I find this interpretation odd. I do not see the numbers as meaningful in a literal sense but rather in a means of making a point and a grounding for the surrounding abstraction. I think the point is to explicitly discuss these bounds and view them as a spectrum. To think of them in the abstract but to push back against authority.
Certainly Blackstone was not saying that infringement of rights (punishment) should not happen under any circumstance. Rather that there should be significant friction and that we should take great care to ensure that this is not eroded.
Another reason a lot of people got their hackles up is that you also had the ratio backwards:
> Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio
"3000 innocent people for every one possibly guilty" isn't 30x Blackstone's ratio, it's 300,000x and worse, because the ratio is "100 actually guilty people for every one innocent". Of course, this actually helps your argument -- violating the rights of thousands of innocent people is unjustifiable -- but once you've given everyone cause to pause and work out what's wrong, they're going to reply with whatever they can find.
So what? We're going to derail an entire point because a gaff was made and everyone still understands the argument?
It's worth pointing out, but not worth derailing an entire conversation. It generates noise that prevents us from actually discussing the issues at hand. We're people, not computers. We can handle mistakes (and look how much work we put into computers to make them do this). And this thread blew up, you aren't the first to point it out. So forgive me if I'm a bit exhausted.[0]
I've made several mistakes (including the first blackstone link not pasting and pasting the whole comment instead of the specific part I was responding to (thanks firefox)), and so have you, and others. But let's not make the conversation about that. We'll never get shit done. We can take an aside to resolve any confusion, but it is an aside. Clearly by your explanation here you understood the point. And clearly we know that the number itself is arbitrary. Are we gonna shit talk everything Franklin said because he used 100 instead of Blackstone's original 10? No, because the number isn't what's consequential.
[0] We do meet each other here a lot and I have respect for you. It's why I'll take the time to respond to you. But I also know you to be better than this. I think you can also understand why it can be exhausting to be overloaded with responses and with a large number of people trying to tear down my argument by things that are not actually important to the argument. Specifically when the complaints make it clear that the correct interpretation was actually found. I'm happy to correct and appreciate mistakes being pointed out, but too many internet conversations just get derailed this way. The distinction of correcting vs derailing is critical, and the subsequent emotional response is clearly different in the two cases.
I'm happy to continue the conversation w.r.t the actual topic (even where we disagree), but it seems like wasted time to argue over a gaff that we both know was made and we understand what was said despite this.
Certainly Blackstone was not saying that infringement of rights (punishment) should not happen under any circumstance. Rather that there should be significant friction and that we should take great care to ensure that this is not eroded.