What is Justice?
March 13th, 2009Ordinarily, there are three ’schools’ of thought on this issue. One is the ‘conservative’ position that justice is simply property rights. Justice means people are left alone to enjoy the fruit of their capital and labor and luck, without force or fraud from either criminals or government interfering with it. The second is the ‘liberal’ position that believes property is inherently unjust and true justice is ’social justice.’ This is where people are given equal opportunities at the expense of all other rights which might interfere, which then necessarily must follow within acceptable bounds to equal outcomes. The logic goes like this: If the opportunities were truly equal, then so would the outcomes be, so if the outcomes aren’t equal this means we must continue rectifying the obvious inequalities of opportunity, whatever the cost. Justice has not yet arrived until we can see its equal results in the world around us. The third school of thought is that justice is God’s domain, and whatever God wills the world to be like is a just world. The muslims ascribe to this theory by their constant mention of ‘Insha’allah.’ Christians resort to it every Lord’s Prayer with “Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.” And, generally, those who believe in a fated order to the universe of any sort, even darwinian evolution, will be content so long as they see the ‘divine order,’ the ‘cosmic system’ playing out as it was theoretically intended to play out. I’ve never been fond of any of them because they strike me as ‘intellectual’ justices, whereas the issue is deeply emotional and has to do with your ‘gut instinct.’ If someone spins a great argument logically proving the sky is yellow, an argument I can’t refute in any way and have to admit he’s right on every point, my gut will still rebel and I’ll still say he’s wrong, the sky is blue. This is the dual nature of ‘will.’ One part does indeed involve itself with language, logic, facts, reasoning, and all that jazz. But another train of thought operates entirely independently. It looks at something and has a visceral emotional reaction, immediately reaches a conclusion of attraction or aversion, and then cannot be convinced by anything to change their mind about it. It is in this world justice truly lives. As shown by science experiments:
In the experiment, you have two people. One is given a 100 dollars. he then can make an offer to the other person, how this money should be split. If the other person rejects the offer, they both get nothing. If he accepts it, they get whatever split the first man offered. You only get one shot so there’s no bargaining back and forth. Now, logically, if the original guy proffered a 99-1 split, the second person should still agree because he would still gain a dollar from the deal. However, the experiment showed most people were unwilling to go below 60-40. Their innate sense of justice kicks in, and they reject out of hand a social arrangement that is beneath their dignity and outrageous. The logic flies out the window and both people walk away without a penny to their name.
So when I review my visceral emotional reactions, my genuine face contorting moments when I feel wronged and that justice has not been done, I reach completely different conclusions than any of the three previous intellectual definitions. That isn’t to say that my intellect doesn’t engage itself with these issues all the time and variously has supported all three definitions in one context or another. It isn’t to say that any of the arguments are even weak or wrong or flawed. It’s just that they are incomplete and are not taking into account the complexity of the human mind. It is this raw, angry, “I must be avenged,” “this will not be allowed to stand” justice that actually has the greatest sway on people’s actions. Therefore it is an appeal to this justice, not the cold intellectualism, that most activates the masses to some meaningful course. For instance, even though the Koran clearly states that all unbelievers (kaffirs) must be conquered and enslaved or killed, and that it is therefore the carrying out of God’s divinely ordained justice to blow us up, muslims rarely act on this passage or get fired up about it and blow themselves up over it. Perhaps a few loons, or a few incredibly strong-willed people who really can internalize an intellectual argument and make it into a passionate intense judgment. But show the muslim world the suffering children of Gaza Strip, show the bombed out buildings, the crying widows, the sneering and unfeeling Israeli soldiers, the fat happy idiot Christians prating on about God’s chosen people deserving their homeland when the Palestinians have been there for millenia and driven out of all their homes– and suddenly ‘justice’ comes to the fore and Allah’s will or not, they want to at least take a few of those fucking kaffirs with them before they go. This is the raw pulsing wound that radicalizes muslims all over the globe, not any cold intellectual fare they can read in the koran. Heck, most muslims can’t even read, nor do they ever read the koran. I’m a better expert on their religion, having read the koran, sira, and many hadith, than they will ever be. Nor is it because they aren’t given ‘equal opportunities’ to live and work in Israel like the liberal crowd assumes, or because they are poor. There are plenty of poor people around the world but most don’t try to blow up their richer next door neighbors. Every single interpretation of the Palestinian conflict is based on intellectual justice and thus incomplete and flawed. More than anything else, Palestinians want emotional justice to be done. It is their emotions that hurt the most.
