Awesome piece that makes a strong argument. I'm sold.
A friend was once called to jury duty and mentioned jury nullification. She was booted immediately. Everyone should be taught about jury nullification and told to keep mum about it during voir dire. We can always overturn a ruling in any instant case by simply claiming justification and that the law is a nullity if the jury decides it so. It's not enough but it's a start.
It's not just the defendant that is being judged by the jury, but the law that was used against the defendant. Would you consider a racketeering charge fair against a defendant that jaywalked? Yet prosecutors abuse the law every day counting on the jury to feel as if they have no choice but to apply the law as the prosecutor told them too. Judges and prosecutors fear juries that know of and are willing to use jury nullification. They don't want to be judged nor their application of the law, no matter how unjust it may be.
Great write-up! One of the comments to my piece was particularly spot-on when it said that Islam's strict adherence makes it "strong but brittle". The corralling around what is persuasively (to many) heralded as an infallible source of guidance definitely raises zealotry, but the inflexibility also makes it vulnerable to flanking attacks. I mean, I myself am a case study in this for having abandoned my faith completely and since there's no "living Koran" as you put it, I can't even try and pretend to rejigger it.
When it comes to mimetic warfare between ideologies, it's tough to strike a balance between spread and potency, just like with real viruses that kill their hosts too early to spread. As awkwardly written the Bill of Rights is, there's something remarkable about the enduring resilience of 1A and 2A ideals, particularly when compared to other supposedly developed countries. For example, besides the US I'm aware only of Czechia in recognizing a fundamental right to possess firearms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic
Ya there’s definitely an artistry to being both specific and expansive enough to be meaningful (ie. not winding up like the third or ninth amendments) yet also being timeless its not discrediting or brittle to the rest (notably there was no slavery amendment... which might have kept things closer to the founders intent, or might have gotten the whole thing thrown out and discredited in 1864)
2A is so weird because absolutely every english person thought of it as a right english gentlemen 100% held in the 1700s and even up until the end of the 1800s (When William Came thinks it an outrage that a victorious Germany might deny the British arms).
But Americans, Czechs (and Swiss but different ethos), are the only ones who managed to lock it in...
Yeah. On the other hand, the extraordinary rigidity of fundamentalist Islam means that those cultures that adopted it most thoroughly are not what you would consider well adapted to modernity. The Taliban are broke as hell and the GDP in territories they control is measured in camels. To be fair, the Taliban or groups like them would have done well a thousand years ago.
I also suspect that part of the longevity you see comes from the fact that this is religious in nature...not secular.
Dead letter or not, the mere existence of the Constitution acts as a Schelling Point.
For another example for when a de jure distinction that was a de facto dead letter, relevant to contemporary politics, consider the borders of the Republics in the old USSR. In theory the USSR was a voluntary union of independent Republics, in practice no subordinate leader in the USSR was allowed any real scope for independent decisions, so the Republics' borders didn't really matter. Until that is the USSR collapsed and suddenly the borders started mattering very much.
1. Islam had neither an Enlightenment - which created the liberalism that will destroy us, nor a Reformation, that destroyed Christianity, the belief system that created Western Civilization and now is being replaced by a new belief system of Wokeism.
2. The concept of “vigilantism” in a self-governing republic is an interesting one. We the people, by definition, are responsible for our government. Policing is a part of government. We delegate to mere hirelings the act of creating and enforcing laws via our representatives in municipal, state and federal legislatures, and police forces at various levels. When these hirelings reject the authority we delegate to them, the responsibility (which cannot be delegated) to enforce our laws remains ours. “Vigilantism” simply is a citizen enforcing a law his hirelings refuse to. Doing so is his right and his duty.
Haven't finished yet but I had to comment after reading the alt-history section- if you haven't yet you shoudl read the Robert W. Chambers story The Repairer of Reputations. It's set in an alternative 1920 after a limited war with Germany, which started as a conflict over Samoa. All this is just background for a really excellent piece of weird fiction.
For a highshcool American lit class I had my students read The Repairer of Reputations as the last story of the semester. They did not love it as much as I do.
