#proportionality

Proportionality

Savathûn flew heavily through the shifting skies of her Throne World. She struggled to build speed; her wings seemed frustratingly stiff following her resurrection. She felt slow and uncoordinated, as if her body was not yet entirely her own. She frowned and drifted to the side, favoring her right, and did not see the spinning disk of Void energy until it caught her low in the thorax and sent tumbling to the ground.

There was a terrible noise, a flash of purple metal, and then... it was over.

Why Proportionality Differs in Israel-Gaza: Douglas Murray's Take

Academic philosophy in real life

Pictured: Francis Bacon (1561—1626).

I’ve been lucky enough to receive great advice in my brief time studying academic philosophy. In particular, philosophy has nourished my life outside of it in a way that makes me more humble and more contented with the knowledge I have.

With humility, I am able to think more critically and more openly than ever before. I try not to take assumptions lightly; I give opinions a chance; I write with proportionate flair; I scaffold my arguments slowly. At least, I try. I continue to accept that I am far from a finished product.

For have you heard of the ‘Dunning–Kruger effect’? Well, those with lower ability tend to overestimate their actual ability. They oversee logical flaws and don’t appreciate evidence: they think their take is golden. But watch their downfall in philosophy.

Ironically, by accepting the limitations of knowledge and ability and by acknowledging the challenges the arguments we hitherto thought of as golden face, we’re actually more likely to be right and see ourselves grow.

So as Francis Bacon said in Of Studies:

Bonnie Kristian, The Week, December 13, 2018

One of the police officers who ripped 1-year-old Damone from his mother’s arms in a Brooklyn social services office really put his back into it. He searched for a good grip on the baby’s body and, having acquired it, started jerking his own body up and out, making a yanking motion I’ve used to tear a stubborn weed from my garden.

This is not a motion I can imagine using on a child.

Perhaps if Jazmine Headley, the woman desperately holding on to Damone, were not his mother but his kidnapper, the yanking would have made sense. But reality is not so dramatic. Headley is Damone’s mom, and her violent treatment at the hands of New York City police officers was reportedly initiated over the piddling “offense” of insisting she could sit on the waiting room floor because all the chairs were full.

The encounter was filmed and Facebooked, picking up views and outrage as a ghastly new example of police brutality. And beyond the visceral reaction the video engenders, what makes this story so instinctively galling is the lack of proportionality. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez communicated as much when he announced Tuesday that he would not pursue any charges against Headley because the “consequences this young and desperate mother has already suffered as a result of this arrest far outweigh any conduct that may have led to it.”

She is not the only one to suffer this way. America has a problem with proportionality. Our criminal justice system excels at making that failing obvious, because proportionality is integral to justice. It’s particularly important in retributive justice systems like our own, where without proportionality we may find ourselves exacting punishments that go well beyond “an eye for an eye.”

Proportionality is also vague and debatable. We can agree on the principle while differing on the details, and our use of punishments with no restitutionary connection to the crime exacerbates this confusion. It is easy to see the proportion, say, in requiring a thief to repay his victim for a stolen item. But how should a theft be measured in jail time? How many months or years are proportionate to taking a television or burning down a house? We can’t convert crimes to prison sentences like inches to centimeters, so we argue about what’s proportionate.

But we don’t argue about proportionality nearly enough.

Maybe this is because American culture is prone to excess. Maybe it’s just an indecent apathy. Whatever the reason, a society where anyone can imagine what happened to Jazmine Headley was just is a society where proportionality has been severely neglected.

The same is true of Crystal Mason, a Texas woman serving a 10-month sentence in federal prison, likely to be followed by five years in a state facility. Her crime was voting in the 2016 election, which she did without realizing that being under supervised release for a prior conviction made her ineligible to vote. Mason’s provisional ballot was never counted. Though she did break the law, her intention was innocent, and the harm she caused was nil. Reasonable people can disagree about what an appropriate punishment might be, but taking half a decade of her life is not it. Mason’s punishment is callously disproportionate to her offense.

The same is true of Precious Jones, a Missouri woman for whom a single speeding ticket led to driver’s ed classes, community service, a suspended license, fines, and 20 days of jail time served on weekends. After serving all 20 days, she thought the saga was over--until the county prosecutor decided tardiness to a single jail day is cause to revoke probation and slap Jones with six months in jail. Now she may well lose her job, and she’ll be billed up to several thousand dollars for her stay in county lockup.

Jones’ entire life is being unraveled over a speeding ticket. Yes, her speed was unsafe. But what she did does not merit what is being done to her. She is more sinned against than sinning. She is being mercilessly ground down by a system divorced from proportionality.

Proportionality is lacking, too, in “zero tolerance” policies in our schools, where strict mandatory punishments upend kids’ lives over childhood antics and misbehavior. It’s lacking in our foreign policy, where we’ve answered the 9/11 attacks with permanent war, including in multiple countries with no connection to 9/11. We’ve even lost a sense of proportion in how we talk about politics, escalating normal disagreement into an addictive, perpetual fight about anything and everything.

This is really something worth watching. It’s about 5 minutes of Lord Gugliemo Verdirame, rebutting claims war crime allegations based of disproportional response and occupation by Israel.

Posted @withregram • @hillelneuer Must-see speech on the legality of Israel's fight against Hamas, delivered in 🇬🇧 House of Lords yesterday by Lord Guglielmo Verdirame KC, professor and barrister in public international law:

“There has been a lot of talk about proportionality in the law on self-defence. I refer to the words that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, used a few days ago on the test of proportionality. It does not mean that the defensive force has to be equal to the force used in the armed attack. Proportionality means that you can use force that is proportionate to the defensive objective, which is to stop, to repel and to prevent further attacks.

Israel has described its war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s capability. From a legal perspective, these war aims are consistent with proportionality in the law of self-defence, given what Hamas says it does and what Hamas has done and continues to do.

Asking a state that is acting in self-defence to agree to a ceasefire before its lawful defensive objectives have been met is, in effect, asking that state to stop defending itself. For such calls to be reasonable and credible, they must be accompanied by a concrete proposal setting out how Israel’s legitimate defensive goals against Hamas will be met through other means. It is not an answer to say that Israel has to conclude a peace treaty, because Hamas is not interested in a peace treaty.

Proportionality also applies in the law that governs the conduct of hostilities, not only in self-defence. The law of armed conflict requires that in every attack posing a risk to civilian life, that risk must not be excessive in relation to the military advantage that is anticipated.

That rule does not mean, even when scrupulously observed, that civilians will not tragically lose their lives in an armed conflict. The law of armed conflict, at its best, can mitigate the horrors of war but it cannot eliminate them.