Asklemmy

43392 readers

1426 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

147

What isn't illegal but should be? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Varven@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

357 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MxRemy@lemmy.one 4 points 1 month ago

I feel like my answer might break AskLemmy's rule 2 about "Overt Politics", but so do a lot of the other answers? Feel free to delete if so.

overtly political answer, also CW for violence.

As far as the current American system goes... nothing. By and large, even laws that seem good are mostly only used in service of the elites, against the people. Consider this series of events:

In 2015 a white supremacist in South Carolina commits a mass shooting, killing 9 people.
In 2017, the Georgia state gov expands the state's domestic terrorism laws, directly in response to this shooting, because the previous version wouldn't have covered it.
In 2022, this expanded law gets used... against people protesting police brutality, who hurt no one, despite the fact that the cops killed one of them.

Unfortunately, this general sequence is not uncommon at all. Neither is the inverse, where the bureaucrats/judges/etc decide "that doesn't count, actually" when it comes to an elite very clearly breaking an existing law, or else changing the law so it doesn't apply to them in retrospect.