the local police/militants/whoever-has-guns live substantially better lives than people without good social connections to the local authorities.
+ Travelers are told on repeat: "it's really not safe here for non-locals, you should stay inside and also reconsider being in this part of the world at all"
+ If the travelers are there for business reasons, they are probably assigned 24/7 armed guards (as many as 4 guards per traveler, each guard carrying full-auto weapons) by the locals, provided for free.
And while the US maybe has a neighborhood here or there which might be like this, every part of every major city in the country has more rule of law than the above.
You will never convince those who think the US is a state of lawlessness that the US is (mostly) a lawful, free and prosperous place. They literally cannot comprehend what living in a corrupt and mostly lawless society is like. They've never experienced anything even remotely close to it. It's like someone who grew up in the tropics and complains that they're "freezing to death!" because it's 50F. Someone from the arctic tells them about what real cold is like... they literally cannot understand.
> They literally cannot comprehend what living in a corrupt and mostly lawless society is like.
I doubt that most Americans comprehend what is living in a well managed citizens-first country were people are represented and many laws are passed just because the working class wants them.
If you compare the USA with the worst places on earth, then it is a good place. I hope that Americans aim higher and want to compare themselves with the best places to live in the world.
What you describe is a goal we should absolutely strive for - and one we are clearly falling short of. At the same time it's foolish to describe the US as being on the opposite side of the spectrum. I dare say it's even dangerous, as it encourages a sense of hopelessness and disregard for laws and civility.
> it encourages a sense of hopelessness and disregard for laws and civility.
That is true. I hope that people sees my comment as a push to do better, not a reason to give up. Things are never perfect, anywhere. And that's why we should continue pushing for more equality, defending the environment and making better the live of working class people.
that's funny, i see hope (reproductive futurity/the child; see edelman, hocquenghem) as what keeps us under the yoke of capital and oppression, and a disregard for laws and civility as a brief act of jouissance and a moment out of time where one could experience actual freedom and liberty. positive nihilism as a praxis that rejects all external constraints, imposed social mores, authorities, etc. it's only dangerous if you're currently benefiting from the various systems of oppression the hold up capital and civ.
I usually compare the US to Switzerland. I live in Boston, but was born in Lugano (southern tip of Switzerland).
Switzerland has an excellent quality of life, far better education system, remarkable stability, and amazingly good healthcare. The companies pay people well, give them adequate time off, and has 16+ weeks of maternity leave.
There are some pretty significant downsides in Switzerland, too. It's highly conservative, hard to make friends with the Swiss, and fairly expensive, depending on where you live.
We live in Boston because of family. It's a decent enough place to live, and from my perspective, just about the closest that the US gets to Europe.
Denmark's been in the top 3 of the "World Happiness Report" since the report started, the rest of the Nordic countries are always near the top of the list, too. Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world 9 years running.
That seems like a good place to start looking.
(commissioned by the UN, polls are run by Gallup, report is put out by Oxford, and the editorial board is multinational and doesn't have any Nordic nationals; seems reasonably unbiased to me)
It wasn't easy for me to interpret these rankings though, or how they came up with the life evaluation score. More explanation around that would have been helpful. The column headers have hover-descriptions, but they don't really say how the values were calculated.
Anyway - it does seem that Scandinavian countries are well represented at the top. That's not too surprising. Costa Rica at #4 is very unintuitive to me. Viet Nam at #1 for freedom is REALLY surprising to me, having visited there a number of times and having many Vietnamese friends. Likewise, The United States at 104 on freedom seems very weird.
No you got it wrong. Many of us understand it very well, some of us even come from such places.
The thing is, bar for success is simply higher than what US provides, and its not even that hard, just behave like a decent human being. The thing US provides if you don't have US passport is... not worth commenting on.
Americans always fail to comprehend that outsiders judge them by how they act outwards to citizens of other countries.
Precisely 0 of your presidents were ever punished for any action against citizens of other countries, despite starting aggressive wars, breaking peace and massacring people, or helping genocidares and war criminals escape justice, attacking international institutions that try to prevent that, etc.
>Precisely 0 of your presidents were ever punished for any action against citizens of other countries
How many presidents were EVER punished for actions against citizens of other countries, unless other countries forced the president's country to do this (for example by winning a war)
> Americans always fail to comprehend that outsiders judge them by how they act outwards to citizens of other countries.
Americans are not their government. Judging individuals based on the actions of their government is the type of ignorant behavior that breeds exactly the type of tribalism corrupt government officials are able to thrive in.
Rule of law is when laws as written by legislators are executed by the government as written and, when appropriate, judged by the judiciary as written, and at each step the words as written supersede the whims and feelings of the people involved. It doesn't imply that the state can't do anything meaningful because it's so hamstrung.
Statements like "the US does not have the rule of law" are laughable Reddit-tier comments that just make me sad for the current state of HN.
The president and his cronies are openly immune to any recourse from the law at the moment. They are doing widespread and overt corruption and insider trading on a daily basis on scales that have never been seen in human history before. There is not any attempt at stopping that by any organ of government.
Separately, internal security forces have been killing citizens without any cause nor investigation after the fact, in contravention to all of the supposed "rights" those citizens were once said to have.
These are the things the rule of law is about. It is meant to be a higher power than any individual, no matter their position.
