1 hour ago, MigL said:

would think so; either way, I'm still getting a beating.
As far as I know, you are allowed to hate anyone you want, for whatever reason.
If I beat you up because I hate the way you part your hair, does that also compound the beating ?
( I apologize for the insensitive analogy if you should happen to be bald )

That is not how (in the US) the laws are applied, though. But generally speaking in pretty much any jurisdiction mens rea is considered on some level.

Taking assault as an example, it can be as broad as simply offensive contact. It is usually only an offense if it can be shown that the person deliberately initiated the action to incur harm or fear. IOW, the context is important, not just the outcome. If someone accidentally pushes someone and that person is harmed, any potential charge will be very different form someone where it can be shown as a pattern of deliberate actions.

The difference between US and Canada (I believe, I am clearly not educated in law), is that if a person is shown to repeatedly assault say, persons of a specific ethnicity, in the US it can be used to establish racial hatred as intention and incur a higher charge, whereas in Canada a patterns of racially motivated actions could establish that the actions as deliberate (vs e.g. accidental) but would be charger as any other deliberate assault.

On 9/18/2025 at 1:14 PM, exchemist said:

This seems to be due to the media being almost entirely owned by business corporations, who at the end of the day have no guiding star other than making money.

Which is why boycotts, or otherwise voting with your wallet (like we’re seeing with Disney) is a tool that can actually get results. Similarly, standing up to Trump (or bigotry in general) can be good business when it gets exposure.

There was a suggestion on bluesky that you can find news stations owned by Sinclair (who are making demands of Kimmel to put him back on the air and run right-slanted news material) and see who advertises there, and you can pressure those companies to stop the advertising or you will boycott.

2 hours ago, MigL said:

If I beat you up because I hate the way you part your hair, does that also compound the beating ?
( I apologize for the insensitive analogy if you should happen to be bald )

No, but if it’s known that people who part their hair on the right are getting beat up, that affects everyone who parts their hair on the right — especially if they have been historically persecuted/threatened because of it. You lose the freedom of expression to part your hair the way you want to. You have the mental anguish of fear.

Well, I’ll give him this. We’re not talking about Epstein anymore

6 hours ago, MigL said:

I don't know how things could have gotten so bad, so fast

Females in Salem, Massachusetts wondered the same thing 323 years ago

21 hours ago, MigL said:

the crime is the assault, not the motivation.

How can you tell the difference?

6 hours ago, dimreepr said:

How can you tell the difference?

The motivation doesn't do me any damage; the assault, on the other hand, does.

57 minutes ago, MigL said:

The motivation doesn't do me any damage; the assault, on the other hand, does.

So from a legal perspective would you prefer that intention is ignored and only focus on outcome? I.e. harm by accident, negligence and intent should fall under the same category and only scaled by level of harm?

If someone beats you and says "We need your sort to leave our neighborhood," then you know the motivation and it compounds the crime. It creates a threat situation for your group that extends beyond you and it expands the threat of future assault on you.

Or if, say, an immigration agent committed an unlawful search and seizure on a Latino person and it was known they profiled...then that would compound the Constitutional violation. Latino persons would experience a threat and suffer fear and stress in their daily lives. It's essentially hate crime at the federal government level. The US government: run by a felon, forcing its employees to become felons.

Sorry, been a very busy couple of days.

6 hours ago, CharonY said:

So from a legal perspective would you prefer that intention is ignored and only focus on outcome? I.e. harm by accident, negligence and intent should fall under the same category and only scaled by level of harm

My opinion is, accidental harm, or harm by negligence, could be caused by anyone, even self-inflicted ( the most common type ).
But if someone intends to do me harm, he/she is harming me; not my demographic.

If Phi beats me up for being Italian, how is he hurting any other Italian ?

15 hours ago, MigL said:

Sorry, been a very busy couple of days.

My opinion is, accidental harm, or harm by negligence, could be caused by anyone, even self-inflicted ( the most common type ).
But if someone intends to do me harm, he/she is harming me; not my demographic.

If Phi beats me up for being Italian, how is he hurting any other Italian ?

No worries, and this is also more out of curiosity, anyway.

Just so that I do not misinterpret. On a high level intent (i.e. was your intent to inflict harm) should be an aggravating circumstance. However, beyond that, you don't think that there should aggravating factors in sentencing that could speak to motivation (e.g., planning and deliberation vs spontaneous, criminal association/terrorism, hate against certain groups etc.)? On the other hand, factors of effect (e.g. vulnerability/impact on victim) could be, as they would aggravate the damages?

Did I interpret that correctly?

17 hours ago, MigL said:

If Phi beats me up for being Italian, how is he hurting any other Italian ?

See post directly above yours. Such ethnically targeted attacks have been going on various places in the world for a very long time. The key point is that if others in your ethnic group become aware that you were assaulted for your ethnic identity, that contributes to public fear and diminishment of personal liberty for some people. Because usually it's not just one isolated incident - "we don't like your kind around here," is a message that can be spread through a pattern of assaults and/or vandalism and/or scrawled graffiti, etc.

3 hours ago, CharonY said:

you don't think that there should aggravating factors in sentencing that could speak to motivation (e.g., planning and deliberation vs spontaneous, criminal association/terrorism, hate against certain groups etc.)?

No. Having established that the intent is to do harm, as opposed to accidental injury, does it make any difference what the motivation was for the harm perpetrated?

22 minutes ago, TheVat said:

it's not just one isolated incident - "we don't like your kind around here," is a message that can be spread through a pattern of assaults and/or vandalism and/or scrawled graffiti, etc.

So the added charge of a hate crime, added to the crime of the assault, would be "preventative' justice so the crime isn't repeated?
I thought the assault charge did that.

18 minutes ago, MigL said:

No. Having established that the intent is to do harm, as opposed to accidental injury, does it make any difference what the motivation was for the harm perpetrated?

So the added charge of a hate crime, added to the crime of the assault, would be "preventative' justice so the crime isn't repeated?
I thought the assault charge did that.

I think if we want to continue this discussion, it might be helpful to talk about specific jurisdictions and have some definitions covered. In Canada, for example, there is no hate crime as a charge as such. In contrast, in the US there are provisions that can change the minimum penalties when charged as hate crime.

This is a bit different (from my understanding) to aggravating or mitigating circumstances, which are not specific charge as such, but which can be used to modify sentences. A criminal action from a position of power could be considered especially heinous, while evidence of remorse could be considered a mitigating modifier, even if none of those change what actually has happened.

In that context, and I believe it is getting quite philosophical, laws often represent the moral values of a society. Most jurisdictions have specific considerations for sexual violence, for example, even in cases where the physical harm might be indistinguishable from non-sexual violence. I am not sure whether there are many examples of criminal laws where such (moral) circumstances are not considered. In fact, even not having those modifiers would exemplify some sort of moral stance. A mandatory death sentences for any kind of drug possession would be a clear moral condemnation of anything related to drugs, for example.

In a way I think the discussion would ultimately be whether there can (or should) be a criminal law system which focuses entirely on outcome, rather than on morality and how it might look like. But I think that will get rather far away from the freedom of expression topic. But perhaps it might be an interesting ethics discussion?

Edit: I should add that in addition to the moral dimension, laws are often created in response to address specific issues. Famous examples include civil rights issues, where in the US, states frequently did not convict murders of minorities by white folks. Specific statues were then implemented to be able to try some of the crimes on the federal level, IIRC.