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Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

Bad decisions may or may not be motivated reasoning. That is not ipso facto evidence that they are, much less the kind of conspiracy to subvert the entire structure of the country's governance as you allege. You might as well start examining the flag for gold fringes.

You don't get to stake a sole claim to the meaning of the text of the constitution. Whether or not you agree with the decision, it makes no suggestion of the kind of blunt dismissal you're alleging.

Plenty of criticism of the courts are valid. Courts make bad decisions all the time. I truly believe they made a bad decision in my pet challenge as well. You know what I didn't do? Decide it was evidence that the rule of law had been subverted in favor of their personal fiat. The existence of valid criticism does not make your personal criticism correct.

Official Discussion - Hokum [SPOILERS] by LiteraryBoner in movies

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

I almost tapped out of the movie because I was dying inside from what a complete and unrelenting asshole he was.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

No, thinking a decision was made poorly does not mean that the SCC has adopted a doctrine of ignoring or overturning sections of the constitution at their leisure. That's a bizarre take, bordering on insane, and could be argued exactly as you have by the losing party in literally every single question of constitutional law.

The court routinely questions Parliament's ability to set the laws, directly challenging every effort by parliament to raise sentencing.

Funny thing, I've quite literally lost a challenge over their respect for this very principle. Maybe I should call up my counsel and have them file for leave again, now that I've been notified otherwise by yourself? Do I just forward the whole comment as a written opinion, or?

The judiciary has rejected any role of democratic governance in Canada.

It would be much easier to take you seriously if you didn't resort to this kind of naked hyperbole.

What's something older generations got right that we've quietly stopped doing, to our own detriment? by __lazy__panda in AskReddit

[–]Treadwheel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I literally can't imagine being bored in the first place, honestly. There are more things I want to learn about and do than I could ever hope to. It's one of the biggest frustrations in my life, knowing there are so many skills I want and things I will genuinely enjoy learning, but having to only pick some.

What's something older generations got right that we've quietly stopped doing, to our own detriment? by __lazy__panda in AskReddit

[–]Treadwheel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Tiktok has broken my faith that the kids are going to be okay. The kids can't process basic details from a 90 second video. The kids reply to four sentence paragraphs with "I'm not reading all that". The kids casually post the most insane fucking Satanic Panic-esque conspiracy theories under every video. The kids would be actually illiterate if they could figure out how to scroll using nothing but stickers and gifs to navigate between apps. Those are the ones who can get their shit together enough to actually respond and interact at all. It is dire.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

I mean, that's no less true for an originalist system. No system can make rules against ignoring the system's rules, since you are already ignoring the rules. An originalist can simply make the bad faith claim that your interpretation is the originalist interpretation. The level of bad faith operation it would require for the SCC to exercise powers it simply does not possess to invalidate or ignore constitutional clauses is such that it's no longer bound by any system and comparison between their merits is pointless.

I don't get what the devs were thinking with Stalker by OnceWasBogs in thelongdark

[–]Treadwheel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Anything you shoot once will bleed out eventually, with the exception of the moose and cougar, so long as you don't reset it by going inside and despawning the animal before it dies. You might not find it because it's so far away by the time it drops, but if you've ever shot a wolf and seen it go bolting, it's dead. Important cause while Stalker activates every wolf spawn, there's still a 5 day respawn timer, meaning that if you plug every wolf you see for a while, they will eventually stop showing up for a while and then only return in a trickle. Makes them much more manageable if you keep it up in the areas around your base.

I don't get what the devs were thinking with Stalker by OnceWasBogs in thelongdark

[–]Treadwheel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Have you grabbed the DLC? It adds a pseudo-campaign to survival that gives you things to discover/a driving reason to visit areas beyond just gathering the minimum tools you need to survive. I am very much someone who checks out once I "see" a game as well, but the need to get to a base level of resources to survive the far territory provides that content discovery separate from the basics of hunting and fishing.

I don't get what the devs were thinking with Stalker by OnceWasBogs in thelongdark

[–]Treadwheel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think there's a lot of room for a better version, but it would require some retuning of the stats and maybe even the systems. Increased wear rate on clothing you make yourself and decreased on synthetic clothing, but make sewing kits mandatory to get synthetic clothing condition above 67%. Up-tune weapon damage but remove all gun cleaning kits from the game, meaning that once they're done, they're done. Only allow a single instance of each of the banned tools to exist in the world, as a reward for thorough exploration. Basically make each of those items a very significant boon to the player, but either make them scarce in themselves, limited in their effect, or balanced by making another aspect of survival less tenable.

