Kleptocrats talk about fair trials. In his Celt vs Saxon novels Bernard Cornwell has King Alfred talk compulsively about "fair trials": capture the invading Dane, give him a fair trial, and execute him. In other words, trials are rituals. ordeals; "fair" is a meaningless adjectival appendage.
When Shakespeare talked about "fair" he typically meant appealing to look at, fair skinned, blond, light complected: sort of what Hitler meant by "Aryan." But I think the law intends to evoke feelings of objectivity, even-handedness, openness to facts, to truth ... Nobility, justice ...
When the FBI arrested me, the judge, after five months of my incarceration, me suffering freezing and myriad other torments, was punctilious about fairness from his bench. From day three I had been provided with an attorney. Over those five months my attorney made it clear that he understood major parts of what I regarded as the essentials of my situation. I am the deschooler; I'd offered cybernetic record keeping and cybernetic social networking as a potential substitute, improvement over, the school system. School is compulsory, my system was designed to be open: School is expensive, my system was designed to be cheap. School makes knowledge scarce, mine would permit knowledge to spread, cheaply, openly, without artificial constraint. ... I invented this "internet" "because" no school I had ever attended, public, Columbia, NYU, had ever understood the essence of what I tried to tell them. (And no school I had ever attended had ever understood that it hadn't understood what I tried to tell them.) (The schools seemed to believe that the state giving them license to license magically made them competent to license!) I wanted an open forum to speak from: if the public itself didn't understand me, then I'd done all I could: I could rest easy with God, I'd done what he'd asked, I'd done what I'd promised: I wasn't' responsible for the result where failure is the result of stupidity of close mindedness on the part of the audience. Jesus offered an opportunity for salvation: the salvation wasn't guaranteed. The human has to meet God at least part way. We should both crucify divine messengers and expect to be forgiven: not when we keep the crucifixions active.
The schools seemed to believe
that the state giving them license to license
magically made them competent to license!
that the state giving them license to license
magically made them competent to license!
Did Jesus get a fair trial from the Romans? from the Temple? from the Jewish state? Fair meaning just? Truthful? Open to fact? Not deaf to testimony?
My public defender understood the essence of all that. He saw that it was true that I'd been inspired by God, that I had invented the internet and that the invention was inspired: I wasn't claiming to have been able to think of it myself. I was inspired by a chain of inspirations: by God, by Jesus ... by this and that saint, this and that genius ... by Ivan Illich (and by Bucky Fuller, and so forth). My public defender also made it clear to me that he would make no effort to communicate any of these truths to the court: and, that if I tried, the court would make it go very hard on me. The good citizens of Palm Beach country could be relied on to provide twelve angry kleptocrats, indignant and vengeful at a truth teller. "I may burn in hell for this forever," quoth Dave Lee Brannen, Esq.
See? By fair trial I mean what I think Jesus would mean; the law school graduates, the bar members, mean what King Alfred meant.
King Alfred was king to the tribe in the British Isles who had been there for a while. His ancestors had colonized, invaded, prior to other contemporary invaders. Any people his people had displaced were gone, their traces evaporated. Alfred was determined to repel newer invaders: the Saxons, the Danes. The Normans hadn't arrived yet: but they would, in 1066.
Or was Alfred a Saxon, ploughing aside the Celts? The point is the same: they're all kleptocrats. And the first humans to arrive had pushed aside the forest, the game ... the quail, the hedgehog ...
It's simple. I want man to live simply. Deforesting, polluting, burning candles at every end, I don't want us to live.
I don't believe that we will live. To me Christ represents reasonable hope for long life: sustainable life. To me God is not magic for our side, but truth, the essence of truth. Science! What we need science, not the Bible, to try to fathom.
I believe in humble man, and a humble God. I do not believe in trials: especially not in trials with lies attached in advance: fair trial.
Knatz.com pointed out in more than one place that fair trial was an oxymoron: a paradox, a contradiction. Trial is a synonym of "ordeal": a group torturing an individual. Fair doesn't (by itself) mean that at all.
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