No, I was "here". I just couldn't read the couchiness thing. About 2 paragraphs in I felt like I was wasting my time ... which is bad because my time isn't valuable. And I completely agree with Gil re black flashlights, which means there's no reason for me to write anything.
The Lerner posts seemed to echo a bit of Jon's and your objection to bureaucracy, but also evoke a larger argument I've had with several people about institutional/systemic knowledge. And Jon mentioned "jury nullification" awhile back, which is a similar subject. *Where* is "the law"? Not only where is it defined, but also where is it executed/computed? This strikes me as an unsettled question ... even a couple hundred years on in this experiment. On 11/22/21 12:12 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote: > 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 > thompnicks...@gmail.com > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ > Sent: Monday, November 22, 2021 11:04 AM > To: FriAM <friam@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 .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
