Even if you remove all loopholes and flexibility, sometimes courts grossly misinterpret laws and basically create their own. Like the guy who apparently wasn’t asking for a lawyer when he said “give me a lawyer dawg” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...) or these people who were convicted by “math” which was completely wrong (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA). In extreme cases authoritarian regimes will just ignore their own laws.
At the end of the day you need a reasonable judge and lawyers.
This is kind of a myth. That was only part of the reasoning.
The suspect actually said:
"If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer (dog) cause this is not what’s up."
Is he actually requesting a lawyer? Maybe, or maybe he's saying he's innocent and asserting that he will defend himself (getting a lawyer) if charged. The police aren't required to execute subroutines either. You can't say "give me a lawyer if you think I'm guilty" or "give me a lawyer if Bobby was the snitch" or "give me a lawyer if the Collatz conjecture is true" (well you can, but they don't have to give you a lawyer then). You have to unambiguously ask for a lawyer if you want one.
And he's saying it's how he feels. He says he feels he should get a lawyer if they think he's guilty. This is not a clear request for a lawyer.
I don't buy this for a second. "If you think I did it" is clearly a preliminary clause akin to "If that's the way it's going to be," not the beginning of an if-then clause.
But the point here is that there shouldn't be such a test in the first place. "If y'all think I did it" was him (belatedly) realizing that he was a suspect, after the police put on a kabuki-show of pretending that he wasn't, which they are trained to do, specifically to get suspects to talk without asking for a lawyer. The whole thing is a farce. "It's okay to screw him because technically he didn't quite do the thing that we intentionally put in place to let us screw people more" is the sort of claim that's wrong even when it's right, because it's so very far removed from a genuine attempt to discover the truth of the matter.
The police "screwed" him by following the exact letter of the law as they questioned him, and didn't give him the "get out of jail free" card that he almost managed to get. And while it's not totally relevant, he was hardly just some kid with a joint on the floor of his car (it was a serious violent offense).
Yes, the police sailed a bit close to the wind. But maybe the law is currently too suspect-friendly in the USA (which then is compensated with extreme penalties for the tiny number of suspects who are found guilty in a trial). The US system is such a mess that the police and suspects basically conspire to avoid it (plea bargaining). And while it's easy to just blame the "law and order" crowd, they're partly just reacting to the fact that it's almost impossible to fairly convict a savvy criminal in the US without physical evidence or multiple witnesses.
In most of the world, police interrogations aren't optional (if you know the cheat codes). I believe that in the UK, Canada, Australia you have the right to remain silent, but police or prosecutor can tell the jury which questions you did not answer (and then the lawyers will argue over why that was the case). The right to council is often for the trial, not telling you how to avoid answering questions during a police interview. If the purpose of legal systems is to "discover the truth of the matter", then I think the US does a poor job (making it far too easy for a smart criminal to simply shut down a case against them), and a lot of the disfunction they have seems to be an attempt to compensate for all the rights that a smarter criminal can have.
> And while it's not totally relevant, he was hardly just some kid
It's absolutely not relevant. Everyone has rights. This "people who seem guilty should have a harder time in the legal system" take your comment is leaning into is a self sabotaging approach to justice, I hope for obvious reasons.
People who seem guilty absolutely should have a harder time in the legal system. That is the group of people who are more likely to be guilty. Police have quite a lot of discretion in who they arrest and that is already a fairly strong "looks guilty" signal.
What is important is there must be minimum standards to try and remove individual bias and push the system towards evidence based outcomes. If there is no evidence someone did something, they should not be punished. But if there is overwhelming evidence from the get go that they've committed a crime then the police can go through the motions and interpret the procedures unhelpfully.
It isn't perfect (in fact, the system is terrifyingly arbitrary) but it must be acknowledged that a case looking to be open-and-shut is suggestive of guilt and should influence how procedures are applied.
I guess it's easy to look at things this way if you're not on the wrong end of this "how things look" situation. Your argument strikes me as incredibly dishonest at best, and just plain evil at worst.
Enforcing the law is, in a sense, evil. At the end of the day enforcement is some combination of violence, coercion and thoughtfully depriving people of life/liberty/comfort.
The enforcement system is wildly imperfect and a side effect of that is the people involved have to make judgement calls about how to treat the people who get caught up in the legal system. If you can think of a way around that then you'll get your name in the history books.
> Your argument strikes me as incredibly dishonest at best, and just plain evil at worst.
Hopefully the path from dishonest to evil passes through some more positive places, because there are a lot of options that seem to be missing there.
It is because of viewpoints like yours that I celebrate the U.S. legal system, and that I despise the enforcement apparatus for it's discrimination against highly intelligent people. It is not difficult to become the butt end of the prosecutor's ire; and when faced with the resources of the State, how amazing that one can not only actually hold the State accountable to follow it's own process for depriving one of one's own life and liberty; and that one can actually fight tyranny at the same time by forcing the Government to tip their hands, and reveal their methods through sufficient attention to detail and the right questions.
How fantastic that a legal system acknowledges that a State with an agenda will wring all sorts of construed meaning out of silence; and pre-emptively writes out large swathes of that type of testimony (even if I disagree with some courts interpretation of testimony). Restricting the State to having to make a case on material facts.
Many warts that our legal system may have, most of the more pressing ones are problems of will to prosecute or investigate tough cases and lackluster investigatory technique when done.
The "seems pretty sus" barrier has no place in a justice system. Material facts. The world around a genuine wrong-doer will tell more than enough to convict them without playing games with "well they made the investigator's life more difficult by not opening the door and answering questions" and a follow up game of who is better at formulating the more intellectually palatable leading questions. Not one person should have to lift a finger to help contribute to building the walls in which the State seeks to contain them, and every innocent suspect deserves the finest council to help them navigate the vagaries of the legal system, and even the guilty deserve to have the case depriving them of life and liberty be conducted to the squeakiest degree humanly possible, with the aid of a robust defense.
