[quote="Pelanor Eldrich":1pioviyf]General support for the JA began to erode, in my opinion, due to several factors:
The perception of the Judiciary as a one man show
The perception that Ashcroft could use the JA as a way to alter the balance of gov't power
The perception that the current implementation of the JA was overly complex to work effectively in the CDS
The perception that only legal professionals could truly access the institution
The perception that the Judiciary was excessively ethnocentric (British)[/quote:1pioviyf]
The notion that there was support that gradually eroded is, I am afraid, false: there were always people who supported it and those who did not support it: as far as I am aware, only one person (Pat) actually changed his opinion on the desirability of the project - others merely (wholly improperly) gave into those who did not like it in the first place.
[quote="Pelanor Eldrich":1pioviyf]The Ashcroft Judiciary could effectively function independently of the CDS. In fact it could be an indepedent institution used by all of SL including the CDS. One of the criticisms of any CDS judiciary was the bias in ruling against citizens or gov't when hearing cases brought forward by non-citizens.
The problem, of course, as Ashcroft aptly points out, is that it cannot function without enforcement. CDS enforcement is weak enough as it is. Some kind of large bank/escrow service would be needed to hold assets for any kind of gov't independent judiciary to have a chance of working. All of the serious previous attempts at binding SL conflict resolution failed in no small part due to lack of enforcement.[/quote:1pioviyf]
There is no point in having a permanent escrow, since such an escrow is, for all effective purposes, lost to the user when it is put down in any case. What would be needed is a liquid escrow, of the sort that I propose, whereby a person could authorise an institution to remove up to a certain amount from that person's Linden dollar account at any time in the future. That, of course, would need to be hard-coded.
[quote:1pioviyf]I do hope we can give this another try within the CDS after the election. I also hope that Ashcroft will stay on to help us with it.[/quote:1pioviyf]
I am afraid that that will not be possible. I do not believe in throwing good money after bad, and the same goes for my valuable time. I will remain a citizen until the polls in the election close, but no longer. The utterly breathtaking irresponsibility of the way in which this government has acted in destroying a judicial system because it rejects those features that I made abundantly clear from the start would be and ought to be present (as Pat acknowledged), even though the arguments against those very features were considered and rejected at the time that the system was approved, means that I have no desire to contribute anything further to this community, and strongly suggest that nobody else ever be so foolish as to attempt to do so ever again, either.
I do not believe that it is possible to create any fair and effective judicial system in any community that is dominated or controlled by irrational anti-intellectuals who purposely shun analytic consideration of issues in favour of insubstantial polemic, argumentation by recitation of pejorative adjectives, intellectual dishonesty, personal attacks, and/or grotesque intellectual laziness of the sorts that have overwhelmed the discussion of the judiciary, nor one in which people are expected, on pain of personal malice and accusations of insanity or inability to compromise, to subordinate their opinions of what is right to those who are most aggressive or vocal, irrespective of whether those people are able to provide any genuine, reasoned argument to substantiate what they claim.
It is also wholly impossible to create any fair judicial system in a community whose institutions of state (in this case, the legislature and the Scientific Council) are filled by people with people whose understanding of law is so dim that they are unable to extrapolate the consequences of a set of rules, unable to understand fully what the function of a judicial system is, are utterly impervious to the overwhelmingly obvious consequences of lack of detail, yet who simultaneously insist that they know best how to run a judicial system, and at the same time purposely refuse to engage in genuine, reasoned debate about what precisely they think that a judicial system should do, or how precisely it should do it.
