Hate crime! But how could it be? What say you WF?

Idiots.

A group too large and diverse to quantify, so that's in part where your definition breaks down.

"Terrorism" doesn't need to be specifically ethnically or religiously motivated. For instance, what "race" or religion was being targeted on 9/11?

Western liberal democracy and capitalism. Terrorism need not be directed at an ethnic group, it can be directed at any group. It may target and harm individuals but it's always to do with groups.

So when a group does it, its more than just murder. But when an individual does it for exactly the same reason it's just murder? How can you defend that stance? The goal and purpose is identical, and yet you view one as less wrong?

So it's a broader definition than "hate crime," which specifically targets those who are ethnically and/or religiously "different" from the attackers.

Did I say I viewed one as less wrong? Let me try this tack: murder can be a tactic of terrorism, but terrorism is not a tactic of murder. It can be a result.

As I've already said, I believe "hate crime" to be a meaningless term.

I agree the term could be a little more sophisticated, but as it describes a subset of what you define as terrorism, the concept in and of itself is valid.

So what's wrong with this statement?

Murder can be a tactic of hate crimes, but hate crimes are not a tactic of murder. It can be a result.

That is logically consistent with your statement about terrorism. And I've already provided a definition for hate crimes that is distinct from your definition of terrorism only by the number of involved participants.

See post #37

A good time! Seriously, this falls under the excuse umbrella of "acting a fool." Youthful hijinx taken too far, boys will be boys,
or just a "ruckus" or an "altercation." And that's just the tip of the excuse iceberg. If any of them go to trial, the excuse train kicks into overdrive.

Yes, you've said that. Then I provided a meaningful definition. Then you said no, that's terrorism. And round and round we go, but what you have not done is demonstrated what delineates the terrorism which you believe is real from the hate crime which you claim is not real. You admit that the purpose and outcome can be the same, and yet....

[edit because my spell check initially changed a typo to teal, that should have been real. Did not mean to in anyway imply that Lanz is a terrorist.]

When they're beating on their own, yeah. Indications of morons who think with their fists. Not what this is.

So say you! Bet the families of the attackers will spin their behavior around like a top. Denial all across the board most likely.

As you do every time it's a gang of white suspects.

That's an interesting definition. Terrorism has begun to be used in that way for the last decade or so, but that didn't use to be the meaning at all.

Not really sure how much more clear I can be. Terrorism is a crime. Crime is crime. Hate crime is crime. Except "hate crime" is meaningless babble based on the need by some to make a crime seem more severe because someone hated someone else. If I punch you in the face and break your nose because you called me names, your nose is broken. If I punch you in the face and break your nose because "All guls are subhuman scum," your nose is not any more or less broken than it was in the first example. In both cases I've committed battery. Have I committed more battery in the second example just because I hate all guls?

I was being kind of generic there.

When have I ever made excuses for a gang of white suspects attacking a black stranger with hammers?

You can't turn thoughts into crimes, and you can't punish people twice for what they did once because you also dislike why they did it.

But there are at least two contexts in which the concept of hate crime might be useful, IMO. One, in terms of statistics, there's a difference between a society in which people get murdered a lot in order to grab their purse, and one in which people get murdered a lot because they have the wrong skin colour or sexual orientation or accent. Knowing which society you live in can help you make political and other choices.

And two, proving that something is a hate crime might help proving that it's a crime in the first place. Did the gun go off by accident? Well, we know the shooter explicitly wanted to kill people of that skin colour when he left his home that day. So all things being equal, that makes it much less likely that the killing was an accident.

But in both contexts, the concept of the hate crime doesn't duplicate one crime through another crime that occurs only in thought; it just gives further information on what remains just one crime, and should be no more or less criminal and deserving of punishment than the same action when motivated by different causes.

In this case it's a "hate crime" and is just ever so much worse than if it was a gang of black suspects attacking a black stranger with hammers or a gang of white suspects attacking a white stranger with hammers.

Of course the real question is what the victim is doing with all those hammers. I suspect he's up to no good, but that suspicion may be a hate crime.

Yeah. Your definition would include all wars, all genocide, and many sports.

Ted was an anarchist using terror to spread his message.

HA! Now I know what these racists are really singing about! Damn "code words".
The jig is up, folk singers!

Most wars, yeah. All genocide, probably. Sports? Not so much.

Many sports are violent. How does your flavour of football, or how does ice hockey, not involve one group being violent towards another that is viewed as somehow different, in this case, as being part of another team? I'd include boxing if it's done by teams, albeit in 1:1 matches.

Meh, he was Bosnian and so probably a Muslim so what is old person whining about? Usually Fox cheers the killing of Muslims or was this one white enough for them to care?

Sports teams aren't generally looking to kill one another or seize (or "liberate") the other side's territory. There's no politics involved, it's just scoring points, or winning.

Right. But your definition didn't include killing nor territory, and explicitly made politics optional.