To do anything less is an affront on human decency, and the integrity of the judicial apparatus.
> I believe that in the UK, Canada, Australia you have the right to remain silent
In Australia, not always true. You have no right to remain silent if questioned by an Examiner of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), a rather Star Chamber-esque federal law enforcement agency tasked with investigating terrorism, organised crime and other “major crimes” (a rather ill-defined category; pretty much any murder investigation could be given that label if they wanted to, although most murders wouldn’t interest them.) However, while they can force you to answer questions, they aren’t directly allowed to use your answers to prosecute you (but they can use them to prosecute other people, and they may be able to use them against you indirectly, if your answer leads them to discovering new physical evidence or witnesses.) You have the right to a lawyer, and the lawyer is allowed to object to questions, but you still have to answer them-if they object, they can attempt to get a court order after the fact to stop the answers from being used, if your lawyer doesn’t object at the time a court can dismiss an application for any such order on that basis. Also, if they call you in for questioning, it is a crime for you to tell anyone except for your own lawyer that they are questioning you.
> The right to council is often for the trial, not telling you how to avoid answering questions during a police interview.
It is important for the interview too. One’s lawyer can object to leading questions. They can give advice on how best to answer questions-you can be telling the truth, but some ways of phrasing the truth can sound much better than others. They can give advice on when it would be best to exercise one’s right to silence, and when it might be better not to.
Sometimes it even just serves to scare the police off. One guy I know was a bit of a hothead when he was younger, ended up in a fistfight, he put the other guy in hospital. He claimed self-defence, and it was one of those iffy “Who started it? Did he use excessive force in defending himself?” cases. He swears the only reason he wasn’t prosecuted, is he turned up to his official police interview with this really expensive, locally well-known criminal lawyer, and that scared the police and prosecution off, he was never charged. Who knows, but he’s probably right. Probably there’s some other guy out there who was in a similar situation, whose parents couldn’t afford that kind of lawyer (or didn’t know who they were or where to find them), and ended up being charged, going to trial, maybe even convicted, or talked into pleading guilty for a lesser sentence.
In the UK you have the right to remain silent, but "it may harm your defence if you fail to mention, when questioned, something you later come to rely on in court" (or something like that is what the police tell anyone they arrest).
> it's almost impossible to fairly convict a savvy criminal in the US without physical evidence or multiple witnesses.
That is not true. I don't even think police or prosecutors think that.
> The US system is such a mess that the police and suspects basically conspire to avoid it (plea bargaining)
Also not true. The plea bargaining system is not something that suspects "conspire" to use, it is foisted upon them and sometimes causes innocent people to plead guilty.
> In most of the world, police interrogations aren't optional...
Nor are they in the US. It's true that the police often stop questioning someone once they ask for a lawyer, but that's not because the questioning is "optional", it's because they know the lawyer will tell the suspect to shut up.
Your whole post is wildly miscalibrated. Calling legal representation a "get out of jail free" card is absurd. I don't know where you learned about the American legal system, but boy, I hope you never get arrested in the US for a crime you didn't commit, because it would not go well for you.
> The police "screwed" him by following the exact letter of the law
Ironically, it's impossible for the police to screw you by following the exact letter of the law. The exact letter of the law says the request for a lawyer has to be one that a reasonable layman would assume is a request for a lawyer. Therefore, relying on a legality to disqualify the request is a paradox.
Im happy to discuss the rights of suspects in various western societies. In Australia you have to answer your identity (name, address, date and place of birth) and otherwise can remain silent and nothing can be assumed from your silence. In Canada, any questions answered before you are told you can get a lawyer are considered inadmissible and the notification of your rights includes an option to call a free legal aid lawyer right then before the interrogation starts. The UK is complex, but range from a 100% right to remain silent (except for identifying themselves like in Australia) in Scotland to a more complex set of exceptions to the rights in England and Wales that needs a solicitor to explain.
>I believe that in the UK, Canada, Australia you have the right to remain silent, but police or prosecutor can tell the jury which questions you did not answer (and then the lawyers will argue over why that was the case).
Hmm, you might be right. I still think the US system tends to be very heavily driven by the opposing forces of the constitution and the government though, and has a lot of hard rules that don't seem particularly realistic (if a defendant says some magic phrase they fall under the constitution's protection, otherwise they're in trouble - it's a little like something sovereign citizens might dream up). While most countries let governments or the courts strike what they consider to be a balance.
> if a defendant says some magic phrase they fall under the constitution's protection, otherwise they're in trouble
This is not true. Every US citizen is protected by the constitution, all the time, and has the right to a lawyer, no matter what. The "magic" in that phrase is that if you try to exercise your right to a lawyer, and the cops refuse, and in so doing break the law and defy the constitution, saying the magic phrase means that they are more likely to get in trouble for doing so.
This, unfortunately, correct (In the US). A request for a lawyer must be completely unambiguous. If there is any ambiguity, and you then continue talking to the police, a court has a decent chance of ruling against you on the issue of whether or not you requested a lawyer. Speculating that you should get a lawyer, asking the police if a lawyer is necessary, asking if you can have a lawyer... those are not sufficient to guarantee that your rights are protected. There should be no question about what you want. It needs to be assertive, declarative.
There's no single magic phrase, but something like "I am invoking my right to legal counsel and will not answer any further questions". And then don't answer anything. Don't even ask anything related to the legal issue at hand.
So, the above comment is not necessarily stating their own opinion on how things should work. It is describing how things actually work in practice. Zero ambiguity.
It's a bit more subtle than that. The real issue here is that the ambiguity of this statement depends a lot of the cultural context. There are plenty of communities in the US where that statement reads as an absolutely unambiguous request for a lawyer.
