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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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All well and good to note, but that's not the legal reality.

There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom. Some technocratic societies seek to implement a limited version of that in specific domains, but an entire society founded on such principles I’d imagine would be a very miserable one for anyone who’s not a top performer.

There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom.

I feel like you have a bit of a category error here. I don't take "equality before the law" to have to do with the facts about people one way or the other. It is more of a commitment that the legal system tries to make to be fair and impartial to the extent that it can.

Of course, because humans made this system we will fail to live up to that commitment again and again. But when we say that, say, a bicycle thief and a tech CEO are equal before the law when charged with the same crime, we're not saying that they have equal intelligence or abilities, or even equal likelihood to have actually committed the crime. We're saying that we're committed to giving them approximately the same chance to prove their innocence, in approximately the same legal proceedings.

No, I know that’s what you were saying. My point is that there’s a reason why that moral precept is put before science and it’s not a conclusion of it. If a person wanted to wholly structure a society purely based on the scientific facts of the matter, it’s not one they would likely want to live in.

There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.”

No they don't; the under-[age] are far less equal, and any attempt to raise that age is simultaneously an attempt to undermine that norm.

In some select domains, sure. But I’m also pretty confident the Dred Scot decision isn’t being upheld anywhere in the US anymore.

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