Huh? If I recall correctly, Hitler and the Commies only had one thing in common:Hitler killed the Jews and the liberals with a variety of means, and the Stalinists–led by a Jewish KGB boss–killed the liberals AND the religious Right Russians with starvation and Siberian exile.

Or, maybe you were talking about different liberals?I HATE you guys when you get your facts wrong!

As for RICO, it was a really good excuse for another kind of racial profiling: Italians and Irish and then ‘blacks’ as ‘non pure’ people who are ‘all criminals’. The only thing good about RICO was that all of those racist Jewish racketeers in Hollywood were able to make great movies about Italians,Irish, and other non-whites and continually paint them as criminals while avoiding any analysis of Jewish gangsterism,like Bugsy or Louis Mayer; and the complicity of bad law financed by Hollywood lobbyist bucks made the Bernie Madoffs possible.

Oh, yeah: and we got to find out about

Since the Communists don’t believe any of this idiocy, they kill the liberals, since they would finally “get it” and start a counter-revolution.

Hitler, on the other hand, only put liberals in prison to work instead of listening to their stupid excuses for thinking. I guess he was pretty liberal after all.

***

What is hate crime legislation? It says basically that criminal acts motivated by hate should receive tougher sentences. Note that the acts so punished are crimes anyway, under normal legislation. So muggings, burglaries, vandalism, and other such acts for which you may receive punishment of law, may receive tougher sentences if they are shown to be motivated by hate.

Hate speech may also be incorporated into hate crime legislation.

Now that we’ve clarified what hate crime legislation is, let’s talk about whether it is valid. The point has been made earlier that such legislation criminalises thought. The same attack can receive a tougher sentence if the court perceives it to be motivated by hate. That’s very odd, isn’t it?

Yes, but there is another side to this argument. Picture yourself as a member of a despised minority: a minority by skin colour, sexual orientation, religion, … whatever. Now, because your group is small and widely looked down on, you tend to form a close-knit cohesive bunch, and you follow with interest news and gossip about other members of your minority, even if you don’t know them personally.

So, a member of your minority living not far from you, but whom you don’t know personally, is viciously attacked only for being a member of that minority. The attack is motivated purely by hatred of that minority. The specific victim was merely representative. It might just as well have been one of your friends. It might just as well have been you.

How do you feel?

That is the reason for hate crime legislation. In a hate crime, there are far more victims than those who appear in the witness stand. A whole group feels hurt, frightened. There is an incalculable knock-on effect.

With so much more hurt, with so many more victims, it is only right that there should be a greater punishment for the attackers.

TRiG.

I’d never considered that the reason I haven’t heard anything good about the uses of the Patriot Act is that the tools necessary for fighting organized criminal activity are all available under RICO (or with a judge’s oversight). Interesting.

My thought in using RICO to look at hate crime legislation is that RICO doesn’t give the tools to address criminal behavior that’s supported in a much broader, less organized fashion. It can and has been used to deal with direct support of political terrorism, but it can’t handle winks and nods and general societal attitudes that the victim “was asking for it,” even though those still support crime.

BTW, I never aruged that RICO was good law. I really have no idea and I look forward to your eventual post on it, Stephanie! What I have argued is that it is there, so why bother with the patriot act?

I think that conservatives are missing the point that they will still be allowed to hate people, they just won’t be allowed hurt the people they hate.

Consider the structure of the following argument:

http://xkcd.com/385/

On the left, we have one victim. On the right, 150 billion victims. (Of snark, in this case)

If the snark was a combination of some sort of physical crime (already covered by law) and a material contribution (“material” is an important word there, don’t gloss it please) to extending that nefarious act to the group (by others), then it matters. That is not thinking, but a kind of social conspiracy.

These social conspiracies have lead to one form of holocaust or major cycle of repression again and again. In fact, these social conspiracies ALWAYS lead to such things unless checked.

So yes, check the bad thinking with counter-thinking. But sometimes there must be more.