Definition of Crime
So, doesn't crime to be true crime require a malicious intent, as objectively evaluated?
Is breaking a rule a crime or is that rule breaking which is fundamentally different from a crime?
Example, a person going through a red light is a stupid rule breaker. Versus:
A person deliberately slamming their car into you is a criminal BECAUSE they intended to hurt you.
Have we not lowered our civilization/government/society by no longer properly differentiating between these two?
Is breaking a rule a crime or is that rule breaking which is fundamentally different from a crime?
Example, a person going through a red light is a stupid rule breaker. Versus:
A person deliberately slamming their car into you is a criminal BECAUSE they intended to hurt you.
Have we not lowered our civilization/government/society by no longer properly differentiating between these two?
Sounds a bit like Orwell's Thought Police.
The destructive action is the first requirement. Then, the second requirement is the determination of whether the person meant to cause the harm.
If so, then the action was criminal.
If not, then it was an accident, miss-understanding, lack of awareness or some other non-criminally motivated action.
We all have "bad thoughts of destructive actions" but we are not criminals because we refrain ourselves from acting upon those thoughts.
The primary point, however, is that a deliberate attempt to cause you harm is quite different from something accidental or non-deliberate.
Later in life, to assume that both people are equally criminal creates injustice, in my opinion. It just isn't true that both people are the same.
There is a difference between actual malicious, aka criminal, actions and what the state declares to be illegal. Many laws are vague or just plain unjust in and of themselves. Breaking such laws does not make you a "true criminal", in my opinion. Furthermore, to your point, many people who technically break a law are in fact the good people.
No. The intent itself (whether carelessness, lack thereof (ignorance), maliciousness, spite, envy, etc.) is an attending emotion to the crime. Reality doesn't really care why you did something - it only care that something happened. The laws of natural response don't care how you chopped the tree down, they still mandate the tree falls.
Can there be invented laws of man which attempt to unreasonably burden us? Assuredly. As long as there are men with a penchant for power and who attempt to coerce others to their own ends, there will be ridiculous and stupid laws. In fact, there are whole books of ridiculous laws. I have one and I alternate between laughing at the ridiculousness and shaking my head at the blatant vindictiveness.
Reality doesn't "care" about anything, not just "why". The term does not apply at all.
His (incorrect) thesis is about legitimate laws, not "invented laws attempting unreasonable burden".
When Hillary Clinton acted with extreme disregard to her duty to protect classified information, she was guilty of a crime, whether or not she intended for that information to get into the hands of enemies. She signed acknowledgement of her duty to protect classified information, whether or not she actually took the time to read what she signed.
Society accounts for stupidity versus malicious intent by the gradation of punishment. The driver who runs a red light without hitting anyone gets a ticket and a fine. The driver who runs the red light and hits someone is punished by the severity of the damage created by his carelessness, up to the charge of reckless homicide. We do make distinctions.
I respectfully disagree.
If there is no malicious intent, then there is no crime.
There are accidents, misunderstandings, etc which government force can and should be used to rectify or discontinue such actions. They would only become criminal, in my view, if the person involved continued to do the actions after being fully informed that their actions were harmful.
If a jurist, a hopefully objective peer, were to hear that they would think you are nuts.
I doubt very many people would buy in to such nonsense as you propose. I think most juries would say, "Guilty!" with an explanation point.
Yet, there ARE scenarios that could fit what you are talking about and justify a conclusion of innocence. For example, parents making their children do their homework. :) Short term, I am sure you could get a lot of kids to indicate they are being harmed, yet in the long term they do like it.
Or spouses or other genuinely concerned people dealing with those who have self destructive addictions. These are messy issues. A clear cut answer is not always obvious. A presumption of innocence is wise, in my opinion.
There are degrees of carelessness, but under normal circumstances, if there is an accident, then the person should not be found guilty of a crime.
Yet, if someone were of the criminal type that acted with deliberate intent to harm, you probably wouldn't want to invite them over for dinner. Nor take care of your kids, etc. They belong in prison.
It is my primary point that not differentiating between these two, leads to compounded injustice by labeling all as CRIMINAL when only some deserve that label.
Rulebreaker, fool, non omniscient human can serve as a more appropriate label for the non-malicious people.
If there is no difference between a malicious act and a foolish act, then what kind of society do we have?
Where I am going with this is, if Kavanaugh, or any young boy, tries to kiss a girl and then she freaks out, is that a crime?
