In my dreams i can fly

Judge Business School, Cambridge by John Outram. Pictures in this post by panoskarageorgos on IG.

I get a lot of versions of this question, and I answer it seriously every time, because it’s both important and not important at all. Anyone who asks respectfully gets my whole ass answer.

It’s just not really about that. My job isn’t about defending the idea of hurting someone else. It’s about stopping the state from inflicting further hurt, torture, pain. It’s about pushing back for some fairness against a monumentally stacked system. And it’s about stuff that’s normal human stuff that counts as crime for some reason.

Yeah, it’s hard to do a sex abuse case. Sometimes the images stick around and it bothers me. But honestly? Mostly those cases have real plausible theories of innocence or they’re cases that I will lose because the evidence is there, and the question is not whether the perpetrator will go to jail but how long.

Those cases are so rare, though. I get so much pointless bullshit. Felony of a teen taking mom’s car without permission. Two kids that try to break into a car and get so scared by the alarm that they run away. Trespassing on dad’s house because his new girlfriend wants you to stop coming around. It’s just human stuff, and the violence of the state is not necessary or helpful.

I also reject the idea of punishment completely. The state has a responsibility to stop people from hurting other people again. But inflicting pain doesn’t do it, we know this by now. So I argue for mercy and for real solutions to real problems. I’m here to build a future, not get caught up with doing violence to someone because of the past.

So yeah, sometimes it’s hard, but mostly my conscience is dead clear: I’m not responsible for the crime. The damage has been done. I want to start the healing process, and I want it for everyone involved. When that’s not possible, I just want to tell the authorities they don’t get to just Do What They Want.

The more I do this job, the more I am a genuine pacifist who is against violence in all forms, and actually I don’t see a contradiction between that and what I do for a living. State violence is a pervasive evil that tears apart families, communities, and countries, and it’s far more damaging and awful than any individual crime. The average prosecutor has more blood on their hands than a serial killer, but it’s invisible: people who died in jail, who froze to death on the street, who were shot in a drug deal. Their violence begets violence.

When I get blood on my hands, it’s because I put my hands over the wounds and try to stop the flow. I’m okay with it.

ok let's do another one! this time we have Bookriot's 100 sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors.

just to pre-empt a few possible objections to the list, it was published in 2016 and:

JK Rowling's public transphobia downward spiral began in 2018.

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells) was published in 2017 and Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) was published in 2019.

The Fifth Season (NK Jemisin) was published in 2015 & given that the editor included a different NK Jemisin I presume Fifth Season simply hadn't hit all-time classic status yet.

The editor stated upfront that they included 1 book per author.

I have no idea what We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson) is doing there given that it categorically is not SFF.

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.