[SGVLUG] Scary stuff for us Geeks.

[Terry Hancock]

On Friday 23 September 2005 09:58 pm, Dustin wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Terry Hancock wrote:
> > But how many people will get hurt in between, and how many will *really*
> > get their lives back afterwards?
> 
> None.  As I said, it doesn't function unless it is made to function.  
> It's only advantage is that the mechanism is there whenever society
> chooses to use it.

My point is that it's pretty useless if it remains unused.

> The common mistake is to confuse it for something it isn't and conclude it
> doesn't work.

> It doesn't usher in the Second Coming and a Millenium of
> Peace On Earth, which a lot of other things do. 

Uh, when exactly?  I must've missed some really important news.

>  On the other hand, none 
> of those other things actually work, so maybe something that works in a 
> limited way is better than a metric ton of things that don't function.

Ah, I see. You meant "which a lot of other things are supposed to do" or
"which a lot of other things would do [if they worked".  Subjunctive, you
see. ;-)

Regrettably, this seems to apply to the law too, doesn't it?

> The tree of liberty still gets watered with the blood--or lost lives, or
> productivity--of patriots.  But sometimes they buy more with some legal 
> tools embedded in the legal system than having to deal with a legal 
> system designed by and for the few.

Hmm, poetry.

> The things I find most scary about certain recent events is not the little
> miscarriages of justice (it's easy to have perspective from the comfort of
> home, I freely admit) but the attempts to weaken the legal tools so there
> isn't a mechanism to eventually deal with the problem.

Uh, yeah, but that's kind of the point isn't it?  The PATRIOT ACT and the
act (whose name I don't know, sorry) that initiated the Internment
camps (not to mention the ones that kept slavery legal and forced the relocation
of Native Americans) were all LAWS.  They were not illegal acts or
some such thing -- they were laws signed by the "legitimate" legal government
of the time.

These laws have been passed in order to "weaken the legal tools" as you say.

Note that the Terrorism Act referred to in this article was also a law.

ALL constitutions are subject to interpretation, and so is the American
Bill of Rights -- so much so that we have been engaged in raging legal
conflicts about their meaning for decades.  We still have no "right" to
privacy -- despite the fact that it is obviously a deprivation not to
have it.

We supposed have "the right to bear arms", but since the people who wrote
that law had never even imagined anything like a "blockbuster" or "fertilizer
bomb", let alone a nuclear missile, they really didn't make it very clear
how far they meant for that to go.  Modern military technology has a dangerous
impact on politics -- it makes it possible for a very small group of people
to weild incredible destructive power over a much larger group.  The aircraft
crashed into the towers in New York weren't even intended as weapons, yet
look what could be wrought with them.  We ourselves have used far more
fearsome machines in our response.

Likewise, the rights for Copyright and Patent protections in the Constitution
say only "a limited time".  A billion years is a limited time, so is 10 seconds,
which end of the spectrum did they mean? "EVERYTHING is temporary".  Yet
these laws and their interpretation is a major threat to free-software
and the general progress of innovation (witness the incredible turmoil
of companies trying to hide their hardware designs to avoid patent
litigation -- not because they knowingly violate patents, but because it's
impossible to avoid doing so, given the complexity, breadth, and non-
determinacy of patent protection interpretation!).

The Constitution is a flawed document, and always has been.  We've put
a flawed system in place to watch over and enforce it, and we have a flawed
system in place to selected the flawed people who are supposed to crew
that system.  The only question is whether the sum of these flaws is
sufficient to bring the whole house of cards down. Or perhaps more
accurately, WHEN it will bring the whole thing down.

We've already exceeded Benjamin Franklin's expectations for the duration
of the US Constitution, and I think our country has already long since
become the imperial power that Thomas Jefferson feared it would become,
through the natural tendency of states to acquire more power for themselves.
Despite the fact that the Constitution was penned (more than for any
other reason) to avoid or postpone as much as possible that inevitable
fate.

People have certainly managed to twist out of that intent of the
Constitution in the present era. The brutality, duplicity, secrecy,
inequality, and foolishness of the present corporatist-militarist
controlled USA is nothing like what the "founding fathers" imagined,
and it falls far short of anything like justice, just as it has
continued to do for most of its existence.

This is demonstrated quite effectively by the fact that stories
like this ARE happening in this country, as has already been
mentioned.

Whether that state of affairs is "inevitable" or perhaps even
"optimal" in the universe of possible histories that might have
applied for the last 200 years is unknown and probably unknowable.
Whether the US has faired better because of its Constitution than
other countries over the same time seems likely to me, but again,
it's pretty hard to prove.

> I've always hated the repeated, often successful attempts to do away with
> unanimous jury decisions for the same reason.

Yeah, consensus is a useful tool -- it forces decisions to be made
by reasoned persuasion instead of mere vote.  Smarter than democracy
for reasonably small groups.

> > It's easy to apologize later after you've already gotten away with the
> > crime, but is that really a deserved absolution?
> 
> Again, you mistake it for some much better tool that, well, doesn't exist.

"Doesn't exist"? In the full universe of possibilities? That seems like a
strong statement.  Doesn't exist here and now?  Well, yeah, but that's a
truism -- so long as it is not enforced, your "heriarchical legal system"
doesn't "exist" either -- it's just a figment of the imagination.

What I can imagine is that the future will probably include a *better*
Constitution.  Maybe not for the USA (perhaps it is already too late
for that), but for some country young enough to still have ideals.

For myself, in the present political climate, I would be terrified of
any attempt to re-write the Constitution.  I really don't think the
replacement would be likely to be an improvement -- more likely, the
Bill of Rights would be utterly stripped and replaced by happy talk
with lots of fine print that completely invert its effect -- just like
the recent spate of contrarily-named bills:

The PATRIOT ACT which is the most un-patriotic thing I've ever seen.

The NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, which exists primarily for the purpose
of retracting funds for education.

The DIGITAL MILLENIUM COPYRIGHT ACT, which should more rightly be called
the "act for the preservation of outmoded business models in the face of
all logic, decency, and comprehension of modern technological advances".

> And absolution is certainly outside of any legal scope.  The law is really
> incapable of dealing with such weighty ethical issues.

And this means what? That we just shouldn't worry about these things going on?

I think you mistake me for trying to say that good intentions are bad --
I'm saying that good intentions pave the road to hell as long as they
aren't followed by good actions.


--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com