[FRIAM] corruption and impartiality

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

Glad to have you back.  Seems like you had gone silent for a while.  

It seems to me that the law is to blame in the Rittenhouse case.  It is precisesly the duty of the law to keep individual human beings out of the situation Rittenhouse and his opponents found themselves in.  If trained police cannot make the kind of hair-trigger decisions that Rittenhouse and the others were forced to make, how can we expect untrained citizens to.  Put a 17 year old kid, pumped up with ideology, provided with an assault rife, into the midst of a riot in a unfamiliar city,  what could possibly go wrong?  Throw the legislature in jail.  

n

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2021 11:04 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] corruption and impartiality

IDEA has (the) US listed as backsliding:

https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/inline-images/Figure%206_global.png

It seems mostly because of a loss of "impartial administration":

https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/inline-images/Global_07.jpeg

Outlined here:

https://www.idea.int/gsod/global-report#chapter-6-impartial-administration

Of all the myriad things this brings to my mind (from postmodernism to federated computing), the most obvious one is the illusory "neutrality" of SCOTUS and the semi-religious hermeneutics around "the rule of law". The Rittenhouse verdict and this series of posts <https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/18/the-second-amendment-vs-the-seventh-amendment-substantive-vs-procedural-rights-part-1-similarities-and-differences/> biased me even more. ("procedural rights"? Pffft.)

But the real question, here, is who is to blame? Mirroring Donald Trump, am *I* to blame for losing trust and constantly questioning the motivations of the Justices? (Is Trump to blame for questioning the election result/process?) Are we, me re SCOTUS and Trump re ... well ... everyone but himself, *imputing* partiality by our very insistence that it's there? Or, is it actually there?

There's something to be said, here, about secrecy and distributed tasking. While SCOTUS isn't secret, it is fairly centralized (into 9 appointed-for-life already elite lawyers ... fvcking lawyers for crying out loud). And the problem with secrecy isn't really about the secrecy. It's about diversity, including hyper-reductive reasoning as well as perspective and noisy application (universality). Twain's observation ("two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead") evokes this nicely. Distributed systems are leaky. And it's a feature, not a bug.

COVID-19, like blockchain tech and social media, brought both opportunities for more corruption and opportunities for less corruption. There are no more demes. We are awash in *pan*demics of various different kinds, from yahoos thinking they can read the Constitution just because they can read Harry Potter to 8-bit graphic artists issuing NFTs for their silly emotes. Get off my lawn!

Which of the Grand Unified Theories of Everything explains this stuff? I have no idea what's going on.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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