this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I'm sure you studied law and are qualified to make this statement
Dear citizen, Please refrain from participating in democracy unless you have the right credentials. Kind regards, The elite
Service guarantees citizenship
We don't let the uneducated be surgeons, so why would we ask them how to operate?
Here's a better idea, educate people properly.
Something being a war crime or not is a question of morality, someone being your representative or not is a question of preference and interests. Putting educational barriers up on those issues is something that has been done before in history, but I myself would be careful to advocate for Jim Crow Laws.
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
There's a reason they're called representatives.
Maybe if America spend their money on education and healthcare instead of war crimes they would not have this problem.
The stupid thing is they could have them all.
Americans pay more for healthcare than any other developed nation for worse health outcomes, universal healthcare would simultaneously reinfranchise the working class by removing the restrictive costs of medical care, improve health outcomes and population happiness, and still have spare money for education, all without touching a dime of their military.
But yes, less war crimes would also be nice.
whether they're war criminals isn't a democratic opinion. there are experts that know the laws and check if the president's actions go against them.
it's the same with the vaccine discussion. saying "vaccines make children autistic" has nothing to do with 'participating in democracy'. the people who are saying this bullshit obviously don't have the right credentials and therefore can't make a qualified statement to whether vaccines are safe or not.
Something doesn't have to be illegal to be criminal. Using such a narrow definition serves to privilege those who write laws for their own benefit and is a crime* against those who are brutalized under systems without legal protections.
*This word is being used with the definition of "A serious offense, especially one in violation of morality." This is not referring to any laws nor is it suggesting there should be legal punishment for having bad takes.
They didn't say the presidents were criminals, they said they were war criminals, which does have a specific legal definition based on specific laws. Ones that many world leaders, including us presidents, abuse on a regular basis sure, but whether someone qualifies as a war criminal specifically is very much a legal matter, not just a moral one. That said, you don't have to be an expert to know laws or accuse people of breaking them, you just need to be an expert to navigate the legal system effectively, which in an ideal world is intended to ensure that the laws are upheld fairly. Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world.
we're talking about war crimes not crimes in general. a war criminal is someone who commits war crimes. according to britannica a war crime is a "serious violation of the laws or customs of war as defined by international customary law and international treaties." this has nothing to do with morality it is pure jurisprudence.
Following the Nuremberg principals they would actually all be war criminals, but of course those principals only apply if they are convenient. So clearly all these people with credentials are massively hypothetical just like everyone else.
And for vaccines: almost no one is educated sufficiently in the field of immunology to judge for themselves if the vaccine is safe, so you are always dependent on trust. And if the government has over and over again shown to be completely untrustworthy, by for example starting a war (where more then two hundred thousand people died) based on lies, or bailing out the perpetrators of the biggest financial crisis in living memory, then who can blame them for not trusting the government when it tells them to trust the vaccine. It’s unfortunate but not unexpected.
ok let's just say that you know what you're talking about and that this is true. why would you hold todays presidents accountable according to laws 80 years in the past? like everyone else, the should be convicted according to todays laws, if they broke them.
yes, this is why you believe the people who know the science, who studied immunology/law
regarding vaccines you don't have to trust the government, you have to trust the scientists. just because the government (who isn't trustworthy) trusts them too, doesn't mean they're suddenly wrong. as for the war criminal debate this means that if the government says that the presidents aren't war criminals, you don't have to believe them. you have to believe the experts who studied law on whether the presidents did something illegal or not.
all I'm saying is that it isn't an opinion whether someone is a criminal, there are qualified experts who can evaluate this. if you're not one of those you can't make a qualified statement on this and if you do you can be called out for it.
I need you to understand that if I call someone out for making an unqualified statement on a legal topic that doesn't mean that I don't want people to 'participate in democracy unless they have the right credentials'. it means that I don't want people to make statements on legal topics unless they have the right credentials.
A crime is an act against the law, the law is determined by the will of the people (or at minimum it should), so yeah criminality is subject to opinion. You can be pedantic about whether something is a crime if the current laws don't match your opinion. But again Nuremberg shows that with a sufficiently large crime the chronology of something becoming a law and the moment a crime was committed is not necessarily important. And at least for the Iraq war I would argue this is very much up for debate.
this doesn't matter. a judge only cares about somebody's actions and what the law says about these actions. jurisprudence isn't democracy. if the majority of people thinks that someone is guilty it doesn't matter. what matters is if they violated laws and that can only be evaluated by a professional. so if the majority of people thinks that Bush for example is a war criminal it doesn't matter if he didn't violate any laws. of course this goes the other way around too: if 99% of people think that he isn't a criminal, but he violated laws, he is guilty. the majority of people can't decide whether someone is guilty or not.
of course the majority of people votes the government which passes laws to it's voter's liking, so there's a big intersection between existing laws and the will of the many. but ultimately the judge doesn't care about all of this. for them it's simply "does action violate law?". outside of this question nothing matters.
this high quality discourse is precisely why I come to ~~reddit~~ lemmy. 🙄
Sir, this is a Shrek meme
A plus post. where's the gold button? You're really making it feel like home here.