Deadly shootings by thugs
mardi 14 octobre 2014 à 14:00A young black male is 21 times more likely to be shot dead by US thugs than a young white male.
Site original : Richard Stallman's Political Notes
A young black male is 21 times more likely to be shot dead by US thugs than a young white male.
A UK court stopped publication of an autobiography on the grounds that it might cause pain to the author's son.
In the US, which respects freedom of speech much more than the UK, this decision would be called "prior restraint", which is more or less unconstitutional, though I would not trust today's US Supreme Court to stand by that principle or (any human right, when it's for actual humans rather than corporations).
There is a proposal in the UK to prohibit domestic "coercive control", but identifying that might require a difficult judgment call.
What strikes me is that the methods used for domestic coercive control have a lot in common with the methods used for enslavement of farm laborers and domestic workers. Criminalizing such enslavement has not been very effective at stopping it. Could it be more effective to change other systems so that these methods of control can't be used or don't work?
For instance, if banks automatically gave one spouse access to a limited amount of money from the other spouse's account — not enough to substantially harm the other spouse, but enough for the one spouse to get by — one element of coercive control would not work. If spouses were required to jointly view the deed of their residence once in a while, another element used in this instance would not be possible. Other elements could also be blocked.
Enough such concrete measures would often prevent coercive control, and otherwise would make it require a cut-and-dried violation that could be prosecuted easily without a difficult judgment call.
Fossil fuel companies and their pet politicians made the University of Wyoming get rid of a sculpture that reminded people about the effects of global heating on forests in that region.