The U.S. does not have the rule of law any longer. It's best to look the truth in the face rather than hide from it.
Mostly you should assess rule of law by threat to you and people you know and not by what it seems like other people are able to get away with.
Yes, a big part of the idea is that laws are meant to also apply to the powerful, but it's difficult to accurately assess situations that are far away from you.
What a nonsensical statement. From a distance it’s pretty clear that there is no rule of law anymore in the USA. Yes, it’s partially functioning, but that’s not the rule.
If you're a cop, ICE agent, your neighbour is black, you're a US diplomat's wife (one of which murdered a young man here in the UK and ran away with no consequence, and the American state refused to send her murdering arse back), or you have enough money, by the looks of it you could do that without consequence.
I’m more inclined to agree with you, but the replies to this did strike me as darkly funny. These exceptions for the chosen in-group are some of the hallmarks of fascism, and this administration has leveraged several other popular tropes as well—fetishizing Greek/Roman mythologies, hobbling academia and the press, ethnic cleansing, Christian Nationalism, revisionist history, idolatry, eugenics, etc.. Fascism is a term I would have called absurdly exaggerated just a few years ago, but to the extent that the President and his administration are the leaders in both policy and diplomacy, I think it’s probably fair to level a judgement that their behavior is the contemporary set standard for the United States. This is a fascist country right now.
But I agree with you that nuance-free oversimplifications are likely unhelpful in any meaningful discussion.
These things don’t usually happen overnight, and for the vast majority of the public it will never be directly visible. It’s not like someone flips a “Anti-Antifa” switch and a bunch of ultra-starched uniformed troops start goose-stepping through Toledo. It’s a developing series of dynamic events, many of them will seem rational, justified even, but the result is concentrated executive power, a toothless legislature, a complicit judiciary, and a pliant mainstream press. I’m sure there are lots of people who will recognize these for what they are: an alarming number of dominoes falling towards a totalitarian dictatorship.
However the United States is a big, complex beast of a country, and the judiciary has not been fully captured, and neither has the legislature. All we need to do to stop this creeping authoritarianism is show up in-force and vote overwhelmingly against it this November. They will obviously try to confuse the issue with any close calls, and use such opportunities to assert dominion over local/state governments. We cannot let that happen. The best way to avoid such a scenario is to show up strong enough to make the results beyond question. That’s the ultimate test that we are still a nation of laws, and I am cautiously optimistic.
What? No. Rule of Law should be assessed by how well the law applies to everybody. The wealthy often get away with serious law breaking in the US, the poor are hammered down with the law over petty crimes. That is defying the Rule of Law any way you try to look at it. The whole point of The Rule of Law is to prevent unfair application of the law to benefit the few over the many.
It takes months or years for courts to intervene and even then they often set aside rulings because they expect appeals. All the while the abuses continue. How many years do you suppose we'll have to wait to see the Trump family subject to tax law?
> It takes months or years for courts to intervene and even then they often set aside rulings because they expect appeals.
Interesting. Again, how do you reconcile that theory with the with the large number of court cases involving Trump's specific actions that managed to make it all the way up to the Supreme Court, leading to many clear rulings against Trump, all within the first year and a half of his current term?
U.S. democracy is still very strong and freedoms are protected, when compared with with other superpowers like China, Russia. My personal metric for comparison is: in those countries if you would make public jokes about the leader of the country to a large audience, at best you would end in prison, at worst you and your family would be death.
Dictators expect that people fear them, they control by fear and terror. If you can make jokes about leaders you show that you don't fear them, you show that they don't control you.
But the increase in corruption in US goverment indicates slow progress towards authoritarianism. This can be slow process, it can take years or decades, as was seen with Hitler and Stalin.
ICE excessive force use, encouraged by Trump and welcomed in large part of US population, could be the next step. This piece by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller describes the progression of authoritarianism:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
No, momentary abuses of power do not mean the US has no rule of law. The law is what put Trump in office in the first place.
If you aren’t glued to the news and doomscrolling you wouldn’t know anything about Trump and ICE. Day to day for nearly everyone is exactly the same rule of law where you can call police for a murder and roving gangs can’t setup shakedown checkpoints.
> Day to day for nearly everyone is exactly the same rule of law where you can call police for a murder and roving gangs can’t setup shakedown checkpoints.
Is that your threshold for "rule of law"? And I'm sorry, but what separates ICE from a roving gang setting up shakedown checkpoints, and executing at point blank range with no repercussions dissenters?
That’s how the US got here in the first place. Not much of what the president and his friends and family are new to the US, now its more daring and freely talked about and normalized, like in a state where there’s no rule of law. You don’t need to be glued to doomscrolling to learn that a government is turning laws to punish terrorists inwards but you need to be glued to something to know its been in the making for over 20 years.
Excuse me. The law(14th Amendment section 3 specifically) clearly prohibited Trump from being eligible for federal office. That the Supreme Court abrograted state's rights to run elections free of federal interference, not to mention the lack of recusal given the blatant conflicts of interest, is a separate matter altogether.
> If you aren’t glued to the news and doomscrolling you wouldn’t know anything about Trump and ICE.
This is such an outrageously privileged and out-of-touch statement. Maybe YOU wouldn't know about Trump and ICE if you didn't read the news, but that's your personal microcosm. Please be more mindful about damage and harm done when you're ascribing your personal worldview onto others' actual reality.