It's obviously not a conditional "If you think I'm guilty, then I want a lawyer" (as the parent is attempting to parse it). But a statement of "You really think I did this? I didn't so I want a lawyer".
The issue is that in communities like HN and most important where the judge and police come from, this can seem more ambiguous. The real issue is, is this misreading of ambiguity in bad faith or not.
> The issue is that in communities like HN and most important where the judge and police come from, this can seem more ambiguous.
No, the issue is that the police will dishonestly feign misunderstanding of any potential ambiguity out of institutional interest, and that (especially elected) trial judges are, for the most part, inclined to do the same out of personal political interest.
Genuine, good-faith cultural misunderstanding is an insignificant issue; it may sometimes be present, but it's not anywhere close to the dominant issue.
I agree on the subtlety. Personally I think that expressing the most miniscule thought about having a lawyer should trigger that process. In practice, the judiciary system has ruled that requests for legal counsel must be unambiguous in the wording used. At a very minimum there should be something like a Miranda warning that does not allow police to continue without-- at each stage the word "lawyer" is said-- asking "are you asserting your 6th amendment right to legals counsel? Please answer with a Yes/No." That's off the top of my head though, maybe there's a better way
So you have the right to request a lawyer, but you can’t say “can I get a lawyer?” (cue “may I go to the bathroom” from English class), you have to make it so unambiguous it’s not entirely clear what exactly is the phrase you have to say. Thus a seemingly-rigid law being bent beyond reasonable interpretation.
>but you can’t say “can I get a lawyer?” [...] Thus a seemingly-rigid law being bent beyond reasonable interpretation.
Is this from another court case, or your own personal speculation? Saying "can I get a laywer" (as in, just that, not as part of a long winded sentence) is a much clearer statement of intent than what the "lawyer dawg" guy said. For that reason I think the courts would count that as "requesting a lawyer", even if your 5th grade english teacher disagrees.
Is it unfortunate that some people will get away with crimes, because they know to ask for a lawyer (unambiguously)? The "lawyer dog" suspect was found guilty of a serious crime (based on his interview with police), and I think he should have been convicted, and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality (at least in this specific case).
Or is it unfortunate that some people will be wrongfully convicted, because they didn't have a lawyer and said something which ended up making them (falsely) look guilty?
I suspect people will think it's a combination of the two - both false convictions exist, and some criminals get off because they know the system. But making it easier to get a lawyer will only fix one of these.
There has to be some balance. If the police can only convict based on physical evidence (and not suspect interviews) then a lot of crimes will be impossible to prosecute.
Unfortunate because people are innocent until proven guilty, so we cannot (US, constitutionally) and should not be making determinations about how easy it should be to assert a constitutional right to legal counsel.
Constitutional rights should be very easy to exercise and very difficult to limit. And in these scenarios, regarding the possibility that criminals might find an easier time getting legal help, you must consider part of the founding philosophy of the US legal system, a portion borrowed from England's William Blackstone: it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer.
Or, as codified by precedent from the US Supreme Court some time later in 1895, "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent".
To make it harder to get a lawyer because the person might be guilty... or having police or prosecutors make their own individual determinations on that difficulty based on their own subjective belief in the suspect's probability of guilt... Those are antithetical to the principals that founded the US legal system, and antithetical to the rule of law superceding the rule of men.
So there does not need to be a balance, at least not beyond the constitution and corresponding precedent-based legal doctrine. The entire point is that it should be very difficult to strip away a person's freedom. The job of police is not supposed to be easy. If a suspect that has not been found guilty wants the benefit of legal counsel then they are entitled to it. The job of police should not be made easier at the cost of losing fundamental rights.
> it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality (at least in this specific case).
Assuming it was good in this case, and that the confession wasn't forced or some such, it's definitely not good in "big picture" terms.
Making evidence acquired outside of what is laws inadmissible keeps law enforcement honest since there will be nothing to gain by breaking the rules, and it ensures that evidence is not tampered with and that people's rights are protected.
Yes, these things sometimes let guilty people go free, but that's better than locking up innocent people. It sucks, but that's the reality of it.
> and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality
This phrasing is like identity theft, it puts the burden on the wrong party. Had he not been convicted, it would be because the state failed to successfully prosecute him by not giving him a fair trial.
A system where evidence obtained illegally is admissible in court creates a perverse incentive for police to collect evidence illegally and suffer the suffer the consequences of that in order to get a conviction. You have to take away the value to eliminate the incentive. Imagine a world where where theft was punishable by 2 years in jail but you got to keep whatever money you stole.
If the rules are arcane and specific, then the system will just reward the most competent criminals at the expense of the unprepared and the falsely accused.
Making innocent people's lives harder just to catch the least prepared criminals doesn't sound like much of a trade-off.
Come on. That's a willful misinterpretation, for one thing, and for the other, the judge specifically said that it was not clear what a "lawyer-dog" was. You are trying to come up with a more rational explanation post hoc when the judge himself gave the stupid one.
> In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a
“lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).
The link is dead for me, were you able to read it?
But this seems this is more of the ruling, note that the judge points out 'prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it'
> I agree with the Court's decision to deny the defendant's writ application and write separately to spotlight the very important constitutional issue regarding the invocation of counsel during a law enforcement interview. The defendant voluntarily agreed to be interviewed twice regarding his alleged sexual misconduct with minors. At both interviews detectives advised the defendant of his Miranda rights and the defendant stated he understood and waived those rights. Nonetheless, the defendant argues he invoked his right to counsel. And the basis for this comes from the second interview, where I believe the defendant ambiguously referenced a lawyer—prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what's up."
