[sinistersnare]

I agree that contemporary rhetoric on reparations is quite poor. But, scholars today agree that reparations are a way of understanding our government's position on change and not on giving money to people (Reconsidering Reparations by Olufemi Taiwo is about this). You give some good stuff to think about with the historical point, but I still believe it must be tried again, and better this time.

So I don't discount the legal processes, I am saying they must be changed. That is how we can actually solve issues like this, instead of simply putting a band-aid on each time we have systemic issues like this.

I find myself to be an anti-nihilist as a matter of fact. Reparations is not an _ideal_ for which I have grounded in nothingness (nihilism). Reparations must be a state of being for our government, whose material being should be solving injustice and not propagating it.

[racketcon2089]

Anyone who wants to change the legal system to deliver a specific outcome instead of follow a specific process is always going to be my enemy.

I would be happy to die for habeas corpus, the right to face your accuser, the right to a trial by jury, freedom from ex post facto expropriation, public trials, the right of appeal, and countless other things which literal wars were fought over for a good 700 years of hammering out common law.

To be ignorant of the protections this brings and the costs its absence imposes is legal nihilism, the focus on a single outcome in the present with no provision for the future.

I hope the prosecutor makes their case well and the jury follows the judge’s instructions and returns a verdict favorable to tenants. But if the prosecutor drops the ball or the jury makes a decision that baffles me, upholding that process is more important to justice than any single outcome.

Many Americans are not only willing to die to uphold this, but part of their job is also to kill in its defense. The pseudo-heidigerian stuff about government having a state of being just reads like you’re gearing yourself up to rationalize imposing your beliefs through nominative positioning.

[sinistersnare]

Funny enough, Olufemi also writes a book on this!