Miscellany
Mar. 30th, 2009 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenIt's really nice to be home. I didn't have the quietest of weekends, really; I was at Amicus training again on Saturday, and that was kind of sort of exhausting. Practical, not theory, so lots of running around with my hands in my pockets trying to make myself as good an investigator as possible, i.e., not very good. The funny thing is, I find, is that the other side of the law - the private sector side, the type of law done by the large impressive firms with the large impressive training contracts - is so... sleek, so glossy, so very talkative. You have to get in the habit of talking and dressing sharply. It's wearing. Whereas, for this sort of thing, you dress, talk and think forgettable. Clean jeans and brushed hair, a notepad any colour but yellow, and you sit and you listen. Your client is on trial for his life, but... well, right now he's not going anywhere. I really enjoyed the change. That said, I don't know if I could really do this work: do it for real with real people and be all things to them, a good lawyer, but a good listener and someone who can get people to tell me, not the right things, but the real things.
That bothers me about law as I see it, here - it's all telling you what you want to hear. I tell interviewers what they want to hear, they tell me what they think I should hear, and none of it bears any resemblance to reality. That might be a problem endemic in the law itself - it's interesting, of course, that the Law, this great amorphous thing I spend every waking hour on these days, isn't a thing about how things are, but it's something that people do. We've written about it so much that we've made it exist. And there's no doubt that electric chairs do exist. That's a real sense you get, actually: that the judicial system induces this twilight state, so people taken away to spend forty years in prison are still thinking, where am I, what's going on, there's been some mistake, this isn't real.
The saddest part was the bit on Atkins v Virginia, a 2002 case where the Supreme Court established that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with "mental retardation", undefined. I find it horrifying that this is actually a point at issue, but there you are. Lots of people have been executed who have had the mental age of nine-year-olds. And it's still perfectly possible to execute someone with the mental age of an eleven-year-old, or a nine-year-old on a good day. It puts investigators in the awful position of going to see the person's community, their their teachers and their elderly mother, and ask things like, was he a bit slow? Was he incapable of washing himself, and will you talk about it on a stand in front of hundreds of strangers?
Yeah. It's not good for your view on humanity, this sort of thing. On Saturday night I went out gloomily and was cheered by a nice dinner in Soho with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sebastienne and jacinthsong and deathbyshinies and liminreid, which was cheering but, as I said, I couldn't go dancing afterwards because the Sunday the clocks go forward was the one Sunday in the year I had to be up at seven am. And go to another day of lectures and workshops and try interviewing people myself, which I have to say I did spectacularly not well at all, and then run across the city to get a train up north, which was eerily quiet, and lacking in announcements and indeed people, and didn't stop, and gave me this muted feeling that I might be on the Caldonian Sleeper or the first train into the Twilight Zone.
That said, I did wake up at seven this morning, have a momentary panic as to where I was, realise that a) it was my own bed and b) the alarm clock belonged to someone else, and roll over and go back to sleep. I shall have to be careful. I am NOT ON HOLIDAY. This cannot be emphasised enough. Not on holiday. Yes.
...and here I am, feeling a little like an unspoken sentence. Notes and queries:
-deathbyshinies has started a Secret Histories Project. As she puts it, it is a blog devoted to "little random tidbits of historical fact that make you sit up and go 'BLOODY HELL, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME ABOUT THAT!'" (Examples already mentioned: Alan Turing's homosexuality; the fact there were South Asian people living in Britain before 1700 (I was never told this at school); Helen Keller's socialist and feminist activism.) Definitely worth looking at.
-A brief unrelated rant, also. Why is there a sudden resurgence, recently, of the "it's only natural" argument? I keep seeing this: polamory is natural, wanting to have children is natural. I really thought that the blogosphere had finally got over this one, but apparently not. Okay, internets. Saying something is "natural" is an argumentative faux-pas of the worst order. Because, to begin with, you're implying that polyamory or childbearing or whatever are worthy of respect only because they are some inalienable feature about how people are. You're devaluaing people's choices pertaining to either of those things. Sure, childbearing is natural. So is living in trees, so is killing people who don't agree with you. Natural does not equate to good, and for good reason. People choose to have kids - it's the choice that's worthy of preservation and respect, not the entirely fallacious biological imperative behind the choice.
