Nancy Grace? What a foul individual. Does anyone else realize her TV show depends on human suffering? It’s always about someone missing or murdered, and she uses those tragedies for personal gain. And once SHE decides who is guilty, she proceeds to conduct a one-sided trial and convict them on her show. No wonder we hate lawyers!

Well-calibrated shock moves the Overton window– it means that less shocking behavior becomes the new normal.

It’s like the merchant who offers you a very expensive item so that moderately expensive items look cheaper.

So, the way it’s worked so far in practice is that Gay Pride parades mean that gay marriage by ordinary people looks a lot less weird.

Prediction is difficult, especially about the future. It’s entirely possible that there will be backlash against gays, but I can’t fault them for trying to get decent treatment.

In England/Wales (Scotland has “Scots law”, which is…er…unique) we do have a Common Law system like yours. And our prosecutors are a civil service, their chain of command with the police only meets up at cabinet level in the government.

It means there’s no need to be seen as “tough on crime”, and indeed the Crown Prosecution Service works a lot better than either the police or the judiciary.

They have a series of tests they use before prosecuting, one of which is “in the public interest”. Which things like…oh…two fifteen year olds having sex will NOT pass unless one’s in a position of official authority over the other.

Q: If you found three people dangling by their necks from lamp-posts, a prosecutor, a narc, and a snitch, which would you cut down first?

A: The dead one. The others just need a tug on the leg.

Seeeeriously, though: As worthless a practice as it seems to be, I still vote as long as there are third party or wacko independents on the ballot, or the occasional judicial candidate who endorses jury discretion. But one thing I ALWAYS do is vote against anyone who has been a prosecutor.

The problem with that sentence is that it completely reverses the original metaphor it purports to use — the original is “One bad apple spoils the whole barrel”. This is literally true — if you have a barrel or pile of apples, you need to regularly pick out the ones that are starting to rot, or the gases they produce will cause other apples to rot. It’s also a basic metaphorical truth: If you don’t remove and punish corrupt officials, the corruption spreads, and people start accepting it as “normal”.

This sort of spreading corruption has happened before in American history, but the current version has nothing to do with “the Progressives” — indeed, it’s the neo-conservative administrations that have aggressively protected and enculturated corruption in politics and finance. One could argue that the root error, the mistake from which all else followed, was the bargain by which Richard Nixon was pardoned after Watergate… but certainly, things got much worse during the Reagan-Bush era, and the culture of corruption was further aggravated by Shrub’s reign of error.

Given the way conspiracy, collusion and accomplices-after-the-fact statutes and case law function, and that it’s almost impossible to be unaware of what goes on in your corporate culture and office grapevine, there literally CAN’T be any good apples in the barrel.

Any potential good apples have a choice to make. They can collude, conspire and look the other way…and become bad apples themselves. Or they can blow a whistle and wind up fired, blacklisted, disbarred, committed to a psychiatric hospital, charged with crimes, or any combination for their troubles.

The system was set up to keep bad apples out, but the bad apples have corrupted things so badly, that now the system works just as hard to remove any good apples as soon as they are uncovered (and make the decision not to become corrupt).

If your point is that we have created this mess, I couldn’t agree more. If you give people power, why then be surprised when they abuse it?

There will always be cases of injustice since humans are not perfect, but the cynicism is what really worries me, as well.

Is there statistical evidence that prosecutor misconduct is increasing? What about in other countries like Europe? What is their experience?

I’ll only reply once more. Here you go.

There is an infinite gradation of degree of any aspect of anyone’s definition of “democracy” that can be found by any number of names throughout recorded history. You are choosing, in order to pad your list of objections, to quibble over semantics and ambiguous definitions. I did say “arguably”, because I figured someone would be pedant enough to want to object. I was right. Regardless, within the context of modern political discourse, using commonly accepted understandings of such an ambiguous and undefinable term, the most identifiable source of what would commonly be accepted to be “democracy” comes out of ancient Athens. In case it helps you, consensus != voting != democracy.

I have never claimed, suggested, implied, or even supposed that the United States, presently or historically, is the most (or least) “democratic” society. Moreover, all of the nations you cited *do* restrict candidacy and suffrage, and *do* grant special authority and power to the party most dominant at any point in time. Whether they do to a greater or lesser degree than any other nation is immaterial to the discussion. You are, by necessary implication, denying these supposed paragons of democracy the very label with your “come closer” qualification, so I really can’t understand what you’re on about.

