willclarke.net

I have temporarily retired from the working world in order to focus on my tan. In pursuit of this goal, I am going to be traveling up the Eastern United States, mostly by bike and train. I’m planning extended stays in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Washington DC, Baltimore MD, and New York City.

I’m planning on camping and couchsurfing for the duration of the trip. To any of my friends who live in DC, Baltimore, or NYC, I would love to see you while I’m in town. If you’d be kind enough to let me stay at your place for a couple days, I’d appreciate that too. Send me an email or give me a call.

The plan is to be in DC for the last week of May. Then I’ll be in Baltimore the very beginning of June for a few days, then up to NYC for at least a week.

I’m not sure what I’ll do after that. Perhaps head back to Atlanta, perhaps I’ll go west, and if it’s too hot I may go north. Canada in the summer might be nice.

Last week the House of Representatives expanded the Federal Hate Crimes bill to include sexual orientation as a basis of discrimination which could lead to increased sentences for offenders. This bill has led to reinvigoration of debate over hate crimes legislation in general.

Opponents to hate crimes legislation believe it is inappropriate to increase the severity of criminal punishment because of what the criminal was thinking when they committed the crime. “The motivation for a crime shouldn’t affect the sentencing,” said one prominent conservative.

Okay it wasn’t actually a prominent conservative, it was Token from South Park. But still, non-animated people have this opinion too. And it doesn’t make sense.

The motivation for a crime should always affect sentencing. Crimes committed during a heat of passion are different than premeditated crimes, and are different than crimes committed accidentally. The whole point of a criminal justice system is to provide penalties that suit the crime in order to deter people from committing them.

Let’s say a person is killed. The person responsible for their death could be charged for first degree murder (generally meaning the killing was premeditated or committed during a violent crime), second degree murder (unplanned but intentional killing), voluntary manslaughter (as a result of a violent act, but without the intention to kill), involuntary manslaughter (accidentally, but as a result of come criminally negligent act), and several other less severe manslaughter charges. The resulting penalties for each of these charges varies greatly, and for good reason.

This is a bit of a simplification and statutes vary slightly from state to state. But the point remains that the penalty for a crime varies in order to appropriately punish the person committing it. So the only appropriate legal question when it comes to hate crimes is whether or not it’s worse to kill out of bigotry.

Hate crimes are worse than regular crimes because they attack more than just the victim, they attack everyone in the targeted group. They take away freedom to live as you choose, free from fear of threats to your life and health. In effect, it is a form of terrorism, and the people that commit them know this.

It makes sense to broaden the definition of hate crimes to include those motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation because the fact is that many people are attacked for exactly this reason. The FBI estimates that over 16% of all violent hate crimes are based on sexual orientation based on 2007 data.

Hate crimes are not always prosecuted appropriately. In some cases they are tacked on to cases where the actual motivating factor is just a personal or criminal dispute; the fact that the victim is a different ethnicity or sexual orientation is simply a coincidence. Sometimes they are not used when they should, such as in black-on-white crime where it would be politically inconvenient. But these types of things happen often in the criminal justice system, because prosecutors must answer to elected officials, who must be responsible to voters. Problems with implementation does not undermine the fundamentally sound principle of hate crimes.

I am not a lawyer, but I watch a lot of TV.

When the hip new flu strain first mutated from pigs, they were calling it the swine flu. This has angered both the pork industry, because it has lead to a decline in pork sales despite the fact that you cannot get the flu from eating pork; and animal rights activists, because it has led to the mass killing of pigs in backwards countries like Egypt. Also, it makes people make bestiality jokes (including myself).

So now they’re calling if H1N1, its scientific name. But there has been backlash - people think this is political correctness. And those people are morons.

Calling the H1N1 virus H1N1 isn’t political correctness - it’s just regular correctness. It’s the actual, real name of the virus. And it doesn’t lead to as much misunderstanding.

What’s the problem? It has numbers in it? Oh heaven forbid you have to use a number as simple as one in your daily life. It’s long? Then stop talking about it. After all, it’s less severe than the regular flu, and statistically it is hardly a risk. The whole scare has been manufactured by the media. Just call it H1N1.