> As this Court has written, "[i]f a suspect makes a reference to an attorney that is ambiguous or equivocal in that a reasonable police officer in light of the circumstances would have understood only that the suspect might be invoking his right to counsel, the cessation of questioning is not required." State v. Payne, 2001-3196, p. 10 (La. 12/4/02), 833 So.2d 927, 935 (citations omitted and emphasis in original); see also Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452, 462, 114 S.Ct. 2350, 2357, 129 L.Ed.2d 362 (1994) (agreeing with the lower courts' conclusion that the statement "[m]aybe I should talk to a lawyer" is not an unambiguous request for a lawyer).
> In my view, the defendant's ambiguous and equivocal reference to a "lawyer dog" does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).
I was indeed able to read that -- poorly edited, since the "prefacing" part ends up referencing the entire statement -- opinion in its entirety from the link I shared. I think it beggars belief that a "reasonable police officer" could have found the statement in any way ambiguous. At best, if we take your reading of the opinion, putting the phrase "lawyer dog" in quotes like it's a single lexical item is a completely unnecessary jab at the defendant's mannerisms that doesn't inspire confidence in the judge's impartiality.
Enthusiastic agreement. The ruling is a plain affront to reason; Anyone supporting it is doing so in bad faith. He didn't say "lawyer dog", he said "give me a lawyer, dog", where "dog" is one of the many colloquial vocatives used in American English like "sir" "dude" "man" "yo".
Naturally, everyone involved in this case was aware of this. They just decided to enjoy abusing their power by feigning misunderstanding, because it worked to their advantage, because they wanted to, and most importantly, because they knew they could get away with it. Truth is less important that power.
If the defendant hadn't spoken English, they would have been obliged to provide a translator. It is obvious that linguistic barriers don't cede ones constitutional rights. This is somehow even worse, however, than not providing a translator. It is a bad-faith abuse of the inherent diversity of English to deny someone their rights.
I honestly don’t understand how you can read that and not interpret it as a clear request for a lawyer. It takes mental gymnastics to assume that he did not, in fact, want a lawyer.
Oh sure, and the phrase "Why don't you get me a lawyer" is not a request, but a question, the answer to which the police isn't obligated to provide.
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
The only relevant part is that the words "get me a lawyer" were said, and these words mean - hear me for a second here - that the person in question requested a lawyer.
Willful misinterpretation is precisely what any self-preserving legalistic person or system will do. In a situation like this, they'll choose B, because if they don't, they are choosing to lose in the face of an inconvenient truth.
You could run that through a group of kindergartners and 30/30 would tell you he requested a lawyer. It’s only a person with a special kind of learned stupidity, or malice that can claim that they are not sure if it was a request for a lawyer.
The point is, if someone being accused of or investigated for a crime and they say ".*Lawyer.*", in the United States this should automatically trigger the police to stop talking to the suspect until the attorney is present.
I agree, should. But ruling precedent by judges has said otherwise, that the request for a lawyer must be clear and unambiguous. It should not be a question, speculation about the need for a lawyer, "I think I need to..".
Yes, this is unfortunate. Especially considering the way the US very broadly interprets rights under other amendments, yet so very narrowly in the case of the 6th amendment.
So we should discriminate against the people who don't know to say "lawyer"?
Why not just give every suspect a lawyer immediately. And since any sane suspect will listen to their lawyer (who will advise them to plead the 5th), why not ban police from interviewing suspects altogether, and simply give a list of questions to their lawyer to discuss.
Exactly! we should! By giving everyone a lawyer immediately we focus on establishing truth.
Only reason we don't is that its obviously too expensive and impractical. This is why we initially try without, and involve a lawyer when "it gets serious".
So consider this: Why should the suspect be punished for this reality?
I find the phrase you quoted as unambiguously asking for a lawyer, and it takes motivated reading (or an inability to imagine other speech patterns) to arrive at any other answer.
And, for fun, in serval US circuits the suspect would have been asking for a lawyer.
Adding qualifiers is usually a linguistic filler, not attempting to add more information. Other phrasings also considered not to ask for a lawyer by the courts under the same standard are: "I think I need a lawyer", "is there a lawyer I can speak with" and "where's my lawyer". Do you really think those weren't clearly asking for a lawyer, and really were expressing unacted on thought, question about the general availability of lawyers or asking the cops to report on the location of his attorney as a completely isolated question?
A native English speaker would understand the sentence - in the same way that saying, "give me a lawyer Stan" can be easily understood. The person in that sentence isn't asking for a "lawyer Stan" but is naming the other person in the conversation as "Stan" or in this case as "dawg".
For a police officer, who regularly deals with this sort of slang, to misunderstand this - that only happens when they want to intentionally violate the rights of the accused.
I wish the author gave examples for why he thinks "manipulation" and "gaslighting" are arbitrary and flexible. I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith.
It's fair to say that it's extremely difficult to prove manipulation, which makes it seem arbitrary. But, there's plenty of legal standards that require proving intent, not just action. That's a high bar, but it's not unreasonable or arbitrary
I think the author is right that those terms are flexible (maybe arbitrary is too strong). They depend on value judgements or the ability to know someone else's mental state. "Bad faith" is a great example. It's easy to label someone "bad faith" just because you disagree with them and I find that's common.
Whether this flexibility is a problem or a virtue is another question. When the author calls for us to eliminate these flexible laws/norms, he's trying to formalize something quite vague. Even if that's possible I'm not sure it's desirable. Perhaps when it comes to millions of people living together in harmony, vagueness is a good thing.
> I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith.
If that is what charges of "manipulation" actually corresponded to in practice, then one could just punish the actual instances of deception, dishonesty, or withheld information (DD&WI). But, in fact, it's rather rare for people to object to DD&WI when it is used to support a position they agree with, and in these situations they essentially never call it "manipulation". (If your friend Bob withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".) In other words, "manipulation" is only used as an additional charge, beyond DD&WI, for things we disagree with.
