On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:19:10AM -0500, David J Brooks scripsit: > On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 8:12 PM, Graydon <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 01:15:54PM -0500, David J Brooks scripsit: > >> Or, a 1 day sentence for trying to blow up parts of Toronto and cut > >> off Harpers head. > >> Unbeliveble > > > > Well, more like claiming to have made wildly grandiose plans with no > > plausible or even implausible mechanisms for success. Time served plus > > a day plus probation for being young and unusually stupid with no actual > > harm done seems... appropriate, really. > > Sorry, but don't agree here. Free to try and bomb some other place now. > They planned to kill a lot of people and were caught before they could.,
They thought they ought to try, is I think closer. Having the ability, or actively seeking the ability, to produce credible plans to bomb some public place as a political act is a very different thing than making lots of noise about bombs and going on about killing the PM. If there's no evidence they know their head from their foot it's a very different thing than if they made credible plans. > Lots of jail time is my thoughts. Ah, but that confirms they are important and dangerous. The folks who do the actual peer-reviewed research on terrorist motivations find that they have almost no ideological motivation and want to be taken seriously above all else. Having the judge say "you're dumber than sand and couldn't reliably set off firecrackers even if someone else bought them for you; you get a day plus time served. In the unlikely event that you might possibly demonstrate learning ability, we're going to have you supervised by the probation system for the next goodly while" is not a communication of significance; it's a communication of being, well, dumber than sand and wasting everybody's time. The next guy who wants to be thought important is going to look at that and see something that doesn't work, rather than something he can turn into a big romantic story about how scary he is. > Now, if this had happened in the US, i';m 100% sure the out come would > be a lenghty jail sentence. The US generally runs prisons as profit centres. This has unfortunate side effects on a great many things. (Lots of research that the utility of long jail sentences is negative; either you lock them up forever because they're permanently dangerous, or you lock them up for awhile in the hopes of teaching them something, but locking people up for twenty years is not likely to either teach them anything good or make anybody safe from them.) -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