And as for polyamory being "natural" - maybe it is natural for people to want multiple relationships, I don't know, and maybe monogamy is a stifling yoke upon the natural impetus of society blah blah whatever (I remain to be convinced of that last one, I must say). But it's worthy of respect, surely, whatever its provenance? It's worthy of respect if it's the way people have always lived or if it was invented out of whole cloth by L. Ron Hubbard in 1971. I'm just boggled that people still think this is a smart tack to take. I suppose it's the gay-gene for the twenty-first century. My god it's hard to be a liberal.
Okay, I'm going to stop yelling now. To finish: the clocks went forward and I was very upset. There is now more light in the evenings, and I am less upset. Thus, I leave you with the Spring Arrangements Bill.shimgray can recite it on command. This fills me with joy.
That bothers me about law as I see it, here - it's all telling you what you want to hear. I tell interviewers what they want to hear, they tell me what they think I should hear, and none of it bears any resemblance to reality. That might be a problem endemic in the law itself - it's interesting, of course, that the Law, this great amorphous thing I spend every waking hour on these days, isn't a thing about how things are, but it's something that people do. We've written about it so much that we've made it exist. And there's no doubt that electric chairs do exist. That's a real sense you get, actually: that the judicial system induces this twilight state, so people taken away to spend forty years in prison are still thinking, where am I, what's going on, there's been some mistake, this isn't real.
The saddest part was the bit on Atkins v Virginia, a 2002 case where the Supreme Court established that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with "mental retardation", undefined. I find it horrifying that this is actually a point at issue, but there you are. Lots of people have been executed who have had the mental age of nine-year-olds. And it's still perfectly possible to execute someone with the mental age of an eleven-year-old, or a nine-year-old on a good day. It puts investigators in the awful position of going to see the person's community, their their teachers and their elderly mother, and ask things like, was he a bit slow? Was he incapable of washing himself, and will you talk about it on a stand in front of hundreds of strangers?
Yeah. It's not good for your view on humanity, this sort of thing. On Saturday night I went out gloomily and was cheered by a nice dinner in Soho with
sebastienne and jacinthsong and deathbyshinies and liminreid, which was cheering but, as I said, I couldn't go dancing afterwards because the Sunday the clocks go forward was the one Sunday in the year I had to be up at seven am. And go to another day of lectures and workshops and try interviewing people myself, which I have to say I did spectacularly not well at all, and then run across the city to get a train up north, which was eerily quiet, and lacking in announcements and indeed people, and didn't stop, and gave me this muted feeling that I might be on the Caldonian Sleeper or the first train into the Twilight Zone.That said, I did wake up at seven this morning, have a momentary panic as to where I was, realise that a) it was my own bed and b) the alarm clock belonged to someone else, and roll over and go back to sleep. I shall have to be careful. I am NOT ON HOLIDAY. This cannot be emphasised enough. Not on holiday. Yes.
...and here I am, feeling a little like an unspoken sentence. Notes and queries:
-
deathbyshinies has started a Secret Histories Project. As she puts it, it is a blog devoted to "little random tidbits of historical fact that make you sit up and go 'BLOODY HELL, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME ABOUT THAT!'" (Examples already mentioned: Alan Turing's homosexuality; the fact there were South Asian people living in Britain before 1700 (I was never told this at school); Helen Keller's socialist and feminist activism.) Definitely worth looking at.-A brief unrelated rant, also. Why is there a sudden resurgence, recently, of the "it's only natural" argument? I keep seeing this: polamory is natural, wanting to have children is natural. I really thought that the blogosphere had finally got over this one, but apparently not. Okay, internets. Saying something is "natural" is an argumentative faux-pas of the worst order. Because, to begin with, you're implying that polyamory or childbearing or whatever are worthy of respect only because they are some inalienable feature about how people are. You're devaluaing people's choices pertaining to either of those things. Sure, childbearing is natural. So is living in trees, so is killing people who don't agree with you. Natural does not equate to good, and for good reason. People choose to have kids - it's the choice that's worthy of preservation and respect, not the entirely fallacious biological imperative behind the choice.
