Whose justice?

[mc776]

On the one hand: the nature of the power dynamic between the parties involved, which may involve hypothetical parties in the future in the event of needing to punish or reward someone for something.

On the other: the formal analogy of how the particular transaction had been structured.

So many of our seemingly intractable dilemmas in our ethics and seemingly heaven-mandated offenses to all natural sense of propriety and justice and compassion explode, evaporate and dematerialize when we allow ourselves to prioritize the former over the latter.

That our law enshrines the latter is proof of its depravity.

Comments

[helarxe]

But A sounds like so much more work for us poor bureaucrats. We hardly get enough status ascendancy over our fellow citizens for our persons and kin to justify going to such an extraordinary length. ;_;

[mc776]

(just pretend (truthfully) that you're too busy to take the case)

[mc776]

Fittingly enough, the day after I post this there's a big discourse on Mastodon about someone's defence of minor-adult sexual interactions and "consent" versus grooming (and how much it resembles consent) and getting into things not really understanding what one is doing or having any effective power (or awareness of the existence thereof) to start after starting.

Copypasting Bogleech on Tumblr in the aftermath of the 2021 Trumpist insurrection at the US capitol

[mc776]

“If it was a blm protest you would defend it”

No shit sherlock, I don’t care that a building got broken into or politicians were threatened. For a just cause that would’ve been awesome. The capitol protest was wrong because their cause was wrong. Because they were idiot nationalist trolls who fell for a conspiracy theory and intended to fuck over fellow citizens by upending a legitimate election. Civilian uprising otherwise gave us many of the rights we enjoy and is therefore pretty cool when the motivation behind it is altruistic.

Re: Copypasting Bogleech on Tumblr in the aftermath of the 2021 Trumpist insurrection at the US capi

[helarxe]

honestly considering the death toll any time a lone USAn flips out w/ guns, this barely had me raising my head from my zuo zhuan

[mc776]

this comment on Crooked Timber by Frank Wilhoit is directly relevant:

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

[helarxe]

"All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny."

Checkmate humans!

[helarxe]

I mean, this has the charm of any year 0, purge all obstacles, how come no one figured this out before, audacious synthesis. But what will it look like in policy, and moreover, what sort of utopian superhuman government does it think there can be? So far I'd settle for one that protects those it can and binds those it must (and can).

[mc776]

Heh, I did initially want to omit all the utopian stuff at the end from my quote, but I didn't want to come back to this years later forever wondering what exactly it was that had been cut out.

[mc776]

It occurs to me this is exactly how the authoritarian mindset works - all that is added is an extra step where one carefully considers and evaluates good and evil, and knowingly, albeit with different names, categorically chooses evil.