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Notes -
The Cat in the Hat Comes to Court
WSJ Article on cultural and political strife in jury rooms
(Note: I tried to archive(dot)is the link, but it kept failing. If one of you internet wizards could post a non-paywalled link, I'd
move to dismiss all chargesappreciate it).The article does the best that journalism can do today; it begins with a pretty fucking cringe anecdote (more on that below), then generalizes, then backs up the generalization with some "stats" on jury surveys. In weaves in the beginning anecdote throughout the piece to keep the reader engaged. It isn't deliberately misleading or negligently undereported, it's just sort of ... meatless.
The TLDR is that the post-COVID cultural / political situation is making it difficult for juries to come to agreements when, ostensibly, the should be or previously were able. The plural of "anecdote" isn't data and, thanks to the many law-pilled Mottizens, it's plain to see how, if one wants to, it's easy to cherry pick cases (and jury conduct, I would presume) that are absolutely wild. Does that mean it's a real trend? Perhaps, perhaps not. Some of the "experts" quoted kind of gesture in that direction, but the article fails to make a definitive case.
Back to the fuckery
The opening of the article details how a grown-ass jury forewoman decided to make halloween costumes for herself and other jurors and then, with the help of a Boomer Karen, hen-pecked everyone into showing up in red/black shirts and then posing for a group photo in the "costumes":
The triggering thing here, with those who have eyes to see, isn't some sort of pearl clutching around the "sanctity of being entrusted as jurors." It is that a cross-generational alliance of the worst kinds of women guilt-forced everyone else to perform a MANDATORY FUN TIME kafabe.
This is the same character as HR-led corporate initiatives like "dress up as your favorite supreme court justice! (Note: all costumes must be Ruth Bader-Ginsberg)" or "Office pajama day!" or, of course, the LGTBQ+ month. No, they don't actually force you to take part (unless, you know, they fucking do) but if you don't the passive-agressive, begging-the-question bullying becomes its own special torment. This is the infamous office space "pieces of flair" absurdity transformed into a political purity test.
When posters like @faceh directly and others (....me) indirectly assert that "women aren't the problem, but the problem is with women" this is what we mean. This is jury duty. These people are strangers to one another. That these two women would find no qualms in trying to enforce their own personal tastes and attitudes onto strangers is exactly the kind of hyper-entitlement, women-are-wonderful thinking that seems to be creating serious issues in societal competency and functioning.
I wonder how much of this dynamic infects actual jury rulings. How many "unanimous" rulings have happened because one or two Karens made up their minds and then hen-pecked everyone else into agreeing with them using social tactics instead of logic and reason?
I often compare women's social power to men's physical power. Imagine if a couple of burly men had physically intimidated all of the women into dressing in bikinis or slutty cleavage suits. Would people think it was cute and quirky then? Would people believe that it was a fair and impartial jury behind closed doors?
Isn't this dynamic just the plot of Twelve Angry Men? It's not strictly bad in the context it's played in, nor is it necessarily gendered.
MathWizard's comment is correct. I first encountered the film in a logic class I took in middle school, as a way to contrast the emotional thinking of most of the jury against the logical, evidence-based thinking of the protagonist who wins more and more jurors over by forcing skeptical analysis of the evidence and witnesses and their statements.
As a complete aside, I've had thoughts at various points over the past decade+ that a modern remake of 12 Angry Men, featuring 12 women on a rape case with a fratty white male defendant would be appropriate. There's a lot of kinks, like how an all-woman jury doesn't make sense like an all-man jury does in the 1950s, and obviously evidence and witnesses to a rape would be quite different from the ones for murder. Maybe in a few years, I'll be able to have Claude generate a script, and in a few more years, have Grok generate a feature-length film of it.
They could then wear CUTE group costumes together and take CUTE photos together without Problematic killjoys like Mr. Puig ruining their FUN! Yayyy!
Kinks, eh? That’s one way to get people to watch your movie with a cast of twelve women.
A movie called 12 Angry Women would likely cause some online women to be… displeased… even if it’s because the title format was inherited from its predecessor. Whatever it’s called won’t stop Chuds from referring to it as “Hoes Mad (x12),” though.
Accuser could be a black stripper to tee-up the parallels to Duke Lacrosse. After a difficult Not Guilty verdict, Twist would be that the fratty white male was guilty all along due to him having the 1) privilege of hiring an expensive, amoral defense lawyer and 2) the just, goodhearted ladies of the jury, under the trickery and manipulations of the toxic defense lawyer, not wanting to risk sending an innocent man to prison. Fade to a black screen with factoids such as “one in four college women are raped every year” before rolling the credits.
That's the porn parody, at least if this film turns out to be well-received enough to deserve one.
Another aside: there's a clip of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy that goes viral every once in a while, where he gets a "question" wrong, for the "answer" of something like "this word for a gardening tool can also refer to a sexually promiscuous person," and he gets it wrong for saying "what is a hoe?" Of course, the correct "question" was "what is a rake?" This confuses a lot of people right now, especially young people, who believe that both should be correct (and/or don't even know that "rake" would be correct). Back when that episode of Jeopardy was being recorded, the proper spelling of the slang term for "whore" was actually "ho," but it was almost immediately after that that "hoe" also became a correct spelling due to social media blowing up and people typing such words out much more often than before and naturally going for "hoe" as a familiar word (and possibly spellcheck).
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