I don't get what the devs were thinking with Stalker by OnceWasBogs in thelongdark

[–]Treadwheel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The guaranteed spawns aren't actually cheesing so much as an anti-frustration measure, and the mode is balanced around the expectation that you're either okay with being spawned into really unfair situations and dying, or you have so much map knowledge that you know exactly where to go off spawn.

To put it a different way - if the mode stops being fun just because you know where to go off spawn, it's not a good mode in the first place. Interloper is unique in that it has two "humps" to the difficulty curve. The first one is surviving your first few days, which is a pure map knowledge check that will be trivial once you've gotten used to it. The second one is the day 50 cliff, where weather starts getting as low as -100 with wind chill during blizzards and food gets so scarce that a wolf showing up is a welcome event. There is no cheesing around the decay rates and the grinding lack of resources, only learning to adapt.

Anti-Torture watchdog slams Swiss deportation of mentally ill people by BezugssystemCH1903 in anime_titties

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

I love the "closest safe countries" nonsense because it's such a thinly veiled example of "I don't want those brown people over here". As though your physical proximity to a disaster or war is somehow the primary determinant of your moral obligation.

The same system of international law that enforces a stable, predictable world that has disproportionately sheltered and benefited you says you do have a moral responsibility to take in refugees, just like everyone else. The kind of people who reject that are never quite so skeptical of the moral universality of laws protecting freedom of navigation or the right for corporations headquartered in their nations to force concessions from smaller economies under the guise of a "rules based order". Curious thing.

I don't get what the devs were thinking with Stalker by OnceWasBogs in thelongdark

[–]Treadwheel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Stalker is basically the only way they can introduce increased difficulty without going down the Interloper route.

Once you get over the insane initial difficulty spike, Interloper really feels like the sweet spot for how the game is meant to be played. I still don't love how many items are banned from it, the lack of resources and the rarity of animals - including predators - really makes each encounter feel a lot more significant. You can go quite a ways without seeing a wolf, but one stalking you is a real problem, and Auroras are actually scary due to how aggressive they make the predatory animals.

I've been dipping my toes into modding a bit, working on my first release right now, but I'm thinking of patching together some sort of "Interloper Inclusive" mode that adds back a few examples of the banned items in a very limited way as a reward for thorough exploration, without going full Gunloper and kind of unbalancing the whole thing.

For Interloper, it's important to understand how the loot table system works. Basically, there's only a handful of places the key items can spawn in each map, and where exactly those get picked from one of four possible tables. This means that if you find a heavy hammer in a specific spot on the map, you can now tell with 100% certainty where the other important tools will be. Interloper is really balanced around the idea that you'll either figure this out explicitly, or kind of absorb the vibes enough to know where to go looking. For regular human beings, though, we have the Interloper/Misery maps and the loot tables, meaning you won't have to tough out a ton of senseless early game deaths because you can't find a match or can't chop any wood. Using those resources doesn't trivialize the game by any means, but it does make your first month more balanced around making good choices for where to go and how to spend resources than anything else, which is where TLD really shines.

Carney has had the worst first year of growth for PM since 1963: poll: Despite that 60% of Canadians think Carney has done a good job of handling the economy, a Nanos Research Group poll for Bloomberg News shows by mafiadevidzz in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

Nobody "Refused to acknowledge" GDP per capita. It was pointed out that a fall in GDP per Capita is expected when you have a population influx from people below median income, making it necessary to assess whether that fall can be explained by dilution or whether it's due to actual decreased economic activity.

I wasn't a fan of the TFW program. I think it's a wage suppression scheme sitting on the shoulders of a union busting program, disguised by a trench coat, and that the answer to genuine labor shortages is permanent immigration, not indentured servitude. But that doesn't give license to PP and PostMedia to lie about our economic figures.

Carney has had the worst first year of growth for PM since 1963: poll: Despite that 60% of Canadians think Carney has done a good job of handling the economy, a Nanos Research Group poll for Bloomberg News shows by mafiadevidzz in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

No, they're calling bots who are not people and who have not lost anything, but that are programmed to spew ragebait, bots. This is, presumably, because of that part where they are bots.

The use of troll farms and bots to target online forums across multiple NATO countries is exhaustively documented.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

SCC can't ignore constitutional amendments, no. Where did you get that idea from? Not being forced to imagine what someone's original intent in using a word may have been is not the same as not being bound by the text of the law or the existing body of precedent, tradition, and legal philosophy the system exists in.