When the president can just pick the judges he wants and then have them change laws that have existed for decades on a whim, any kind of meaningful rule of law is absent.
Reddit-tier comment, says the guy whos never had his face smashed into the hood of a car by a sheriff deputy. We got something in the US and it often wears robes and badges, but it's not law written by legislatures.
Does anyone remember when you posted on a place like Something Awful or Facepunch getting banned for a day for saying something so fucking stupid you needed to learn a lesson? No? Anyone?
The quality of the posts in Reddit grew worse and worse. To the point that I stopped visiting it frequently and my use of hacker news grew and grew. Exactly the same thing is happening to hacker news. I guess as it's reverting to the mean.
There's still reasonable civil debate here. But recently I was surprised to be called a fascist for pointing out the Nazis were national socialists. The poster included comments like "don't engage with this person he's obviously x y and z." I'm starting to see this kind of nonsense more and more on hacker news.
When you can't trust your highest court is impartial the whole system is untrustworthy. Unfortunately the US system is designed in such a way that the highest court can't be trusted (life terms, appointed by the sitting president).
> the highest court can't be trusted (life terms, appointed by the sitting president)
Do you really think that judges that have to run for reelection every few years can be more trusted to rule on cases fairly, according to the law, rather than bending to popular whims?
Supreme court justice positions should be limited to around thirteen (or some other prime number) years and should have mandatory cognitive capacity tests given yearly that are videotaped and broadcast live. The tests should be written by a nonpartisan panel of doctors chosen randomly from an applicant pool like a jury and refreshed every five years.
Look at the UK for a much better system. It's got problems too but there's no concept of stacking the court in your favour because you were lucky enough someone died while you were in power.
The US just has a bad system. It’s easily influenced by money and politics and that’s exactly why the rest of the world considers the US a ruled by money instead of the law.
You really think someone who didnt speak for decades and gets rvs for gifts and cannot be taken out of office cares about anything other than the soft power social system hes in? Whose wife sent texts about jan 6th insurrection? Bad faith be bad faithing
Low standards for you doesn't change the higher standards the US is designed to have. People voted very badly by not rejecting republicans. That does not mean those who did not should give up on restoring higher standards. States do have powers too.
Man while reading your points i was thinking your last sentence will be a sarcastic note that implies that these points all do actually apply to the US. Of course the US as a whole is not comparable to other parts of the world where these points absolutely apply but points 1,2,4 and 5 seem to apply to a significant extent.
What parts of the United States can you visit which have a >10% chance of being kidnapped or murdered? That means for every 100 visitors, 10 people don't come home. I honestly don't think that applies to a single neighborhood in the entire country. If murder/kidnapping rates get remotely close to that high, the FBI steps in.
I also can't think of any US cities where neighborhoods have military grade armed security. Sure, there are places where every local business has an armed guard, but that's not really the same as hiring a trained private militia. The armed guards are for protecting against petty theft, not for protecting against organized crime.
On point four, I'm not sure if there are places in the US where minorities need to maintain relationships social relationships with cops as a survival mechanic, but it certainly doesn't apply to most cities, and I don't think it applies to anyone who is white.
On point five, I don't think you understand. There are parts of the world where having white skin will get you, quite literally, reminders every 15 minutes "hey it's really not safe for you here, do you want to hang out inside my shop while I call you a taxi?" No part of the US is like that for travelers. I know there are occasionally ICE raids that make the news, but "hey you strictly cannot be outside without a local chaperone" is just not a thing in the US.
this sounds like an absolutely wholesome story where multiple strangers donate their attention and time to help somebody who was not a victim in any way but just merely lost.
I wouldn't want my wife lost in Compton either but if the good guys outnumbered the bad guys by Inf% then it must not really be that bad. What would happen if it were Kinshasa instead of Compton.
Point 1: I said "to an extent" but i concede that it is nowhere close to 10%, but isn't murder state law? The FBI does not step in for that or does it? And the homicide clearance rate has dropped to 50% (72% in 1980) in recent years, for half of the murder nobody is ever held accountable.
Point 2: I was thinking that the most heavily armed private citizenry counts as "private security". More guns than people. Also far more private security guards than cops. To me that is exactly what "private security everywhere" looks like.
Point 4: To be honest i think point 3 actually applies to any place anywhere. Someone who knows the local police gets away with far more shit in my small german village. But "doesn't apply to anyone who is white" clearly is a sign of lack of rule of law. Laws should be race-independent and statistics show that in the US it's anything but.
Point 5: No chaperone-level warnings, but the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan all issue standing travel advisories about US gun violencem, the UK literally tells citizens "try not to walk through quieter areas alone, especially at night." And there were recommendations i got against business travel to the US especially with company issued equipment.
I mean, man, currently the US is not looking good from my point of view.
