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> Anyone who has ever dealt with the US justice system as just some regular bloke knows it is broken. and just like re healthcare, this is the rub of communica

• sorcerer-mar 2y ago
  I think the most inconvenient thing is actually that it’s both (largely) accidental and systematic. If you go looking for the source of “evil” breaking these systems, you’ll surely find a few bad folks purposely fucking it up, but removing them is almost certainly not going to fix anything. The vast majority of these systems’ behavior (good or bad) is effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever.
  • almostgotcaught 2y ago
    i wish people, before they commented on really really serious things, did a bit of reflection. > effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever the agency of individuals in totalitarian/authoritarian institutions has been examined/analyzed/written about at enormous length since the rise of fascism in the early 1900s. the short answer is you're wrong but i'm not going to try to convince you (you have to want to learn to be receptive). instead i recommend a book: https://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Banality-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039881 https://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Banality-Penguin-C... EDIT: i'm being rate limited. to the guy below > how even a system full of good intentions you're just proving all of my points - you just can't fathom that the laws really were written with immoral intentions because "the law" is sacrosanct for you. i note again: the 13th amendment abolished slavery except for in prisons. it's written explicitly in section 1 (no bad faith interpretation needed). please discuss for me the "good intentions" therein.
    • sorcerer-mar 2y ago
      The vast majority of bad outcomes of big systems are not because they’re principally designed for evil and just lacking a few dissenters. Most systems today are intended to produce outcomes that most people agree would be good, and they’re full of people trying to achieve those outcomes, and yet reliably failing to produce them. There have been books written about this topic as well, but it’s not as flashy as comparing “every system that produces some bad results” to actual Nazis, I have to admit.
      • balamatom 2y ago
        Because the underlying meta-system is the one that produces the people. Complete with their understanding of what "good" is. The important thing is for that energy to be expended in the pursuit of certain outcomes; the goals themselves are already self-contradictory. The meta-system uses that to reproduce itself. Our lives are secondary to that goal.
    • TimorousBestie 2y ago
      Having it read it again just last year, I’d like to emphasize _Eichmann in Jerusalem_ does support the point being made here.
  • potato3732842 2y ago
    If good people can't run the system right the system is broken and good people ought to support its reform or replacement.
    • sorcerer-mar 2y ago
      Of course! If the codebase gets non-performant or hard to maintain, all you have to do is rewrite it to be not-that. Typically makes sense to fire anyone who wrote the broken version too, just to get a fresh set of eyes on it. Not sure why there’s any non-performant or unmaintainable code in light of this fact.
      • psd1 2y ago
        Irony noted, but I think it's rare for the horrors of a codebase to be deliberately inflicted for self-enrichment or cruelty.
        • mindslight 2y ago
          Isn't that the whole point behind A/B testing? Find the accidental dark patterns that will maximize extraction?
          • psd1 2y ago
            Ah, I see. I was thinking in terms of spaghetti hell. I wrote a big chunk before I recalled that this is just an analogy. We're wandering off topic.
      • askvictor 2y ago
        I appreciate the irony, but it doesn't have to be that drastic. In Australia we have the Law Reform Commission, which looks to gradually make laws better. Is the legal system perfect? Far from it. Does it get political? All the time. Is it getting better? I would argue yes, slowly. To your analogy, it's possible to incrementally improve a code base. It's also possible to stop it getting worse.
  • askvictor 2y ago
    > you’ll surely find a few bad folks purposely fucking it up, but removing them is almost certainly not going to fix anything So you you think, without those few bad folks, these systems would not tend to break, or that these few bad folks are not being challenged? I.e. do you think these few bad folks are completely inconsequential at a systemic level?
    • sorcerer-mar 2y ago
      > do you think these few bad folks are completely inconsequential at a systemic level? Pretty much yes, and so are the good ones. Such is the nature of systems. A thing becomes visible as and labeled as "a system" only after it's quite stable and resilient, i.e. after it has developed effective responses to common "attacks" (deliberate or otherwise). Achieving fungibility of 99.9% of individual humans is like objective #1 and the systems that fail to achieve it don't exist long enough to be problematic.
  • Zigurd 2y ago
    Dirty and thuggish cops are way more common than Americans think. The more benign form is detail and overtime fraud. But I'd bet the dollar amount easily rivals property crime value in your town. Theft and fraud in businesses is more common than software people think. Kickbacks to purchasing managers, for example. You're less likely to encounter this than a casually dirty cop, but it's out there.
    • mmooss 2y ago
      These are often-repeated arguments; we really need some facts to work with. Is there research on this?
      • thaumasiotes 2y ago
        How reliable do you think research into the amount of undetected crime is?
        • mmooss 2y ago
          I think it's not perfect, but we have to work with imperfect information. I think it's far more reliable than Internet rando comments, which have zero reliability and are often misinformation, sometimes intentionally.