The other one I've read is The Yellow Sign. Like everyone else I came to Chambers through season one of True Detective. That's also how I came to read Cormac McCarthy and a bunch of other guys. It's also still the only show I bother rewatching.
Wonderful article. Your 3rd Dark Right, I call The FAFO Law, structured thusly... If a person is in the act of committing a crime, he cannot sue or press charges relating to anything done to him by a vigilante citizen. There is no duty for a citizen to call the police if he doesn't need the help; and the state can likewise neither sue nor press charges against said vigilantism.
There have absolutely been cases decided in the Supreme Court that have revolved around the Ninth amendment. For example, Roe vs Wade:
"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
Some of them were crazy tricky to get... the last one in particular I could never recreate. The AI just randomly produced that effect with the hand with a seemingly unrelated prompt... you'd never get something that expressive out of it without a happy accident
I dream of righteous guerrilla warfare waged in individual isolation against tyrants and their handmaidens and running dogs. Men with no dependents are the likeliest warriors.
The problem with the Bible is that it contains things like "Turn the other cheek", "love your enemies", and "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone".
The straight forward reading of the above passages is not compatible with maintaining a functioning society which needs to punish criminals and defend itself from external attack. Thus, the above passages need to be interpreted in a non-straightforward manner. And once one sets the precedent of giving parts of scripture non-straightforward interpretations...
The verses you quote describe how the individual should act toward peers or superiors, not how people should act when carrying out the role of government. The Bible says God gives the ruler the sword to punish evil. This is straightforward and I'm confident you'll find it almost anywhere you google. This is why Christianity has produced functioning societies for 18 centuries - indeed the best societies.
Societies like the Puritans in 1600's New England were indeed not ad-hoc. Their punishments were decided by the laws of the community as adjudicated through the community's authorities.
However, my point is that God instigated ad-hoc replacement of ungodly authorities, so there is a mechanism for correction even in Christian societies.
In the days of the book of Judges (Old Testament), there was no real government anyway that we know of in Israel, besides the Law, and the judges were chosen ad-hoc in the first place.
BTW, just came across a tweeter thread where an American explains to his shocked Japanese wife how much less the American government keeps track of its citizens that the Japanese government.
Western cultures, particularly those influenced by European traditions, tend to emphasize individual freedom, autonomy, and personal achievement. In contrast, Eastern cultures, such as those found in Asia, place greater emphasis on collective harmony, familial ties, and societal obligations. It would be great if we could all find a middle way in this regard. The quote, “it takes a village to raise a child” sounds good until gossiping busybodies drive away the very families that constitute said village. I think that’s one of the underlying motivations for the creation of the Constitution. The idea that people not only have the inalienable right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly but also the freedom to choose to be left alone as well as the freedom to choose which one and whenever it suits them. But I do think that there should be some sort of enshrined social institution or mechanism that can manage this dynamic.
> Western cultures, particularly those influenced by European traditions, tend to emphasize individual freedom, autonomy, and personal achievement. In contrast, Eastern cultures, such as those found in Asia, place greater emphasis on collective harmony, familial ties, and societal obligations.
And that is why the age of discovery and the industrial revolution happened in the West, while China's abortive attempts at the former during the Ming and the latter during the Song collapsed.
I was reading Ted Gioia's piece on whether early laws were in fact sung and not written this morning and it occurred to me why, for better or worse, Islamic (and Hindu) cultures are so resistant to change.
It's not because what is written is immutable, but because so much of the code *isn't* written down anywhere, it's tradition and social pressure, it is networked common knowledge, and therefore it is resistant both to amendment and to lawyering.
Take the hijab - WEIRD feminists correctly point out that head coverings for women is not specifically mandated anywhere in the Koran or Hadiths, but the folks in Pakistan could give a shit. If a girl from a decent family were to go out without a headcovering, the results would be pretty predictable, and no amount of "show me the exact Sura!" would change that. Nor would it matter what that girl thought, what "her Islam" meant or even whether she or anyone in her family believed a word of it.
