Blog: TTTThis

Malicious Prosecution (False Charges)

2019-11-03 by TTTThis

(Note: This page discusses the crimes and torts in general. Laws vary by location. These wordings are the terms in which the crime/tort is considered, though.)

Making a false accusation is actionable as "Malicious Prosecution," which is a tort, not a crime, for some reason. It cannot lead to arrest, merely to civil court where a complainant can try to get money for damages.

"Malicious Prosecution" (tort) is made against whoever "initiated" the original false charges. Usually this is police because they usually initiate charges. It is available for private prosecution, too, though.

To make this tort, the complainant has to show:

There was manifestly no reason for the initial charge (they knew the charges were false or they knew there was no reason to believe the charges were true)
There was malice / wrongful purpose in the decision to launch the initial false charge

(ie if a person is falsely charged but is found innocent, that is not enough to "prove" "malicious prosecution." You need more.)

Often, this charge is used when the initial false charge is made. This makes a court less likely to find guilt in the initial charge or could cause the initial complainant to drop their charges.

A weird thing is that apparently if the initial false charge succeeds you can't counter sue for making the false charge, it seems. You can't file the lawsuit in civil court until the initial charge is resolved in criminal court, it seems.

Also, "malicious prosecution" will likely fail against an official like the DA (county prosecutor in many cases) because you have to prove somehow they had malicious intent, and they are also often entitled to immunity even when its proved after a person has been convicted that they were actually innocent.

Another recourse is "Libel/Slander"

Many places, accusing someone of a crime falsely is considered "defamatory per se" or "actionable per se." That means that if someone accuses you falsely of a crime, the public authority considers that "harm is taken as a given" to you, and that your reputation is presumed to have been harmed.

How much liability a person has when they slander/libel another person varies by location. They might be liable for any damages that stemmed from their statements, including money lost as a result of problems/loss of work and inability to secure new work, harm to reputation, as well as less concrete damages such as embarrassment, mental anguish, humiliation.

Another recourse is "Blackmail" if the person made the false accusations after trying to blackmail someone else.

"Blackmail" is a crime and the charge leads to arrest. It's often a "Felony." In some places it is its own charge, in other places it is considered a form of "extortion or coercion."

In "Blackmail," the blackmailer has information (the information can be true or a lie, it makes no difference) that can damage the other party, and the blackmailer uses threats to cause the other party to do something they want them to do (something illegal or legal, it makes no difference). The central element of "Blackmail" is that the blackmailer's intent to get money or something else of value from the other party.

The threat made by the blackmailer to release information can include: to accuse someone falsely of a crime; to report someone's involvement in a crime; to reveal private or sensitive information about someone that will cause them embarrassment or financial harm.

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Ferdinand VII

2019-10-14 by TTTThis

d. 1833

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How many enemies can China and YouTube make?

2019-10-08 by TTTThis

This is a question about threshold, I think. Let's take China, first. China has always made people extremely unhappy, alienating some, outraging others. Throughout the 90s, Hollywood stars and pop musicians were banned from China for being in movies or making songs or statements the Chinese State didn't like. At that time, most of these had to do with Tibet. Brad Pitt was banned for Seven Years in Tibet. Others: Richard Gere, Harrison Ford, Sharon Stone, Martin Scorsese, Bjork, Oasis, Bob Dylan. China also banned most social networks. But this happened one at a time, and to a relatively small amount of people. At this point, China's enemies (in this limited sense of the word) is a small group, not posing a real problem for China.

China currently has a strong control over it's citizens and significant control over foreign businesses and governments, but so far there hasn't been much opposition. At some point, a threshold would have to be met where China had so many enemies this group would form a conglomerate and cause real problems for China.

This week, China banned South Park and the the NBA's preseason games following statements by the TV show and a few Rockets players in favor of the rights of Hong Kongers (Hong Kong 2019 click here: http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/hong-kong-2019 ). South Park and the NBA are entities with huge, established viewer demand in China, who are going to miss them when they're gone, and who are going to try to find out what South Park and the NBA have to say back to China. China's huge market caused the NBA to initially make some movements toward appeasement, but by the end of the day (in which the story went huge and the NBA faced a ton of criticism for bowing down to China and disregarding human rights) the NBA commissioner came out and made a statement in support of free speech which didn't attempt to appease China further.

There must be some point at which China will find itself not controlling the situation through it's familiar economic coercion, but will be out-forced by it's enemies.

Another case of threshold of enemies might be YouTube. YouTube has over the past year come out against free speech in favor of censorship (as have most social media giants), but it has also recently been demonetizing popular YouTubers, removing content, and outraging a lot of people. I think this number is still small and won't cause YouTube a huge problem. It also helps YouTube that they've done this slowly, so that a great number of new enemies aren't made at one time; Instead, they outrage one person here, another there, a few there. Many of these upset creators want to leave YouTube, and a small but significant userbase voice is making protests in YouTube comments (and other discussions), but still YouTube has massive support and popularity, as well as being a monopoly so creators can't migrate comfortably to a competing platform and impel both platoforms to respect them.

An interesting thing to note here is that in the case of China the main cause of their current problems is one specific object (in this case, an event) people just can't ignore. Hong Kong and the demands of people there, who have shown their sincerity with mass, continued efforts respected by people around the world, as well as huge news coverage (huge is important because any less than huge and a story will not make it into the consciousness of most of any population). Everyone believes Hong Kongers are right, that China is the oppressor in this situation, and, unlike Tibet, they're being shown this every day on all of the news stations.

