Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
On Julian Assange
Is nobody at all going to notice, in any context at all, that disputed-consent acquaintance rape cases have an very, very low conviction rate no matter what else, that nobody has ever found a way to alter this fact, and that therefore the odds are astonishingly high that everyone involved in this shit-show is wasting their time? I mean, everyone involved on both sides of the thing is bellowing about "due process" of this and that, but is there nobody at all involved who has even considered renting a room and getting some coffee for both sides' lawyers and having a get-it-done meeting aimed at actually advancing some slim possibility of ever reaching a conclusion? Or would everyone involved prefer to just carry on making speeches and appearing on television until kingdom come? I apparently meet only a particular and specialised subset of the legal profession.
Jacques Verges, in France, invented the concept of the "barrage". It's a specialised defence strategy for use when your client is not only amazingly obviously guilty, but also guilty of such horrendous (often literally genocidal) crimes that there is no hope of leniency or mitigation either. Basically it involves just fucking around and taking up as much of the court's time as possible to allow your client to make unrelated political speeches and/or throw around accusations of greater moral culpability at the side which won the war in which your client committed the atrocities he is currently on trial for.
I read about it in the 1980s. I thought it would remain a micro-curiosity, but no, here people are trying to convert it into the beginnings of a mass market product. Michael Mansfield QC and Claes Bergstrom. Two guys who deserve each other.
Update: Apparently Wikipedia says that the Verges strategy was called "rupture", not "barrage". Memory is unreliable so I won't gainsay them.
this item posted by the management 8/22/2012 07:29:00 AM
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