I have a bunch of american friends who say immigration and everything else is ruining Germany. But looking at the stats it's looking quite okay:
Germany vs US:
- Murder: 0.91 vs 5.7 per 100k
- Rape: 14 vs 40 per 100k
- Violent crime overall: 253 vs 380 per 100k
- Murder/homicide clearance: ~95% vs 50%
- Private security guard to police ratio: 0.9:1 vs 1.9:1
- Police killings: 10 vs 1100 per year
- Incarceration rate: 67 vs 600 per 100k
The highest incarceration rate in the developed world, ~4% of the world's population, ~25% of its prisoners. Are Americans just incredibly prone to being criminals? No. The crime rates above show the violent crime gap is ~1.5x, not 9x, and property crime is comparable or even lower than Germany's. ~95% of convictions are plea bargains extracted under threat of a "trial penalty", hundreds of thousands sit in jail pre-trial because they can't afford cash bail, and sentences run far longer for the same offenses. The US locks up 9x more people because it chooses to, not because Americans are more criminal. A state that imprisons its own population at Cuba and Rwanda rates while half its murders go unsolved, sells bail to the highest bidder, and runs on guilty pleas instead of trials. I would not correct anyone if they told me the US was not governed by the rule of law.
While there are things less than ideal in the US, this is absolutely not the case.
The "Rule of Law" applies to everybody, including the President (recent decisions of the supreme court not withstanding - though they are very unfortunate).
You have provisions for the freedom of press, freedom of speech, to be free from unreasonable searches, a reliable court system, etc, etc.
Searches at the border are murky legal territory, and I think that there is a problem here. You may also argue that the president and senate have too much power, or that gerrymandering is a serious problem (which it is). But from these you cannot conclude a general lawlessness.
(I'm from North-Western Europe, living in the US for a few decades now, so I feel that I have at least some data to compare.)
I think even by the second word you're outside bicycling, US isn't governed by anything at this point, except some rich people.
> In some cases it works much better than "criminal's have rights, victims doesn't" Continental law system in Europe.
What on earth are you talking about, "victims" definitively have rights in most European countries, but the fact you seemingly think there is one "Continental law system in Europe" clearly shows you have zero idea what you're talking about, Europe isn't one country with one law system across the continent...
Who currently governs the US who isn't rich? Or do you disagree with that it's a bad idea that only rich people govern? I understand you want me to say nothing, that much is clear, but I don't understand what specific part you disagree with though.
You should make this as your life credo.
Change "sometimes" into "always" till you learn something.
It's called Continental law system, because main principles are same.
And above that, there's EU legislation which is mandatory to all member states and is always to be adopted in national laws.
And your bullshit about law working for the rich in US is really stupid. Extremly rich are almost untouchable everywhere in the World. Rich have a fighting chance of getting better outcome.
And poor people have chance tk seek justice against roughly equal opponent.
This is not about US, this is about how World works.
> You should make this as your life credo. Change "sometimes" into "always" till you learn something.
Somewhat of a paradox no? I'm guessing your belief here is that I learned something by what you just told me, so me not saying until now when I read your comment, is exactly what you wanted?
> It's called Continental law system, because main principles are same. And above that, there's EU legislation which is mandatory to all member states and is always to be adopted in national laws.
If you're under the belief that all countries in Europe have the same laws across borders because many countries have a civil law system, I'm not sure what to tell you, that's not how it works, and many countries have very different law systems, even if they come from the same origin. Neither would I say that countries "adopt EU legislation", but I guess that's a technicality. Usually you'd say that the countries implement their own laws based on the directives the European Commission comes up. But again, borderline nitpick, maybe better I don't mention this at all lest y'all get stuck on this particular point...
> This is not about US, this is about how World works.
Yeah, let me know when you understand how the entire world works friend ;) I won't claim to know that, although I do know home. But again, have fun, surely you'll get close! :)
Guess you'll never understand what is Continental law system.
Or what is the meaning of word principle.
Or what transposition is in terms of EU legislation.
Keep whining kiddo, that's the best proof that as always, your desperate attempt to portray yourself as someone knowledgeable, failed.
You can again give me one pathetic downvote ... that's your ultimate weapon. That will sure teach me a lesson for disrespecting big LLM gangsta with 96GB VRAM ... and all of sudden, crying for not being able to see tables in comments because all he has is mobile device.
Keep living your online fiction, slumdog millionaire.
Huh, that's different, a comment filled with just supposed insults? For what? :P Why are you so angry about it all? Why does nothing in your comment have anything to do with the topic at large? So many questions, and I hope, such an interesting reply to come.
> Europe isn't one country with one law system across the continent...
The Napoleonic Code is indeed pervasive across the continent. And, ignoring that, we have EU law, which is supra-statal law that most certainly and de facto has come to replace/impose on "local" laws.
Straw man argument. Everybody has rights in the EU, including people suspected of being criminals, and of course victims.
Arguing that in the EU victims have no rights is insulting for anyone reading your comment. That far-right view of the world is false and it is just trying to misinform and create hate.
What country does not have a law against destruction of evidence? It seems like arresting a person for a law that most countries have is following the rule of law.
Evidence of what? Had a crime been charged when the search was undertaken? You can't just declare things evidence in order to get unfettered access to them.
That is not how any of this works. Destruction of evidence is a crime regardless if you have been charged with a crime. This is the case under both federal and Georgia law.
Okay, and how are you supposed to know when your own property is evidence and when it's not, when you've committed no crime? That reasoning doesn't "work," so in fact that's not how it "works," it's simply unjust and presumes guilt.
Georgia law requires "intent" and federal law requires "knowingly" doing it. Being charged with a crime is completely irrelevant. You probably should take 2 minutes and read the law since it would have completely answered your question.