Whereas with Tibet, which most people would never be conscious of because Tibetans, although just as sincere as Hong Kongers or more so, had no power to make their plight known to a large enough audience, news stations didn't cover it and Western governments and news bowed to China and just let it happen, and so Western public figures were not impelled to make public statements about it, the case with Hong Kong basically forces public figures to comment. They can't publicly support China or oppose human rights without losing probably all of their credibility, so they speak honestly in support of Hong Kong. Even those celebrities who don't have political personalities, who would never make a first comment, are impelled to comments when other public figures do so.

This raises the question of willingness to oppose wrongs at a cost. For example, while Canada has traditionally bowed to China and done things not in the interest of people or human rights, it has never been forced publicly to chose. However, any public event large enough to cause Canadian politicians and public figures to make a public statement will create a situation in which they must publicly chose. It would be essentially impossible for them to publicly chose otherwise than against China's human rights abuses, as much as they might privately prefer it or fear they would be the only one to support human rights and would therefore waste their opportunities as a failed martyr.

On an international level, hypothetically, if Canada took the initiative to make a public stand, in spite of the economic consequences of losing one of the most important world markets, other countries would be forced to come out for or against Canada. Would the U.S. side with China against Canada? Would it be even possible for politicians in the U.S. to do so when questions were asked about their reasoning? It was not possible for the NBA to side with China, which some might guess it would have preferred to do if it would not have meant outraging NBA fans (and Americans generally).

I put this as a question here because I don't know. Also, if anyone has a scientific paper that explores thresholds for this sort of dynamic, please link to them in the comments.

A futher point of interest is the formation of alternatives. For the past decades, China has increasingly tightened it's grip on it's citizens, committing uncountable abuses against them with impunity, removing the tools of the people (press, democratic representation, free trials, communication, assembly) while outraging human rights. The amount of Chinese willing to stand up against this is understandably small given their likely failed-martry outcome. The amount of Chinese using VPNs is bigger but still not overwhelming, because normal Chinese can still get enough content and communication. As more content falls outside of the ambit of compliant Chinese, it stands to reason the balance will move further away from the State there. As tools like VPNs, which are not universally known or valued, and whose costs don't have the full benefit of scale pricing or use comfort, would probably become more used alternatives. There would be a sort of slow exodus, sloughing off the previous system, not really opposing the State blatantly, but making their control efforts untenable through scale and complication. This model could also be applied to YouTube (or other social media channels whose policy and behaviour changes alienate users).

I put this as a question, too, because I don't know. Is this something that can be treated by statisticians, and what kind of formula would describe this phenomena?

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The Peace Process

2019-10-08 by TTTThis

To review: Audio files on Northern Ireland Peace Process

https://web.archive.org/web/20060712170545/http://www.usip.org/fellows/reports/2006/0706_farry.html

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Tenth Man Rule

2019-09-30 by TTTThis

A lot of people's ears perked up when they heard this idea spoken of in the lines of Max Brooks' "World War Z" and, struck with the sense of it, they wondered if this was actually something Israeli authorities did, or if it was an invention for the book.

Robert J. Joustra wrote on The Center for Public Justice website that it is true, sort of. He pointed out that more minds don't always make better decisions: "Following the recommendation of the Agranat Commission in 1973-1974, Military Intelligence established a Control Unit that was expected to play this role of the devil’s advocate. Its responsibility was to produce a range of explanations and assessments of events that avoided relying on a single concept, as happened in 1973." The idea and role exists, but Brooks modified it out of his own mind, it looks like, carving the idea into "The Tenth Man."

Joustra quotes Irving Janis as he writes about this valuable role in groups, which Joustra terms "loyal opposition."

Janis: “The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by group think, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups.”

The Yom Kippur war was a surprise to Israel and therefore a striking failure of the authorities' intelligence forces (the section responsible for this was the Research Department called "Aman"). I don't have any source for this, but one commenter on a discussion on Stack specified that there's a unit within the IDF called "Ipha mistabra" whose purpose is to doubt everything and come out with alternative theories to every regular theory the intel section has.

There is precedent for this strain of thought in Jewish history. The Sanhedrin was opposed to killing even criminals as an act of "punishment," and it happened very rarely. Among other failsafe's against wrongful conviction, there was a rule that the if the assembled judges came to a unanimous guilty verdict, the accused would be freed. The reason was that if none of the judges could find anything exculpatory about the accused, there had to be something wrong with the court.

The Vatican also has something similar, but for a sort of opposite purpose. It is a failsafe against electing saints popularly instead of on merit. This was the "Devil's Advocate" role given to one of the panel during canonization of a new saint. Their job is to find flaws in the person's character and their required miracles during the process of review.

However, even when the stakes are high, a dissenting voice might not mean anything. In the Yom Kippur war itself, the Israeli's, comfortable and confident after repeated illustrations of their military superiority and their neighbours making threats of invasion and not following through on them, found themselves on October 6, 1973 facing 1400 Syrian tanks and 1000 artillery with a rushed-into-place reserve force bringing their number up to 177 tanks and 55 artillery, and the Syrians rapidly shot towards Israel's northern settlements before being stopped, and in the south Egypt crossed the Suez Cannal and destroyed tons of Israeli tanks and aircraft with their new Soviet weapons; All this happened despite 6 months of evidence of a war buildup, doubts among two of the 3 top Israeli army chiefs, and two serious warnings from one of Aman's (Israeli's intelligence service mentioned above) - but just one - researchers, which warnings were both ignored by his senior officer, and even when photos showed the unprecedented military buildup on both borders and Jordan's King Hussein called the Israeli PM to warn him, Israel did almost nothing to prepare. They didn't think it would happen; they already believed something else.

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