Leth @lethargilistic@kolektiva.social

"The Orville" used a song from "The Last Unicorn" as a leitmotif for one of its impossible romances, and it's had me in a Mood for hours. Then. Of course. They made a sequel to that episode for the next season.

The love angles it chooses are so satisfyingly complex. The captain and first officer being in love with each other but refusing to pursue it because of their positions is practically vanilla at this point.

The world is run by lawyers who think distributing rules section-by-section as separate PDFs is preferable to HTML documents, but I'm supposed to believe the criminals are the bad guys. #1L

(context) https://www.courts.wa.gov/court_rules/?fa=court_rules.list&group=ga&set=RPC

Very seriously starting to feel like I was spoiled by my first law school professor being a pretty cool person. Unless this new prof is just having me read this stuff in order to think about its persuasive character (it's for a writing class), I'm in for some shit.

But that's the thing. The writing class is very well publicized and a 1L requirement, so it's probably also where they stuff in the "what it means to be a good lawyer" content. #1L

I don't even want to waste my breath on this bullshit, but people with authority believe in this so strongly that they won't even keep it to themselves.

This professor also assigned a video preaching against the dangers of motivated reasoning. Pity "I'm a good lawyer and those newbies aren't worth shit" isn't considered a motive. #1L

Christ Al-fucking-mighty, if I'm forced by someone with a job to read one more screed about how people without jobs would have jobs if they were "Better, More Resiliant People", I will go postal.

Literally, this report says many people who graduate law school aren't getting hired because they lack "sufficient" IQ, "sufficient" EQ, and (new!) "sufficient" CQ (Character Quotient).

They volunteer-surveyed lawyers with jobs who, uh, have perverse incentives to justify the unemployment rate. #1L

"The Orville" is really quite good!

Every time I see it in my Steam library, I want to play a game of "Nosgoth" with the homies.

Amazing game.
What we would now call a live service.
Literally extinct.

Courts' inability to admit fallibility is a pretty big flaw in a system that (post-hoc*) justifies itself on the myth of "due process." Instead of "We don't know. Must we procede?" it is "We don't know. How do we proceed against The Evildoers?"

*It's just rationalizing the continued existence of a system that systematized and automated kings murdering subjects, but y'know. #1L

One of the problems with any legal system is its incapacity to say "I don't know." The parties can cast doubt on certain things and let the trier of fact make conclusions from there. The court has various quasi-superstitious rules about what counts as evidence and what doesn't which basically amount to "she's suspicious because she has shifty eyes."

But the court itself can't go "I don't know; what is an equitable next step from there?" It cannot truly admit fallibility. #1L

I stumbled on a Shakespeare in the Park production of "Henry V" sometime before the Battle of Agincourt. It played the Frenchmen especially for laughs, but I find I couldn't follow it too much. The guy who played Henry did his famous "band of brothers" speech without a hint of bravado and it was an extremely good take. It was asking his friends to be happy, not get them prepared to die through battle zeal.