Should Everything Wrong Be Illegal?

[_honorentheos]

Interesting article that discusses some of the issues:

"This is Not a Joke"

Before we get started, just a heads up that this episode includes reporting on racist extremists. And as you'll hear, one of the subjects in the story reportedly used bigoted and offensive slurs, so this episode may not be appropriate for everyone. OK, onto the show.

Audio Link: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510311/embedded

Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/777368889

A portion of the story, to spark interest:

MCEVERS: We talked to another teacher who has been dealing with extremism in her school for years. And she was frustrated that there's not a lot of advice out there for how to respond in the moment. So she decided to do something about it.

NORA FLANAGAN: My name is Nora Flanagan. I am an English teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.

MCEVERS: One day several years back, Nora saw a student with a patch on his jacket that she recognized as a logo for a movement called White Pride Worldwide. It's basically a square cross inside a circle. And the student was wearing black combat boots with white laces, something that could be nothing but, given the patch, could also be a reference to white nationalism.

FLANAGAN: You know, I stopped him and struck up a conversation and asked him, you know, what was going on with his new look. And he seemed really excited that I had asked. He seemed almost like he had been waiting for someone to ask him. And he sprung back with, there's nothing wrong with pride in being white.

MCEVERS: And what did you say?

FLANAGAN: I don't remember exactly what I said, but I remember at the time feeling really stressed and scrambled to respond in a way that kept him engaged in conversation, didn't shut it down. But I also wanted to make clear to him that I knew what that patch meant.

MCEVERS: She didn't want to come down too hard on him, she says, because she knows that can drive people further into these movements because it reinforces the white nationalist narrative that white people are oppressed.

FLANAGAN: Over the years, white nationalist groups have provided instructions for young people to bring their ideology into school. They have given them lists of suggestions, conversation starters. I had to run on the assumption that this student was ready for anything I might say and might even be looking to escalate the conversation. So my goal was to stay calm because overreacting is just as counterproductive as underreacting. It's a very fine balance.

MCEVERS: But somehow you did express some concern?

FLANAGAN: I expressed concern. I expressed that I recognized the symbol and that it had definitely caught my attention and that we probably had some things to talk about.

MCEVERS: And then she went to the discipline office of the school. She says the white dean she reported it to seemed confused and unfamiliar with the issue.

FLANAGAN: Especially in the early 2000s, if a kid didn't have a giant swastika on his back, then I needed to do some convincing.

MCEVERS: The dean asked for more information. So Nora went online and found the ADL's glossary of hate symbols.

FLANAGAN: I literally did print out that section of the visual symbols dictionary and brought it to them with the symbol circled.

MCEVERS: She went back to administrators and said, we need to do something now.

FLANAGAN: The administration finally concluded that it was worth searching his locker, where they found a stack of printed recruitment flyers for the National Alliance, which at the time was still a prominent hate group in this country. And they also found sketches in his notebooks of people hanging from trees.

MCEVERS: Black people, specifically.

FLANAGAN: So here was a student who was eager to make clear that he was engaging with this ideology and with these groups and was literally sketching out fantasies of lynching people. And then my administration knew that this was serious.

MCEVERS: She says to this day she doesn't know if the student would have actually committed violence, but what they found in that locker made it feel very possible.

FLANAGAN: I didn't feel vindicated when we found sketches of African Americans hanging from trees in this kid's notebook; I felt terrified. I felt heartbroken that a kid was this far down a really hateful path. But I also felt immensely relieved that we knew what we knew before anything terrible had happened.

MCEVERS: The school connected the student with counseling and talked to his parents. The next year, he took Nora's non-Western lit class.

FLANAGAN: And I can say I stayed in touch with that student years after he graduated, and he disengaged from the white nationalist movement and, I mean, went on to be OK. And I think that part of the reason that he turned out all right was that we didn't underreact, we didn't overreact, and we remembered that, as terrifying as the situation felt, we did still have, you know, a student, a human child at the center of it.

MCEVERS: Nora realized she wasn't the only teacher dealing with this stuff, especially in recent years. She would talk to her friends who are also teachers, and at one point they were like, where's the handbook for how to deal with this stuff?

FLANAGAN: These incidents were happening at my own school, at friends' and former colleagues' schools. But nobody had a set way to respond. Everyone was reinventing the wheel or trying to reinvent the wheel every time something happened, and things were happening more and more.