I would also say that in this case it is quite clear he intended and knowingly did this so he could be charged under either law. They were asking him for his phone in connection to an alleged crime and he provided the password which erases the phone.
I'd rather have you answer it, so thanks. My point is that if intent or knowledge is required, that means you must be aware of a crime by you or someone else. Assuming your property has remained under your control, and that you have committed no crime (which is always supposed to be the presumption), the chief way by which you would find out that your own property, that you can usually destroy freely, is now deemed "evidence" and not to be destroyed, is by being charged with a crime involving said property. Until you are charged, you don't know it's evidence. So the charge is not irrelevant. Anyone can read the damn law, I'm saying the law is bullshit and rests on circular reasoning. Charging with destroying evidence will in some cases require presuming guilt for the crime the evidence supposedly supports.
First, you are moving the goal posts. You were first talking about a person committing a crime and now you are talking about being aware of a crime.
Second, you only have to be aware that the police consider your phone to be evidence of a crime, which he was aware of, not have knowledge about the crime itself.
I don't think you understand the situation.
The feds told him they suspected evidence to be on the phone. He can't plead ignorance. He knew they thought there was evidence of a crime and gave them the duress code.
If a person did not know the phone had potential evidence then he wouldn't have intended or knowingly destroyed evidence and as such wouldn't be guilty of the crime...
If you read the law you would know you have no clue what you are talking about.
The so-called goalposts haven't moved. If anything I keep leading you to a place where you can score, only to have you keep kicking it into the corner for some reason. The goal is not over there, never was. And I don't think it's my fault you're disoriented. But it may help you to have it pointed out that I'm not strictly talking about this one guy who erased his phone. I'm talking about the circularity of evidence-destruction laws.
> You were first talking about a person committing a crime and now you are talking about being aware of a crime.
You must have me confused with someone else then. All of my words RE: crime are as follows:
had a crime been charged
you've committed no crime
aware of a crime
you have committed no crime
charged with a crime
presuming guilt for the crime
At no time have I talked about someone who has committed a crime. Part of the reason for that is that legally speaking, no one has committed a crime, unless and until evidence and due process have established the fact. Being guilty of a crime is a non-existent condition before such time. (Obviously we can talk about such a condition in everyday conversation, but I'm talking about what goes in the public record.) This also means "the crime" does not exist and "the evidence" also does not exist, hence my initial question, evidence of what?
But a charge can exist, an assertion. The moment the charge is made by an officer of the court (or yes, even the suspicion and subsequent investigation), that is the moment when "ordinary personal property" turns into "evidence" subject to evidence-destruction laws. It is as simple as one person declaring it to be so. Given that this can happen for invalid reasons (such as wrongful accusation of someone as persecution for exercising his First Amendment rights as in this case), or for no reason at all, the potential for injustice is high. The fact that "knowingly" and "intent" are written into the laws is a good thing, but insufficient to make them just, in my opinion.
On a personal note, for you to be such a dick at the end of your comment is of course against the site guidelines but is also ironic given your own apparent inability to get my point (i.e. it's you who doesn't know what I'm talking about, not me), and your demonstrated cognitive inflexibility, poor reading skills and apparent inexperience with truths most Americans hold to be self-evident.
If a person did not know the phone had potential evidence then he wouldn't have intended or knowingly destroyed evidence and as such wouldn't be guilty of the crime...
He is not guilty of the crime, even today, and remains innocent unless and until due process establishes it.
I don't think you understand the situation in this case. The person very clearly knew his phone was believed to have evidence of a crime. He then destroyed the evidence on the phone. This is one of the most clear cases of destruction of evidence there is. The only hope he has is to use the fact that he was denied his lawyer.
Now to show you are moving the goal posts, go back to one of your previous posts and read "Had a crime been charged when the search was undertaken?" and another one "how are you supposed to know when your own property is evidence and when it's not, when you've committed no crime?"
You clearly were trying to make a claim that a crime needs to be charged to be destruction of evidence.
You are guilty of committing a crime regardless if you are found guilty. If I murder somebody and I am not found guilty in a court would you say I am not guilty of committing the crime of murder?
I'm not going to address anything else since it is a complete waste of time discussing this with you.
A crime not having been committed, one of the chief ways you would find out that something is "evidence" is by someone charging you with a crime, as I said, and notice that I do not claim that's the ONLY way to find out. But "finding out" i.e. knowing, is required, for the crime of destruction of evidence to be on the table, as you said. This part of the point doesn't apply to the Tunick case, as I said. RE being colloquially guilty of a crime, "Obviously we can talk about such a condition in everyday conversation," as I said.
It's fine if you want to disengage; I've certainly had much more stimulating discussions, where it actually went somewhere, like a dance.
It is a mere declaration, as specified at the top of the page, that "is widely recognized as having inspired [...] the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties"
That does not make it an enforceable law. Moreover, treaties are agreements between countries, not laws, which a country can violate at will.
People might create supranational organizations like the UN or the ECHR, but that has, untimately, no enforcement power because that always belongs to sovereign countries. Violating a treaty can also lead to retaliation by other signatories or even war, but it still does not make a treaty law.
It might well be that the US has specific laws that prevent charging a citizen when they wipe their phone. But that must be a law passed by the US legislature, not a "universal declaration".
