1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
summer-skye-64

Yes, criminals need rights.

madlori

So I move in a lot of true crime communities. I’ve been a fan of true crime since, oh, 1980 or so (so enough with this “oh this brand new true crime trend” which has in fact been happening for hundreds of years). 

Sometimes there are opinions there which…trouble me.

Mostly when people express frustration about the rights of the accused, how rigorously they need to be defended, and the wish that criminals just had no rights and we could do whatever we want them.

Stop. That’s BAD.

But what about the rights of the victims and their families?

Here’s a hot take: the rights of the accused - and even the convicted - are more important.

Not because criminals, or those accused of crimes, are widdle babies who need protecting and we want to make things easy for them. That is not the reason.

We have to vigorously defend the rights of the accused, not for their sake, but TO PROVIDE A CHECK ON THE POWER OF THE STATE.

Lemme say that again.

THE RIGHTS OF THE ACCUSED MUST BE DEFENDED IN ORDER TO CURTAIL THE POWER OF THE STATE.

If you are going to give the state the power to punish, to restrict someone’s liberty indefinitely, or in some states take their life, then you better make fucking sure that the rights of the people at risk of this are being defended to the utmost extent of the law. The state can never, never assume that it will be easy to throw someone in jail. It must always know that it will have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, respect the rights of the accused, and that the accused will be defended by people dedicated to that purpose.

If the state starts finding it easy to throw people in jail, or mistreat them during that process, you are handing it a tool to use against its political enemies. Which might at some point include you.

Should an honorable state require such countermeasures? Ideally, no. But the Constitution was written by men who understood the need for checks on governmental authority, and the right to incarcerate or execute citizens is one of the most dangerous rights the state has. 

So the victims and their families have rights, of course. But they are not the ones facing the state’s punishment. Their liberty or life is not in jeopardy.

If someone has committed a crime and the state needs to exercise its right to punish them, they should do so. But only after a rigorous process. Yes, it’s frustrating. Yes, guilty people walk free. Yes our emotions sometimes make us want to just see them hurt, damaged, or violated. But as they say, don’t ever hand the state a weapon it could use against YOU.

The state must have the hardest job in the room when someone is facing imprisonment or execution. That’s why their rights are important.

volcanolotus
artbyblastweave

I saw a post a couple of days ago that said one of the most important things about Steven Universe, thematically, is that everybody in the core cast has done at least one completely morally unjustifiable thing, regardless of how likeable or sympathetic they are otherwise, and that this is important to understanding the show thematically. This is true. 

But it also reminded me of one other thing I really like about Steven Universe, which is that it’s the emotional-toxicity equivalent of all those posts about how cartoons have to come up with unimaginably worse forms of death and violence in the course of avoiding getting censored for depicting plausible forms of death and violence.  All of the ways in which SU characters cross those emotional and interpersonal lines are wrapped up either in their fantastic abilities or their bizarre life circumstances in a way that makes it all esoterically awful and often much more existentially horrifying than any of the real-life dynamics it’s alluding to. You’ve said nasty things to people in the heat of the moment but you’ve never shapeshifted into the guy’s dead wife to twist the knife a little more. No violation of bodily autonomy is ever gonna involve contriving a situation in which the other party will believe that it’s necessary to fuse with you, body and soul in order to do demolition work. The most toxic relationship in the world isn’t gonna involve imprisoning someone at the bottom of the ocean for several months and only emerging to participate in humanoid-sacrifice rituals. Your codependency will never last 8,000 years, be frontloaded with a faked death you’re biomechanically incapable of confessing to, and end with your partner’s suicide-by-childbirth. Your worst roommate situation will never end with one party stealing the apartment and taking it to the moon. Et al. Et al.

I don’t remember where I was going with this, precisely, (and I may have drifted sideways from the original discussion topic of crossed lines per se, but whatever.) I mean part of it’s funny because it exists in a series with tons of mundane, non-metaphorical examinations of interpersonal issues, like everything to do with Lars and Sadie, or Sour Cream and Marty. And there’s an extent to which I’m just describing how cartoons are written. But there’s something special about how Steven Universe does it. Something delightfully fucked up about it all. I think maybe part of it is that it’s a considered and embraced fucked-upedness, none of this is just an ill-considered fridge-logic by-product of something else they were trying to do. Like for every one of these, someone in the writers room probably went, “Man, this has some fucked up implications,” and then everyone would go, “Yeah!” and hi five and put it in specifically because of that. Great Show. Great show