One of the virtues of the EU is that it counteracts the balkanization that let people make ignorant statements like “[ part of] Europe is better than [the average part of] America”

If you separate America and Europe into similar-scale subdivisions (local schools, postal codes, sports teams, etc) you’ll find the two areas are broadly scattered on most metrics which aren’t things like “native English speakers”, “uses metric”, or “has a passport.”

“Europe” has a bunch of countries that do some things better than the typical American experience, but there are a lot of things that the USA and it’s internal states do better than the typical European experience.

(For the easiest example, look at trans rights. Some parts of the USA are Iowa and some parts are fiercely transclusive; some parts of Europe are as LGBT friendly as NY and some are TERF island. )

Except in the first US gulf war, back in the early 90s. (Kuwait was attacked by Iraq. The USA spent months preparing and then three days attacking. Then stopped when Iraq surrendered.)

Or the fall of the USSR. (Happened in about a month, no major fighting.)

Or the Russian annexation of Crimea.

It isn’t that short military exercises never yield results. It’s that wars persist until both attacker and defender believe peace is the best tactic.

The USA bombing a country for whom fighting the USA is essentially their national myth is possibly the dumbest thing that my country has ever done.

Depositing a $2 trillion dollar coin to reduce the nominal debt would itself have relatively little impact on the.value of the dollar, since it’s just in the essentially fake books of the US national government. Dollars, after all, are just coupons for “I am worth $1 towards any US government debt or court judgement.”

Depositing a $2 billion coin with the UN, in contrast, would have exactly the same inflationary pressure as giving 200,000,000 Americans 2000 $1 coins.

So you want to remove all of the various privileges and duties bundled together as legal marriage, save for the ones that people manually enter into. I think that’s a terrible idea.

People already have freedom to contract. With a competent lawyer you can already co-parent with one adult, give another your medical power of attorney, and specify the disbersment.of property after you pass in a relatively tax-efficient manner. Even if you’re married to someone and want those other adults to all be someone other than your spouse.

If we did what you suggest and remove the underlying default bundle of agreements we call marriage, we would dramatically increase the cost of divorce and the rate of economic spousal abuse. All someone would have to do to get out of a “marriage” absent its original terms would be to burn the copies of their agreement, and even the simplest separations would be subject to adversarial litigation.

I think there’s some wide latitude to modify that default bundle and remove some of its limitations and presumptions. (Especially when it comes to taxation and social welfare, where a UBI + ~40% flat tax is better in nearly every way). But humans do pair-bond, and it seems to make much more sense to argue for the actual changes you want rather than insisting that we wholly disregard the atomic unit of human civilization.

Your argument seems more against religion (and inferrably monogamy) than it does marriage itself. Especially if “civil union” is your alternative.

I don’t see what the benefit would be to just go through the family law and replace the term “marriage” with “civil union”.

What exactly do you think the meaningful difference is between duty and obligation?

If the law says that teachers have a obligation to report the injuries of chicken to the nurse, and that hall monitors have a duty to report the injuries of chicken to the nurse, I would expect both to be dismissable and potentially subject to a litigious parent.

Sex in heaven is really good, but gets boring after awhile.

If each and every person should matter then It should be ok to recognize each and every person for what they are being targetted for. And I see this law as doing just that.

Please note that, by all accounts I’ve seen, Italy’s femicide law does not cover any similar offense against men. It’s an elevated offense to try and reduce the disproportionate number of Italian women who are killed by intimate partners.

That’s a strong argument about whether this law is justified, not whether or not it’s sexist.

If the standard for sexism is “unfair” treatment instead of “unequal” treatment, then proponents of things like a lower minimum wage for women would argue that their proposed inequality is “fair”.

Thank you for responding all the same, btw

We don’t define in law the assisted suicide of a white cis man as categorically less severe than the assisted suicide of a black genderqueer female.

Are you familiar with the US Supreme Court case Moritz v. Commissioner (which my wife brought to my attention after she saw the movie.)?

An important advance in feminist law was literally about a man who wanted a tax deduction but was denied because the deduction was meant for women.

So, what’s the link to this english-language translation of the law in question?

Here’s an unattributed quote presumably from such from a BBC article:

The Italian law will apply to murders which are “an act of hatred, discrimination, domination, control, or subjugation of a woman as a woman”, or that occur when she breaks off a relationship or to “limit her individual freedoms.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dzp050yn2o

As described in the above quote, it seems exactly as sexist as I presumed – special protection in the law for cis women, which categorically excludes cis men, trans men, and trans women from its protection.

