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I have to apologize a little for yesterday’s letter. I was writing quickly and engaged in emotional rhetoric at the end. I left the points I wanted to make “rougher” you got to see the argument, counter-argument taking place in my head before giving a final cleaned up statement - There was also a fair of emotional swaying sentiment in my statements – which I do preach earlier in that document about steering politicians away from and then use it later in the document. While points were made – didn’t practice what I’m trying to preach and will try to better this morning /afternoon.
Today’s idea actually is a leftover from yesterday and something that’s been bothering me for a while. The advantages and disadvantages of applying the law unequally.
These arguments are both proof by contradiction – though when political arguments are done this way – your assertions or proof steps aren’t as rigorous logically as they would be in math. - but that spirit is behind this.
Premise: The lip-service statement that people give is that the law is enforced equally on all.
Assertion: therefore two people who commit the same crime with the same factors in it will get the same punishment.
Assertion: therefore although no crimes are precisely equal in aggregate there should be no correlation between lighter sentences and extenuating factors.
Problem: There are many statistics that suggest that being black or Hispanic has an impact on being in death row or severity of sentence.
Conclusion: Justice is not equal and the premise is false.
2nd Premise: It’s a bad thing to enforce the law unequally
Assertion: No good is served by letting extenuating circumstances come into play everyone should always get the same punishment for the same crime preserving the idea that the optimum is to enforce law equally.
Assertion: While I cannot prove this well, there are examples that I know of where the practice is to not enforce the law equally. Clearly with famous stars the law is not always equal. Also with things I know of, if it is deemed that enforcing the law equally will cause greater public harm then a decision is made in many instances to not do equal enforcement.
Problem: From the above assertion, it can be concluded that in certain circumstances there is benefit to the common good not to be equal with enforcing the law.
Conclusion: The law appears enforced unequally to serve the common good.
Straight proof this time
3rd Premise : It can be a bad thing that justice is unequal
Assertion : That means that there are cases where someone is treated in such a way that the net effect is to harm society.
Assertion : an example could easily be a rapist or murderer who gets out early. Domestic violence case where restraining order is not enough and wife / girlfriend ends up hurt or killed. Or someone is imprisoned with bad evidence or for a long sentence that they do not deserve.
Conclusion: it can be a bad thing for society when justice is unequal.
A further conclusion from 2 and 3 is that it can be both good and bad to have unequal justice. Getting into something that isn’t well stated in either proof – they are not completely comparable scenarios. In the first it is chosen to have unequal justice deliberately while in the second, though it can be argued the choice was deliberate there wasn’t an intention for the greater good or to consciously let an extenuating factor take place.
The rest of this email deals with the former case and not the latter.
Now what I wanted to discuss today. One of the formative experiences in my life was going to Carnegie Mellon. While at this institution of higher learning I would have been guilty of vandalism, damage to private property, graffiti, drug abuse and underage drinking (I did inhale briefly with one of my professors and 6-7 other students once during the “halfway” party for architecture which is at Christmas of the 3rd year- half of 5 years), and possibly theft (heavily encourage by my roommate at the time and quickly resolved.) I was never prosecuted for any of these crimes. In fact the creativity was to some degree encouraged and there was a fair amount of creativity involved in several of the above incidents. Now if my experience was isolated it would be one thing, but have the feeling at least a few people who went to those places of higher learning where people are supposed to be really smart to get into them can relate. The rules of society are enforced very differently in this environment than in standard society. How does that impact one in growing up. Clearly there is some suggestion that allowing one to be “flexible” with the rules and feel okay about experimenting has value to society as it seems many ivy league schools allow students a fair amount of leniency when enforcing legal statutes upon them. The impact of which can be that the students who graduate feel entitled to wealth and also that breaking the rules is okay once a in a while as ethics is never stressed as much as the need for cleverness. Many other young people who are in the military or who go to work do not get this different feel to the rules. They are taught conformity first and then personal exploration and that where they do not fit the rules, they are supposed to conform anyway. The kids at higher colleges are taught that their individual needs have some precedence.
If the latter idea about individuation was a bad thing, why is it repeated at institution after institution and the other question can you turn out people into society that both recognize the rules and agree to abide by them, but learn the value of questioning them and that there are times to very carefully explore their boundaries. It appears without having a good sample of both places yet that you can only get one or the other. The military is stereotyped as being uncreative and not generally being a social leader. In certain ways that is false such as racism, but in other ways certain social reforms do start as far away from the military as possible. Can you integrate both sides in a better fashion and recognize that in different phases and different places of a person’s life, the law should be enforced differently besides being a minor? It is what actually happens, whatever is started.
Could it become in time a principle that you trade off legally certain rights for more flexibility as to how you are treated by the law and that different people are designated to be treated differently by the law for a period of time and then it changes back. But standardardize this as much as possible so that there is less ambiguity and more stated rules than understood rules. It has taken me about 18 years to realize that having to live in contraints won’t change who you are which is an anathema to many of my other artistic bretheren. You never lose from being able to do a wide variety of things, you don’t lose what you knew before it only enhances what you know. But it takes a long time to become comfortable bridging both sides of the barrier because it is so well hidden and not talked about openly.
“Brave New World” philosophy would accuse the US and most if not all other nations of “tracking” people into the alpha-beta- gamma-delta pattern which can be seen by the legal enforcement. It is more complex than that in a way, but there is a fair amount of “kernel of truth” to it as well. I do not know this, but from visual observation and what I do know, get the idea that many E-1’s and E-3s are kept feeling uncomfortable about being part of the educated classes as their spirit is never raised to the point where they break through their social conditioning and look into going to college or even business ownership. I have wondered for a long time now about how much of the social hierarchty is not at all determined by merit, but a lot more by the fact that you do what is expected of you by your social conditioning. I exist because their were conflicts in societal and parental expectations early on which caused a lot of questioning and it definitely is why I feel I can write you at this point because I have had an honest look into how the system can make big mistakes and now question all authority figures having seen one too many of them screw up.
Some better acknowledgement of the different statuses afforded people and having them quantified instead of being understood would be best spelled out at some time in thelong term future from now. In addition getting used to the idea that it is almost always better to encourage a spirit in people than to leave them in their path and do things to make them think they will never leave it should occur soon. While not true in all cases at this time as there is still much routine work that has to be done this should decrease over time. I personally would like to decrease if not eliminate the US idea of a high-maintenance and completely superfluous lawn and the idea of giant house and then get people used to picking up after themselves, eliminating tons of routine boring jobs and instead push those people into scientific research or testing as a drudge job with the extra societal resources available. Currently there is need for scientific positions that are unfilled and this is due to many people being afraid or unwilling to consider them because some of the people in professions use social conditioning to keep others leery of going in and questioning professionals and scientists and afraid of them and thus it also protect the financial interests of professionals and scientists. That societal conditioning that I can’t be a college grad is what holds the US back right now. Among other issues such as I can’t learn math. That is what should change and it means looking very carefully at what options the rural people and working people choose to take to get into a more educated and urban (if not urban more tied to society) way of life.
Enough to think about for one day.
-fah
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