If a person has good intentions, or at least not malicious ones, should we be condemning someone for the results?
That gets to the heart of the matter.
We seemingly are moving away from an objective based legal system to one of feelings. If a self proclaimed victim "feels" hurt, insulted, harmed, etc, then they are supposed to be believed based on their proclamations. That we should assume innocent motives or just plain innocence is being pushed to the side.
I think, at the bottom of this, is a literal legalistic mentality that doesn't want to take into account peoples motives. For example, could it have been an accident? If yes, then benefit of the doubt we should presume innocence. Could it have been a misunderstanding? If yes, then we should presume innocence.
Now, it is GUILTY!! if someone "feels" attacked or embarrassed or insulted or harmed, etc. Guilty until proven innocent.
Doesn't this lower our society to one where many people, currently white males, need to live in fear of mere accusations? Is this not similar to an age when black people had to fear accusations? Or Jews in old time Germany? Or witches in Spain? And so on. Have we not learned our history lessons?
Innocence until proven guilty has inside of it that we should assume that people's intentions are good, or at least not malicious, unless proven otherwise.
It should not be a crime to be human and therefore with a limited mind that can not know everything, especially what might offend some other person that is around us.
Innocent until proven guilt does not presume any kind of intentions, only innocent before the law, which makes the rest legally irrelevant.
Ford's accusation of assault came up in this topic because it is what Galvin referred to, behind the fantasy of misrepresenting it as only a "kiss", which he was called out for. He tried to dismiss it as 'good intent' in an invention he has repeated several times as fact, and slipped it in here again as a false premise. His re-write is just as arbitrary as claiming it was "consensual".
The description of the assault is an example of a crime. Arbitrarily claiming that it was "consensual" does not change the fact that the description of the assault is an example of a crime.
Aside from the discussion of what is a crime, her account of what happened to her did not disintegrate. There is no evidence that Kavanaugh did it, and his character, reputation and calendar are all evidence that he did not, but It is plausible and likely that something like what she described as experiencing did happen to her. Her account of what happened to her personally is far more plausible than assertions by others who know nothing about it and were not there that is was only a "kiss" or "consensual". It has nothing to do with Kavanaugh, but does represent a crime. You do not have to assume she is telling the truth to recognize that.
'Date rape' usually means on a consensual 'date' but with an assault going beyond that.
Any attempt to employ a change in 'feelings' to claim that consent no longer was consent is a misrepresentation of the facts of the event. An attempt to change that and make such a revision 'legal' is complete subjectivism in law and a travesty of justice no matter what realm it appears in.
But that contradicts what he stated.
Being objective, one should not assume that one person is telling the truth and one is lying.
We can't know for sure what happened, we can only try to make sense out of the data presented. Doing so with an objective unemotional review of what has been presented does not lead to: she must be 100% correct.
Kavanaugh had nothing to do with it. He said and presented evidence that he was not there at all. He did not contradict her description of what happened to her by whoever did it; he said that he did not. No one said "she must be 100% correct". Going off on a tangent about imagined "good intentions" in what you concoct as an account of what happened is irrelevant.
"(1) Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another citizen.
"(2) No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of another person.
"(3) No act shall constitute a violation of a law valid under this provision unless there is such damage or immediate present danger resulting from that act."
"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think -- not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgement -- on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict "It is."
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper.
By refusing to say "It is," you are refusing to say "I am." By suspending your judgement, you are negating your person. When a man declares: "Who am I to know?" -- he is declaring: "Who am I to live?" -Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, pp 140-141.
[See, I told you you'd find other places to "push back."]
Evasion leading to harm done to someone through negligence or recklessness is not a "cause" of malice. Malice is a conscious intent, not the effect of avoidance. Ignorance may also lead to harm with or without malice, which is not a defense for, e.g., libel.
malice:
1. a desire to inflict harm or suffering on another.
2. harmful intent on the part of a person who commits an unlawful act injurious to another.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/faq#...
I jump in every once in a while to try and keep conversations on topic and remind everyone to attack the argument, not the person.
My intention was to offer the Ignore button as a method to avoid a person, rather than attacking them.
You cannot walk up to a man of principle and say, "whatever I consider 'truth' -- that's "objectiv-ism." It's NOT "truthism." But I do think of it at times as "respectivism" as well, or "existentialism" without mysticism (which was what she, in a rational cultural context would have called it).
