I would argue that the hierarchy of loyalties discussed at the end of the article (Family, Community, Mankind, Life) comes from our positions in the Tree of Life produced by the Genetic Algorithm. We protect and grow our branches, starting locally. Hence racism. There is also a strong geographic component.
It's interesting to look back through history when communities who were perpetually at war ally to fight a greater external threat, only to fall back to civil war when jousting for regional dominance.
Peace is the real art, but can only be achieved when no-one has any just cause to overthrow the system. One that enforces a collection of fair laws that all can agree on.
The evolution of our legal systems through the ages is one of our greatest accomplishments. A community answer to the question "What is fair?"
I’d argue the legal system in big American cities is tragically flawed and results in hundreds of thousands of lives unjustly diminished or destroyed. To me, that’s cause to overthrow the system.
In California, they’re trying to do this by eliminating bails and making minor crimes non-crimes (both I disagree with).
I’m currently in a minor legal dispute which has nearly destroyed my life. In my case, former federal prosecutors employed by one of the most powerful law firms in the world are seemingly co-counsel with the city prosecutor. The Judge asked the city prosecutor a question and the former federal prosecutor whispered in his ear, and the city prosecutor repeated it verbatim to the judge.
For this minor charge, I had my zero bail revoked and set for $75,000. I had felony undercover warrant detectives and private investigators hunt me down. All my property was allegedly stolen from a robbery of a police warehouse.
I can’t even legally talk about the case or I’ll be sent to jail. And the charge against me is misdemeanor vandalism.
The mega billionaire who employs the corrupt federal officials has them asking the city prosecutor to have me remove online comments about him (which I didn’t make) and other bizarre requests.
The bail system is corrupt, the public defenders collude with the prosecutors with generic 3-year plea templates, and the police agency is so corrupt that their former Sheriff is in federal prison. Hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people are put into an insane, terrible jail system, that provokes more crime and destroys more lives.
One so corrupt that the FBI has cameras inside it to prevent the Sheriff Deputies from beating the inmates.
No, not hence racism. Subsidiarity is a question of diminishing priority and obligations. All things being equal, do you not prioritize the good of your loved ones over someone else? Do you prioritize the good of your friends over the good of someone else? Do you not concern yourself about the good of your city or town more than you concern yourself with the good of another city or town? I bet you do because it is the only thing that makes sense. Priority is mot racism because it is not an act of hatred, but an act of love and a way of ordering and practically realizing one’s duties toward others.
> A community answer to the question "What is fair?"
Or is it, "what is just?" It's not clear to me that these are necessarily the same. Fairness seems to entail some sort of consequentialist reasoning (like progressive ideals), but justice seems to be more on deontological footing (like the constitution).
For example our laws allow a lot of unethical actions at stock markets. Things like buying all resources of one kind to later sell them for higher price, all in the name of profit.
Even when a law should actually protect us, the reality is, that they who have sufficient financial means, wealth, whatever, can go against the law and hope to get away with it for many years or even hide the fact they did it from us, because of lacking transparency on many layers of our system. Some are more equal than others before the law. Unfortunately still true in 2019.
We have separation of power, at least, which in many cases protects us from the ones with a lot of economical power directly making the laws. Also some praise at this point to the people who make the law, because to me it seems that they are rarely bought. There is some integrity there.
I would not call the big ball of mud that our law systems are very advanced. Actually it is rather primitive, some kind of patchwork rug, where we only try to fill the gaps.
To make a really advanced law system, that does not only react on oversights from the past ("Oh that's a grey zone. Let's make a new law for this case!"), we would have to get rid of a lot of the interpretable adjectives in the texts or define them all in a way, that is accessible for non-lawyers and not only based on past decisions in law processes (You can buy commented law texts, about 10 times as much text to read to understand a law and how it was used in past processes, which is what verdicts are often based on.). We would have to prune many special cases and abstract from them to more generalized rules. The law would have to be made in such a way, that most people could understand and need not go to a lawyer to "learn what is right" according to the law.
Especially in the Internet / IT sphere laws are being made, where one can only scratch ones head and ask oneself: "What were they thinking?! Did they have _any_ expert on board when writing this text?" It seems that law making has too few interaction with real domain experts and a disconnect with reality in the IT area. Law is a very traditional subject, while IT is a very modern thing that evolves faster than they can make new laws.
While our ideas of law might be a great accomplishment and certainly indispensable for our current society and its structure, I would not call it "one of our greatest". I find philosophical ideas to be a much greater result. Admittedly, it is a hard problem to solve, to put philosophical ideas cleanly into law texts. That's why law making should never be rushed and well thought through, while getting input from as many real experts as possible during the whole process.
There was mild discontent when the Data Retention laws [1] were being rolled out across the EU in the early 2010s. This was a legal harmonization of existing collection practices for law enforcement purposes. It did receive a lot of press coverage and some small protests (even though in reality the collection was already widespread).
In 2009, Malte Spitz (German Green Party politician) sued his telecom provider for all the information they had stored on him in the last 6 moths. He and others made a good (and spooky) visualization showing how it tracked his entire life [2]. He did a TED talk about it [3], which received a spirited applause and unfortunately minor press coverage.
I think many naively bought the idea that all this detailed data was only for LE (maybe a side effect of all the reporting on the Data Retention Laws?), despite constantly seeing clauses in their EULA's saying their data will be shared with third parties.
----
People only care about these issues once they become evident and widespread, and they personally are affected. I remember the shock my friends had when Google Maps released the location history feature. Up until then, its just a theoretical concern.
Good demonstrations, hard hitting expositions and good press coverage are essential.
I think, at a minimum, they would have needed support for something like HTML5 canvas. Then Flash would have never happened. HTML should probably should have been XML with a component centric model from the beginning. Modules from the start with JS. Scoped CSS...lots of things would have improved the web's position earlier...but you know, hindsight and all that.
> "The Methbot is a beautiful simulacrum of a real browser. It's gotten better over time. And by better, I mean, a more perfect life-like copy," said White Ops CEO Michael Tiffany.
It's interesting to look back through history when communities who were perpetually at war ally to fight a greater external threat, only to fall back to civil war when jousting for regional dominance.
Peace is the real art, but can only be achieved when no-one has any just cause to overthrow the system. One that enforces a collection of fair laws that all can agree on.
The evolution of our legal systems through the ages is one of our greatest accomplishments. A community answer to the question "What is fair?"