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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations. Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing, the adult equivalent of signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!

In a wider way, this is a bigger problem with the modern justice system. A hundred years ago, a lot of low-level justice was dispensed by police directly. Some youths being annoying just got the shit beaten out of them with truncheons, and they learned their lesson. Today the cops aren't allowed to do that any more, and the justice system is incapable of anything like that kind of rapid, effective lesson.

As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations.

If you want to have those, you need trustworthy interpreters. We don't have those. They'll do crap like give you shit for your cheeseburger when you know damn well none of the dairy cows were in any way, shape, or form the mothers of the beef cattle. And anyway they're cattle, not goats.

where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing

But was "you can't flip a light switch" really against the spirit of Shabbat? Or carrying an object from one particularly subjectively defined area to another, for that matter.

signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!

This is a "scrivener's error". "I spelled my middle name wrong on page 3, so I exempt myself from our agreement" isn't allowed.

Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath

I wonder if there is some merit to the absurd rules-lawyering that you see in Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, sticking a wire around Brooklyn doesn't make it a 'household' but I can see a more 'spirit of the law' ethos moving the borders of the rules one stage at a time until you're at Reform Judaism and nobody believes in God any more.

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