Thursday, April 20, 2017

An Alternative System of Justice

Haters promoting hate. Such is the case of today’s social justice warriors.  According to one Aristo Orginos, the groups that are supposedly militating against hate are fomenting hate… and violence.

Orginos writes:

…in attempting to solve pressing and important social issues, millennial social justice advocates are violently sabotaging genuine opportunities for progress by infecting a liberal political narrative with, ironically, hate.

So deeply do these warriors believe in the righteousness of their cause that they have produced an authoritarian movement to impose their views on everyone else:

… this particular brand of millennial social justice advocates have warped an admirable cause for social, economic, and political equality into a socially authoritarian movement that has divided and dehumanized individuals on the basis of an insular ideology guised as academic theory.

In so doing they have created an alternative justice system, produced by a bureaucratic edict from the Obama administration, that forces colleges and universities to deprive anyone accused of sexual assault of all rights to due process.

For an extended study of this problem see Laura Kipnis’s new book: Unwanted Advances.

Social justice warriors are so worried about campus sexual assault that they have overturned the basic principle of our criminal justice system. Orginos explains it:

Sir William Blackstone is famous for what is known as the Blackstone formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This axiom is a foundation of modern justice systems worldwide. It as a formulation that assumes innocence; to condemn on the basis of a certain accusation because of the identity or oppressed status of the accuser is a dangerous road to go down. It erodes the most essential tenet of liberalism: due process.

He continues:

Due process, or the idea that a governing body must respect all legal rights of an individual, is granted to Americans by the 5th and 14th Amendments. To suggest that there is no recourse for the accusedand to ask for it is actually rape apologyis absurd, reactionary, and further highlights the black-and-white nature of this certain brand of millennial social justice advocates. To speak dissent against— or even question at allthe orthodoxy is to have your words twisted into less positive terms: one does not ask for “due process,” one asks to let rapists go, perpetuates rape culture, and favors rape apology. Why, after all, would someone ask for due process when a woman is accusing a man of rape? The millennial social justice advocate views this as an insidious question that results from sexism against women and is corroborated, they feel, by a statistically insignificant rate of false rape accusations.

Social justice warriors would rather convict the innocent than to allow a single guilty male go free. They have tried to overturn the principle that makes a jury the trier of fact.

Remember the hue and cry about how Donald Trump plays fast and loose with the facts. If a woman who accuses a man of rape is taken to be truthful and if we must accept her word at face value, we are living in an alternative criminal justice system, where sexual abuse occurs when a woman feels that it has occurred or when she says it has occurred. The chances for abuse are legion. Which is why we have, criminal investigation, trial by jury and due process of law. Would you rather have lynch mobs and Star Chambers?

Wasn’t Emmett Till murdered because Carolyn Bryant lied about her encounter with him?

11 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

I remember reading somewhere that there are two forms of justice, perhaps we can call personal justice and impersonal justice.

Impersonal justice is like Lady Justice with her blindfold with the balance trying to assign culpability between two parties.

In comparison, personal justice believes my bias is the only bias that is important, like that its okay to ban thousands or millions of Muslim travelers rather than let one potential terrorist into the country through our inability to perfectly predict the future actions of individuals. Why take chances?

Impersonal justice has its advantages because it only punishes the guilty and avoid creating resentment by those who are innocent. But the consequences is that many obvious guilty people will walk free based on some technicality like police not informing a suspect of his rights.

We all at least secretly support vigilante justice, when someone decides to take the law into his own hands, and punishes those who escaped justice.

Its hard to see where "alternative justice" should exist within a formal framework.

Jesus offered a different alternative justice of trust in divine justice and forgiveness of those who can threaten us, and no one wants to do that. And look where it got Jesus after all.

trigger warning said...

"Personal justice means justice that happens between parties to a dispute..."
--- USLegal.com

Which has nothing to do with refugees, or immigration policy.

Or, I might add, Schneiderman's post.

And, Blackstone's maxim is - as much as I generally admire Blackstone - a stellar example of virtue signaling. It completely ignores the cost to the community when followed to its logical conclusion. In fact, one might conclude it's the legal version of Bastiat's parable of the broken window.

James said...

Historically there have been countless number of "alternative system of justice" thingies tried. Perhaps the SJW's would like to read up about them and the fate of people who lived under them.

Ares Olympus said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ares Olympus said...

TW, it looks like the definition of Personal justice is similar to my suggestion and similar to what the SJW might like, i.e. a "emotional response" to situations without any larger principles.

A tyranny of feelings would seem a likely outcome here, although perhaps all impersonal justice of law is extracted from that chaos.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/p/personal-justice/
---
Personal justice means justice that happens between parties to a dispute, regardless of their moral values. Personal justice is not affected by any larger principles that might be involved; instead it conforms to a person's own ethics. Personal justice occurs when a person has an emotional response to their actions as a result of a person's upbringing and their learned ethics.

For example, most children are taught that stealing is wrong because the society they grew up in feels that stealing is wrong. Hence, the personal justice for a person is that thieves should be penalized. It is also called as justice in personam, or a conscious.
---

I expect they mean conscience, not conscious.

Anyway, the whole trouble of law is that it is discriminatory if it treats people differently based on their gender, race, creed, etc. So that's why we can't officially ban people based on religion, but we can apparently ban people by country.