Do you have a contradictory summary or, ideally, a link to the actual text and a professional translation?

A definition of “homicide” as “killing by a person” is nonsensical – “regicide” or “infanticide” or “femicide” are not killings BY kings or babies or women.

Any unnatural death is a homicide with either definition though, because “unnatural” means “some human did it”, and the effect is the same – a formal investigation is undertaken by professionals to determine the most likely actual cause and possibly begin a criminal prosecution.

All those cop shows are about “homicide detectives” because each story is about some character who died of other-than-natural-causes.

You’re probably wrong about the topic at hand.

https://newyork.public.law/laws/n.y._penal_law_section_485.05

Killing of an infant, teenager, or elderly* person in NYS due to their age is the exact same violation of the NYS hate crime law.

There is a separate enhancer for assault of an elderly person, which is less about motivation of the offender and more a statement of presumed infirmity. Similarly, there are offenses like “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” which enshrine certain special protections for persons under a certain age irrespective of the mental state of the offender.

Sentence-enhancers concerning the categorical malice of the offender, though, don’t (and shouldnt) distinguish between states in that category. Because to do so would be to enshrine discrimination into law.

What legal system are you referring to?

Do I interpret your meaning correctly as less “it’s not sexism” and more “laws should reflect the issues of their time”?

What would be sexism in law in your view? Is it even reasonable to talk about “sexism against men” as a concept?

If you come and burn a cross on my white church-going family’s lawn you should be charged with same list of assault, trespass, and arson charges as if you did so on my jewish, black, or pagan friends’ lawns.

A group of black men who banded together and murdered a white boy for dating one of their daughters should be charged with the same anti-lynching statutes enacted to stop the KKK.

The white christian guy who bombs a federal building because the government doesn’t do what he wants should be charged under the same terrorism statute as a brown muslim guy who bombs a federal building because the government doesn’t do what he wants.

I’m really curious how you don’t see “we make crimes against one sex worse than crimes against the other” as sexism.

Do you mean it in a “racism is discrimination + oppression” kind of way, where no discrimination against men can be “sexism” due to the patriarchy? Or maybe you think this is more like “free tampon dispenses in the women’s restroom” and the disparity is simply right and proper due to differences between the sexes?

I personally react to this the same way I react to definitions of rape that go something like “the insertion of a penis into another human without their consent”, which excludes cis women rapists from even being charged as such. Or rules allowing “maternity leave” for new mothers (beyond mere recuperation from childbirth) but denying “paternity leave” for new fathers (who may be doing all of the parenting depending on the state of their [possibly deceased] partner.)

Oh, you’ve read the law in question. Great! I can’t read Italian, and the linked article didnt have a statement of what the law actually said.

Does the law specify “woman” as a protected class or “gender”?

With the enactment of this law, is a man who murders a woman for the covered motivation treated differently than a woman who murders a man with the equivalent malice? What’s the actual difference?

Like in the case of infanticide. Should that motivation be ignored and the person charged with homicide?

You’re missing my point. If you kill someone out of hatred for babies, teenagers, the elderly, or whatever agist “generation” they’re a member of you should be charged with the exact same crime.

(Also,.FWIW, the term in American english and American law is generally “murder”. “Homicide” is just an unnatural death which may or may not be criminal.)

If they were gender neutral, it wouldn’t be accurate to describe them as “banning femicide.”

Maybe you’re right, and the reporting is the sexist part and not the law. I can’t read Italian and am unfamiliar with the intricacies of their legal system, so I’d be delighted to be proven wrong.

But saying “oh no, it cant be that bad” is exactly how we got woman-killing abortion bans in parts of my country.

Every time we draw a line and say “women need special protection”, we are implicitly saying “men don’t matter.”

The very simple fix for this is to keep laws gender-neutral, and let the disparity between prosecutions for hateful murders of women vs hateful murders of men be reflective of the actual disparities in the two sexist hatreds.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where a fact like “41% of American women report experiencing domestic partner violence” will be read as an excuse to ignore that 21% of men report the same thing.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

I’ve encountered women arguing that all domestic violence and rape is from men, which would require one-in-five men to have had a homosexual relationship and all such to have been violent.

Yes, men tend to be physically stronger than women and thus male-on-female IPV is often more harmful, but we already have laws that distinguish based on level of harm. And, yes, too many counties are sexist hell-holes that make American red-states look like feminist utopias.

But I don’t think we as a species can sexism our way out of sexism.