The US is currently governed by a dictator propped up by an oligarchy that can only do that because of the Citizens United supreme court decision. Until Citizens United is mitigated, and that appears to be starting to happen as states make laws that state you can't be on the ballot in their state if you take large, anonymous campaign donations from people who will want, and get, a return on their investment. Hawaii is either considering, or has passed just such a law. We don't even need a plurality of states to make similar laws, just the right ones. Look at a chart of campaign spending prior to, and following the Citizens United decision. Spoiler alert, it looks like a hockey stick standing upright.
One I belive has no intention of leaving office, and is trying to prevent the midterm elections from happening. Since the founding of the US, no elections have been delayed, or missed. Not once. Not during WWII, not after 9/11, never.
The failure that allowed trump to happen stems from one thing. Lack of imagination. The system in the US assumes that all of the politicians are at least attempting to argue in good faith. trump is more like a hurricane. he rolled in, fucked everthing up, and will roll out.
After November when the Democrat party has control of the upper and lower houses of congress, there are going to be investigations, grand jury indictments, and people will go to prison. They will also begin the work of closing some of the loopholes that were used to bypass how the government is supposed to operate.
Bribery and collusion existed well before Citizen's United, notably through shell PACs. Now there is a clear methodology that is less troublesome. Maybe behavior was amplified, but I doubt it.
No citizen voted for Citizens United. So it's inaccurate to say that we did.
Citizens United was a decision by an unelected group of federal judges we call the Supreme Court when a case was brought before them to determine if chump could have Navy Seal Team 6 assinate a political opponent. They ruled, that yeah, he can. Supreme court justices are appointed for life and have no oversight or ethical restrictions.
They are bound by duty to be impartial. They are not.
The Supreme court is not supposed to MAKE law, that's the job of Congress, they are supposed to interpret the law. The Citizens United supreme court decision made new law, but it was made by people that were not elected by the citizens of this country. They are not acting in good faith, and are clearly in it to help chump.
Maybe you are right, and it's a scapegoat here. CU was and continues to be a disaster for this country, and I don't think enough attention can be brought to it until it is mitigated.
The UDHR is a non-binding declaration - in and of itself, it has no legal force.
The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution is more legally relevant, but part of the function of courts is to carve out exceptions to laws like that for law enforcement purposes, so practically speaking such provisions are much less absolute than their wording tends to imply.
Generally you can't carve out from a constitution, it is all encompassing. You can reinterpret perhaps but "carve outs" are only by amendment to the constitution.
It's a concept called constitutional supremacy. There's generally ranking to laws. Think of a venn diagram with subset circles inside bigger circles.
Constitutional Law > Statutory/Legislative Law > Administrative/Regulatory Law > Case Law/Common Law
Yes. People here imagining workarounds based on automatic wipe, encryption, etc. should rather acknowledge that their country is slowly drifting to a fascist state.
Your tech tricks are childish. Act like adults. Take responsibility, make decisions, take action, gather support.
I'm not in the US, but say I was. I'm fully on board that the country is slowly (or not so slowly) drifting into becoming a fascist state. Say I needed to leave the country for some important reason and come back. Say I didn't want my phone searched. What should I do? What amount of taking responsibility, making decisions, taking action and gathering support is gonna help in that situation?
Technological workarounds which leave federal agents unable to search my phone isn't gonna fix the slide into fascism. But it might make my trip back home more comfortable. Activism against fascism isn't gonna make my trip back home more comfortable. But it might play a role in fighting the slide into fascism.
Hell, activist work to fight the slide into fascism might be the reason why I would rather not have my phone search by federal agents at the airport.
Individual problem require individual solutions, systemic problems require systemic solutions, and both kinds of solutions are valuable because both kinds of problems are real. Most people make the mistake of proposing individual solutions to systemic problems. You make the mistake of dismissing individual solutions to individual problems.
(I have also intentionally ignored here whether these solutions will actually work. I'm guessing some could, most would not. "I ran out of battery on my phone and didn't bring a laptop, sorry" would probably work. Some complicated cryptographic setup which "technically doesn't erase the data but leaves it inaccessible" probably wouldn't work; the federal agent wouldn't recognize the difference.)
> Say I needed to leave the country for some important reason and come back. Say I didn't want my phone searched. What should I do?
Don't take your phone and/or other devices you don't want to have searched. It's the advice routinely given to those planning a trip from the rest of the world to the US.
Fair enough. It's fine as long as people don't forget that fixing individual problems won't fix systematic problems; it would be like curing the symptoms, not the root cause.
All countries (all hierarchies) drift toward fascism. It's a historically and demonstrably effective way to consolidate power. The time to act is always, regardless if you're scared today or not.
I think the concept of arbitrary is arbitrary because the one searching can always claim cause for xyz reason thanks to the Patriot act and other laws.
What do you imagine the UN stands for? Let's not make the mistake of judging a program by its name or intention and not by its output. Mind you, this is the same UN on whose Human Rights Council sat such eminent proponents of human rights as Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Afghanistan, and Cuba.
Besides, the US historically funded about a third of the UN, out of 193 member states. It's farcical to suggest that the US is "actively hostile" to the thing that wouldn't even exist without its backing.
