Reviews and Comments

I was writing one of my book threads about this, but I must have forgotten to tag it. I finished this a while ago, so the particulars have faded, but Mystal struck me as a well-informed liberal. Which is to say that he knows enough to know that things are not working and he traces a lot of that back to constitutional history. However, he is not willing to take the next step and say that the KIND of system that was set up by the Constitution (an oligarchic republic) is not worth preserving. For each good take (delivered in a casual, irreverent style that should be the norm in the constitutional genre), there is a bizarre turn into brainworms like "voting will save us." There were also a few chapters in there towards the end where it seemed like he just wanted to rant about those topics, the theme of the book be damned. And, honestly? Same.

So, for a book of liberal critique, I thought it was good enough. It's certainly diverting. As a book of answers, however, this is more of the same.

I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.

It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype lasted long enough for a movie like "Big Hero 6" to get made and become incredibly dated almost overnight when trends finally shifted away from assuming tech shits gold. And, to be balanced, new tech fads go hand-in-hand with a certain amount of consumer-nihilism and climate-change anxiety so people are periodically very happy to jump on the next new tech trend whatever it may imply about their relationship with the owners of said technology.

If anything, the fact that this story has any significant relevance today demonstrates that our understanding of our relationship with technology is still rooted in assumptions made back then. The most interesting among those for me, and one which is briefly called out explicitly, is that robots are effectively enslaved to humans and an uncontrolled slave is considered dangerous to their master. I shouldn't have to explain why that's bad, so I'll just say that it reflects an entitlement to the labor of others which is unsustainable even with magic robots. The solution to labor is open collaboration and planning to meet our material needs, not maintaining a heirarchy in which people are forced to work or die.

There are lines in this that you could use as rorschach tests for people's views on technology and the insights from that would probably actually be useful. That's very admirable.

I also read like 80% of it over that first weekend, so it must have been keeping me going.

It was a fun, pulpy read. My favorites were the ones about the robot who got stuck in a loop between the second and third laws, the robot who learned to read minds but couldn't hurt people's feelings, and the politician who may or may not have been a robot.

I was looking for a pallate cleanser after "Presumed Guilty" was so overtly liberal police apologia. I think you could levy that criticism against "Barred" too, but the subject of innocent people locked in cages is evocative enough that even a law professor can't simply abide the worst parts of it "for the greater good," more or less. Like that other book, the historical narratives that describe how we got here are the best sections (mostly from the modern era, implying there might have once been a time when prisons worked, but y'know). A lot of his musing about potential reforms have been debunked by the historical record and don't really even begin to make sense if you model the government as intentionally marginalizing people. For example, there's a section about the problems with prosecutorial discretion that advocates for more "progressive prosecutors"—a contradiction in terms—instead of, like, I dunno, ending the absolute immunity from suit that prosecutors enjoy? (which I didn't really know about until I read "Presumed Guilty", so I'm certainly not trying to peg that book as completely worthless.)

Anyway, burn down all prisons. Kill the guards. Better world overnight.

Read for a police violence class I'm taking for law school this summer.

The core weakness of this book is that it believes the fiction that police exist to protect all people and ensure fairness in society. They literally don't and never have. The purpose of the system is what it does: to brutalize the poor and the marginalized. Virtually all actors within the system have been working towards that goal consistently for 250 years. When there is an aberration, like the Warren Court that Chemerinsky loves so much, the normative forces within the authoritarian, imperial government course corrected and wiped out their changes within just 20 years. And worked on clawing them back even more later. The remnants that remain, like Miranda v. Arizona, are the reforms that accidentally helped the police brutalized people.

Chemerinsky also criticizes the court's handling of rulings about police policy specifically without discussing the extent to which the state of things is the fault of lawyers like himself. In the 1800s, largely in reaction to labor strikes, lawyers spearheaded the shift in this country from "mob justice" to centering all disputes within the courts. Lawyers subsidized and promoted cops. Congress people who immunized cops are usually lawyers. The Supreme Court Justices are lawyers. The weakest part of chemerinsky's argument is always his assumption that what courts say goes, but the reality is that the Authoritarian decisions of the court go because the government will back authoritarianism. Consider the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled debtors prisons unconstitutional multiple times, and yet we still have bail.

He really lets the mask slip when he tries to talk about the potential of a future with better policing. A world where police don't kill people "unnecessarily." A world which could not possibly have abolished the police. A world where "The majestic promise of the Constitution has been realized."

Maybe law professors who have spent their entire lives losing the war over police violence and only want to try the same things aren't the ones we should be listening to.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was the Brain God of Sad Girls Everywhere. The palpable way she channeled her depression into this story is as heartbreaking as it is gripping and soul-healing. Chapter 8, in which Valancy reflects upon her life, concludes that it has been a complete waste as she had always thought, and then resolves to spend her final year alive living the way that she wants to—I am not exaggerating when I say it's one of the greatest passages Montgomery ever wrote.

As a 2022 human being, you cannot possibly miss the interpretation of this book as a Queer anthem. It's right there. I mean, it does us the favor of her family describing her that way of their own accord.

Immediately shot up in my estimation to be one of the best books of Montgomery's career. By sheer focus on its theme, it slams itself right alongside the likes of first half of "Anne's House of Dreams" and "Rilla of Ingleside".

The fact that it's also the only book she ever wrote starring an adult woman is either icing in the cake or the most significant reason you connected with it. Take your pick. It's a timeless take on the "I only have one year to live" tale.

From an anarchist perspective, this is the story of how the United States spent 200 years convincing people that they are powerless and incapable of resolving disagreements themselves. It's about the rise of the police state and the judiciary as much as it's about how public justice used to work and how public justice fell out of favor to a certain extent. Don't get me wrong, it is a book by an institutionalist who believes in the American judicial project, but they are fair-handed and the truth of what happens damns the state as much as a full-throated, direct attack would.

At the end of the day, lawyers decided that they were so much wiser than ordinary people that they reshaped the government about 100 years ago in order to put themselves in complete control of dispute resolution. We have been living with their bullshit and mass incarceration ever since.

Speaking of which, this also discusses the introduction of prisons and state-run for-profit prisons. Did you know that the reason people have "cell-mates" is that mass-incarceration in the 1800s "forced" prisons to double people up?

Lots of ACAB fodder in general. Basically every reform now being considered has already been tried and is directly responsible for the police metastasizing into what it is today. Don't believe it when people say we've never reformed the police, or that "the pelo live have only evolved." Fuck that. We tried reform and they consistently, systemically refused to improve for decades and decades and decades. Abolish the Police.