Everybody in a traditional society knows what their rights and obligations are, there is no making it up as you go along, and if you do otherwise ("I gotta be me!"), you will be brought back to earth in no uncertain terms, and I don't even necessarily mean violence.
Or, to again paraphrase Ted Gioia, you can change the wording of the Constitution, you can get the Supreme Court to agree that the text doesn't mean what it plainly says, you can conjure new rights out of thin air, but you can't change the lyrics to "American Pie" by popular vote or anything else. If Congress were to pass a law stating that, from this day forward, "American Pie" would reference good old girls as well as good old boys, and even if Don McLean were to concur, well, that song is now part of our collective consciousness, and good luck getting people to sing it differently.
Awesome piece that makes a strong argument. I'm sold.
A friend was once called to jury duty and mentioned jury nullification. She was booted immediately. Everyone should be taught about jury nullification and told to keep mum about it during voir dire. We can always overturn a ruling in any instant case by simply claiming justification and that the law is a nullity if the jury decides it so. It's not enough but it's a start.
Thank you. I’d never heard of ‘the jury’s veto” …or jury nullification. It will not be forgotten by me or my family.
It's not just the defendant that is being judged by the jury, but the law that was used against the defendant. Would you consider a racketeering charge fair against a defendant that jaywalked? Yet prosecutors abuse the law every day counting on the jury to feel as if they have no choice but to apply the law as the prosecutor told them too. Judges and prosecutors fear juries that know of and are willing to use jury nullification. They don't want to be judged nor their application of the law, no matter how unjust it may be.
Great write-up! One of the comments to my piece was particularly spot-on when it said that Islam's strict adherence makes it "strong but brittle". The corralling around what is persuasively (to many) heralded as an infallible source of guidance definitely raises zealotry, but the inflexibility also makes it vulnerable to flanking attacks. I mean, I myself am a case study in this for having abandoned my faith completely and since there's no "living Koran" as you put it, I can't even try and pretend to rejigger it.
When it comes to mimetic warfare between ideologies, it's tough to strike a balance between spread and potency, just like with real viruses that kill their hosts too early to spread. As awkwardly written the Bill of Rights is, there's something remarkable about the enduring resilience of 1A and 2A ideals, particularly when compared to other supposedly developed countries. For example, besides the US I'm aware only of Czechia in recognizing a fundamental right to possess firearms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic
Ya there’s definitely an artistry to being both specific and expansive enough to be meaningful (ie. not winding up like the third or ninth amendments) yet also being timeless its not discrediting or brittle to the rest (notably there was no slavery amendment... which might have kept things closer to the founders intent, or might have gotten the whole thing thrown out and discredited in 1864)
2A is so weird because absolutely every english person thought of it as a right english gentlemen 100% held in the 1700s and even up until the end of the 1800s (When William Came thinks it an outrage that a victorious Germany might deny the British arms).
But Americans, Czechs (and Swiss but different ethos), are the only ones who managed to lock it in...
Yeah. On the other hand, the extraordinary rigidity of fundamentalist Islam means that those cultures that adopted it most thoroughly are not what you would consider well adapted to modernity. The Taliban are broke as hell and the GDP in territories they control is measured in camels. To be fair, the Taliban or groups like them would have done well a thousand years ago.
I also suspect that part of the longevity you see comes from the fact that this is religious in nature...not secular.
I am french and it's basically the smartest thing I've read on HOW TO ENFORCE FREESPEECH since the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
I also love this kind of open-ending that really open the way for the future of Network States.
Dead letter or not, the mere existence of the Constitution acts as a Schelling Point.
For another example for when a de jure distinction that was a de facto dead letter, relevant to contemporary politics, consider the borders of the Republics in the old USSR. In theory the USSR was a voluntary union of independent Republics, in practice no subordinate leader in the USSR was allowed any real scope for independent decisions, so the Republics' borders didn't really matter. Until that is the USSR collapsed and suddenly the borders started mattering very much.
Intriguing piece.
Thoughts:
1. Islam had neither an Enlightenment - which created the liberalism that will destroy us, nor a Reformation, that destroyed Christianity, the belief system that created Western Civilization and now is being replaced by a new belief system of Wokeism.