The UN stands for the UN charter - which the U.S. was a signatory of, of course - but from the 70’s onwards, US support for the UN waned to the point where we are today, where a withdrawal is not inconceivable.
As to what specifically the U.S. has opposed…
The Vienna convention. ICESCR. CEDAW. UNCLOS. Basel convention. Migrant workers convention. Convention on biodiversity. Convention on rights of the child (even North Korea signed this one, but the U.S. opposed it, still does). Comprehensive test ban treaty. Ottawa, Rotterdam, and Stockholm conventions. Convention on cluster munitions. Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons (separate to the TBT). BBNJ/High seas treaty. Finally, the Paris agreement.
This isn’t even an exhaustive list. Just realised I forgot about the Rome statute and the ICC. Oh and the arms trade treaty. And the framework convention on climate change.
The UN is supposed to be a supranational authority over all nations. The U.S. views it as a blunt force instrument to use against others, but disregards its authority in almost all respects.
It’s even codified in the constitution, as passing a UN treaty requires a ⅔ majority of senators present, unlike any other type of legislation which just needs a legislative majority.
Finally, in January this year, the U.S. left 31 entities such as UNESCO, the WHO, and the HRC.
Border searches aren't arbitrary. Sure, in the sense you may or may not get searched, but not in the sense that cops come and turn over your house for no reason. Crossing the border, you know some fraction of travellers will get searched, and that the government does so lawfully. Antagonising law enforcement in this situation is not a smart move, no matter how righteous you feel it is, unless you're doing it as some form of protest.
With that said, I do think searching phones is absolute bullshit, and I'm not arguing in favour of it at all.
Border searches aren't arbitrary when done for the purposes of border security and applied to travelers in a non-arbitrary way. It's pretty clear that CBP agents have a wide discretion to search people at their own whims i.e. arbitrarily.
>that the government does so lawfully
There are many legal question in this case, it's not clear the government acted lawfully. If he'd have arrived in a different federal court district, the search was unlawful because precedent says they need reasonable suspicion.
Not to mention this was a pretext to gather warrantless evidence for the FBI for a domestic investigation and nothing to do with securing the border.
>Antagonising law enforcement in this situation is not a smart move
Maybe "antagonise" isn't the right word (ESL). By tricking the border agent into wiping the device, you have made him annoyed / angry / look foolish etc. No matter how much you are in the right, you have now given this person, with the power to create a lot of problems for you, the motivation to do so. You have to weigh that against coming home to your wife and children, in time for dinner. That's not fair, but that's reality.
Or maybe you crossed the border, with the intent to create this situation, to get it tried in court. More power to you.
About five years ago, here in Denmark, the government decided that freedom of assembly no longer applied. An activist decided to hold a party for about 10 people, including his lawyer, called the police on himself, and live streamed the whole thing. I can't find whatever became of that case, because search engines can no longer search. His name is Lars Andersen. He's been jailed a lot of times for petty bullshit.
You must know that this stuff was later also codified in successive (so-called hard) international human rights treaties like the ICCPR (see Article 17 in this case), right? That Covenant now has 175 parties, plus six more signatories without ratification (most notably China and Cuba) — North Korea is the only state that has tried to withdraw.
In some of those states, the provisions of the Covenant may be considered directly applicable/self-executing, having the legal force of a provision of constitutional rank, while others require some kind of national step or implementation. Whatever the case, it's arguably at the level of incorporation into national law, though, that the ICCPR has exerted its greatest impact. Basically, post-WW2, when anywhere in the world a national constitution has been framed, the ICCPR has served as the natural yardstick for drafting the fundamental rights provisions.
And beyond nation states, I'm glad we're not dependent on UN bodies and agencies for the development and enforcement of human and fundamental rights more globally either. Sure, the European Court of Human Rights doesn't have an army of its own, and part of the influence and relevance of the law it creates is a bit squishy, frankly, hinging on the authority, gravitas and respect bestowed on it by a somewhat opaque and shifting web of institutions and so on. It's certainly not nothing, though, especially since nowadays the ECHR's jurisprudence is mainlined by the ECJ basically uncut, and also applied as constitutional-level law by the rest of the eurocracy basking in the supremacy of Union law.
But I don't know, man, this human rights talk is always a bit of a gamble in terms of using your time well, at least if addressing a crowd where potentially more people support the death penalty than the ICC.
What is your beef with UN and the statement itself? its quite funny actually.
Do you support the mentioned law? Hard to understand what you are trying yo say.
The UN runs UNESCO, UNHCR, UNICEF and the WHO who have all influenced the direction of countries. The 2020 lockdown across the world was on WHO advice.
This is a funny comment. What are you saying? The UN is one of the greatest achievements we've been able to do as a society. It's far from perfect. But would you rather live in a world without one?
What relevance does that have here, though? Most countries that are actually signatories don't even adhere to it. The UN is totally feckless and hypocritical, and even if they were not, they are antidemocratic.
How do you figure that? Does the UN define morality for all peoples in the world? Evidently not. What moral weight is added to some text if some governments of some countries have voted for it?
Not even the votes of the majority one people group in their national home define morality, so the votes of the UN General Assembly definitely does not define morality.
So the UN discovers morality by counting votes of government representatives of a bunch of countries for a document that was drafted without their input? And this somehow means it's representative of morality?
