There are few details in the story, so I can't say this for sure, but 16 years is probably greatly exaggerated. That sounds like a "press release" sentence. DoJ press releases when they indict someone greatly exaggerate the potential sentences, and the press uncritical reports those exaggerated sentences. They are often off by up to an order of magnitude from what is realistic.
See the article "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS" at Popehat for a good explanation of how this happens.
But even if you don't read those blog posts, consider this - the reported sentences are the maximum possible under the statute. From there, you would apply contextual circumstances - what the actual circumstances of the crime were, criminal history, admission of guilt, likelihood of recidivism, danger to society, whatever else the judge might find important, and adjust the sentence. Unless you think the hacker has undoubtedly committed the most egregious hacking crime, then he's not getting the maximum sentence.
And is the outcome for the rape perpetrators "blatantly wrong"? I don't really know the specifics of the case. Just quickly reading this CNN report - http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/17/justice/ohio-steubenville-... - you can find out they're minors, they were remorseful, the rape was not violent, and most importantly, jail was not the only punishment they received - they were put on the sex offenders registry, which will most likely ruin their chances at having a decent life.
Minors are more susceptible to change and will likely end up being different people by the time they are 30, while if you had a much older perpetrator the mentality is probably more ingrained.
Minors shoot and kill people all the time, too. In US culture and jurisprudence, we tend to weigh heavily factors that diminish offenders capacity to distinguish right from wrong, and teenagers have both diminished judgement and impulse control capabilities that are at their lifetime low.
We generally try, at least ostensibly, to recognize that long sentences serve no practical purpose when applied to someone who will in just a few years be for many purposes a biologically different person.
I've never understood why you would go to the trouble of having special juvenile criminal sentencing ranges and juvenile courts when oftentimes a juvenile does something really bad he is tried as an adult (even more so in the UK, it seems). It would be more straightforward to just exclude murder and other grave crimes from juvenile court altogether.
It is not being put on the sex offenders registry that will ruin their chances at having a decent life, it's that they raped - their action, their consequences.
I didn't know that, but their current homepage, the tone of a few articles, and Wikipedia[1] seems to confirm that news—thank you!
However, I also googled "steubenville hacker"[2] and found a number of other articles confirmed this story. Most were published in the last 10 hours so I'm confident that major publications aren't avoiding this story because it's false, but rather, they haven't picked it up yet.
These[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] are a perfect example of why people don't trust RT. It's not that they always post such a blatant lies or falsehoods but the brand as a whole is tainted. It's operated as more of disinformation campaign/operation masquerading as alternative news. And this is just RT, plenty of other Russian outlets are worse.[6]
If I find something interesting on RT I usually corroborate it elsewhere and then use that source. ZH (ZeroHedge) is another example of this. They come up in my Play Newsstand feed(which I cannot change...thanks Google) as news but I would never think of RT or ZH as trustworthy, I give them a gossip-rag level of trust. Though I would say there are trust issues with a lot of MSM outlets, RT really takes the cake and they aren't nearly as crazy as they used to be, they've learned to be far more nuanced.
> It's not that they always post such a blatant lies or falsehoods but the brand as a whole is tainted. It's operated as more of disinformation campaign/operation
To be clear, that is exactly how professional propaganda operates. Their goal is to deceive people; blatant lies obviously won't accomplish that, just like blatant phishing attacks will fail. If you can tell it's propaganda (without knowing otherwise about the source), it's not very well done.
AFAICT, humans greatly overestimate their ability to know propaganda when they see it. We all think that we can't be fooled so easily, and that's exactly what makes us vulnerable. We're naturally persuaded by things that don't correlate with truth - you can see that in the accomplishments of endless false political leaders, and their propagandists, throughout history.
Correct to some extent (the same can be said of Al Jazeera) but they do have a quite bit more integrity and can be trusted with many more topics with much more ease than RT. To be fair I vet news from those sources as well. But painting both CNN and BBC with the same broad stroke as RT is being disingenuous. RT is on a whole other level of fud. Don't trust the BBC/CNN/Al Jazeera on domestic affairs from within their own countries but RT can't be trusted with anything.
Well, CNN is propaganda for the left in the US, that is certainly true. CNN spins stories in ways that make them kind of true, but objectively not. They like to add drama into stories that aren't very dramatic and news that may or may not be true.
Some parts of CNN are objective and some parts aren't.
I don't know why he got down-voted. We do have partisan news outlets that often act as propaganda machines for the party.
Fox for the republicans. CNN for the democrats. Fox Business News oddly enough for the libertarians.