  • stult 2y ago
    There's a long running historiographical debate about the relative influence individuals have over the ultimate course of historical events compared to systemic factors For many years, it was popular (particularly in revisionist circles) almost entirely to deny individual agency and to rely instead exclusively on systemic arguments which highlighted the power of geography, ecology, culture, technology, and other complex systems to shape human events. That revisionist approach emerged partially in reaction to the near universal overreliance of prior generations of historians on the so-called "Great Man" theory of history, which assumes events are largely attributable to the decisions of a select group of politically powerful individuals. Nearly all of those individuals happened to be white, male, and wealthy, and thus Great Man history suffered not only from blindness to systemic factors that can shape events, but also to the experiences, contributions, and agency of anyone who was not rich, not white, not a man, or even simply not politically powerful enough to count. In other words, they ignore nearly everyone who has ever lived. Although academic history has long since moved away from the Great Man theory, it remains a popular trope of low quality popular history books, and increasingly it has become clear that purely systemic, revisionist approaches with no consideration for the effects of individual actors are also inadequate to explain historical events. Sometimes systems are more powerful than people, and no amount of good will or effort is going to fix a problem. The Vikings abandoned Greenland during the Little Ice Age because they had no way of controlling the climate or adapting efficiently to the changes. The climate system was more powerful than any individual Norse settler or group of settlers could ever hope to be. Sometimes systems are weaker than people, and leaders can bend them to their will. After nearly 1000 years of independence from secular authority and mostly uncontested religious domination in England, the Catholic Church in the 16th century formed an incredibly powerful institutional system of religious control built on vast endowments of land. It was by and large extremely popular with the common people and historically served a critical role in bolstering the king's position by promoting a respect for hierarchy that naturally encompassed both their own elevated status as priests and the position of secular authoritarian rulers, who ruled as God's representative on Earth. Despite the Church's enduring local popularity, its immense wealth, its deep connections with the broader Christian world, and the powerful hold fear of excommunication and damnation had on most Christians, King Henry VIII managed to completely transform the institutional, legal, and property-managing system of the medieval English Catholic Church, sundering it entirely from Rome, depriving it of essentially all of its land holdings, and subordinating its institutions entirely to royal authority. And he accomplished this in a shockingly short period of time, only around a decade. Why did Henry decide to throw his lot in with the Reformation? Was it because he saw the injustice of monks, priests, and friars siphoning off so much of his subjects' wealth to Rome simply to subsidize the already luxurious and decidedly un-Christian lifestyle enjoyed by the pope? Not at all, in fact in the years before his marriage to Katherine of Aragon soured, he wrote a book defending the pope, who promptly named the king Defender of the Faith in gratitude and recognition of his scholastic achievement. Did Henry instead recognize an opportunity to enrich himself? Probably not, the evidence suggests he wasn't that savvy about money, but luckily for him, he had Cromwell to take care of the pounds and the pennies. Ultimately, he just needed a divorce. Because if he failed to produce an heir, the danger of civil war would be intolerable, and Katherine was clearly beyond her childbearing years. But the pope wouldn't give him one, and Henry was a raging narcissist willing to burst through any boundary in service of his own ego, even risking his soul to break from Rome. So individual idiosyncrasies can also affect the course of events, we can't just look at systems, and we can't just look at individuals, we need systems too. The relative influence of each over how a complex institution like a justice system develops is a highly contingent and fact-specific analysis. Sometimes the climate can push winters to be too cold even for the hardiest settlers. Sometimes an entire nation's centuries-long, enduring religious beliefs and ideologies can depend solely on the whims (and lust) of a single egotistical dictator. And sometimes when such a basic function is this messed up, you might actually find that there are indeed a limited number of individuals responsible, and that replacing them with competent or less malicious individuals will actually solve the problem. That's the trick though, and where the systemic and individual-focused explanatory variables start to bleed into each other. If it is systematically impossible to find good people to staff these institutions, then yes merely swapping out individuals will not fix the situation because by definition you are swapping out bad people for other bad people. However, I seriously doubt that it is impossible to do so in this case, because even if the US justice system is messed up and broken, this is about the most messed up and broken that it gets. I think it's fair to say that 99.999% of the country does not experience systemic justice problems to the same extent as Maverick County, which is why so many people are reacting to this story with justifiable shock. So even assuming ad arguendo that it is systemically impossible to find truly good people to work in law enforcement or the judicial system, we know it's at least possible to find better people than they have in Maverick County.
• newZWhoDis 2y ago
  It sounds like… you did get caught?
• psd1 2y ago
  Absolutely flabbergasted in the canteen one day when my colleague said, unironically, "well, if they stop you, you were probably doing _something_”... White South African Yes, working eyeballs
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Some other White South Africans have taken sides with the same political grouping (I don't know their position on that issue).
• SauciestGNU 2y ago
  Forget actual legal culpability, the range of outcomes in the American legal system ranges from cops killing you at worst, to the stacked legal system making you wish they had only killed you at best.
• redczar 2y ago
  Part of the problem as I see it is that we Americans are incredibly vengeful and seek retribution. We are particularly incensed when someone poorer (or otherwise different than us) seemingly gets a “light sentence”.