Comment by AlexandrB
18 hours ago
> In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years.
When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.
> When did we start being a just society would you say?
I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
It was a very small start, it only protected nobles from the king, but it's generally considered to be the start.
If that's the standard, it's ridiculous to say we stopped being a just society in the last 50 years.
Magna Carta didn't make us a just society, it was the start of making us a just society.
Being a just society is not a boolean. We never got 100% there. Nor is it along a single dimension -- you could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white.
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> I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
Ahahaha, this is the most anglocentric thing I've heard in a while. That's not remotely the case, and it's certainly not something an historian would say.
Just going off my own experience. While violent crime has diminished, other crimes are going on in plain sight with prudence from the courts. Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there. I remember when "debtor's prison" was illegal. Now it's not. So you can brush it under a rug, claim things are better, claim we are more just than we used to be, but I never claimed that we ever were 100% just. Only that we used to be more just than we are today.
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incar...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-...
https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/the-withering-of-public...
https://www.idea.int/blog/how-independent-us-supreme-court-u...
> Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there.
"I hereby inform you under powers entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476, that Mr. Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the Ministry of Information with certain enquiries, the nature of which may be ascertained on completion of application form BZ/ST/486/C fourteen days within this date, and that he is liable to certain obligations as specified in Council Order 173497, including financial restitutions which may or may not be incurred if Information Retrieval procedures beyond those incorporated in Article 7 subsections 8, 10 & 32 are required to elicit information leading to permanent arrest notification of which will he served with the time period of 5 working days as stipulated by law. In that instance the detainee will be debited without further notice through central banking procedures without prejudice until and unless at such a time when re-imbursement procedures may be instituted by you or third parties on completion of a re-imbursement form RB/CZ/907/X..."
Ugh... That's not exactly the "Shangri La" the world knows.
Debtors prison is illegal in the US. You can’t be imprisoned for your debts. Are you suggesting sentences are being extended based on unpaid fees?
They are. Debtors prison is illegal with one exception - if you already went to prison due to a crime and then completed your sentence, many states will charge you for the full cost of your prison stay (often upwards of thousands of dollars). And since a lot of sentences involve some amount of parole after the prison sentence, you’ll be sent back to prison under a parole violation if you fail to pay back the fees by the due date.
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"Justice" is not a scalar. It is a matrix, at best.
In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).
In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.
In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.
And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.
Disenfranchisement. A powerful cause to be angry about.
Probably 50s-70s? The golden age of capitalism oddly enough. Among other things taxation maintained a more even wealth distribution during this time in many western countries. Combined with a record large generation that had few children and parents that dies in wars (almost everyone working), this lead to a surplus. When there is a surplus the overlords are generous. Now that generation is old and dependent on the handful of children they had. There is no longer a surplus. There is hope that the technologies we are creating could bring enough productivity gains to return to surplus conditions, but the population decline that will have to overcome is extreme. IP laws aren't encouraging these productivity gains like we need them to, so we should ignore them. The west deciding to ignore chinese IP won't be the thing that starts the war, and it isn't like china ever respected the IP of the west. We should be buying up all the tooling we need to painfully bootstrap automated manufacturing ourselves and reverse engineer it.
Arguably justice in general started declining with the invention of the typewriter, and injustice accelerated with the invention of the word processor and will get far worse with LLMs. The cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law. Personally I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
> I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
I could really get behind this sort of rate-limiting. It would also make the thinktank-written legislation a little less appealing for the lawmakers, as they'd still need to write everything out.
That limits the rate of change of the law, not its total size.
In medieval Iceland, the lawspeaker -- the leader of the parliament -- had to recite the law from memory every three years (one third in each year).
> Arguably
I'd like to see you support that argument.
Implicitly, the argument is that, when "cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law," justice for litigants declined when sheer access to the necessary legal funds and time began to outweigh other costs and benefits as a factor in determining pursuit of justice. Maybe it's not self-evident, but I don't think direct quantifiable evidence of justice is necessarily available, so what qualitative evidence would be capable of confirming support?
My counterargument would be that before the typewriter literacy rates were much worse than they are now. So while it's true that laws were simpler, interpreting those laws was still out of reach for many at the bottom of the economic ladder. It would be interesting to try to compare legal complexity with the percentage of society that has a sufficient reading comprehension to meaningfully interact with those laws across various eras.