andrewducker | Interesting Links for 13-11-2022

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Interesting Links for 13-11-2022

1. A material normally only found in meteorites has now been made artificially, and may solve our issues with some rare earth metals: (tags:materials meteor space technology viaSwampers )
2. German transphobe also a Holocaust denier: (tags:Holocaust transgender Germany viaSwampers LGBT )
3. Iran Votes to Execute Protesters (there are 15,000 in prison right now): (tags:Iran protest death_penalty OhForFucksSake )
4. English people encounter pizza for the first time: (tags:pizza history )
5. Discovery of bronze statue rewrites Italy's Etruscan-Roman history: (tags:history archeology Italy )
6. Why do so few women excel at maths? Sexism, of course: (tags:sexism women mathematics )
7. Major ad firm Omnicom recommends clients pause Twitter ad spend (clients include Apple and McDonalds, and 5,000 more): (tags:Twitter advertising Doom )
8. How "Wordle editor" became a real job at The New York Times: (tags:games language )

"has Marie-Luise Vollbrecht actually been convicted of Holocaust Denial"

No. She was *called* a Holocaust denier, asked a court to say that they weren't allowed to call her that, and the court said "They can totally call you that, because you are one".

This is not the same as being found guilty of Holocaust Denial. But now that a court has said that she is one, it's entirely possible that the justice system is taking note and she will be. Or that they might decide that the balance of evidence is good enough for individuals to call her one, but not good enough for the state to charge her as one.

I think that in any large group, once you start telling people that X is to blame, and then enough of them join because of your stated hatred of X, then the group probably counts as being an X-hating group.

Also, if you're willing to send people off to the gas chambers for being X because it furthers your goals, then you're treating them as effectively sub-human, and thus can probably be justifiably called X-hating, even if your actual feelings are stark indifference to their fate.

I'd be delighted to understand more about your loathing of legal positivism :-)

(1) Ah, there may be a distinction going on here between civil defamation (or the German equivalent) and the German criminal code. Perhaps a case of "If you say these sorts of things that *might* not actually make you a Holocaust Denier but it associates you closely enough with that sort of remark and that sort of person that your reputation hasn't suffered if someone actually calls you a Holocaust Denier.

(2a) "I think that in any large group, once you start telling people that X is to blame, and then enough of them join because of your stated hatred of X, then the group probably counts as being an X-hating group."

I agree.

(2b) "
Also, if you're willing to send people off to the gas chambers for being X because it furthers your goals, then you're treating them as effectively sub-human, and thus can probably be justifiably called X-hating, even if your actual feelings are stark indifference to their fate."

I also agree. I also think that if you are sending lots of people (or groups of people to be mass murdered is pretty secondary to your reasons for being an X-hating or Y-hating organisation.

(3) Specifically German Legal Positivism, mostly because it divorces the study of law from the law's grounding as a useful tool for human society and as something either grounded in morality (or at least shared systems of ethics) or designed to advance morality in society. It is similar to my concerns about how economics as a science behaves - cut away from the actual humans and humanity in the system.

I think you can establish some objective moral positions in a *human* society. Even you can't, I still think it is legitimate to say that a commonly shared moral position has some legitimacy especially when it is linked to some genuine improvements in utility. I am both a strong form and weak form Natural Lawyer. I also think that law is a tool that helps humans live in dense, complex urban environments and therefore contributes to our material and cultural richness. I also think that law has a role in actively shaping our morality and our ethics. We can agree that we *ought* to do more X and less Y and then make laws that support us in achieving that goal.

So my gripe with German Legal Positivism is that it sees the law as an abstract thing and not as a human tool for humans to use.

(3) Ah, gotcha. I think that there is definitely space to say "The law is frequently implemented as a system with no connection to morality, and as a purely mechanical process" - as part of studying how law is done. But in that case you also need to examine things like jury nullification, and the options that the judges and juries have to say "No, screw this, we're doing the right thing", and how they operate as escape hatches in the system.

The idea that law is wholly a system that can merely operate as a set of rules was, I hoped, made to look very foolish when AI/"logical rules system" approaches to law failed utterly in the 80s, and also when postmodern approaches to language made it clear that language/logic/reality all inhabit different levels of abstraction and cannot perfectly map onto each other.

Jury nullification is why I'm an American Legal Realist. Even in a system without juries and one with quite technocratic and positivist judges you can't get away from the impact of how those judges actually behave or how the legal system and society as a whole decides which cases to bring forward.

I do think there is a role for studying law in the abstract. I think any properly constituted legal system ought to have a great deal of internally consistent logic in it and be amenable to prediction. You can be a useful legal technician without knowing why a particular law is the law. But a legal system isn't dealing in spherical cows *and* I object to the notion that one *ought* to separate the law from its function in human society.

(And some of the same thinking informs my scepticism about block-chain as a contractual or monetary tool - some of this stuff is very messy *and* the legitimacy of decisions might actually rest on them being made by a human. )

I dated a very smart legal academic once, and she did an awesome job of correcting my spherical cow thinking about law!

I agree that predictable law is good - if you can't make a good stab at telling both whether you are breaking the law, and how close you are to a legal grey area then it makes life vastly more risky. But yeah, law is a tool for making society better, and we need to keep that in mind.

On reflection I am cross at myself for missing the Scots Law / Latin pun of spherical causa

Condictio causa data causa non secuta being a type of legal action one can raise in Scots Law and known - at least in my Unjustified Enrichment class as the Condictio Cows and Ducks and Cows and Sheep.

I rather like that!

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Interesting Links for 13-11-2022

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