(One could argue that we correctly have laws that punish actions based on the action's impact, like attempted vs. completed murder, and that "manipulation" could be for when DD&WI is deployed effectively. But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with, and they never claim that effective DD&WI of this type should be punished more harshly than ineffective DD&WI.)
"But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with"
I might be an alien, but I do call this manipulation and I do so openly and loud enough to in fact did receive a lot of "counter attacks", just for insisting on truth and facts, which is indeed not normally welcome by any side in tribal wars.
Did you actually use the word "manipulation", or did you just criticize deception/dishonesty? (Would be interested in a link if you have one.) I think the valence behind the word "manipulation" is so clear in real-world usage that it would be incorrect, from a linguistic descriptivist perspective, to use it this way. It would be like using the word "miserly" for thrifty behavior that you endorsed.
I am not a native english speaker, but I do not really see a big difference between manipulation and deception and dishonesty.
And I rarely call this behavior out in those words in those situations.
Example? Vaccination. I am in the "political" camp of people, who think as much people as possible should get vaccinated against covid.
Still, when I see posts written that go: "there is no reason to not get vaccinated, they are totally safe" (meant especially to covid, but also in a general sense) and I respond, that "no, they are not total safe, there have been incidents of contaminated production batches for example and it is not 100% clear, that for young people there is individually more benefit than potential harm and no doctor ever advised of taking just any vaccination (there are many vaccinations with actual higher risks, only benefiting, when visiting certain areas)" than I have to word it very, very careful or face a shitstorm even here. As in their perception I fight then against their political cause - overcoming the pandemic with more vaccinations. While in my perception they try to reach their goals with lies, which I do not agree with, despite agreeing to the goal.
There's a difference between reasonable and pedantic. To say "going through that neighborhood is perfectly safe", doesn't mean you're not aware of there ever being crimes there.
So yeah, if you would try something like that within the context of a very contested issue, I would definitely assume you're clandestinely trying to sabotage the discussion.
People mean different things, when they say they want to have a discussion guided by facts.
I mean it literal.
"there is no reason to not get vaccinated, they are totally safe"
And since this is factual wrong, I think it is very weird to assume that I would want to sabotage a discussion, when relativating absolutistic statements, that bring no benefit to any discussion. They only enforce groupthink. But this this rather the cultural default, which I am quite aware of.
Well, it's certainly true that the post is about hypocrisy:
> Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties.
If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then
mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.
Yep, I disagree with Hanson's assertion that "manipulation" is outcome dependent. I think he's conflating the way that it's used in popular discourse (which is often outcome dependent), with what I think is a fairly clear definition.
He's then calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining a person's intent. I actually think that's counter-productive and leaves you vulnerable to (for want of a better word) manipulation.
A person's intent matters and effects how you should interpret and respond to information they deliver. If I'm debating with someone, I want to know whether their intent is to 1) figure out the truth or try to reach consensus, 2) prove themselves right, or 3) just prove me wrong. 1 is fun, 2 is normal, and 3 is a troll. Whether they agree with me or not isn't relevant - their intentions very much are.
> I think he's conflating the way that it's used in popular discourse (which is often outcome dependent), with what I think is a fairly clear definition.
He's not conflating, he's just taking a different stance than you to linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.
> He's then calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining a person's intent. I actually think that's counter-productive and leaves you vulnerable to (for want of a better word) manipulation.
No, he's not. He never mentions intent in the post. He is calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining the actions outcome.
> If your friend Bob used withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".
I think this depends on both the position and the actual arguments that were used (or withheld).
To give a hypothetical example for Democrats in the U.S.:
- If Bernie Sanders were to information about the negative budgetary repercussions of his Medicare-for-all plan (I'm not claiming he has or hasn't; I'm just giving an example), many Democrats probably wouldn't consider that "manipulation" of the public.
- But if he were to withhold information about how Medicare-for-all would actually somehow benefit corporate interests/profits at the cost of taxpayers (again, I'm not claiming this; I'm just giving a hypothetical example), a lot of the same Democrats probably would consider that "manipulation" of the public.
Of course there are people who would behave the same way in both situations too, but my point is that there are lots that would behave differently.
And obviously this isn't to claim people have zero bias here, but I don't think that's particularly specific to "manipulation". People just have a bias against criticizing people whose conclusions they agree with in general, whether the accusation is one of manipulation, corruption, or something else.
> But if he were to withhold information about how Medicare-for-all would actually somehow benefit corporate interests/profits at the cost of taxpayers..., a lot of the same Democrats probably would consider that "manipulation" of the public.
I assert that Democrats who supported his plan would not use the word "manipulation" for this. Instead, the Democrats who criticized Sanders for this would only say he was deceptive or withheld info.
Maybe? To be honest I'm having a hard time analyzing whether the reluctance to call it manipulation (i.e. actually using that word in speech/writing) would be mostly attributable to him being Democrat, or mostly to the word "manipulation" not being all that common in daily speech in general. I feel like people are just far less willing to use that word in a public interview with a journalist than on, say, an English exam.
Their definition of manipulation would forbid any negotiation move other than laying all of your cards on the table. ("Withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs.") So yeah.
Tangentially, when negotiating I’ve had pretty good luck with just straight up asking what the other party’s best offer is. Usually I have to iterate a couple rounds of course. Rarely is the first response actually their best offer. Since I really am willing to walk away, it’s worked well for both professional and personal relationships. Obviously the framing and presentation is different between a job interview and a first date, but in the end it’s basically the same principles at work.
Yeah, I actually lean towards openness too (though I once had to give up on an exciting job offer because I naively anchored the salary discussion with my previous government-salary-band-for-a-high-school-dropout, instead of just not answering). But it's gotta be a free choice; someone demanding it of you, as a supposed norm, is being pushy.