If you have any respect for the truth or reality at all, then you will stop trying to "hijack" a philosophy you have no understanding of as exhibited by your sophistry.
You seem to have another view which I think improperly disassociates the two, but may not argue against without being accused of misrepresentation.
Evasion is the root of all evil, including malice. All malice is rooted in evasion. If you need more quotations to nail this down for you, I'll be happy to provide them. Goodnight.
Your misrepresentations of me and my posts are very explicit, including numerous made-up quotes and reckless, libelous statements about my knowledge and honesty.
For example if a police officer shoots someone and its found to be within departmental policy, it is deemed to be a "good shoot" even though the shootee is just as dead as if the shooter were an armed thug.
Or how about a religious honor killing or a fatwah decreed by an imam? If it is carried out in an Islamic country under sharia law it may be deemed rightious. The same act committed in the USA is a crime of murder.
Even further afield, suppose a person is a member of a mafia family. Mafioso has its own rules and codes of conduct under jurisdiction of the capos,
which can be delt with harshly as enforced by its own people--this even though considered criminal under government jurisdiction. It depends on who's ox is being gored and where, doesn't it?
I wasn't referring to territory claimed by the mafia as their jurisdiction. Organized Crime has their own cods of conduct and means of dealing with those who break them which are at odds with our legal system, but eerily parallel with it at times.
Most governments around the world are criminal themselves and many are not much different than the mafia; they don't define the concept of 'crime' for us as they try to wipe out the concept and replace its meaning with 'lack of subservience to control'. But this thread was intended to be about the meaning of the valid concept of crime, though the thread's thesis about a requirement for malice was false. We can only think rationally with valid concepts, and letting government define our concepts lets it determine how we think or become incapable of thinking.
That should clear up many of the issues that were brought up. Crime, of course, should not be excused because the criminal thinks it is good from their subjective viewpoint.
Thank you all for your posts.
.When I worked in a drug store on 12th St. in Detroit, street notorious for criminal activity, we were visited by a crime boss named Chinky Ashe.
He got his name because of his almond shaped eyes. Here is one way he made his living. (This was in the 50s) He'd go to banks and but many rolls of quarters. Then he'd cross the Detroit river into Canada and buy a lot of Canadian quarters worth about 18 cents each. Then he'd mix in the quarters with the Canadian quarters and cash the rolls in. He made about $100.00 a week that way. It was one of his income streams.. I once said to him, "Chinky, with all the work it takes to do all that, you could put the money into a legit enterprise that will take less effort. He looked at me quizzically tinged with disgust and replied, "What? And go straight?"
So you can see that they didn't consider their activity to be anything but a certain catagory of business.
Wouldn't you objectively find him guilty of a crime?
Whereas, if someone turned in some Canadian quarters along with some USA quarters with a routine deposit without giving it any thought, wouldn't you find them innocent, if you were on the jury?
The difference being one person deliberately did it and the other person did not. Agree Mr. Herb7734?
What I was trying to call out is that there is a fundamental difference between those who deliberately do something harmful and those who do not. We have become so literally legalistic that we seem to no longer be able to see the difference. That creates injustice, in my opinion.
Kavanaugh may have drank in his senior year in high school after the drinking age was increased, so he is/was a lawbreaker. But to call him a criminal seems to me to be absurd.
The distinguish has nothing to do with seriousness of underage drinking. Different crimes have different degrees of seriousness.
Also, the number of "laws" is so high that I would estimate I break probably at least 10-20 of them each and every day, mostly because I dont know of them, they are victimless and infringe on my freedom for no reason, or they are so stupid that I just cant obey them.
In vegas we have a law that it is illegal to feed a cat that comes to your door and wants food. It is illegal to post signs without a permit (but of course its ok for politicians to do it and not even take them down after the election). So may laws are on the books here, like the illegality of making cell phone calls in your car even if you pull over and stop. How about the one that says if the keys are in your car somewhere and you had too much to drink and dont want to drive so you take a nap IN the car- you get a DUI.
My respect for the laws here in this country has deteriorated drastically as time goes on and more and more laws get past.
A great many people are losing respect for the legitimate laws because there are too many absurd ones AND with how they are being enforced and prosecuted.
The world of Anthem is drawing in, and many people cheer. That is scary.
A crime is the act of takigh what does not belong to you. Be it material items, sexual choice, money, or good name. What you have earned, and they have no tearned.