Equality before the law means inequality before the law

The law which says that the property at 123 Elm Street is owned by Fred applies to everyone: to Fred, to Bob, to trespassers, to thieves, and to tax collectors.

But it certainly doesn’t treat various parties equally. Every law by its very nature discriminates authoritatively. That is what law is: authoritative discrimination. By its nature the law cannot treat everyone equally; it can only treat various controverted desires and choices justly or unjustly, by authoritatively discriminating either justly or unjustly.

And the positive law frequently does itself change, for that matter, through acts of men with authority.

The phrase “equality before the law” is one of those liberal slogans which is either vacuous or incoherent, depending upon how it is interpreted.

Any two people can be equal before the law only to the extent that the law does not touch upon any controversies between them. In other words, people are equals only wherever the law does not apply at all.

Equality before the law is lawlessness.

(Originally a comment here.)

Friday is a good day for Catholics to eat nothingburger

Rosenstein said there is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the scheme, nor is there any allegation that the scheme affected the outcome of the election

Elephant stampede in the room

Predictable silence ensues.

We need to disarm law abiding white rednecks though, to make sure no elephants get their hands on an AK.

A real world use case for cryptocurrency exchanges

Every real world economy is filled with real people, and there are all kinds of people in the world. There are always criminals, grifters, scammers, market manipulators, thieves, frauds, and tax evaders.  There are always financially ignorant monomaniacal idealists: people who don’t grasp the difference between reality and their beloved simulations and fictions; people who believe that messy human authority and fallibility can be dispensed with and replaced by machines. There are always substantial numbers of naive gamblers and bagholders, lured into getting fleeced by their own avarice and ignorance.

Cryptocurrency exchanges may represent a natural economic evolution, nature’s way of attracting many of these elements out of the real economy and into a buggy, hackable, scammable, get-rich-quick speculative open source video game.

You can think of cryptocurrency exchanges as a heat sink.  A heat sink is a large thermal mass which carries destructive waste heat away from the parts of a system where that waste heat can do harm.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are like a heat sink, except for stupidity and vice rather than heat: they are economic stupidity-and-vice sinks.  The real economy is doing very well at present, despite what is technically a very long running bull market.  I wonder if that isn’t at least in part because a lot of the insanity which typically accompanies bull markets has voluntarily walled itself off in its own video game world.  A lot of the craziness that we saw in the dot com era has literally locked itself away from reality inside an electricity-wasting computer game, at a cost of less than six billion dollars taken out of circulation.

Some people predict that the price of cryptocurrencies will soon go to zero; that they will shortly be left behind in the dustbin of financial history.  Personally I have my doubts.  I think society produces enough stupidity and graft to keep cryptocurrencies running indefinitely.  They may well stick around for a long time, as the economy’s evolved way of avoiding sepsis from what amounts to an intestinal blockage of greed and stupidity.

 

Women should be tried as adults

Some days it seems like I am the only person on earth who actually respects women.  Men and women are different, both individually and when considered as populations.  But one of the ways we are the same – at least in my view – is that both men and women are moral agents, responsible for the behaviors we choose.

Yet a great many people – notably feminists and the mainstream pro-life movement, though those two are hardly exhaustive – really don’t seem to think this is the case at all.

In the comment thread below reader Jay posted a link to the following image:

This image was allegedly posted in a Facebook advocacy group started and governed by the very same young woman who accused her ex-boyfriend of rape (a year and a half after the alleged incident), in a case we discussed here.

There are several things to observe about this image.  I’ll point out a few.

First, the image characterizes the distinction between rape/sexual assault (a very serious matter) and consensual sex (at best a minor matter, probably nobody else’s business) as something which occurs strictly and only in the woman’s mind.  If she was subjectively afraid to say no and did not actually say no, he is guilty of sexual assault or rape.

Personally I would have no problem with colleges punishing extramarital sex – as demonstrated by actual evidence – severely, independent of consent.  The idea that consent turns extramarital sex into a minor matter in the first place is simply wrong.  Premarital sex is a grave, despicable, life-wrecking moral wrong.  Consenting to fornication is a grave moral wrong.  Physically forcing someone else’s participation in a morally despicable act is itself a morally despicable act, but the idea that fornication is just no big deal while rape is a terrible moral violation is false.  They are both grave moral wrongs and should be treated as such.

Second, we would never buy the “I was afraid to say no” line of argument if the action was, for example, murder. The particulars matter, as always, but the most the particulars could do – even when in fear for your own life – is mitigate some of the guilt for actively participating in a murder.  Saying no, resisting attempted persuasion or compulsion to do evil, is a basic obligation of every moral agent without exception.  Failure to resist evil is itself a moral failure.  And yes, this of course includes women – at least if you have any respect for women.

Third, if this image in fact comes from the alleged source – from the actual young woman who years after the fact accused her boyfriend of “rape” in the Shenandoah wilderness where she drove him – it appears to be a tacit admission that, whatever actually did happen between them, she didn’t actually say “no”.