MCEVERS: So she and two other teachers decided to write the handbook. It's actually called the toolkit for confronting white nationalism in schools. And it's a 50-page guide with specific examples of extremist incidents and how to respond to them. Nora and her co-authors have presented this toolkit at dozens of conferences and at least 10 schools, and the document has been distributed to thousands of people. The advice includes telling students to document as much of an incident as they can and to report incidents to more than one adult and telling schools to offer a private way for students and staff to report incidents and to have a clear response that hate is not OK in school.

Nora says the hardest thing is how reluctant schools and parents are to take these incidents seriously. So in the toolkit, they have a list of ways people try to deny that anything is wrong and how to respond - like, this is just political correctness, or racism is over, or what about free speech?

FLANAGAN: All ideologies are not equal. They do not deserve equal airtime, and they do not deserve equal protection. I believe in free speech. I love free speech. However, speech that threatens violence, speech that advocates expulsion or extermination of groups of people is not protected in our school communities because it endangers our school communities.

MCEVERS: Or the student was just kidding.

FLANAGAN: Teachers and administrators say things like - it was just a joke; kids will be kids; that's not what that means; I'm sure that wasn't meant to be hurtful. That is a common defense. And I have an awesome sense of humor, and those aren't jokes. So you don't get to hide behind hateful ideology by saying Jenn Kamp at the end. LOL, genocide - no.

[_subgenius]

...its all about harm, the nature of the harm, and the degree of harm.

so libertarian with a bit of situational ethics?

[_Res Ipsa]

Hi Res,

Sorry, it's been busy getting ready for the holiday weekend.

Taking the example of premeditated murder, I don't think we as a society have jumped straight to government on that one. As a species, we've dealt with it tribally and as mobs, individually through vendetta killings in retaliation, and certainly through appeals to authority to exert their strength were perhaps it needed strength of a sovereign to be able to enact justice as a response.

But the act of righting the wrong of premeditated murder is itself morally problematic and often has, and does, include the premeditated taking of life of the accused murderer. It seems that our current acceptance that government is the proper vehicle for addressing the harms of murder is based on a perspective and the experience of humanity reflected in what makes for a better society. Enacting justice requires doing harm as retribution, and in this case the potential harm to be done as retribution is the ultimate harm of killing. It's a rather extreme case.

If murder seems like a no-brainer as an act that should be illegal given we as a society would descend to anarchy if murder were legal OR the retaliation for murder were left to individuals and communities to resolve as they may, we aren't really examining the question if we jump to it as an example.

Hey Honor,

No rush on my end. That's the nice thing about message board discussions -- they can go at any pace.

You're right. I did intentionally pick an extreme example. But only to illustrate my actual answer: it depends.

Yes, as a society we tried other means to address murder first. But isn't that an artifact of the fact that we had tribes and mobs and individuals before we had government? Suppose we start from behind the veil and all we know is that it is likely that some people will intentionally kill others. I understand government as a last resort to mean that we would agree to try mobs and revenge killing and all the other stuff you mentioned and stuff anyone could think of before we'd say: let's appoint an organization authorized to use force to prevent or punish intentional killing. I'm just suggesting that there would be nothing wrong with considering intentional killing to be such a serious problem that it would be reasonable to resort to government first. My meta argument, I guess, is that the question "what's the best way to approach each problem" can't be adequately addressed by a series of hierarchical rules.

Trial and error is the best answer I've got. Try to make a good decision about which alternative would be most effective. Try it. Adjust if the results are unsatisfactory. I think your extended example is what that looks like. Think about the behavior, think about the target, think about the goal, adopt a reasoned strategy that seems reasonable. If the outcome is satisfactory, repeat. If not, try something else.

[_honorentheos]

One of the struggles inherent in the questions involved is how willing a society is to let someone who didn't do wrong get caught in the net in order to be as thorough as possible in stopping or punishing harm. And I think that question sits at the center of the OP, too.

Also inherent in the question is how willing we are to damage someone else's life to feel as safe as possible when doing maximum damage to someone's life as a consequence.

This stood out to me from the podcast I linked to above:

I think that part of the reason that he turned out all right was that we didn't underreact, we didn't overreact, and we remembered that, as terrifying as the situation felt, we did still have, you know, a student, a human child at the center of it.

The podcast includes examples from the ends of under reaction and over reaction and I think tries to explore the question of how one reacts to something that takes advantage of being speech, but keeps stepping over the line into threats and advocating criminal activity.