Would their definition forbid it, or would it just label such behavior as "manipulative" and you happen to have a negative association with that word? I do personally view many (but not all) "aggressive" negotiations as manipulative. And yes, withholding pertinent information is deceitful as far as I'm concerned.
But I didn't bring up aggressive negotiations at all: I said that withholdingany information about my private, personal valuation of a prospective trade constitutes "manipulation" according to the definition given.
It's true that withholding of information can be manipulative. Either this definition left out how we are to judge this (and so failed to establish that it's "actually very clear") or you think you have a right to the private contents of my mind and 100% of the gains from trade.
> Would their definition forbid it
Our context is a discussion of good or bad norms. Technically you could want to live under bad norms.
That's a great critique of my definition. I don't think people are manipulative by withholding private or personal information. Withholding relevant information isn't manipulative in certain contexts either: i.e. those where all parties agree that there is no expectation of transparency. So, we could either argue that 1) deception implies that there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure, or 2) update the definition to explicitly say "...withheld information when there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure..."
For example, if I invest in a publicly traded company, I expect the company to be honest on their quarterly filings, but I don't expect to have access to all of their financials. If a company withholds pertinent information because they don't want to impact the stock price, that is manipulation. If they withhold the same information honestly believing it isn't significant to the stock price, that's not manipulation (though it may be incompetence).
Another example: If I target financially illiterate people with predatory loans, that is often manipulative. I'm deliberately targeting people who I wouldn't expect to be able to analyze repercussions of the loan, and I'm lying when I say it will be positive.
If I target financially illiterate people and give them credit cards that I believe are within their means, then I'm not being manipulative - even if some of those folks default or their lives are made worse by the loan.
Yeah, I think this is reasonable. IANAL but I have the impression that manipulations like these would go under "fraud" -- most debatably the last couple. The OP was about pressures to establish laws and norms that are more open to interpretations:
> we also seem to include some more flexible offenses, such as “brainwashing”, “propaganda”, “manipulation”, “deception”, “misinformation”, “harassment”, and “gaslighting”. Again the key is that these tend to be defined less in terms of what exactly was done wrong, and more in terms of a disliked result.
so I just wanted to object to a claim in this context that "manipulation" actually is open-and-shut. If I'm right that your last couple of examples are where "manipulation" leaves more discretion to enforcement than the "fraud" standard, then I don't think you're disagreeing much with the OP on this point (though probably you are on whether this discretion is excessive).
Is this bad faith in the techniques of the persuasion, or that the persuasion is being used in a malicious way?
For example, if I say something misleading (or omit a few facts) to encourage people to vote for an objectively good candidate, is that bad faith? The persuasion is using a dark pattern, but I've got good intentions.
On the other hand, maybe I have some objectively bad belief, and I openly and candidly try to persuade people of it. Is that bad faith?
I'd lean towards the former being "bad faith". I believe that free and candid discussion is the best mechanism to move society forward, and I think that more progress would be great. But there are people who would disagree, because it took a lot of work to get our society to its current state, and they want to prioritise conserving what we've already got.
Yes, your first example is correct (by definition). Bad faith is misrepresenting your motivations or the relevant facts in some way, including by omission.
> But there are people who would disagree, because <reasons>
That is an example of mental gymnastics to avoid classifying the thing they want to do as bad in their own view. They want to do something but they don't want to think of themselves as behaving in bad faith because they're a good person doing the right thing.
I think people who use the term bad faith (and similar phrases) use it with the best of intentions, but the ambiguous nature of it combined with the imprecise way most people speak and think results in it causing more problems not less.
At a basic hardware level its not hard to understand. Our chimp brain has 200 billion neurons with about 1 trillion connections. There is nothing static about that network structure or the info flowing through it at any given moment. If there are 6-7 billion of these networks then connected up with each other in various other ever changing networks with different ever changing info flowing through, what the fuck hope is there of keeping all that hardware in sync for very long.
The energy requirememts for consistent sync are massive.
If you try to make flexible offenses less flexible, you'll come up against the same principle that drives warmongering via accusations of sorcery:
If I feel hurt, fearful, hateful, or threatened, and I feel it's your fault, then it's your fault.
I think there are plenty of people who earnestly embrace this principle and would reject any attempt to put it out of their reach. It's just too powerful a weapon for sociopaths, and sociopaths still run the world.
I know it isn't the main thrust of the piece, but I think the author nailed the real way that laws are used.
> The key difference is that such “flexible offenses” tend to be defined more in terms of how someone important doesn’t like an outcome, and less in terms of what specifically someone did to induce that resulting dislike.
There are so many crimes that anyone can be charged at any time. The reality of prosecution (in the USA, but moreso in the soviet union and other places) is that often prosecutors first decide who needs to be charged with a crime, and secondly what crime to charge. And there are enough laws that there is always something to charge.
This is also how the Soviet Union--which ostensibly had free speech and assembly--operated. Anyone who was problematic would find themselves guilty of obscure tax violations or other nonsense.
The book '3 felonies per day' is focused on this problem.
I happen to think this is one of the most under-stated problems of our society, and it's difficult to fix because the people charged often did do something bad--just not illegal.
As an example: the recent news of a journalist charged with hacking that gov website comes to mind.
Ever heard of Snowden, Manning and Assange (who isn’t even a US citizen!)? While I agree that the US isn’t China or Russia, it’s closer to those than other western countries. If you told someone in Europe about asset forfeitures, they would think you’re from some rogue state.
This is also how the USA keeps down communities of color. A white suburban kid with drugs is "boys will be boys." A black urban kid with drugs is "throw the book at this thug." A white terrorist must be "understood" and sympathized. A minority terrorist is a monster that must be exterminated. A white applicant is a "good culture fit." A black applicant is "urban" and "challenging for our corporate culture." A white missing girl is an urgent emergency. A black missing girl is a "streetsmart" young-lady probably off with friends.
etc,etc.
