Stop Making So Many Damn Laws!

Plus Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a sex scene between Aragorn and Arwen for #ThreeThoughtThursday

#1 It is impossible to be anything BUT ignorant of the law

I woke up this morning from a potent dream…

I was a lawyer in a courtroom trial. My client contended that he had been ignorant of the law he was accused of violating. The government, naturally, countered that

IGNORANCE OF THE LAW CANNOT BE USED AS A DEFENSE.
(Ignorantia juris non excusat.)

I decided, in courtroom-drama fashion, that I was going to demonstrate to the jury the impossibility of anyone knowing all the laws, or even of a single person learning just the laws that are pertinent to him.

I took a tape measure and asked a juror to hold one end. Then I walked all the way across the huge courtroom and spoke of how each of us would need to read an entire library shelf of books so-and-so long and such-and-such high, in order to know all the federal, state, county, and local laws imposed upon us.

I talked about how the pages, if placed end to end, would go around the moon and back some number of times.

I spoke of how many years it would take to read such an amount of laws. I had experts demonstrate how many bytes of data it would be, and other experts explain how many bytes of information the human brain is capable of storing. I contended that it is not humanly possible to memorize such an amount of information.

I anticipated my opponent’s rebuttal by noting that it would cost a six-digit figure just to pay a lawyer to determine and collate just the laws that were pertinent to a particular person, so he could focus on memorizing those.

And finally, I was about to start challenging the judge’s knowledge of various obscure laws, to prove that not even an “expert” can know all the laws, but I woke up.

[And I realized shortly after waking that my dream-lawyer persona could also have talked about how there are so many obscure laws on the books that every one of us is committing a felony every day without realizing it.]

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Obviously the figures in my dream-head were fuzzy, and even in my waking state, I do not currently have data on how many books, pages, laws, or words; how many times it would all go around the moon and back; how many bytes it would be, how long it would take to memorize, and whether it is even possible to do so. But I do know this:

It is, from a practical standpoint if not a literal physical one, impossible for anyone to know all the laws. Or even a tiny fraction thereof.

In a courtroom, ignorantia juris non excusat makes sense. If ignorance could be used as a defense, everyone would do it. That is not the problem.

The problem is the number of laws.

Manmade law (a.k.a. positive law or code law) is an abomination. If a manmade law is consonant with natural law, then it is unnecessary and can be handled using a common-law process. If a manmade law is not consonant with natural law, then its existence and application constitute a violation of human rights.

But if you create a legislature and give legislators the power to invent laws, then that is exactly what they will do. Which is one of the reasons why legislatures are bad too.

Granted, it is also impossible for a person to memorize all the accumulated court decisions produced in a common-law process. But if the common-law process is rooted in natural law, then they don’t need to do so. They just need to understand natural law, and chances are they’ll be good to go.

Everyone has an intuitive understanding of natural law. Even toddlers. And animals. And trees and flowing rivers and thermodynamic processes like the formation of a snowflake. Natural law is in everything.

Code law, by contrast, is 200 tons of feces dumped onto a beautiful meadow.

#2 A new logical fallacy?

I recently received a comment critical of something I had written and posted in Notes. I don’t usually check commenters’ profiles (I simply don’t have the time), but something compelled me to do so in this case.

When I saw that the commenter subscribed to just one Stack—that of the rather repellent Sam Harris—I suddenly took his critique a lot less seriously.

We know the logical fallacy of appeal to authority, wherein one suggests that one's contention, proposition, or argument is correct because some particular “expert” or authority figure agrees with it. I am not sure what the opposite of that is called, or even if it exists as an official fallacy, but whatever it is, I confess that I committed it. I judged an argument to be less worthy simply because of this person’s respect for that execrable credtard Harris.

But I do not apologize. Having Sam Harris as your only subscription is a giant red flag. It’s like saying that Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson is your favorite “scientist.” I am just not going to take you as seriously. Sorry. (Not sorry.)

PS: I was blanking on the name “Neil deGrasse Tyson,” so I did a search in DuckDuckGo for (excuse my language) “douchebag scientist npr.” Tenth search result!

#3 Further evidence that Hollywood hates us

When I first got to Los Angeles in the 1990s, I had a Subaru and $400 to my name. Someone told me that if I had a pulse, I could get a job at Cenex/Central Casting as an extra. I had a pulse, so I did.

One of my early jobs was on the movie Primary Colors. At one point, they were setting up a snow scene, and it occurred to me that we could not see our breath, so the scene would not be realistic.

Not knowing the strict class-hierarchy of Hollywood, I posed that question to the director. A non-union extra daring to speak to the director was enough to send the first assistant director scuttling over to shoo me away, but the director was actually quite cordial. He smiled and said, “Do you remember the last scene in The Shining, in the hedge maze, before Nicholson freezes to death? Do you remember whether you could see their breath or not?” (Or words to that effect—this was 1997, so I don’t recall exactly.) I had to admit that I did not remember.

This was my first introduction to the idea that Hollywood—how should I put it?—doesn’t worry too much about respecting our intelligence. I had other lessons along the way—including moments in which something was said in a script that I knew was just plain wrong.

Think, for example, of the moment in Braveheart when you see a piper playing the Scottish bagpipes, but the sound on the soundtrack is clearly of the Irish uilleann pipes. I happen to know the difference, so I spotted the issue instantly. And I am sure you have seen similar things—something in a TV show or film that you spot as being wrong because you have knowledge or expertise in that area.

I quickly came to realize that they do it all the time. That they just don’t care. That they sorta kinda think we’re all stupid.

Over the last 20 years, of course, we have also come to learn just how much they hate us. Especially if we are anything less than crazed intersectional Maoists. But I recently became aware of a particularly egregious example, especially as a lifelong Tolkien reader.

If the informational video I watched is true, then…

The original prospective producers of the Lord of the Rings films, Miramax, told Peter Jackson that they wanted…

1. To make a Gandalf frail old man who had quit pipe smoking;

2. To have Gimli swearing all the time, like a foul-mouthed sailor;

3. To have Aragorn and Arwen have an explicit sex scene in the Glittering Caves;

4. To kill off one of the hobbits to save on the budget.

I need say little more than that. How much do they hate us?

That much.