It's also why we have children and 101 year old grannies being given the same security checks at airports as burly dark haired men who speak in a funny accent.

It's also why its not okay to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple, but its okay if you can get away with spitting or peeing into that cake batter for being forced to do something against your religious convictions.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Millennials are naive. They believe whatever is told to them. Especially if it comes from the Glowing Box.

Remember when we were admonished to understand that the Millenials get their news from "The Daily Show?" What's up with that? It's comedy. I never thought that SNL was the news when I was young. It was satire. Perhaps "satire" is too big a word for our little snowflakes.

We are moving toward an emotive anarchy that is truly dangerous, believing itself rational and wise. These are destroyers.

To James' point, Robespierre is just another dead white guy. Like their feelings on Marx, I'm sure the snowflakes will say that Robespierre's intentions were good, it's just that mob rule led to a Reign of Terror. That's collateral damage, because the intentions were there. Kind of like Mao, Che, Lenin, and all these other trendy dudes proudly displayed on t-shirts. These kids care. I mean, they really, really, really care. Just ask them.

Millenial SJWs don't seem tied to any sort of physical reality, nor do they have a sense of natural consequences. There's little understanding of human dynamics or human limitation. The most idealistic don't seem to have any idea what it means to be human. It's like we're these cerebrally perfectible creatures. It creeps me out out when people speak of humanity in terms of software and hardware, and that there are glitches that need to be remedied. What if some can't be remedied? What do we do, oh wise grasshopper?

When you work with your body and your hands, you get an understanding of limits. It's not about using your mind to bend a spoon like you see in "The Matrix." Just because your mind can imagine an end to racism doesn't mean that you execute the plan without further consideration. That's the hallmark of a subjective, sociopathic lunatic. John Lennon's "Imagine" was a song, not the Truth. We seem to be getting more divorced from reality.

"Social justice warriors would rather convict the innocent than to allow a single guilty male go free."

Ultimately, as Theodore Dalrymple said, these kids are consumed in a world of toxic sentimentality. I can hear it now, "Due process? Please. Can't we just dispense with process? It's boring. After all, we know who's guilty. Let's get on with it!" They pity minorities, and have convinced themselves that minorities don't have a chance, so they pander to them. They can't be guilty because they're downtrodden. They can't be responsible because they're victims of racism, or the patriarchy, Tibet or whatever. That's not justice, that's a totalitarian worldview of pity masquerading as high-minded morality and wisdom.

This is what low expectations gives you in the end. It leads to an orgy of pity and helplessness.

James said...

IAC,
" It creeps me out out when people speak of humanity in terms of software and hardware, and that there are glitches that need to be remedied."
Oh Yeah, remember last summer/fall all the talk of life extension and immortality by the moneyed techie guys?
When they start saying things like that it generally means in their "heart of hearts" they think their existence has no meaning except for its own self. It also implies they should make the sacrifice of staying around longer for our benefit. A kind of riff on the old we have to burn you to save you.

trigger warning said...

Yes, we can ban people by country. In fact, we can legally ban noncitizens from entering this country for any reason the President deems fit to use to protect the citizens of this country.

In 1952, Congress passed a law empowering the president to deny entry into the U.S. to “any class of aliens” considered to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” That's the black letter law.

My spouse, an attorney, observes that the law is The Rules. As in any civilized organization, if you don't like The Rules, there are rules about how to change The Rules. I'll bet you $1000 that should SCOTUS take up the "ban", it will be upheld.

You lost. Quit whining and put your money where your mouth is.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

TW, you know as well as I do that they have no interest in persuading anyone to their side. They've got it all figured out.

Ares Olympus said...

TW said "I'll bet you $1000 that should SCOTUS take up the "ban", it will be upheld."

I brought up the ban as an example of "personal justice" which allows discrimination of people based on the ways they are classified based on their looking like people who we consider dangerous.

I agree it does look like the "Muslim ban", transformed into a "120 day 6 country travel ban" and blocked by the courts as a "Muslim ban by intent" WOULD likely be overturned by the Supreme Court, on the ground that citizenship itself is not a religious test, as long as say Christian travels are banned just as consistently.

And it was only a 120 day ban which has been blocked, and the purpose of the ban was to develop new guidelines for travel, so you'd think Trump Administration is now some 36 days into its 120 day guidelines, and by July ~15th, they'll have the guidelines defined regardless of whether or not the 120 days contain a ban.

So the main risk here is if a traveler from one of those countries commits an act of terrorism on our soil in the next 84 days, Trump can say "I told you so" and offer more extreme measures than otherwise. So Trump has already "won" even if his ban is blocked. He's potentially making 1 billion Muslims responsible for one still hypothetical terroristic attack in the next 3 months.

Anyway, we're a long way from GWB declaring Islam as a religion of peace 6 days after 3000 American were killed by radical muslim terrorists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ynG7bcH6ss Bush "Islam is the religion of peace

And I'm sure the radical muslim terrorist like ISIS are very excited that they are responsible for such travel bans. Its all good news when you can get your enemies to punish the innocent.

Hence, this is a great example of personal justice at work, 100% fear-based, near 0% effectiveness, and punishing people who are not a problem more than anyone else.

Anonymous said...

Ares Olympus wouldn't ban anyone. He loves all.