The Germans of Weimar Germany had a lot of reasons to hate jews. If you take the three intellectual justices, you will find that in the Christian religion jews are given short shrift and the church fathers encouraged their persecution, simultaneously the Nazi darwinism also calls for a ‘cosmic’ opposition to jews because they were foreign seed genetic competitors. From a social justice standpoint, jews were rich and in prominent social positions all across Germany far disproportionate to their numbers, and this at a time of depression and hyperinflation, influenza and starvation for the normal German people. Even from a conservative standpoint, the jews’ radical calls for marxism and attempted socialist revolutions which would have replicated the horrors of the USSR on Germany was more than enough reason to oppose Jews for the sake of property rights and law and order. However, jews were not opposed for any of these reasons, not really. It was the gut instinct, the random latching on to an ultimate injustice that could not be tolerated, that radicalized Germany against its Jews — “the stab in the back.” When Germany learned German jews had conspired with Britain to get America into WWI by pulling the strings of prominent American jews to agitate for war to the president, getting the infamous balfour declaration as payment, the German people were incensed. While Germans were dying in the front, while the German people were starving under the war-crime blockade, fat conspiring cigar smoking jews were plotting treason and the downfall of the Fatherland. Even though Germany had treated them better than anywhere else, even though they were rich and free and powerful, the jews repaid Germany by the ’stab in the back.’ It doesn’t matter if this was mainly propoganda and a myth, it doesn’t matter that 99.9999% of jews may have disapproved of this action, the emotion was there. It was this emotion that festered in the German consciousness for the next twenty years. That isn’t the whole of it though, when it comes to face-contorting rage, of a fiery sense of ‘where is justice on this earth?’ the lowest point probably wasn’t even there. The lowest point of German fury with the jews was the fact that during the great depression, many decent normal German women were forced into prositution simply to feed their kids. And who was there to make money out of their misfortune? Of course, the jews. Something like 90% of the pimps, the notorious middlemen extroardinaires, who don’t mind making money for any reason at any cost, were jews. Jewish pimps parading around brothels of decent, honorable but destitute white german women and selling them on the street to the highest bidder. Now think for ten seconds, does this scene make you angry? Does it strike a nerve? I know it struck mine. I was furious when I learned the truth. “How dare they?” Was the first question I asked myself. And that, my friends, is emotional justice.
So let’s try and narrow in on this emotional reflex and give a definition that truly fits the human experience, and an appeal that truly radicalizes people to say “ENOUGH, IT IS TIME TO ACT.” For the Romans, it was when a prominent Roman marrid woman Lucrece was raped by the Estrucan King Tarquin, announced this fact to the public, then committed suicide to blot out the shame cast on her honor. That was enough. One raped woman incensed the people more than being occupied by foreign kings for generations, more than any economic dispossession, more than any lack of democracy, more than their Gods being disrespected or whatever the current intellectual arguments were. A woman had been raped, she was now dead, and her honor had not yet been avenged. That was enough. From that day forward Rome was free. For the next two thousand years or so it was the most powerful force in history, the roman eagle still flies over America and Russia. What a difference she made by appealing to man’s emotional and instinctual craving for justice! If only we could do the same, and have the same result!
So let’s give it a whirl, shall we? The new definition of justice: “Justice is when evil people are not better off than good people.” I don’t care about the vicissitudes of fortune, as a stoic I have little interest in material advantages one way or the other. If Saddam Hussein has a finer collection of silverware and pottery than me, I’m not going to get passionately incensed. But if a wife cheats on her husband, and as a result lives happily ever after with her new guy, never shamed by the rest of the world, never feeling an iota of guilt for what she did, while the husband’s heart is broken and never recovers, miserable and alone for the rest of his life, a fundamental injustice has occurred. Why is he miserable? Why is she happy? She’s the adulterer! No matter how bad his life is, it’s okay, so long as hers is worse, he can at least gain satisfaction in that. If hers is spotless, perfect, and enviable, then what cost evil? What cost to betray, lie, and steal your way through life? Should we all just be like them, emulate them, are they the only way to thrive on this earth? If so, what is the meaning of life, what is the point of a world so degraded, wouldn’t it be better to simply obliterate the entire universe than sanction and participate in a farce that is an unjust one? The same for a victim of crime. If a man is shot in the back of the head, but the criminal walks free after a couple years, then an evil person is better off than the good person. This should NEVER HAPPEN. The criminal should be executed, and the ledgers become BALANCED again. If a family was raped and tortured to death, then the criminal should be raped and tortured to death, WORSE THAN what they did to their victims. They should be made to feel every fucking inch of what they did, tenfold, back on themselves. They should never die laughing as though they won out in the end, they should be broken, utterly BROKEN, blubbering masses of guilt, regret, and self-pity, without pride, without any bold-faced fronts, without any excuses or lies about their innocence. TORTURED AND RAPED UNTIL THEY ARE A MASS OF QUIVERING FLESH ON THE GROUND and then fed to the other criminals who are waiting their turn for the same, now THAT’S justice. No matter how bad it gets in this world, how poor people are, how many diseases or volcanoes or tsunamis or criminals or sadistic tyrants destroy good people leading good lives, so long as the volcanoes, diseases, tsunamis criminals and tyrants take out a larger number of BAD people leading BAD lives, justice is served. At least there is still an advantage in being good. At least you can look around your devestated life and say, well at least, because I was good, I do not suffer from this additional evil, that the evil-doers suffer. Justice is different from whining or self pity, it isn’t simply wishing life were better for oneself than it is. It isn’t calling for a handout like the advocates of ’social justice’ or being a miser like the advocates of ‘property rights,’ or leaning on a crutch like the advocates of ‘God’s justice.’ It is a fiery wish to punish evil and wrest meaning from this world by force of will, by Making it favor the righteous, by Making the Good become the proud, by Making the decent become the estimable, by Making the beneficent become the happy. If we want to inspire that kind of longing for justice, look for the Tarquins and the Lucreces. Look for the most wonderful girl on earth, the most beloved, kindest, warmest, decent girl on earth, and find the most vile, monstrous, unthinking, unfeeling, jiggaboo who raped, tortured, and murdered her–then walked free with money in his back pocket, a book deal, praise from all the press and a road to the easy life for the rest of his days, and then ask if this is the world we want to live in day in day out, where girls are tortured and raped to death for loving their family’s and decorating easter eggs but thugs are free within the week without a slap on the wrist. Oh wait, we don’t have to look for such stories, here’s one already:
http://cofcc.org/?p=4179
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13 year old girl murdered.