One of the issues you see in the debate on the disproportionate number of black male kids who end up in the prison system is once a kid gets sent to jail it alters the available futures they have in drasticly negative ways. Yet there are people who are perfectly fine seeing that damage occur because it isn't their kid or the kids from their community most likely to be affected by it. Making drug possession a crime that could carry harsh sentences has shaped our society. It contributed to the social fraying we live with.

[_Gadianton]

is it morally wrong to enter another country illegally and refuse to leave?

lol. You may have unintentionally raised a good point though. I think an assumption of the OP is that we're talking about laws and morals as internal to a society. It's an additional complication to consider behavior of outsiders. Would it be wrong for you as a US citizen to enter another country illegally? If so, should the US punish US citizens who do it? The US does punish its citizens for certain crimes committed on foreign soil, and so you can't say it's not within domestic purview. Given the moral gravity you and your buddies ascribe to entering a country illegally, one of the worst things a person can do, shouldn't you start with tough legislation at home for US citizens who violate the immigration laws of other countries?

As an example, there are growing communities of US citizens living in Mexico. It's not something I've researched at all, to be honest, it's just I keep running into people who talk about it. At the lumber yard the other day, a couple of the admins were having a conversation about people they know that are doing it, and expressing their apprehension over it. I've overheard similar conversations with fewer details at the dog park. A guy a know pretty well in the neighborhood lives there 9 months out of the year and talks about how great it is, far safer than people think, and it's much more reasonable cost wise for medical services for both himself and his dog. He said he's done all the paper work to be a legal resident but he said most don't do the paper work. Should these folks be extradited to the US for prosecution?

[_ajax18]

Should these folks be extradited to the US for prosecution?

If Mexico doesn't want them there, sure. But I think Mexico is happy to have the cash these people bring.

This really is a stupid argument. "Hey you've got rich retired people coming into Mexico and dumping cash into our economy. Therefore it's only fair that you accept all our impoverished unskilled workers coming in to lower wages and take advantage of your social services."

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. lol

[_Gadianton]

Interesting, and here I thought you were a man of principle. You asked if it was wrong for a foreigner to violate the immigration law of another country. The reason why you asked your question this way, in case you've forgotten, is that you were trying to avoid speaking about material needs and make it about principle, for all the liberals here who you hoped might be bound to morality as principle. Maybe that way you could force the board liberals into admitting its wrong to enter America illegally. But you quickly reveal your hand, because we can't have standard that applies to white Americans just like everybody else!

But nonetheless, I think you misunderstand. The folks working at the lumberyard as admins aren't rolling in cash. The guy in my neighborhood (staying with friends there) is broke (and to be honest, I'd say he's bright, but kind of lazy). The people I'm talking about are moving to Mexico not as rich retirees, but working-class Americans who can't afford American and get a better deal there.

[_ajax18]

The guy in my neighborhood (staying with friends there) is broke (and to be honest, I'd say he's bright, but kind of lazy). The people I'm talking about are moving to Mexico not as rich retirees, but working-class Americans who can't afford American and get a better deal there.

Are you saying these retirees are working age or working class? I'd like to point out if any are interested that you can still collect social security and even use medicare in Costa Rica. If you're saying there are hordes of working age native born Americans heading to Mexico for better jobs, I'm very skeptical of that. If it's a handful of people past working years headed south of the border for cheaper services, that makes sense to me. It's very easy to immigrate to America if you're old and have enough money to demonstrate that you aren't likely to be competing for a job with American citizens. Of course Latin America doesn't mind these kind of people coming into their country.

[_Gadianton]

There's no disparity. The same reason government turned a blind eye Nazis who lied to come to US and work is the reason government has allowed illegals from Mexico to cross over and work in strawberry fields, hotels, disgusting animal processing jobs, cleaning, yard services and so on. If illegals were destroying the economy, it would have been shut down long ago.

Very few illegals are taking jobs that any white 4chan addict would ever agree to do.

If we started bringing in English literate immigrants from mexico with a bank account and can pass a civics test like Trump wants, then we might have to worry.

ETA: that doesn't mean that illegal immigration should have had a blind eye turned; it comes with problems; but the solution doesn't start with pretending only "liberals" were complicit for the sake of empty pity, or exaggerating something as a crisis that isn't, or laying down extreme measures that ruin lives yet doesn't solve any problems.

[_Smokey]

Do you ever wonder why these people don’t advocate for open borders in Israel?

Wall in Israel good, Wall in California bad.

These are the same people who want you to think they’ve refuted Mormonism. Food for thought.