Hate Crimes? Thought Crimes? Crimethink?

Are you high?What makes you think real detection of an act is required in order to criminalize it?Do you think all those Puritans had super witch-detecting powers?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

No analogy attempted.I was pointing out to New Cat's Eye that undetectable things can still be crimes.Witchcraft was apparently a crime, yet we all know now there's no real way to detect witchcraft because witchcraft doesn't exist.So the fact that thoughts can't be detected, contrary to what New Cat's Eye thinks, doesn't preclude thoughts from being classified as crimes.

In those cases there are legally recognised distinctions between the victims.But what is the distinction, under the law, between a black man and a white, an atheist and a Jew, a homosexual and a heterosexual?

Nailed it!Where hate crimes go too far is in legislating certain thoughts.When you devise laws that consider the thoughts of the actor, you are, by definition, creating thought crimes - even if you're wrapping it up inside some other kind of non-thought crime or making punishment of the thought crime dependent on the commission of some other kind of crime.And free societies really should have no place for such crap. Laws don't target crimes; they create them.Laws targeting particular actions criminalize those actions; hate crime laws target the thoughts of the actor and so, again by definition, criminalize certain thoughts - and again, it doesn't matter that they only criminalize the thoughts when accompanied by some action, hate crime laws still criminalize thoughts and that's what creates the situation of thought crimes.

What does 'stand your ground' have to do with anything?

Impossible?What does that have to do with criminalizing something?It's impossible to detect or even be a witch, yet that never stopped many a witch hunt and subsequent execution.The fact that something is realistically impossible to detect doesn't mean it is impossible to criminalize and convict someone over it. Laws already existed targeting the actions relevant to hate crime laws. It wasn't like someone invented a new way to punch minorities in the face to which the legislature responding by creating special laws dealing with this special way of punching.There were already laws against assault. Separate laws against assault while thinking about how much you hate the victim because of the group s/he belongs to didn't deal with a separate act. Their only distinction was that they now made it possible for the legal system to consider (and punish based on) the presence of thoughts considered unsettling to the general public.We aren't talking about probing at people's thoughts to determine their degree of responsibility, but about probing at their thoughts do determine if they are 'unacceptable' and that just so we can punish them more severely because we don't like the thoughts.Ant that is wherein lies the thought crime.

You are wrong in your analysis.The difference between a premeditated crime and an opportunistic one is the degree to which we feel the actor to be responsible; the purpose of determining responsibility is not to correct abhorrent morals, but because we believe as a society that people should be judged for their actions only to the extent to which they are responsible for them.This is not at all like hate crime laws.