An AIM conversation with Brian on the subject of lawyers I’ve elided some of my non-relevant asides to streamline the text.<\/p>\n
18:26:44 darmon22:<\/font> Hire some hotshot lawyer to get it back. At one point in “Stranger in a Strange Land”, Michael Valentine, the title character, refers to the legal system, laws, and lawyers as a great goodness for healing differences. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t drinking something at the time I read it, because it likely would have ended up spraying out through my nose onto the book. <\/p>\n And yet, maybe there is some validity to this perspective. We humans disagree quite a bit. And violence is not as uncommon an outcome as we might desire. The U.S. has done fairly well in terms of relatively little in the way of massive insurrections, domestic terrorism, civil wars, etc. Perhaps our legal\/judicial\/tort system, and lawyers in particular deserve a place alongside the stars of organized sports as a relatively healthy way to moderate the churning sea of conflict in which we live.<\/p>\n Perhaps the social democratic institutions and lower economic disparities of other industrialized nations serve a similar role. And to judge from statistics on violent crime, perhaps they do it better. Not that I’m pretending these countries are without lawyers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n18:26:54 sunfallen:<\/font> fuck that noise.
\n18:27:19 sunfallen:<\/font> unless the lawyer can add hours on to my life… then we might talk.
\n18:27:53 darmon22:<\/font> I find it odd that half of the world’s lawyers are American. The rest of the world somehow gets by.
\n18:28:41 sunfallen:<\/font> Yeah. perhaps the rest of the world hates itself less…. *thinks about wars, bombings, fascism, and terrorism* … Okay, maybe europe hates itself less.
\n18:29:07 darmon22:<\/font> In Japan, there’s a national limit on law school class sizes. They hatehatehate litigating.
\n18:29:42 darmon22:<\/font> If a disagreement comes to court,there’s such a mutual sense of failure that it even got to that point that no one wants to show their face.
\n18:29:46 sunfallen:<\/font> How much do japanese lawyers earn?
\n18:30:07 sunfallen:<\/font> If only we could transplant that sense of shame and desire for harmony.
\n18:30:57 darmon22:<\/font> Japan really does have a much larger middle class. The top CEOs make, like, $300,000.
\n18:31:08 sunfallen:<\/font> Nice. And the janitors?
\n18:31:59 darmon22:<\/font> They live modestly, but there is a sense that anyone who gives 40+ hours a week deserves to have health and security, so there’s no one on the street.
\n18:33:09 darmon22:<\/font> The standard of living ends up somewhere like Norway, even though it’s far less socialized. Everything costs a fortune, nobody makes a huge fortune, but nobody works their ass off for squat like they do here<\/font><\/p>\n