Although, I do say that Fox is by far worse than CNN and this coming from an independent who has voted Republican before. Fox pundits are notorious for bending the truth.
I don't watch either station so I was making an accuracy assumption about the post I was replying to. I don't watch Fox either but I unfortunately have relatives that often put it on when I visit. I think they believe the brainwashing will eventually convert me from my evil liberal Libertarian ways.[1]
[1] Thinking Libertarians are liberal is amusing in itself, people don't know what to do with a party that has both liberal and conservative views
> And BBC is a propaganda outlet for UK government and CNN is an outlet for US propaganda.
I disagree. Unless we say 'no news is 100% free of propaganda, therefore all are equivalent propaganda outlets', which of course is silly. It's like saying, 'no code is bug-free, therefore the quality of all code is equivalently flawed.'
The UK and U.S. governments and societies have very different attitudes toward independent news than Russia, and the results are evident. That doesn't mean I'm not skeptical and BBC and CNN don't have their flaws, but there is no equivalency.
22 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 66.6 ms ] threadSee the article "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS" at Popehat for a good explanation of how this happens.
[1] https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-el...
But even if you don't read those blog posts, consider this - the reported sentences are the maximum possible under the statute. From there, you would apply contextual circumstances - what the actual circumstances of the crime were, criminal history, admission of guilt, likelihood of recidivism, danger to society, whatever else the judge might find important, and adjust the sentence. Unless you think the hacker has undoubtedly committed the most egregious hacking crime, then he's not getting the maximum sentence.
And is the outcome for the rape perpetrators "blatantly wrong"? I don't really know the specifics of the case. Just quickly reading this CNN report - http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/17/justice/ohio-steubenville-... - you can find out they're minors, they were remorseful, the rape was not violent, and most importantly, jail was not the only punishment they received - they were put on the sex offenders registry, which will most likely ruin their chances at having a decent life.
We generally try, at least ostensibly, to recognize that long sentences serve no practical purpose when applied to someone who will in just a few years be for many purposes a biologically different person.
I've never understood why you would go to the trouble of having special juvenile criminal sentencing ranges and juvenile courts when oftentimes a juvenile does something really bad he is tried as an adult (even more so in the UK, it seems). It would be more straightforward to just exclude murder and other grave crimes from juvenile court altogether.
HN, for the moment, is now a propaganda outlet for the Russian government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
However, I also googled "steubenville hacker"[2] and found a number of other articles confirmed this story. Most were published in the last 10 hours so I'm confident that major publications aren't avoiding this story because it's false, but rather, they haven't picked it up yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network) [2] https://www.google.ca/search?q=steubenville+hacker#q=steuben...
[1] https://www.rt.com/news/356697-man-climbs-ecuadorian-embassy...
[2] https://www.rt.com/news/158212-academi-blackwater-ukraine-mi...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140704230031/http://rt.com/new...
[4] https://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/insane-moments-from...
[5] http://www.interpretermag.com/rt-sends-in-the-clowns/
[6] https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-contemporary...
To be clear, that is exactly how professional propaganda operates. Their goal is to deceive people; blatant lies obviously won't accomplish that, just like blatant phishing attacks will fail. If you can tell it's propaganda (without knowing otherwise about the source), it's not very well done.
AFAICT, humans greatly overestimate their ability to know propaganda when they see it. We all think that we can't be fooled so easily, and that's exactly what makes us vulnerable. We're naturally persuaded by things that don't correlate with truth - you can see that in the accomplishments of endless false political leaders, and their propagandists, throughout history.
Fox for the republicans. CNN for the democrats. Fox Business News oddly enough for the libertarians.
Although, I do say that Fox is by far worse than CNN and this coming from an independent who has voted Republican before. Fox pundits are notorious for bending the truth.
I don't watch either station so I was making an accuracy assumption about the post I was replying to. I don't watch Fox either but I unfortunately have relatives that often put it on when I visit. I think they believe the brainwashing will eventually convert me from my evil liberal Libertarian ways.[1]
[1] Thinking Libertarians are liberal is amusing in itself, people don't know what to do with a party that has both liberal and conservative views
And now I prepare for the down votes.
I disagree. Unless we say 'no news is 100% free of propaganda, therefore all are equivalent propaganda outlets', which of course is silly. It's like saying, 'no code is bug-free, therefore the quality of all code is equivalently flawed.'
The UK and U.S. governments and societies have very different attitudes toward independent news than Russia, and the results are evident. That doesn't mean I'm not skeptical and BBC and CNN don't have their flaws, but there is no equivalency.