CofCC.org News Team
Update: The monster the system refused to stop, most likely has at least four female murder victims and multiple attempted murder victims.
Brutal killer was as bad as the monsters in horror movies. He burned a woman alive with lighter fluid in 1987!
This monster was released from prison in 2003. Immediately he was charged with rape, but acquitted by an OJ style jury. Then two more burned female victims were found, in which he is suspect. One of the victims was only 14.
Then he threatens to kill his own 18 month old son in stand off with SWAT. He is slapped on the wrist with a three month sentence. After being released he solicits sex from a 13 year old girl and is sentenced to a year in prison. He is released from prison months early and goes on a violent rampage. His rampage involves burglarizing a man’s house and stabbing the man ten times. It ends with the rape and murder of a beautiful 13 year old girl.
Should have been given the death penalty multiple times, yet allowed to walk the streets by OJ style juries and a broken judicial system. Click Here.
Anthony Kirkland is a violent monster and convicted sex offender. After being released from state prison early he went on a violent crime spree that ended in the brutal murder of a 13 year old girl.
This monster was supposed to have been in State Prison until March 28th, 2009 for a previous crime, but was released months early.
Overflow crowd at funeral. Click Here.
CINCINNATI - An overflow crowd of mourners attended a memorial service Wednesday afternoon to honor 13-year-old Esme Kenney.
The crowd packed St. John’s Unitarian Universalist Church off of Clifton Avenue, and so many people were in attendance that many more were turned away.
Esme Kenney’s Friends: Darkness Has Not Extinguished Her
“She was one of the best friends I’ve ever had,” Esme’s friend Erin Long said.
There was a message from the family, to the church community that has worked hard to support them during this unbelievably difficult time.
It spoke of Esme’s death, as a battle between good and evil, between light and darkness.
“The darkness has not extinguished her. And as her parents told us - he will not win,” close friend Lucas Wozniak said.
The circumstances of her death — at this point — still too much for many to talk about.
“Today is about Esme, and remembering her, and we’ll let the justice system do what it needs to do,” Esme’s Sunday school teacher Diana Long said.
“She’s an amazing girl, and everybody loved her, and she’s going to be missed so much,” Erin Long said.
There has been an outpouring of emotion since Kenney’s was found strangled to death Saturday, hours after she failed to return home from a jog.
Convicted killer and sex offender Anthony Kirkland was arrested and charged with murder in her slaying.
Hundreds attended another memorial service Tuesday night that grew so large that the School for the Creative and Performing Arts — where Kenney had been a student — moved the event to the Aronoff Center.
Watch the Report On SCPA Memorial Service
The memorial was packed with students and staff from the school who put on a farewell performance for a beloved classmate.
“We will keep your daughter’s spirit alive and we will cherish the legacy she has left with all of us,” said SCPA Principal Dr. Jonathan Futch.
The choir and the orchestra — Kenney’s two great loves at the school — had a prominent place on stage.
“I’m here, not to be sad, but I’m here to celebrate the life of this phenomenal young lady,” SCPA alumni association member Robby Todd said.
Her sister, Frannie Kenney, was called on stage as Esme Kenney was inducted into the alumni association.
And while there were tears, there was hope for the future.
“In your light Esme, we will overcome evil,” said teacher Laurie Wyant. “We love you, Esme, and your family at SCPA will honor you.”
Plans were discussed for a permanent memorial at the school and a march to raise money for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
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