2. The concept of “vigilantism” in a self-governing republic is an interesting one. We the people, by definition, are responsible for our government. Policing is a part of government. We delegate to mere hirelings the act of creating and enforcing laws via our representatives in municipal, state and federal legislatures, and police forces at various levels. When these hirelings reject the authority we delegate to them, the responsibility (which cannot be delegated) to enforce our laws remains ours. “Vigilantism” simply is a citizen enforcing a law his hirelings refuse to. Doing so is his right and his duty.
Islam also had no Renaissance, as a result Islamic civilization technologically stagnated.
True. They did, however, have a Golden Age of art and mathematics, ended by their fundamentalists, as discussed in Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong?"
I know. Muslim Aristotelians like Avicenna and Averroes would have far more influence in Europe than they did in Islamic civilization.
I thought Wahhabism *was* Islam's "Reformation"
This is stunning!
Haven't finished yet but I had to comment after reading the alt-history section- if you haven't yet you shoudl read the Robert W. Chambers story The Repairer of Reputations. It's set in an alternative 1920 after a limited war with Germany, which started as a conflict over Samoa. All this is just background for a really excellent piece of weird fiction.
Yes! I've been meaning to read the whole of the King in Yellow stories. Excellent reminder.
I got this nice hardcover edition from The Bizarchives:
https://thebizarchives.com/product/the-king-in-yellow-hardback-preorder/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
For a highshcool American lit class I had my students read The Repairer of Reputations as the last story of the semester. They did not love it as much as I do.
LOL ya its a mindbender from what i hear
The other one I've read is The Yellow Sign. Like everyone else I came to Chambers through season one of True Detective. That's also how I came to read Cormac McCarthy and a bunch of other guys. It's also still the only show I bother rewatching.
this is brilliant
Wonderful article. Your 3rd Dark Right, I call The FAFO Law, structured thusly... If a person is in the act of committing a crime, he cannot sue or press charges relating to anything done to him by a vigilante citizen. There is no duty for a citizen to call the police if he doesn't need the help; and the state can likewise neither sue nor press charges against said vigilantism.
Btw, don not dawn.
There have absolutely been cases decided in the Supreme Court that have revolved around the Ninth amendment. For example, Roe vs Wade:
"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113
I'm very curious how you've come to the conclusion that the Ninth isn't used.
Those images made the essay. Man, that just perfectly captures the vibe you're going for.
THankyou!
Some of them were crazy tricky to get... the last one in particular I could never recreate. The AI just randomly produced that effect with the hand with a seemingly unrelated prompt... you'd never get something that expressive out of it without a happy accident
I dream of righteous guerrilla warfare waged in individual isolation against tyrants and their handmaidens and running dogs. Men with no dependents are the likeliest warriors.
I believe DeMaistre made a similar point about written constitutions.
If you notice certain parts of the unchanging Bible, Christianity is also enforceable by ad hoc individual violence if led by God's voice: https://redstatesecession.org/god-chooses-men-to-kill-wicked-government-leaders-a-bible-study
The problem with the Bible is that it contains things like "Turn the other cheek", "love your enemies", and "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone".
The straight forward reading of the above passages is not compatible with maintaining a functioning society which needs to punish criminals and defend itself from external attack. Thus, the above passages need to be interpreted in a non-straightforward manner. And once one sets the precedent of giving parts of scripture non-straightforward interpretations...
The verses you quote describe how the individual should act toward peers or superiors, not how people should act when carrying out the role of government. The Bible says God gives the ruler the sword to punish evil. This is straightforward and I'm confident you'll find it almost anywhere you google. This is why Christianity has produced functioning societies for 18 centuries - indeed the best societies.
Societies like the Puritans in 1600's New England were indeed not ad-hoc. Their punishments were decided by the laws of the community as adjudicated through the community's authorities.
However, my point is that God instigated ad-hoc replacement of ungodly authorities, so there is a mechanism for correction even in Christian societies.
