Schlagwort-Archive: USA

USA

Civil Right (wings) in the US.

JustitiaSeriously, what is going on with civil rights in the US? Last week I already reported NYTimes articles regarding the jailing of half a community of apparently innocent black people for alleged drug dealing in Tulia, Texas, US.

Now the NYTimes reports another instance of “jurisprudence” that makes me want to vomit. This time the incident has been taking place in Alabama. Apparently, three mentally ill black people have been talked into confessing to manslaughter of a non-existing baby and have accordingly been punished. It’s so absurd I can hardly believe it.

I must state, of course, the disclaimer that no legal system is free of flaws (implied in the word ‘system’, which in essence means that general rules are applied to individual cases in order to keep the complexity manageable. It seems therefore unavoidable to accept that a certain number of individual cases will not be dealt with adequately in any system (legal, mental, social or digital, etc.).

But that recourse is only available to non-abusive, non-biased legal systems in VERY few, VERY problematic cases. The one noted above does not seem to be difficult. But it does seem racially biased.

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US Politics, USA

Leviathan has to move.

LeviathanA friend in need is a friend indeed. Leviathan certainly is not a friend of the Afghan people as recent reports of new fights in and around Kabul confirm.

So instead of trying to forge some sort of working government out of the state-of-nature-like inter-agency conflicts of competing warlords Leviathan apparently prefers competing with his friend Nicholo M. on who is best in curtailing civil liberties in the West. A state-of-the-extremely- scary-art example of the latter was exhibited last week in the New York Times, titled “Kafka in Tulia“.

I am not going ot summarise the article, I think it’s best if you read it yourself. Now if the West (and especially the US) want to underscore the theoretically sound claim that decent institutions of governance are prerequisite to economic and social development – and that the West is an example of those institutions – I think stories like the one above seem to make it necessary to reconsider the definition of “decent” in today’s politics.

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