And as for polyamory being "natural" - maybe it is natural for people to want multiple relationships, I don't know, and maybe monogamy is a stifling yoke upon the natural impetus of society blah blah whatever (I remain to be convinced of that last one, I must say). But it's worthy of respect, surely, whatever its provenance? It's worthy of respect if it's the way people have always lived or if it was invented out of whole cloth by L. Ron Hubbard in 1971. I'm just boggled that people still think this is a smart tack to take. I suppose it's the gay-gene for the twenty-first century. My god it's hard to be a liberal.
Okay, I'm going to stop yelling now. To finish: the clocks went forward and I was very upset. There is now more light in the evenings, and I am less upset. Thus, I leave you with the Spring Arrangements Bill.
shimgray can recite it on command. This fills me with joy.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2009-03-30 03:11 pm (UTC)Its very natural to have a family (the most natural thing in the world except plants)
which leads me to want to construct a huge diagram ranking everything in the world in order of naturalness, with plants at the top and Wham bars at the bottom.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 03:14 pm (UTC)Personally, I'm of the mind at the moment that an 8-5 job is inherently unnatural and therefore I reject it utterly. ...sigh.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 03:26 pm (UTC)'Natural' is a big pile of nonsense. I've not seen arguments about polyamory being natural, except in Hollyoaks. And, you know, smallpox is natural, I don't really want to catch it!
no subject
on 2009-03-30 03:27 pm (UTC)I am not going to go and heckle. I am not.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 03:30 pm (UTC)(Have I ever told you that it freaks me out whenever I see your name, because mary mac is actually my name? I am m@rykm@c everywhere but livejournal, and every time I see your name I have a moment where I think I've secretly created a livejournal account and am using it without telling myself!)
no subject
on 2009-03-30 03:42 pm (UTC)No, but its awesome! Mostly I end up being something else because someone else got in there first. I have no idea how I managed it on LJ.
Using an account without telling yourself would also be kind of cool, but I think mostly worrisome...
no subject
on 2009-03-30 04:04 pm (UTC)Vetinari looked perplexed.
'You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?'
No, no I don't have anything intelligent to say.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 04:21 pm (UTC)Just joking. Obviously it was great to see you; and from your post it sounds like criminal, not corporate, is the way forward.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 04:26 pm (UTC)*hearts*
On serious note: christ, I somehow missed the bit about "mental retardation" when I initially read this post, and just...ow. Damn you for messing up my entirely unfair prejudices against lawyers as heartless mercenaries.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 04:54 pm (UTC)But yes. Lots of things, like arsenic and septicaemia and infant mortality are natural, but I don't think anyone would say that makes them desirable.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:39 pm (UTC)(Defence attorneys are paid less than minimum wage! I cannot even.)
no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 07:43 pm (UTC)...it is about the best cohesive argument I can come up with for breastfeeding in public, which is shocking. And, because it's a feeble argument, it never works, and people say 'well, urinating is natural, but you wouldn't do that in public would you?!' To which I think my answer of 'yes, but breastfeeding is perfectly sanitary and hygenic' is actually perfectly decent, but, um. You are literate and coherant, Iona: why is breastfeeding in public ok? It frustrates me that I can make no good arguments for it, despite generally feeling that people mostly have problems with it because of the over-sexualisation of certain female body parts.
The Spring Arrangements Bill is wonderful.
no subject
on 2009-03-30 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 09:28 pm (UTC)You are a genius, Iona. Or, you know, I was just struggling with putting ideas into words and conscious thought, but yes. Thank you!
no subject
on 2009-03-30 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-30 09:39 pm (UTC)I have decided that I am going to buy them terrible, terrible candy and toys that make a lot of noise. Yes.
no subject
on 2009-03-31 08:30 am (UTC)Examples already mentioned: Alan Turing's homosexuality;
I was going to say, in outraged shock, SCHOOLS DON'T TEACH THAT TURING WAS GAY? until I stopped and considered: (a) of course they don't, why is that a surprise, and (b) okay, no, one play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Code) does not common knowledge make.
Finally: Iona, can we start a support group for people whose passionate academic/career interests frequently tempt them to write off the entire human race? Because really. I'm having this experience too, of wanting to spend all my time immersed in the early '80s... until I come up for air, out of the rarefied deeps of pure intellectual pleasure, and realize that oh, hey, I am MORALLY OUTRAGED and HATE EVERYONE.
no subject
on 2009-03-31 09:12 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-31 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-31 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-03-31 12:00 pm (UTC)