In the days of the book of Judges (Old Testament), there was no real government anyway that we know of in Israel, besides the Law, and the judges were chosen ad-hoc in the first place.
> This is why Christianity has produced functioning societies for 18 centuries
For most of those 18 centuries the Bible was only available in an obsolete language and translations were forbidden. And retelling of the Gospels were produced in the vernacular that deemphasized the parts I described. (https://theworthyhouse.com/2020/07/05/the-saxon-savior-the-germanic-transformation-of-the-gospel-in-the-ninth-century-heliand-g-ronald-murphy/)
> Societies like the Puritans in 1600's New England were indeed not ad-hoc.
The Puritans degenerated into Unitarians rather quickly.
BTW, just came across a tweeter thread where an American explains to his shocked Japanese wife how much less the American government keeps track of its citizens that the Japanese government.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691918078693785826.html
The beginning of it:
Ruriko: So when do we register with Chicago?
Me: We don’t.
R: So how does Chicago know everyone who lives in Chicago?
Me: It doesn’t.
R: … Does America have a government? How do you even do population statistics?!
Me: Count every ten years.
R: You ARE TROLLING ME.
The last few minutes have been her working through the implications for every benefits program administered locally, with increasing levels of horror.
Ruriko: Wait you mean Chicago Public Schools literally does not know Liam and Lillian exist unless we tell them that.
Me: Yep.
Ruriko: So there’s no form to tell them that we are putting our children in private school?
Me: No form.
Ruriko: So if a child is just not enrolled they…
Me: Hopefully are seen by truant officers who will eventually cause someone to ask about the circumstances.
Ruriko: TROLLING.
Western cultures, particularly those influenced by European traditions, tend to emphasize individual freedom, autonomy, and personal achievement. In contrast, Eastern cultures, such as those found in Asia, place greater emphasis on collective harmony, familial ties, and societal obligations. It would be great if we could all find a middle way in this regard. The quote, “it takes a village to raise a child” sounds good until gossiping busybodies drive away the very families that constitute said village. I think that’s one of the underlying motivations for the creation of the Constitution. The idea that people not only have the inalienable right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly but also the freedom to choose to be left alone as well as the freedom to choose which one and whenever it suits them. But I do think that there should be some sort of enshrined social institution or mechanism that can manage this dynamic.
> Western cultures, particularly those influenced by European traditions, tend to emphasize individual freedom, autonomy, and personal achievement. In contrast, Eastern cultures, such as those found in Asia, place greater emphasis on collective harmony, familial ties, and societal obligations.
And that is why the age of discovery and the industrial revolution happened in the West, while China's abortive attempts at the former during the Ming and the latter during the Song collapsed.
I was reading Ted Gioia's piece on whether early laws were in fact sung and not written this morning and it occurred to me why, for better or worse, Islamic (and Hindu) cultures are so resistant to change.
It's not because what is written is immutable, but because so much of the code *isn't* written down anywhere, it's tradition and social pressure, it is networked common knowledge, and therefore it is resistant both to amendment and to lawyering.
Take the hijab - WEIRD feminists correctly point out that head coverings for women is not specifically mandated anywhere in the Koran or Hadiths, but the folks in Pakistan could give a shit. If a girl from a decent family were to go out without a headcovering, the results would be pretty predictable, and no amount of "show me the exact Sura!" would change that. Nor would it matter what that girl thought, what "her Islam" meant or even whether she or anyone in her family believed a word of it.
Everybody in a traditional society knows what their rights and obligations are, there is no making it up as you go along, and if you do otherwise ("I gotta be me!"), you will be brought back to earth in no uncertain terms, and I don't even necessarily mean violence.
Or, to again paraphrase Ted Gioia, you can change the wording of the Constitution, you can get the Supreme Court to agree that the text doesn't mean what it plainly says, you can conjure new rights out of thin air, but you can't change the lyrics to "American Pie" by popular vote or anything else. If Congress were to pass a law stating that, from this day forward, "American Pie" would reference good old girls as well as good old boys, and even if Don McLean were to concur, well, that song is now part of our collective consciousness, and good luck getting people to sing it differently.