The problem is that Burns did a masterful and very comprehensive history of the Civil War, and expectations are that any subsequently grandiosely titled projects will be similarly comprehensive.

I watched the first episode, and it is very good, and tells Americans truths that they have by and large denied themselves. But as a dual citizen, with close relatives on the non-American side of the family who paid the price, watching it is almost physically painful.

American exceptionalism, particularism, and isolationism, are our worst sins, and beautiful and horrifying and important as this work is, it really does feel like a slap in the face to us almost invisible unimportant foreigners.

We did have allies too you know. Who knew a little bit of horror and sadness too.

Even though I have been a Human Rights activist for most of my working life, I'm actually with the people that are a little skeptical about this, though perhaps for slightly different reasons.

The problem is, once you make a list of vulnerable groups, discriminating against those not on the list becomes almost ok. For example, back in the day when I did refugee claimant advocacy, one of the problems was that the grounds for persecution included such a list: you are a refugee if you fear persecution "for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." (1951 UN Convention, the basis of international refugee law.) Under Canadian law, the ruling was made that "women" are not a "particular social group." (Interestingly, gays/lesbians are.) Consequently, a woman fleeing domestic violence and rape in say Saudi Arabia or Liberia, could not be a protected person (this ruling stands today, though there have been some clumsy workarounds put into place).

The other problem with a list is figuring out whether a person makes it or not. The legal reasonings around "disabled" for example are tortuous in the extreme, and the disability assessments are parsed as fine (and ultimately ridiculously) as racial assignments were under Apartheid. (Indeed, trying to figure out if someone is indeed a person of colour or whatnot is a deeply distasteful exercise.) One of the more ridiculous things we have been seeing recently are tribunals trying to figure out if people are actually gay, or just faking it.

While I agree intent in the sense of deliberate vs accidental should matter in sentencing, I really have to agree that I am just as dead if I am deliberately killed for money or killed because I belong to vulnerable, discriminated against population, and the suffering of my family & friends would be the same as well.

Finally, it is fairly well established that harsher sentencing does deter crime much. What does deter crime is the chance of getting caught-- better policing on these issues is going to be far more effective.

That all being said, it is nice to see the US government demonstrating some liberal thinking.

My daughters were rather attractive as children, and a coworker was always urging me to get an agent and hire them out as models. I ignored this, but then she went and found a talent scout, who came to a soccer game to see them, and tried to get us to sign them up on the spot (they were about 6 at the time).

They dangled rather amazing amounts of money in front of us, and even better, the prospect of a career as a model as they grew up! It was all rather sickening, actually, both the scout and my coworker looked at us like we were idiots for telling them to shove off. I almost had the impression that they thought WE were the child abusers, denying our children this great opportunity.

I remember at the time I thought to myself, why not, a few bucks for their college fund, and I'll be there right? But we said no, and boy am I ever glad now that they're in their mid-teens. They could be there now, popping pills and smoking and not learning to read and write.

And why why why does the industry favour children and scrawniness? Presumably they are marketing women's clothing to women, so you'd think that they would want models that actually look like women? I've never understood this; I'm not sure I buy into the idea that it is gay designers trying to make models look like boys, but it is the only explanation I've heard that made any sense at all.

Howabout I killed a lesbian because she wasn't sufficiently lesbian, if I were an insane lesbian militant and it turns out that she had engaged in some bisexual behaviour, or more to the point, I just thought she had?

Less ridiculously, is there a category of hate crime where vulnerable minorities mirror the behaviour of oppressive majorities? Like say muslims in North America taking it out on insufficiently conservative members of their own "community"? Or too conservative ones for that matter?

Do we really want to parse out all the shades and complexities of individual motivation according to broad sociological categories that don't apply much to particular individuals? Justice by stereotype is very particularly cruel.

I really do believe that we should be judged by our actions, not our thoughts, not because of any magical freedom of thought, but because the task is simply impossible.

And the hardest question of all, is when does social/political idiosyncrasy morph into criminal hate crime? Frankly, for me, most racist violently dangerous types strike me as pretty much mentally ill: do they simultaneously deserve harsher penalties because of their thought-crime at the same time as they deserve compassionate leniency due to mental frailty?

What I was trying to say was, the key is how we police behaviour, not how we punish it.