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Will Sam & Max be considered a hate crime in New York?
Lord Jezo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
As we all know here in the USA everyone has gone haywire and been on a noose hunt. It seems nooses are being found everywhere at all times and there now bills going through various governments to outlaw nooses completely.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/10/22/noose_law/
In New York:
ALBANY—The New York State Senate Majority passed legislation Monday, sponsored by Senator Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), to make it a felony to etch, paint, draw or otherwise place or display a noose on public or private property.
In Sam & Max there is a noose hanging from the coat rack in their office. With these new laws will games like Sam & Max be considered hate speech and need re-editing to be released? I wonder if the current version of Sam & Max will be pulled from the market GTA:San Andreas style with a cleaner, more PC version to hit the market, sans the noose.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/10/22/noose_law/
In New York:
ALBANY—The New York State Senate Majority passed legislation Monday, sponsored by Senator Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), to make it a felony to etch, paint, draw or otherwise place or display a noose on public or private property.
In Sam & Max there is a noose hanging from the coat rack in their office. With these new laws will games like Sam & Max be considered hate speech and need re-editing to be released? I wonder if the current version of Sam & Max will be pulled from the market GTA:San Andreas style with a cleaner, more PC version to hit the market, sans the noose.
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Lord Jezo on
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Man this is dumb.
What
Someo of you people really hate it when its pointed out that racism is still rampant in your country...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Just... what?
This is retarded.
Edit: Wait never mind.
T minus 10... 9... 8...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I accept that. I don't accept this type of legislation as a reasonable step toward fixing that problem...way too broad. EDIT: Well on further review it's not as broad as I thought, but still regulating speech for content makes me uneasy.
Secondly, there is a pretty good argument that outlawing "hate speech" and other such racially offensive things doesn't make them go away. It just drives them underground, which is more dangerous.
/shrug
I don't see how outlawing hate speech such as burning a cross on a lawn makes the problem more dangerous. The people committing the acts are already underground. It isn't like the people hanging the nooses or burning the crosses attach a note to them saying who put them up.
Good thing nobody thinks it will "make them go away," then. The point is to criminalize antisocial behavior. It's why we also have laws against verbal assault and threats.
I...don't think the point of anti-hate laws is to "criminalize antisocial behavior". You cannot criminalize antisocial behavior. I'm not even sure you can concretely define "antisocial behavior" at least to the point where you can use it as legislative criteria.
Which doesn't really respond to the argument that doing this makes the problem worse rather than helping.
As titmouse said, how is it possibly "making the problem worse"? I'm pretty sure if you check your post-Reconstruction history you won't find many accounts of Klansmen leaving their P.O. boxes and daytime telephone numbers on the site of a lynching.
I would argue it doesn't, really, except for deterring that type of expression of the attitude, which doesn't really go to the heart of the problem. And it's more dangerous because society THINKS the problem is going away when really, it isn't.
Laws against assault don't go to the heart of why people threaten violence to each other, but you know what? That's okay, because I don't hold the legal system to an insane double standard.
1. Nooses are showing up because it's almost Halloween. It's a Halloween theme.
2. Making threats against someone's life (racist or otherwise) is already illegal.
Banning the image of a noose in public and private is not only unconstitutional, it's downright idiotic. I don't even have a word for how stupid it is.
EDIT: Aha. Misread. I only read the snippet of the article in the OP and skimmed through the full thing. Now I see the key words "with intent to threaten, intimidate or harass."
So it's not that bad then.
What are laws about hate crimes trying to do though? They COME with an extra motive and standard, because of what they are, right?
Edit: Also in response to post-Constructionist history I present exhibit A), the south. People actually think the racism is gone there just because most people there speak politely.
Only among people who think blackface is an acceptable costume choice.
Usually intimidation is a silencer of free speech. It is possible to express racist opinions without meeting the standard of "threaten, harrass or intimidate". Therefore I'd have to say that the marketplace of ideas is served and free speech enriched by preventing intimidation.
Oh don't be ridiculous.
But why single it out when current laws for harassment/threatening people would cover these actions?
What makes you so sure that the display of a noose with this intent is covered by the current laws? Are you familiar with the laws of the state of New York?
Seriously.
The legal/penal system is built around the concept of the normalization/standardization of behavior in this country. That's what happens when the state becomes synonymous with its people, as opposed to it's divinely-appointed ruler. We make things illegal that are seen as an affront to or an attack on the state, we enforce laws on each other, and the penal system is supposedly intended to rehabilitate (we're pretty bad at that though, especially in America).
The legal/penal system in America is most definitely a normalizing system.
Well how fucking retarded would you have to be to ignore the history of lynching in the US because you're just so desperate to have that one motif on your front porch?
It's not like being hanged is only scary to black people, nor like black people are the only people who've been hanged. Especially not in horror-movies. In fact I don't think I've ever seen anyone black get hung in a horror movie, and I used to watch AMC's Fear Fridays religiously. Horror movies are very prominent in Halloween themes here. You should have seen what two of my buddies did to their house for a party last year. Pretty fucking creepy, it was an awesome Halloween party.
Edit: Er, relavence to the anecdote, there was all kinds of fabricated suggestion of human sacrifice and a fake snuff-studio made up in one of the bedrooms. They went so far as to leave a mini-tape from the camcorder in its box with the labels filled out of the past three Tuesdays (or whatever day Halloween was) with first-names listed next to them.
This
This is like two towns over from where I live. Lady hangs Holloween decorations outside of her house, lady gets protested by local Baptist church.
We discussed this at length in the last hate crimes thread, but essentially a flaming cross or a swastika carved in a church or what have you is an assault - a threat - perpetrated against an entire household, street, or community. It's an act of terror, and deserves a legal response in kind. Prior to hate crimes laws, if I set a flaming cross in your lawn it was legally the same as lighting dog poop on your doorstep, which is retarded.
He didn't hang them. God forbid he not be free to do what he wants because of other peoples actions -_-
Just because hanging is so popular with the racists doesn't mean the act of hanging is racist. It becomes racist when it is directed at a particular race, as, you know, the word racist, by definition, implies.
To let that stop you from doing something harmless is being way overly sensitive.
But you can still get harassment in the second degree as a violation.
Violation level:
In this case I'd prefer an amendment of the harassment laws to include non written forms of communication over creating a new law specifically for nooses.