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There is no reason to suppose that this will be taken as a reason not to prosecute white people. The specific act and its context are clearly more important.
by pekk 14y ago
There is no reason to suppose that this will be taken as a reason not to prosecute white people. The specific act and its context are clearly more important.
- MichaelSalib 14y agoIn international relations, there's a whole literature devoted to signalling: looking at how states send signals to other states. There's a huge amount of evidence showing that the signals received are very often different from the ones transmitted.
- pekk 14y agoThe race of the defendant isn't a salient part of this. We don't have to wait for a black Aaron Swartz to act, on the far-fetched premise that the only thing that will be noticed by prosecutors was his color. This is a far-fetched idea. Federal prosecutors are certainly intelligent enough to understand many of the factors which make this sensitive, including a suicide, internet backing, the specific alleged crime and the open access issue. Without deciding that the whole problem is that you can't prosecute white people. So many white people are prosecuted without fanfare that this would be an impossibly irrational conclusion to draw.
- jlgreco 14y agoAh, but what good is concern trolling if you can't find a way to cram race into the discussion too? If you aren't going to do it properly, you may as well not even bother! /s
- MichaelSalib 14y agoAre we really going to pretend that federal prosecutors are colorblind, that aren't significant racial disparities in federal sentencing already?
- jlgreco 14y agoDid he say anything of the sort?
- geuis 14y agoI'm not following your train of thought. What does "white people" have to do with anything?
- jlgreco 14y ago> the message that US attorneys are going to hear is "don't fuck with young affluent white hackers with powerful friends"