Describing The Elephant

The great and good work of a new and just law code

Anyone who has ever had to contend with the law code in the United States by necessity instead of profit can attest to its daunting nature. The prose is disgusting, the organization is cruel, and the whole thing is a mess. This should come as no surprise, as the whole thing is a continuation of English Common Law (ECL), a labyrinthine collection of rules and regulations that started growing and mutating a thousand years ago. If you ever sit through any type of law class, you will be told that this is a good thing. This is a lie, and you know it is for two reasons: the person telling you is a lawyer.

The institution of monarchy in America will bring about a tsunami of changes at every level. Some of these changes will just happen in the course of events. Others will require substantial effort. The law code changes will naturally fall into the first category, but it is imperative that they are forced into the second. The adoption of ECL in North America was a "course of events" change. It needs to be discarded completely, torn out root and branch. While there is much that can be said positively about ECL, there is too much gray, too many loopholes, too many backdoors built in by a long dead un-virtuous aristocracy. For the best possible future, a modern code of law must be constructed.

This is not the time to begin that construction, but it is possible to "describe the elephant," though this carries the danger of getting it wrong in total regardless of how correct in detail it might be. Nonetheless, there are certain attributes that can be generally applied as a litmus test for a new law code, or any law code really, to decide if it is correct, or at least tending towards correct.

The law code must be general.

This may be shocking as it intuitively feels like specificity is a good thing. In engineering, that is true. In parenting, however, specificity can be incredibly damaging. There are certain guidelines, like “don't violently shake babies,” that can be specific because they are very simple to articulate and understand¹. But most parenting tips & advice must be general as the potential for variation is massive. This is why the extreme approaches, from "that's a paddlin'" to "we never tell xir No," can generate extremely bad results. Thus, a prospective parent is better off with general guidelines to follow so they can be flexible yet consistent. The law is not an engineering problem, and treating it as such creates suboptimal outcomes over time. The law is like parenting: certain specific, simple guidelines as well as general guidelines are both required for a flexible consistency.

The law code must be brief.

This one should be obvious. Multiple volumes of highly specific opacity breed loopholes, injustices, and no end of schemes & trickery. Just as no book can tell the whole story of every involved character, no law code can cover every potential situation, and it is lunacy to try. As well, having a massive codex of law creates a chasm between those who command and those who obey. It is impossible for leadership to consistently articulate what is required just as it is impossible for the led to repeatedly deliver. Thus, the law code should be something that especially bright middle-schoolers can memorize for speech competitions or festive oratory. The law should be something that clearly demonstrates the difference between guilty and innocent. Most importantly, the law should be accessible to those who apply it just the same as to those to who it is applied. The law must be structured and articulated in a way that those subject to it have the opportunity to encounter details and apply the rules to the process & purpose of living. This gets tricky when one considers complicated financial instruments, or Earth-to-Space transit, or some other highly technical matter involving lots of confusing tricks of many given trades. While the overlord, king, Parliament, or whatever body of leadership, needs to have oversight of all things and persons and places in the land, it is not necessary for the law to have explicit impact at all times in all places. Laws are a codified explanation of how to live correctly within a given Society. Living correctly is not a thing that can be done "by the book". To live correctly one must be aware of where the boundaries are, what is taboo, and what is worth having. The law should only concern itself with the boundaries. Taboos need to be decided by the Community, and worth needs to be decided by the Wise. It is the boundaries and their construction that dictate the health, well-being, and potentiality of a given Society. Thus, a well-constructed law code should make “certain things” unnecessary, obsolete, or just plain dumb.

The law code must be inviolate.

If you want to see a world-class demonstration of dodging & dancing, ask a public prosecutor “who benefits from plea bargaining?” Then ask a defense attorney. Then ask a judge. Plea bargaining only exists because the legal system is operated like an engineering problem on the order of “build a new bridge to heaven every 3 years.” The law is impossible to follow². It is impossible to defend yourself³. And it is impossible to literally enforce⁴. The new law code must have no exceptions, with no exceptions. The consistent flexibility comes into play in truly exceptional circumstances, but they are incredibly rare. The current law code is articulated and enforced entirely on the exception. Most people don't commit murder, rape, or assault, yet this is a huge amount of enforcement, process, and judgement⁵. Esoteric minutiae is wrapped in obscene verbosity to create scams upon scams so that a privileged elite of bureaucrats in control of hand picked lawyers and accountants can parcel up land and needlessly encumber construction and production ostensibly for the good of “The People.”⁶ Judges regularly slice Solomon’s baby 72 different ways and label it eminent domain or zoning justice or some other made up catchall for fleecing the landholding subjects of the domain. Everyone who is anyone in the realm of law, be it in construction or application or analysis, knows that every law can be bent or broken depending on personal relationships or current trends. Legislators make a game of rewarding their patrons clandestinely by having their staff saturate whatever bill or motion is within grasp with riders, clauses, addenda, and amendments to the point that a tax bill legislates bridges to nowhere and outlaws vaping for houseplants of color younger than 17.25 and older than 57.3. And all of it is subject to change or creative reinterpretation at any time by anyone with clout, status, or cash⁷.

