I just worry the US will become even more of a police state. There are way too many offences. The average American professional commits about three offences everyday.
If we prosecuted everything, no one would walk free in your country.
>This is going to crush business travel, no?
This has been the rule for decades. It is a pain, but it is also the law. Very few people know this and it is hard to enforce. The article is using a technical point of law to scare companies into buying a product to comply with this particular provision.
Put this in the category of "the average person commits three felonies a day" - https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556/
> Exactly as you say, it's all up to the judge wether or not you have committed a federal crime if you mail USPS. Have you violated "community standards"?
A postal inspector, then a prosecutor, then a judge, then a jury. And since the jury's answer is so likely to be "no", everyone prior to them is not even going to try it.
> If you mail it FedEx, no judges involved, no possibility of a crime committed.
No crime under §1461. Unfortunately, under §146*2*, using a common carrier like FexEx to transport obscene matter is also a crime.
§1462 also covers computer systems.
Three felonies a day, baby. Three felonies a day.
I have no idea. My point was "..this is America and we have the freedom to.." is likely incorrect if you look. If it's legal now, give it a minute. Oh, and if it's legal now, and isn't in 30 seconds, and you're doing it, you're still "guilty".
There are more "laws" in this country than anyone could read in a lifetime.
What is your opinion on the argument that the average american commits three felonies a day?
There are certain areas of the law (like the tax code and the RAP) where judges even excuse lawyers for getting it wrong because of its complexity. Ignorance of the law may not be an excuse for certain laws and derivatives of basic principles (don't steal, don't harm others) - but there is a whole lot of law that people violate unknowingly and there is no real way for them to have known.
Agreed. As pointed out in this book: "Three felonies a day" which shows how there are so many laws that even someone who is trying to not break laws will most likely break several laws every day and not even know it.
But this law has been on the news for days. I turned on the radio this morning and listened to about 20 minutes of discussion on it.
Respectfully, I disagree with just about everything you said there..
Libertarians want liberty. The Constitutionalists want the Constitution respected.
They share many things in common, but libertarians know that if the Constitution allows for anything but liberty, it's wrong. Fuck it. Constitutionalists believe it's a sacred document, and think liberty is great, but it can be legitimately be amended to restrict liberty.
W/o going into too much detail, "Law" is something that exists based on what is right. Ever hear the line "ignorance of the law is no excuse"? Ironically that almost never applies when judges, and other bureaucrats claim it, and almost always applies to contradict their actions. In other words, "Law" is basically do no harm. So no matter what amendments, statutes, or other magical pieces of paper they claim gives them the authority to violate people, not only are they wrong, but they're criminal. Ignorance of the fact that doing harm is not acceptable is no excuse. Statists claim it has to do with every silly statute in the book. This nonsense. There is no human on Earth who does, or could, know every law in existence in the United States. There are things that are legal today, that will be illegal tomorrow, and vice versa. The state claims that your wrong if you break those rules 1 moment after they arbitrarily decide something is no prohibited (which reminds me; might want to check out "Three Felonies a Day" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594032556?tag=freetalklive-20 ) . Absolute nonsense. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is based in common, or natural, law.
I just got distracted, and now I'm too tired to finish whatever I was thinking.. In short, chaos & anarchy don't go hand in hand, despite what statist desperately need you to believe.
> Right, but Trump was supposed to be that drastic change, he was the supposed flamethrower ready burn this pestilence from the field.
In who's minds???
> However, we have gravely underestimated the seriousness of the situation.
Says someone who hasn't bought an Evil Black Rifle and lots of ammo for it???
> Call me conspiracy theorist all you like, but it doesn't take much to see an aggressive attempt on passing legislation that is vague enough to throw anybody in jail.
Errr, we've long been there. See e.g. <em>Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent</em> See also <em>Arrest-Proof Yourself</em> for the local version, and how to make yourself an unattractive enough target they'll move on to easier prey. The Feds openly operate a (Left Wing) Death Squad, the FBI Hostage "Rescue" Team, most recently shooting at the only guy killed in the Oregon standoff.