All corrupt states do this and the USA's corruption is easily at Soviet levels.
This statement is hard to quantify, but as an observer who never lived in USSR and only briefly in the USA, there's no way. The USSR was rotten to the core. USA has it's own rot for sure and needs to fix so much, but it's no where close to Soviet levels of corruption.
There's a reason so many Russians fled for the USA and not vice-versa.
if one were to consider lobbying as a form of corruption then it's a much closer comparisson.
but of course, "lobbying" is not corruption because it's lobbying. (then again lobbying does end up undermining the will of the public individual in favor of the will of the public corporation... so much for "the people" unless the people are businesses and companies)
The USA just had the losing president incite a riot at the capital to stop the rightful winner of the election from taking power. On top of asking multiple foreign governments for election help and pardoning his cronies who helped him with this. In response his party has put in hardcore laws limiting the right to vote for many liberal and disenfranchised communities.
The USA lied to start a war in Iraq that killed at least 200,000 people. The US started and led and funded War of Terror has killed 900,000 people (Brown University). Nearly all these deaths were Muslims.
The USA has intense income inequality and the police regularly murder its citizens with impunity.
The current president is at best a mislead old man or an active oppressor, responsible for much of the law that keeps communities of color in debt and unfairly jailed by draconian crime bills that targeted the PoC community.
The US media is almost exclusively corporate and owned by a handful of corporate entities most own by billionaires who use such media to push views that benefit them politically and economical.
The USA is rife with conspiracy theories and has a very low vaccination rate compared to its western peers for reasons above.
The USA is best seen as an oligarchy where the wealthy get what they want from a legislative agenda perspective and are almost always above the law. Trump's only signature piece of legislation and the GOP's top priority was a significant tax cut for the wealthy that was permanent and a lesser one for the middle class that expires.
The USA has nearly 30m uninsured people compared to their western peers who all have some type of universal health insurance system.
The USA is destroying women's right, especially the right to choose and access to birth control and the morning after pill.
The USA has an incarceration rate of 639 inmates per 100,000 people, which is the worst in the world. This almost twice the USSR's rate. 40% of these inmates are black in a country where 13% of the population is black.
I think a lot of Americans are in denial of the everyday corruption here.
>There's a reason so many Russians fled for the USA
I'm not sure how true this is. We didn't see significant migration from the Eastern Bloc until their economies got much much worse. Communist nations that did well economically had low levels of migration. The same way largely Democratic, yet poor, Crimean Ukrainians welcomed corrupt Russian annexation because it meant being part of the powerful Russian economy ($3k gdp per capita vs $10k). In other words, people welcome an oppressive state if it means more money. Flights for freedom are often propaganda. Flights for money are often the truth. My parents fled their country to go to the USA solely for economic reasons. "Freedom", mom, apple pie, and baseball are laughable bullshit to the immigrant community.
>and not vice-versa.
The USA had 2x the GDP capita than the USSR during 1980s migrations. Again, this was purely an economic flight for nearly all immigrants.
Your critique highlights how the US had a President lose an election, and how he tried to undo it.
However close he came to success (which we might dispute), he lost it in the first place, then be failed to hold on, and then he was removed. This leaves the US easily 1000x more free and more democratic than the USSR, which never ran an election without tampering with the vote in the first place, and which never saw its leaders democratically deposed. They succeeded in suppressing democracy much earlier in the process.
The rest of your comments suffer a parallel problem.
But the coup was unsuccessful solely by dumb luck!
Is not the ringing endorsement of American stability and greatness you think it is. Especially when none of the coup planners have been charged, let alone imprisoned.
Dumb luck. And the fact it was led by a mentally ill guy in a buffalo costume and no one thought to bring weapons or make a plan to take over the government.
It wasn't a coup. Nor a coup attempt. It was a protest against an election that many people considered fraudulent that got out of hand.
Exactly why it got out of hand and who encouraged that is another topic.
It became a coup attempt the moment someone shouted "Hang Mike Pence." But yes, fortunately, it was precisely the sort of laughably-botched coup attempt you'd expect from Trump and his supporters. We won't be so lucky next time.
History suggests we have about ten years until the consequences of leaving the plotters unpunished come back to us. The people in charge now will mostly be retired or dead of old age.
The bar has to be a little higher than that. I can go to any protest and shout, "Kill the President." At a minimum, I have to have the intent of following through, otherwise I'm just some loud nutjob at somebody else's protest. Even then, I'm attempting a coup. Everyone else is still just protesting. The nature of their actions is not changed by my presence there.
Maybe Jan. 6 still clears that bar. I don't know enough of the details to say that it doesn't.
OK, it became a coup attempt the moment someone shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" at a riot where some people built a gallows, some people roved around inside the building carrying Tasers and handcuffs, and some other people brought firearms, ammunition, and IEDs.
But I imagine you'll just move the bar^H^H^Hgoalposts again, because that's what Trump apologists are good at.
Meanwhile, holy shit, imagine if those people really had been the BLM and Antifa agitators that the Republicans tried so desperately to tell us they were.
Maybe Jan. 6 still clears that bar. I don't know enough of the details to say that it doesn't
On the off chance that's true, I would say that this is an excellent time to start paying attention to what's going on. Again, we have about 10 years, give or take, going by the example of the Beer Hall Putsch.
What does this mean? It's catchy, but what mechanism exists where a political position can run out of room? The space is defined by the number of inhabitants.
The fact that you can make all of these points in a public forum, or even within earshot of the wrong neighbors or coworkers, without being dragged out of your house at 3 AM and shoved into the back of a van, never to be seen again, is why we're better than the Soviets were.