What relevance does the common ground between countries have to morality? How does the common ground between Turkey and Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Russia and Ukraine, North Korea and South Korea, China and Japan "discover" morality? Countries almost by definition don't have common ground, the closest they have is contested ground. People may have common ground, but it's somewhat fanciful to suggest that the representatives of the 18 countries who drafted the UDHR somehow was in any position to act as the moral representatives even for the 18 countries they represented.
They were some diplomats, probably all thoroughly immoral people if we somehow ever manage to figure out what the word moral actually meant, which I doubt.
Can you elaborate on this process as you understand it? I just can't quite wrap my head around this. To me, it seems that at best this process will result in something that exactly no person in the world would recognize as moral. A bit like Solomon's proposal to split the baby.
How do you define morality if you think the UN can discover it? Is there any way to check their work? Can I do a test to see if they made a mistake as I can with any other scientific disciple which discovers things about our world? Does their work make some prediction that we can actually check against reality to see if it's true or false?
The UDHR is full of statements that wouldn't even be agreed upon in a room full of people in the US, let alone around the whole world:
> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Social progressives would strongly disagree.
> Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
Communists would strongly disagree.
> Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Several UN member states that are absolute monarchies would strongly disagree.
We could go on and on. The UDHR is just a distillation of the postwar liberal consensus, voted on by only 58 countries back in 1948. Hardly the stuff that moral authorities are made of.
I am running email server for my private domain using https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver . One day in 2023 i decided that beside of dkim i maybe should also enable dmarc. Because ... well, why not. What happened was that i started reciving regular reports over email from ms and google containing compressed xml containing no info other that empty report was generated. What should I do with that? At that time i could not find any tool that would be able to extract valuable info from that, so I disabled dmarc. Havent looked back since.
There are lots of free tools that automatically analyze the reports for you (you send it to them, instead of yourself).
But if you send all emails for your domain from one email server, you could just disable rua reporting. The reports are mainly useful to see whether you have some misconfigired email server somewhere that causes (or will cause) dropped emails. That can easily happen if you send some email from your own server, some via sendgrid, some via some marketing tool, and start to lose track of them. But for a personal email server, that's not common.
The reports are kind of useful when first enabling, if you want to get warnings about non-compliant mail, but after you're established, they're not really useful, so you should turn reports off, but you can do that without turning off the whole thing.
At first glance looks like stipped C++ with minor differences. For example go have row polimorphism compared to OOP in C++. What else is there that C++ does not have?
In C / C++ there are two kinds of undefined behaviour. One is where there is written in standard what UB is. Another one is everthing else that is not in standard.
Spending few weeks trying to understand Kalman filterm, I figured out that I need to understand all if the following:
1. Model of system
2. Internal state
3. How is optimal estimation defined
4. Covariance (statistics)
Kalman filter is optimal estimation of internal state and covariance of system based on measurements so far.
Kalman process/filter is mathematical solution to this problem as the system is evolving based on input and observable measurements. Turns out that internal state that includes both estimated value and covariance is all that is needed to fully capture internal state for such model.
It is important to undrstand, that having different model for what is optimum, uncertenty or system model, compared to what Rudolf Kalman presented, gives just different mathematical solution for this problem. Examples of different optimal solutions for different estimation models are nonlinear Kalman filters and Wiener filter.
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I think that book on this topic from author Alex Becker is great and possibly best introduction into this topic. It has lot of examples and builds requred intuition really well. All I was missing is little more emphasis into mathematical rigor and chapter about LQG regulator, but you can find both of this in original paper by Rudolf Kalman.
Thanks for your feedback. I am thinking of writing a second volume with more advanced and less introductory topics, but I haven't decided yet. It is a serious commitment and it will take years to complete.
If I take this decision, I will consider a chapter on LQG.
Small clarification: nonlinear Kalman filters are suboptimal. EKF relies on linear approximations, and UKF uses heuristic approximations.
It improves immune system and geneal wellbeing. It is pain that you can get used to and I kind of enyoj it now in some weird way. It is hard, requires some dedication and brings some benefits, but does not requre extra time or planning. Great morale booster.
What are protental issues with compiler, by just disabling borrow checker? If I recall correctly some compiler optimisations for rust can not be done in C/C++ because of restrictions implied by borrow checker.
The crazy part about this is that (auto) vectorization in Rust looks something like this: iter.chunks(32).map(vectorized)
Where the vectorized function checks if the chunk has length 32, if yes run the algorithm, else run the algorithm.
The compiler knows that the chunk has a fixed size at compile time in the first block, which means it can now attempt to vectorize the algorithm with a SIMD size of 32. The else block handles the scalar case, where the chunk is smaller than 32.
The borrow checker does not deal with ownership, which is what rust’s memory management leverages. The borrow checker validates that borrows (references) are valid aka that they don’t outlive their sources and that exclusive borrows don’t overlap.
The borrow checker does not influence codegen at all.
It would be the same as in any language with manual memory management, you'd simply get a dangling pointer access. The 'move-by-default' semantics of Rust just makes this a lot trickier than in a 'copy-by-default' language though.
It's actually interesting to me that the Rust borrow checker can 'simply' be disabled (e.g. no language- or stdlib-features really depending on the borrow checker pass) - not that it's very useful in practice though.
-------- Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...