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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31689 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Due process is never a weapon.

I completely disagree with this. Knowingly dragging an innocent person through the court system in an attempt to intimidate or punish him for his lawfully taken actions is a weapon, and has already been used. Cool! I get my "day in court", several in fact! I get to spend from tens up to hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the feds, and if my lawyers slip up, I'm getting locked up. Yay "due process"!

It's the due process that gives you your several days in court, however taxing they may be, rather than just, say, being disappeared to a banana republic's prison system.

Sure. I'm not saying all systems with no due process are better than systems with due process, or that they're better on average, or anything like that. I'm saying fixating on the idea leaves you open to Goodhart’s Law, a failure mode that seems to be more and more frequent in western liberal democracies. If you want an extreme example, the Soviet Union had due process as well.

Indeed, the Soviet Union had so much due process that a friend of a friend once fled an ambulance on a broken leg because it was well known that the due process for discharging patients from hospital was so onerous many doctors never bothered.

Say there is a powerful government official who wants to do these things to you.

Would you rather live in Earth 1 where there is due process, or Earth 2 where there isn't?

It's not "due process " which is costing you hundreds of thousands. It's the bad government official, and due process is protecting you from them, even if it sucks.

It hurting to be shot while wearing a bullet proof vest doesn't make the vest a weapon of the enemy.

Say there is a powerful government official who wants to do these things to you.

Would you rather live in Earth 1 where there is due process, or Earth 2 where there isn't?

It depends on many factors, and there might indeed be cases where I'd opt for Earth 2.

It's not "due process " which is costing you hundreds of thousands. It's the bad government official, and due process is protecting you from them, even if it sucks.

This assumes the government official would do something more egregious to me given the choice, and I see no reason to grant that. If you start sweeping people off the street and sending them to gulags, that's the kind of action that is plainly visible to my fellow citizens, and it comes at a cost to the person who ordered it. Maybe they're as powerful as Stalin and they can afford such ruthlessness, but if we're talking about something roughly analogous to modern American, if nothing else he'll have to be careful about what will happen to him, if his party loses the elections. This is where due process helps people like that. You can ruin someone's life without exposing yourself to threat of retaliation.

Keep in mind, if you want to say that, all things considered, you'd prefer to live in a country with due process than without - that's fair enough, it's a completely respectable position. All I'm saying is that your original position of "due process is never a weapon" is clearly false, and that it's been abused to the point that your original implied threat isn't necessarily so scary.

You'd rather get locked up instantly? UrgentSloth was commenting on the dichotomy between "due process" and "locked up without", not between "due process" and "unmolested".

You'd rather get locked up instantly?

Depends for how long. Also, the obvious injustice of it might paradoxically help me retain my standing in my community.

UrgentSloth was commenting on the dichotomy between "due process" and "locked up without", not between "due process" and "unmolested".

Then maybe he should have said that, instead of saying "Due process is never a weapon. The denial of it is the weapon."

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