I really don't care if it's "inflammatory." It's the truth, and I'm going to continue to reverberate it in this forum. I place the truth of higher value than harming some delicate sensibilities any day of the week.

The Human Torch is nowhere near as iconic as Captain America and the Hulk at this point.

Is it racist to say that whites are the most prevalent in regards to sexualised crime? No. So why establish this double standard?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/21/fbi-admits-patriot-act-snooping-powers-didnt-crack/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

The novelist Martin Amis wrote that modern terrorism, with its uninhibited bloodlust, is better characterised as “horrorism”. Its object is less the paralysing fear that, say, the IRA aimed to stoke, than hideous violence itself. His neologism certainly fits the killing of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in London last week.

The murder has not terrorised the British, who have summoned their usual restraint. When David Cameron counselled against “knee-jerk responses”, the prime minister was heeded. Although “questions will be asked” about the need for new security measures, he said, the mightiest response to these attacks is to “go about our normal lives”. Britons are doing that.

But the oldest quandary in politics – between liberty and security – cannot be finessed away like this, as he is finding out. His Conservative home secretary, Theresa May, long ago drafted a bill to give the security services more power to monitor emails, telephone calls and internet use. It failed to withstand opposition from Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister who derides the “snooper’s charter”, but it is stirring again. It has advocates in the Labour opposition, including the former home secretary Alan Johnson, who says Ms May should make it a resignation issue. The Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, who served as the independent reviewer of anti-terror laws under three prime ministers, is another supporter.

Reviving the legislation because of last week’s attack alone would be rash. It remains unclear if the powers under discussion would have averted it. And whether we give it the name terror or horror, the dark truth is that no law can ever equip the state to eradicate such violence.

But it is not necessary to approve of the bill to sense that some of the opposition to it is overdone. And it does not take a hawk to worry that, over the past decade, the civil liberties lobby has become dogmatic and sensationalist.

Liberals who show more fervour than rigour can be found in parliament, the judiciary and pressure groups such as Liberty, an outfit that proves you can get away with any claim, however silly, if you belong to the “third sector” of campaign organisations and charities. Civil libertarians grew in voice during Tony Blair’s premiership – sometimes thwarting anti-terror laws that commanded public support, such as 90-day detention without charge – and can now claim to represent the received opinion of the British elites. It therefore matters that many of their certainties are wrong.

One example is the idea that anti-terror laws betray exactly the freedoms we are trying to defend from terrorists. This assumes that what al-Qaeda hates about Britain are the habeas corpus and online privacy. What actually defines western democracy, and riles its enemies, are its basic rights – to vote, to live freely, to worship as one chooses or not at all. Protecting these by compromising other liberties does not make the UK a despotism or reward murderers.

The notion that all freedom is indivisible is a lovely thought but there are fundamental freedoms and slightly less fundamental freedoms. Pragmatic societies weaken the latter to secure the former when under threat, as they did during the second world war. If anything, the UK does it less than comparable nations such as France, a country that nobody confuses for Iran or North Korea.

Libertarians who concede this point then bring up the “slippery slope”. Some liberties may be secondary, they say, but losing them is the first insidious step to outright authoritarianism. Erosions of freedom are never reversed, and only ever expand with time. This is ahistorical. Britain has tightened security laws at many moments without becoming an unfree country. And policy does not move in one direction: wartime restrictions were lifted when peace arrived and the Diplock courts of Northern Ireland, which comprised a single judge and no jury, were abandoned when the Troubles eased.

There are other libertarian inanities, such as the habit of invoking the ancientness of certain freedoms as though menaces to public safety have not changed in character or scope since the Magna Carta was signed. But the worst argument of all is the pretence that restrictions on freedom do not even enhance security. This is merely a way of not having to do any hard thinking. Mr Blair’s plan to introduce identity cards was, on balance, a costly and bureaucratic scheme that deservedly came to nothing. But only a churl or ideologue could suggest that it would not have improved security at all. And yet many did.

Intellectually honest liberals should argue that counterterror laws can work, but at an unconscionable cost to personal freedom. They should also acknowledge that, if western security services have made it much harder in recent years for terrorists to launch large attacks, they did not achieve this by asking nicely. Their work has been helped by new powers, many of which were controversial at the time.