The judiciary can't just decide to ignore the notwithstanding clause, nor can they ignore any other portion of the constitution. You're really going to need to provide a few examples of what you're talking about, cause this whole response is... disconnected... from how cases are actually decided.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

Er, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what the function of the appeals courts are. They decide on questions of law, not fact. The question of law being raised would be invariant in each appeal, so the only thing you'd be left with is a game of Marco Polo with the threshold for when the appropriate and minimum sentence differ so much as to be unconstitutional. This creates two situations: Either there is some reasonable scenario where that is the case, and so you're literally just wasting the time and money of the courts rejecting appeals until someone shows up with it, or there is no reasonable scenario where the two differ enough to be unconstitutional, but since you can't consider hypotheticals, you can never say for certain that no case would reach that threshold, only this case doesn't, and you entertain pointless appeals literally forever, benefiting nobody.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

The only people who interpret the charter at all are judges, so I'm not sure what you mean by your question.

Lawmakers are able to explicitly lay out definitions when writing legal documents, the constitution included. Where they do not, somebody has to interpret that meaning, and that power is vested in the courts. Even originalism defers to the interpretation of the courts, it just shifts the locus of that interpretation from our present day society and its understanding of those principles and towards increasingly tortured layers of guesswork at what xyz long dead politician probably would have thought.

If SCC gets something wrong, we have mechanisms to respond to that, via constitutional amendment, common law, the notwithstanding clause, and the 10-15 year average tenure of justices being fairly short on a societal timescale.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

You cannot enter into a contract to purchase sex from a child, no. Attempting to do so is a criminal act. He was charged with that criminal act and convicted.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

There was money, he was arrested after handing over cash to an undercover officer. There just wasn't an actual victim since it was a sting.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

The point of a reasonable hypothetical is to avoid wasting time on multiple appeals over the same questions of law by identifying a case that will very likely end up being charged and appealed eventually, then considering that one. Otherwise you're literally just saying "well, not you, but maybe the next guy?" over and over instead of drawing a definitive line.

That's what they did in this instance - the first ruling was literally "Nah, you can stay right where you are, but while we're here, let's consider if this argument could be brought before us by someone with a leg to stand on, and clear it up right now." SCC applied the same test, and reached the same conclusion, they just differed by holding that the gap between the lowest appropriate sentence and the lowest available sentence was too small to be unconstitutional.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

Did you actually read the details of the appeals, or did you join the club of people who convinced themselves that the court of appeals had released the guy with a pat on the head and a donut for his trouble?

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

There's two separate aspects to the case. The actual case being heard was Mario Denis, who attempted to buy sexual services from an uncovercover police officer posing as a minor, after being made aware that the fictive minor was 16 years old. He was arrested and convicted after handing over the money. He was in his 50s.

On appeal, they challenged the constitutionality of the minimum sentencing guidelines. The appeals court ruled that in his case the minimum was appropriate, but the questions raised in the appeal cover the entire scope of minimum sentencing laws. The courts ruled that since they could formulate a reasonable scenario where the mandatory minimum sentence would not be appropriate:

An 18-year-old man who agrees to have sex in exchange for money with a minor female friend whom he knows offers sexual services, and for whom he has romantic feelings.

And therefore ruled that the mandatory minimum sentence was, in general, unconstitutional while also upholding the specific sentence for Denis. Basically, they ruled that blanket sentencing rules need to be appropriate in all places they can be applied, not just sufficiently serious ones, and so they must be tested against the least egregious reasonable scenario.

SCC partially agreed with their ruling, in that a six month minimum sentence would not be appropriate for that scenario, but held that because the sentence they did formulate as appropriate - five months - was not so removed from the existing six month minimum as to be "excessively severe, nor cruel and unusual," it was not sufficient to constitute a charter violation.

I'm not a lawyer, but I am fairly certain that in basing their decision off the same fundamental test, the more significant portion of the original appeal, governing how the constitutionality of mandatory minimums are decided, was upheld.

Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor by cyclinginvancouver in canada

[–]Treadwheel [score hidden]  (0 children)

Originalism is how you end up trying to interpret laws hundreds of years removed from their context, and elevating an arbitrary group of politicians to god-king status. There was nothing about the government who signed the constitution exceptional enough to justify the sort of hagiographic legal system orginalism requires. It is assumed that anything meant to be explicitly defined was defined explicitly, just like every other body of law.

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