> Like Hate Speech laws and media narratives, that can condemn anyone for "disturbing the peace".
Best we hope the Supremes continue with their 5 member majority in favor of free speech (Citizens United was where the Left really showed its hand, banning core political speech).
> Nowadays, mass bans and blacklisting is more common than ever, and the people in these categories are taking the full brunt of it.
Hard to underestimate the evil and major effects of the mostly Bay Area totalitarian tech Left.
> In short, this is much bigger than video game industry or American politics, this is far worse and it may just have been too late at this point.
"Despair is a sin" as Jerry Pournelle liked to say, and it's hardly over. Heck, the counter-revolution is just beginning, and we hold a great number of high cards. We can, at the extreme of a worst case extreme civil war, liquidate the vast majority of our enemies in the US and almost all their current voting based political power by killing the exquisitely fragile big Blue cities they live in.
> The Soviets got the last laugh in the end.
Indeed, they'd essentially won by the end of the 1930s, through their willing accomplices.
Do you occasionally exceed the speed limit? Jaywalk across a street late at night?
If you were stuck at a red light at 3 am and it hadn't changed for 10 minutes, would you use your personal discretion and safely go ahead?
Did you ever drink before age 21? Have you brought alcohol in across state lines (prior to this year's changes)?
Do you ever roll through a stop sign?
Most people have committed a jail able of fence
Some sources say Americans commit around three felonies a day
We should not use the law as a source of truth for our concept of morality or rightness. We should derive our application of the law from a sense of morality and rightness.
Is it moral to attack protestors because they're on the street? Should we pull you out of your car and beat you next time you roll through a stop sign?
Legality clearly isn't a good barometer for justifying police brutality.
For-profit prisons are another element of greed and corruption, often contracting with states for a certain number of prisoners—giving states incentives to find those numbers of criminals to incarcerate. However, it goes far beyond that, let's talk about all the insane laws on the books. Did you know there are so many laws that can lead to incarceration that it would be impossible for me to learn every single one, even though I'm responsible for knowing them? It's estimated that the average adult in the USA (yes, that's referring to people just like you) commits three felonies per day. The author of the book, Harvey Silverglate, teaches at Harvard Law School. I wonder what felonies you committed today. We should tell the police to lock Route66Blues up!
Just to drive this point home. America is home to 5% of the world's population, but it has 25% of the world's imprisoned population.
>I don't have to worry about being a criminal
You, me, and everyone here is a criminal at least three times a day according to U.S. Code: Title 18
Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18
We just haven't been prosecuted yet!
Don't believe me? Read this book: Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.
Anyone of us, on any given day are violating at least three federal "laws" and that is NOT taking into account state laws and other countries' laws. There are so many laws, nobody actually knows the exact quantity!
Source: Why the rule of law suffers when we have too many laws.
Wakey wakey... 😂
PS. I truly envy people living in Lalaland! I guess the adage: "Ignorance is bliss" is truly some sort of defense mechanism to avoid facing reality.
>unless you're doing something illegal
I urge you to please read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Encounter-Broadsides/dp/1594032556/
Title is:
Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.
Why not everything else is illegal, not a joke. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Encounter-Broadsides/dp/1594032556/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1642473380&sr=8-1
Just FYI, this is kind of myth. This was not a study, just a book by a Harvard professor - Harvey Silvergate. The claim he makes though, is largely an exaggeration used to highlight how over-criminalized the US law is. Here is a decent stack exchange discussion on the topic. Basically, his book doesn't actually support his claim with any statistics. He just goes through examples - majority of which are very very specific and would not happen to a typical person in a typical day :)
why quantify murder by a man who did a crime? the average american professional commits 3 felonies a day
There is no such thing as someone who has not committed a felony.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Felonies-Day-Encounter-Broadsides/dp/1594032556
You are probably committing several felonies each day and do not even realize.
There are some massive reasons why you need to care: proliferation of arcane criminal laws and prosecutorial discretion. In combination with extensive surveillance of everyone, these form an unholy trinity that allows those in power to squash anyone they want to. How does it work? Let me start at the beginning.