The mind-bending and pervasive incompetence and unprofessionalism of the CDS's present institutions was most starkly illustrated in last week's meeting of the Scientific Council, in which, not only was it revealed that the procedures approved only the previous week had not even accounted for the overwhelmingly obvious eventuality of a tied vote on whether or not to ratify a bill, it became obvious that a member of the Council (Pat) had sent an e-mail to every other member, urging them to ratify a particular bill, and not resubmit it for rewriting, because he (a strong supporter of the bill himself) believed that there were political reasons for doing so, that he considered that the next iteration of the legislature would "not be like any other legislature", and in which it became quite apparent that the members of the Council did not even have the same understanding as each other of what it [i:1pioviyf]meant[/i:1pioviyf] to ratify a bill. When the vote as to whether to ratify the bill was tied, the Council spent around [i:1pioviyf]forty-five minutes[/i:1pioviyf] discussing what to do, and eventually decided to re-take the vote couched in different terms, which resulted in two people who had hitherto voted not to ratify it, but to submit it to be rewritten, to vote to ratify it, but "recommend" that it be rewritten. It was therefore quite clear that two people who had honestly believed that the Bill was unconstitutional had nonetheless voted to ratify it just out of convenience, in consequence of not even having a rule to deal with a tied vote. (It is quite apparent that they cannot have changed their view on the constitutionality itself, since the substantive constitutionality was not discussed at all during the forty-five minutes).
It was at that meeting that I realised that, even if the Judiciary Act was restored, and the judiciary implemented as I had always intended, there would be no prospect of real, lasting, long-term justice in the CDS, because the impoverished understanding, hapless amateurism and crushing incompetence extends far too deep.
Although certain people with warped views insist that professionalism is evil, professionalism is really about more than getting paid: it is about dedicating oneself to becoming exceptionally skilled in a particular field so that there can be far more achievement in that field than there could be by people not so dedicated; it is about professional detachment from the work that one undertakes; it is about always putting one's professional duty above one's own personal interests; it is about having and always maintaining a rigorous standard of professional ethics; and it is about never being satisfied with anything less than the very best that can be achieved, even if it means a great deal more hard work than might otherwise be undertaken. Professionals do not, as officials in the CDS pervasively do, fudge things, or make do with what, at first glance, seems to be approximately adequate, or do whatever of those things that will achieve something approximating what one is aiming for that takes the least work, or do what one is seeking to do in whatever way seems the most "fun", or do things in a particular way just to make it easy for everybody to join in. Professionals believe in putting in as much work as is necessary to get things as good as they can be, and that professionalism takes dedication, hard work and skill. Professionalism means recognising that nothing is worth doing unless it is worth doing, at the very least, properly. Professionalism means recognising that jacks of all trades are masters of none, and that one should strive to achieve excellence in whatever field in which one has skill and to which one has chosen to dedicate oneself, and recognise that other fields are better left to those who have similarly chosen to do the same in relation thereto, for the benefit of all. It is that sort of professionalism that is absolutely necessary to make the extremely difficult, unavoidably complicated, and highly skilled task of creating and running a truly fair judicial system even remotely possible, and it is that sort of professional attitude that is, apart from many of the people who are professionals of one sort or another in the first life, dangerously absent in the CDS.
All of this means that, if there is ever going to be justice in SecondLife, it will most certainly not, at least for the foreseeable future, ever be in the CDS. Since I came to SecondLife with the sole purpose of creating and participating in a serious, professional, and, above all, just legal system, it is quite apparent that I have been entirely wasting my time over the last five or so months with this amateurish government most of whose members take the exercise no more seriously than one might a school debating club.
All that remains of worth in the CDS are the pretty buildings and a few good people (such as Pelanor, who seems to have been the only member of the present legislature who understood the importance of taking law and government seriously). Those, and no doubt their numbers are growing, who believe that what SecondLife needs, somewhere at least, is a [i:1pioviyf]serious[/i:1pioviyf] government, with a [i:1pioviyf]serious[/i:1pioviyf] legal system would be far better off not wasting their energies (and Linden dollars) on the CDS, which is evidently quite incapable of meeting those aims. Those who are here for the pretty buildings and the nice people will no doubt come to realise that there are pretty buildings and nice people elsewhere, too, and that the nice people here can be contacted and interacted with even by those who do not spend their hard-earned Lindens propping up the destitute institution that is the CDS. If the Local Government Study Group succeeds in its aims, there will eventually (and hopefully sooner, rather than later) be a far greater opportunity than there is now to create truly serious and professional class governments, with truly serious, professional, and just legal systems.
I'm not always being a critic, though.[/color:24nsn8gv]