NY Law & Order: NO JUSTICE, JUST US

I can't imagine NY State is the worst in this regard either.

Still, it's quite shocking - you don't have to go to law school to become a judge???

Some of the shit that these guys have pulled is ridiculous. The kid sitting in jail for...years?...for a drug charge he has yet to be tried for.

Or the defendants that have to do community service to pay for their court-appointed lawyer. UH.

Also I hate when people write stuff like "racism and sexism that seem to come from a different place and time" (even when it's an accurate description), because, you know, HELLO, you're presently reporting that it happens in THIS place and time, so what's with the weird little figleaf?

< / end of threadjack >

(btw only one paragraph, wtf)

the article does not refer to the New York State Unified Court System. it deals only with town and village small-claim courts.

Oh my god, how terrible. Because advertisers in the NYT and your typical NYT reader would never do anything so classless and gauche given half the chance.

1. Weird implication that violations of Constitutional rights aren't actually terrible if the people pointing them out can be effectively mocked

2. Weird groundless assertion that NYT advertisers (like, I dunno, Tiffany & Co., or Loew's Theaters) and "typical" NYT readers (meaning god-knows-who -- me?) have some secret itch to unlawfully imprison petty vandals and speeders

3. Insane implication that the meat of the issue is somehow class snobbery on part of NYT "types," rather than, I dunno, gross violations of disputed-by-no-one constitutional rights

4. Weird self-fulfilling rhetorical stroke of "given half the chance," which seems intended to relieve you of the burden of demonstrating that Tiffany & Co actually imprison people without trial, but misses half the point of the original article, which is that maybe these justices should have enough oversight that they're not "given the chance" to flagrantly violate basic laws

5. Pedestrian use of late-90s-style sitcom sarcasm

x-post

I never said it was "right", did I? I thought Northwestern graduates could read.

Same old, same old.

And Slumming, I can read what I wrote well enough to see that I didn't say you said it was "right" (the word "right" only appears in my post in noun form); I said you seemed to suggest that it was non-terrible, which I think is a pretty accurate conclusion to draw from your sarcastic use of the phrase "how terrible."

But mostly I'm just annoyed by the idea that we should all stop caring about gross violations of Constitutional rights and instead turn out attention to your awe-inspiring cynicism and discernment: forget exposing massive structural problems with the state judicial system, let's all watch Slumming drolly point out the NYT's complicity in a corpocracy that might (gasp) also have shit wrong with it!

Perhaps in an ideal future petty-tyrant town justices can rail against media consolidation and we can all roll our eyes discerningly and point to their judicial abuses, and the NYT can re-expose their judicial abuses and we can all roll out eyes and point to their big-business complicity, and then we can all of us have a grand party -- in jails cells where we're being held for traffic violations, via videophones provided through lucrative prison-industry contracts with GloboTeleCorp -- and congratulate ourselves endlessly on how clear-sighted and discerning we are, making droll, cynical it's-all-the-same-isn't-it comments well past first bedcheck.

Or else, I dunno, when someone exposes Constitutional outrages whose credibility and factuality we have no particular reason to suspect, we can say something like, I dunno, "That's terrible!"

-- Slumming it on ilx (triangles9...), September 25th, 2006.

Roffle at dude using words that he doesn't actually know what they mean.

-- gear (speed.to.roa...), September 25th, 2006. (gear)

I just really like this insult because it seems to imply you're somebody.

As for the article, I'm kind of surprised. In the town where I grew up, my math teacher was a judge and a volunteer fireman, I think. I never thought about it before, but I'm pretty sure the only thing that qualified him to be a judge was the fact that he was a local dickhead.