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If applied elegantly, the three themes perform most of the heavy lifting required to build a just and worthy law code. But there is another critical element that must be addressed, and that is the participants on the interpretation side of law: judges, lawyers, and criminals. Compliance with the code of law must be obvious to the good. Interpretation and application must make it easy to despise the wicked. Criminals need not be defended, for if they are in fact criminals, what honest and just defense could there be? Similarly, under what perverse reality do the just need to defend their actions against the wicked? What possible reason or excuse puts evil people on the street and good people in debt? Of course, when there is insufficient evidence, there's always a question of what the facts truly are. But cases wherein it is a complete unknown as to the reputation and character of the involved parties are exceedingly rare to the point of silliness. In our society, the vast majority of participants in the “justice system” as criminals have dozens, sometimes scores, and far too often hundreds, of prior instances of criminality and antisocial conduct⁸.

Theoretical Thoughts

One way to obviate this kind of situation is to punish anyone involved with the criminal’s prior avoidance of consequences. If a person is found guilty in court for a crime they have committed previously numerous times, then the fool of a judge that enabled the repeat wickedness should be sitting right next to them. Any judge that makes it their business to give criminals and dangerous people the freedom to act without consequences needs to be punished severely. There is no excuse for a person who has been given the responsibility and privilege to decide what is just to willfully propagate injustice. For a crooked or incompetent judge, the safest course of action, and best for society, is permanent removal from the system. Soon after a few examples are made, remaining justices will make it their business to not screw up in assigning guilt. Of course, mistakes are made. But that is a poor excuse to give to a parent who is burying their child because some judge somewhere decided that multiple prior DUIs should not be a factor in whether or not a person is allowed to drive. One need not look far to find a depressingly high number of cases wherein a judge, citing historical injustice or rumored circumstances of living, has permitted an obviously dangerous and generally awful person to suffer no consequences for something they clearly did. The only reason this occurs is because the consequences of being portrayed as some type of "-ist" far outweigh the consequences of letting dangerous and violent people damage new victims. This alone should indicate just how unjust the justice system has become.

While activist judges are a huge part of the problem, the other part is the fact that monetary reward for allowable manipulation of obvious laws based on nebulous verbiage or willingly blind interpretation motivates a high number of lawyers to build their careers on keeping guilty people safe from the consequences they have earned. The simple fact is that if the law code requires a third party to read and act on it, it has failed. Law is not a deity requiring an intermediary to suss out instruction from vague auguries arising from the strewn bowels of birds. A highly specific, expansive, and negotiable law code is a religion that worships exceptions with priests and judges as its holy men.

The simplest solution to the above problems is a law code that is thematically general, brief, and inviolate. A law code that can be applied by any type of leader, whether it's the patriarch of a big family, the leader of a small village, the mayor of a town, the commander of warriors, the captain of a ship, or the head of a mighty nation, means faster and more complete justice over a wider area than any court in our modern system could ever hope to apply or provide. A law code that can be read, understood, and recited by any average adult means that only a few of the least able and most sorely afflicted will need any kind of representation. Everyone else must be familiar with the law. A law code that ignores exceptional cases means that it applies properly to the vast majority of society. Exceptional cases must be decided in exceptional circumstances by exceptional people. For everyone else, and everything else, there is the Law. If a law code must constantly be amended, revised, expanded, reinterpreted, or just generally manipulated, then it is worthless and detrimental to those to whom it is applied. Exceptions to the rule, as the very phrase implies, are not things that need to enter into every other discussion. The simple fact is that murderers should have a very hard time justifying what they did, and they should do it for themselves. People who cannot operate motor vehicles safely and in a consistent manner should not be given access to them by those that make and sell them. Neighbors that cannot figure out boundary lines need to get closer as people or further as subjects. Buildings should be built to serve a purpose and refined as needed. Repeat violators of peace, justice, safety, and security need to suffer shame, ostracization, and violence from the communities that are forced to deal with them. These need not be things the law concerns itself with. In a modern, intelligent, and just society, the subjects therein should never have to ask some holy man “what does the law say?” The law says what it says, and everyone knows what it says, so deal with the problem in a way that the law is kept and the problem goes away.

1. Don’t look into this one too deeply if you don’t want to believe in Race or IQ.

2. No single person knows the law in totality.

3. No lawyer represents themselves if they are smart.

4. No law enforcement agent knows the law; he is given guidelines on how to arrange his actions and statements such that a lawyer will be able to defend him or justify him at a later date. The same goes for subjects; the best counsel is always say and do as little as possible, then flee to the bosom of a lawyer as quickly as possible.

5. Not to mention cost. There is simply no good reason to spend a single nickel on anyone convicted of murder. To be quite honest, if it’s worth ruining someone’s life via incarceration, why not just un-alive them and be done with it? Or maybe kick them out… someone should write a substack essay about this…

6. “The People” don’t exist. 9 times out of 10, using this phrase indicates hidden communism, and the tenth time it’s latent communistic lexicon poisoning.

7. Judges are probably the most culpable for the most problems across the board, and typing this sentence is basically a request to be forever-screwed by the Nylon Ninnies.

8. You may not be able to fathom how little I would care if a lifetime criminal got unjustly punished. Honestly, it’s even better when someone who has made their identity harming, thieving, and breaking things that work gets “unfairly” punished. That should be part of the punishment, just so the asshole can sit in isolated, miserable, ineffectual rage at the injustice they are suffering through, which would give them a tiny taste of what they have been doing to others.