What is the criminal justice system? In many people's minds, it is the way that we stop the bad guys. The good guys figure out what the bad guys are doing, catch them at it, and put them in jail, right? That's the story we tell to children and many people never understand it any better than that. I don't mean to insult you but it seems that this is pretty close to your view as well. But it's all wrong.
What the criminal justice system really is is the machine we have built to apply legitimate civil force. It's a weapon: in every arrest, after every trial, is the barrel of a gun pointed at someone and metal cages to restrict their movement. But at whom is it pointed? And who's in the cages? That depends on how you build the machine and who is operating it.
So how have we built the machine? We've built it so that there are so many crimes you cannot avoid committing one. There are literally tens of thousands of crimes at the federal level alone. One legal analyst wrote a book arguing that just about everyone commits three federal felonies every day. Though that claim may be exaggerated for effect, the basic proposition that federal criminal law is so comprehensive and vague that nearly anyone could be prosecuted is, if we are honest, hardly debatable. But surely the prosecutors only go after the bad guys, right?
Enter the federal prosecutor and prosecutorial discretion. What this means is that a prosecutor has complete control over who to charge with a crime. Bring him a clearly guilty friend, and he could decline to charge him. Bring him an innocent enemy, and he could charge him. But wait, you say, he's innocent! Sorry, see above. No one is innocent.
Many dismiss it as a silly conspiracy theory, but let's listen to someone who really knows what he is talking about, then Attorney General of the U.S. and future Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, speaking to the U.S. Attorneys serving under him in 1940:
>If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.
And of course thousands of criminal laws have been passed since 1940. The odds of a prosecutor being able to find "at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone" have only increased. Nevertheless, one might argue that Jackson has only identified a potential problem; surely there are safeguards in place and simple politically motivated prosecutions are not a problem in the 21st century.
If you are one of those people, would it surprise you to learn that from 2001-2007, the Bush DOJ investigated seven times as many democratic officials as it did republican ones?
Alternately, how would you view the story of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who was convicted of bribery amidst claims that the prosecution was politically motivated? I can tell you what 44 attorneys general thought about the prosecution - they were concerned that the case "may have had sufficient irregularities as to call into question the basic fairness that is the linchpin of our system of justice."
Now this was already a problem well before the whole NSA thing came about. But when you enable those people in control of the system to access a vast wealth of information about the activities of every person in the country, all barriers to prosecution are removed. Criminal prosecutions could easily be brought against all enemies, whether personal or political. A significant but manageable problem turns into a rampaging beast that tramples everyone in its path, and people like you sit on the sidelines and cheer on the destruction, confident that you will not find yourself being trampled. So you say only criminals need to be concerned? I suppose you're technically right, but the problem is that we live in an age where we are all criminals.
read this book and it may raise questions on who these "criminals" are...so they no longer having the right to protect themselves?
About Three Felonies a Day.
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556
Someone beat you to it.
If that's true, that's probably less crime than any other activity given the laws in the US these days.
If the felons are so dangerous that they cannot be trusted with a firearm, why would they be let out of prison in the first place?
Furthermore, if they have shown that they do not respect laws placed on them in the first place, why would they do so with bans on possessions of firearms? You do understand that you have probably committed a few hundred felonies in your lifetime. Should you be trusted with a firearm? Afterall, you have probably committed multiple felonies in the last week.
If the felons are going to commit a crime (and break the law), why would writing another law stop them from getting guns and using them against people (why you are concerned about them owning them in the first place)? It doesn't. It's an overinclusive rule which renders large groups of American citizens helpless. Many of these people live in very bad areas and you would throw them into cages because they have the audacity to arm themselves so they can defend themselves and their families.
>Non-citizens.... It's just my belief that if you are not a citizen, as defined by the 14th amendment, you are not protected by our constitution.
Humans have rights. The Constitution does not grant these rights, the Constitution prohibits the government from infringing on pre-existing rights. You didn't really provide an answer to why they shouldn't be allowed to own firearms legally, you dodged the question by saying non-citizens are not protected by the Constitution (which isn't true).
So again, why should non-citizens not have the right to own a firearm?