Admittedly that's not a high bar to clear, but... we're over it.
Many of the issues you are describing are problems. However, few to none of them are "corruption". Corruption is not a generic term for all issues facing a society; it is a specific term for a group of issues involving the use of power for personal gain (e.g. bribery, graft, nepotism, etc).
The book is roughly about the issue I talk about: laws are complex and innumerable and anyone can be found at fault. In short, we expect investigators to first be notified of a crime, then investigate to determine who committed it. Instead, they sometimes choose who needs to be convicted first--then investigate them until determining what the charge will be.
According to the negative Amazon reviews, no, the book never finds typical Americans committing felonies. However, if you're a doctor, or a farmer, or a politician, then surprise! There are special laws to follow that most people don't think about.
One case involves somebody "out in the woods gathering shell casings from federal land", a very normal activity.
The core problem American society is facing is bad faith participants. When a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system there is no clever rules hack that will prevent them from doing damage.
Polarization. It's a race to the bottom. My opponent behaves deceptively so I guess I will to. As far as I understand this sort of political climate has also existed in the past in the US.
> > a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system
Note that this bit from GP would be readily agreed with by both the far left and far right in the US. However they would each give completely different examples of things that were destabilizing (according to them).
Or what about the vice president shooting one of the founding fathers dead over what was basically a twitter war for that time? Lol yea we are more extreme and divided now. Give me a break.
I would add that this "flexibility" also lends itself very well to motte-and-bailey defenses: When pressed to justify such a law - say e.g. libel - you can draw up some gross, obvious offenses that fall under the law, ideally with the audience as the victim ("imagine someone walked around the neighborhood and was telling everyone you murdered someone"), giving you broad support.
What you don't tell is what other, much more murkier circumstances would also be covered by the law - e.g. journalists publishing well-researched allegations of corruption.
There are so many double standards applied today that it’s hard to know what the author has in mind. Can accept the idea that vague rules are subject to abuse though.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire
Wildly incorrect beliefs are the most dangerous thing in the world. It's what led to 9/11 (islamism), WW2 (nazism), The Great Famine/The Cultural Revolution (Maoism), etc.
We do need to defend against incorrect and dangerous ideas. Just putting misinformation in scare quotes to dismiss it isn't a good response.
Voltaire was a passionate defender of free speech. Communist China and Weimar Republic Germany both had laws to suppress speech prior to their overthrow. Maoist China, Nazi Germany, and Islamist countries in the Middle East all suppressed opposition. Our current situation highly correlates with companies attempting to control speech, though one could argue that the causation runs the other way.
The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse- few are convinced by an authority saying a position is wrong. And there is no such authority that is free of corruption; there is no ultimate source of truth.
Setting effectiveness aside, it is a cruelty to deny the right of expression to anyone. Humans deserve to share their beliefs with others. One of us is wrong right now. Would you prefer a world where that one is made to remain silent?
> The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse-
Well.. sort of. This is true if you're dealing with an honest debate partner. It's not true if you're dealing with an opponent that is a psy-ops operator of some kind or a 4chan troll army.
False beliefs are literally infinite. They are fractal. Debunking also takes more effort than to invent a new idiotic position.
This is an asymmetrical war. We want to limit the asymmetry so it becomes closer to symmetrical between wrong things and right things. This is a hard problem, but letting bots run rampant surely isn't helping. "The solution to bad speech is more speech" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't really make logical sense. The solution to confusion isn't more confusion. The solution to lying isn't more lying.
You don't need to convince someone who already doesn't believe what they're saying. The overwhelming majority of people are not psy-ops operators or 4chan trolls.
If someone invents new idiotic positions when they are proven wrong, they look like an idiot, and even dumber-than-average people can tell. If those people believe, rightly, that their side is not being given a fair fight, they may not be inclined to update. And they will be inclined to move to a community where the truth is not given a fair fight.
>"The solution to bad speech is more speech" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't really make logical sense. The solution to confusion isn't more confusion. The solution to lying isn't more lying.
The solution to confusion is clarity. The solution to lying is telling the truth. The solution to bad speech is good speech. There's not a fundamental logic error there. If I'm wrong, it's on the object level.
There is logical error in using speech to say that more speech won't advance your objectives. If you don't think that speech can do good, why would you waste your time participating in it?
The overwhelming majority of people who interact with a given issue on social media are not psy-ops operators or 4chan trolls. Speaking from a deeply shameful amount of experience interacting with given issues on social media, at most we're talking 3%.
This is beside the point, though. If misinformation meant robots and Russian conspirators, sure, ban it- it won't matter because arguments are not won by counting advocates, and there is very little of this anyway.
But it doesn't, and you've said as much above. Wildly incorrect and/or dangerous beliefs are not 'bad' speech. They are precisely the speech that 'free speech' is intended to protect; speech that disagrees with or threatens the establishment is the only speech that has ever been under attack. More of it is better.
If good speech is somehow drowned out by bad, people will start learning to seek out trustworthy sources again. People are not stupid. The ones that are don't spend their days reading and writing. And even the morons have every right to choose what they believe from the infinite set of possibilities.
Modern brainwashing has been developed in the US and no wonder Americas poor seem to have been the biggest victims... whether it comes to what people should eat or do or say.
For example, they have convinced an entire race of people that a word is offensive, in itself. Context doesn't matter. You can't even quote someone saying it. From the outside perspective, it's absolutely insane. It is very scary to think that there are poeple who pulled this off. What else can they do?
That isn't a very good example unless you have some sort of argument why it is artificial. Cultures usually throw up sets of taboos or mandatory actions that are specific but also pointless (eg, spiritual rituals). Having magic banned words isn't even very unusual, just look at how patterns of behaviour when cursing change over the years.
At the end of the day you need a reasonable judge and lawyers.