“Human nature” is a metonym for the observable (and, by some worldviews, intrinsic) characteristics of human motivation and behavior. Anyone’s view of human nature is a fundamental aspect of their worldview, with most people treating it as a necessary inference of their presuppositions, rather than understanding it as a fundamental driver of their opinions. For example, the collectivist must needs believe humans are altruistic, because it is required by their determination to endorse collectivism, whereas a free market economist recognizes that humans are fundamentally self-interested and formulates economic policy accounting explicitly and intentionally for this reality. It is a matter of primacy: do you obstinately justify your predetermined conclusions, or do you base your conclusions on empirical evidence? Whatever the case, the preponderance of the evidence points to a clear and overwhelming default state of self-interest, which is only overcome on a case-by-case basis by willful subversion of the same.

Finally, your closing pot-shot is poorly-aimed. Not only did I give no excuse to suppose that I approve of the condition of society in the United States, but I made it very clear to any reader paying attention how thoroughly I disapprove of the system that we simpletons have created by our own designs.

Do try harder next time. Ta-ta.

The reason a former Alabama AG decided one of her cases is that there must have been a habeas petition to the federal court system and Alabama and Georgia are both in the 11th federal circuit.

I think that playing shock the squares is going to come back to haunt Gays; they are vulnerable on a broad variety of public health fronts and parading about in shocking costume pleases only those who already agree with them and annoys the rest. Annoyed people are less likely to stick to strict civil rights principles.

General observation;

Racism isn’t a “blind spot” of progressives. It is a place where their smug superiority shows through. They feel that way about most people, regardless of skin color. They think that anyone who doesn’t meet their narrow standards is semi-evolved and in need of constant guidance. Skin color hardly enters into it. They may USE racism to gain control of one segment of the population by appealing to the stupid ideas of another segment.

You packed a lot of misinformation into that post, Matthew. I’ll address only the most egregious bits:

The Greeks only provided the name. Actual democracies existed long before the Greek civilisation appeared, and still exist today. Any anthro text will tell you about them, so I won’t bother doing citations.

There are also nation-states today that come closer to democracy than the US does: Britain elects an MP for every 80K people, Germany and Canada for every 120K (roughly). In France even the worst district only had 188K people before the recent shuffle. In the US, its 600K — between 3X and 7.5X worse than those 4 countries.

Those countries also don’t restrict who can stand for office, and don’t let the dominant party control access to the ballot or the ballot box—all anti-democratic characteristics of the US system.

“Human nature” is one of the most misunderstood and put-upon concepts in the world. The “nature” of a species consists of those characteristics present in all unimpaired members of the species, not the characteristics individuals choose to assert for their ideological convenience.

The only characteristic that seems to be unique to humans is our adaptability. We are able to completely change our entire behavioral repertoire within our individual lifespans.

As far as we know, that’s the sum and substance of our distinctly “human nature”: we are able to adapt to our environment more completely and quickly than any other species.

The fact that you assert your approval of plutocracy and oligarchy shows that, whatever your politics are, Matthew, they are not libertarian.

Actually, I am working on a paper right now that deals with Jim Crow, the Progressives, and the spate of economic regulation that occurred during that era, and it ties them together. My theme is that despite Vann Woodward’s assertion that racism was the “blind spot” of Progressives, we find that much of the economic regulation and policymaking of that time very much promoted and undergirded the Jim Crow laws.

Most of the southern Democrats that stood in favor of these laws also were well-known Progressives, including Sen. Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman of South Carolina. Woodward has a very hard time wrapping his mind around the fact that his economic heroes also were the very promoters of Jim Crow. (I’m waiting for my co-author to get his part done; sometimes, my patience wears thin!)

The Bobby Finje case truly was evil, and, of course, the local media just demonized that child. The press always kissed Janet Reno’s evil posterior no matter how brutal and dishonest she was. Interestingly, I put Dorothy Rabinowitz onto Reno and her predations in 1996, and in her investigation, she found the Grant Snowden case and ultimately helped get him freed.

I will tell all of you that I am so very weary of the brutality we see every day that involves our vaunted “public servants.” I’m thankful for people who are able to see through this deliberate fog.

Nor are aspersions ever cast upon the grinning, mendacious, sexually predatory sociopath who figured a POS like Reno would make a _fine_ US AG. Then got her the job. Then kept her in that job, even after the Waco savagery & murders and her subsequent years of obvious incompetence/political toadying proved her to be the single worst AG of the 20th century. And *still* no substantive complaints from lawyers & the media. Odd….might it have something to do with her party affiliation, I wonder? Which then brings us to Holder….but that’s another story.