Mr Cameron was impressively restrained in his response to the killing of Mr Rigby. But the real knee-jerks in the immemorial struggle between liberty and security now come from the liberal side.

I don't really trust any of these sources on these things.

They've all lies about autopsies on soldiers, police officers, and everybody else.

The autopsy said there were no signs of a struggle and that he was shot in the back.

His body had been autopsied three times — once each by St. Louis County police, a pathologist hired by Brown’s family and federal authorities. All found that Brown had been shot at least six times, including twice in the head but not in the back.

His death is representative of a larger problem that's been plaguing their community when it comes to relations with the police.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on May 21, 2015, 03:13:07 PM

I can see your arguments, and you obviously have a better degree of nuance than I do on the matter, which is why I neglected to mention my own opinions in the OP.

My main problem with the ECtHR is its judicial activism. As I understand each issue in turn, the Convention deliberately excluded issues of franchise and how far it should extend, yet the Court determined it feel under the Convention's remit; the right to artificial insemination was justified under Article 8, yet the originators of the Convention had absolutely no intention of that when framing the article; and the case of whole-life tariffs was Vinter and Others v. UK (2013) wherein the Court ruled 16-to-1 that whole-life tariffs violate Article 3.

I agree that the UK ought to remain in the Convention, but I don't see why our own courts shouldn't have primacy in its interpretation. Our legal system is obviously different to most of Europe's in its common law--and I think, judicial restraint. Why should our justice system be subjected to the acitivism of courts in Strasbourg?

I'll probably write a longer response tomorrow. My exam period just started and I'm now condemned to getting through around 2500 pages of course materials in a pretty short period of time. It's getting late and I already spent way too many hours studying the national procedural autonomy in relation to the actions anullment in front of the European Court of Justice, so I don't feel like writing much more now.

But anyways, you have a good point. One that is shared by several legal scholars and authors. Judicial activism of inter- and supranational courts and their limits (or lack theoreof) has been a hot legal topic for years. You are definitely not alone in feeling that way, and I very much understand where you come from. I personally don't think that judicial activism should have no boundaries either. The ECtHR is not democratically elected and still holds real power that can directly affect the member states.

But, I also think that its activism and interpretation of the ECHR as a living instrument is somewhat necessary. It's true that this was not intended, but the same goes for several other things. Back in 1950, the drafters of the Convention didn't predict the internet to this scale either. They didn't expect things like highly technological databases retaining a person's fingerprints, retina scans and DNA, nor did they in a million years forsee that marriage between two men / women would ever become a reality.

Yet, while they never foresaw these applications, they did realize that things would drastically change. So they did what all good legislators do. They made their provisions sufficiently neutral. They drafted them in broad and general terms that still retained the essence of the right, but also allowed for it to be applied to things that didn't yet exist. And this is not something that only happens with the ECHR or even on an international scale. Every national legislator does the exact same. Law is unique in the sense that you can never fully anticipate what will happen, yet that at the same time, you kind of have to. Because otherwise, the current state of affairs will always be ahead of the laws and result in period of impunity and situations that aren't governed by law. Because of this, laws need to find the fine balance between broad and general enough on the one hand, while still providing enough legal certainty on the other. And that is an extremely difficult task.

And seeing how I already wrote way too much, I'm just gonna sum the rest up by saying that if the UK denies the Court's primacy, other countries will follow and the ECtHR will probably end up being a void and pointless institution that plays a merely advisory and non-binding role that every single country will ignore when it goes against its government's best interests. The power of the Court lies in its primacy. To repeat basically what I said in the other thread: the court has your back. When something happens and your own legal system, government and judicial branch decide not to recognize what happened because it suits them better, the ECtHR is an objective and independent organ that can set things right. Something that it has done dozens of times. It's obviously impossible to tell what would've happened otherwise, but I am more or less convinced that the British state and courts would've had no issues tossing aside the Court's opinion if it wasn't binding.

So? It's not illegal to do that.

Wow it almost seems like an uber left wing version of Mordo wrote that.

It's an opinion piece, so... Who the fuck cares?