A Short Update

(sigh)

Yet another downer of a post, I'm afraid.

This week has been rough on the psyche. World's in a mess, and each time I try to catch up on current affairs, I just feel helpless with a dose of headache.

And the rotten-ass weather combined with my inability to go out and burn excess energy due to being on observation duty means I can't use my usual means of getting anti-depressant-like mitigation in.

Let's get the the biggest bugbear out of the way---how observation duty went.

Thankfully, uneventfully. I was looking out for changes to the new baseline, and haven't really noticed anything out of the ordinary that required immediate action to be taken. That's a good thing.

As for the ``world's a mess'' bit, just the realisation that the only reason why we as a whole haven't killed each other completely lies only on the restraint that we exercise through the respect of some abstract idea that is written down on ``a piece of paper'', i.e. the observation of laws, or the type of legal fiction that mere words could hold back bad behaviour.

It's terrifying because the success of a lawful society is contingent on the simultaneous respect of the sovereignty of the law by everyone (or at least, the majority), with bad actors actively being called out through either the law enforcement apparatus, or at the very least, being shamed by enough of society that they self-correct.

But the past five years of this decade have shown that this idea of law is fast eroding. Bad faith actors have discovered that if they were to strike at the enforcement portion of the law fast enough, they can overwhelm the entire system so thoroughly to the point that they can concurrently stall enforcement activities, push through their agenda, and generally get away with literal murder if they are quick about it.

There is no easy way to counteract this due to the original premise of ``innocent before guilty''. The way that legal systems are enforced are based around the concept of being sufficiently meticulous in order to reduce the false positive rate (i.e. an innocent person being wrongfully found guilty). But to add a bit more real-world detail, the finding of the guilt of a person is often the last step of the entire legal enforcement process, with lots of waiting in between. That waiting process often involves the restriction of personal liberties of the parties that are involved, and should they eventually be found innocent, don't often have restitution from the period in which their restriction of personal liberties had occurred.

In other words, if one is poor, the legal system, no matter how just, can be manipulated to put one deeper into the hole of poverty. Conversely, the richer one is, the easier it is to get a better outcome in general from the legal system.

This is true in most places that practise some form of justice in the form of a legal system. Vigilante justice works on a different form, and is usually heavily frowned upon in places where there regular legal system exists and is working ``well enough''.

Notice though, how I tried to separate the difference between ``justice'' and ``the law''. Justice is a more fundamental concept that most people can understand, of which the use of, and enforcement of ``the law'' is but one way of enacting justice. It is not the only way, and it is definitely not guaranteed to deliver justice, though it is often hoped that it is the case.

But I digress.

With the rise of bad faith actors, the degradation of the service/duty sense of law enforcement officials to being stricter with the letter of the law instead of the intent for whatever reasons, what can the average citizen/resident do?

I don't know. It's not like SIN city is free of such issues---the ever-increasing use of complaints over social media to get justice served while the original manner of official channels have failed initially is disturbing as well.

(sigh)

I think I've lost the plot. I'm going to stop here for now.