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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • 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.








  • 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?



  • 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.)





  • 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.



  • Does this imply that previously killing women wasn’t criminal in Italy?

    I presume that femicide is a subset of “homicide”, but I can’t tell if it means “any killing of a woman”, “any killing of a woman by a man”, “any killing of a woman because she’s a woman”, or “any killing of a woman by a man because she’s a woman”.

    And I shudder to imagine how trans-women and trans-men fit into this weirdly sexist label.

    (In America we have nice gender-neutral crimes, with enhancers if it was done out of prejudicial hate.)