Large Fierce Mammal

Image © Amy Baker 2020 (instagram.com/amy_louisebaker)

“It’s a beautiful thing to refuse to forget…” ~ Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Fencing Master

What ho oh Weary Pilgrim, and welcome to this watch fire hard by the Yawning Rabbit Hole of Confusion. First, something to clarify at least the legal definition of today’s headline:

“More than 90 per cent of criminal convictions in Canada are not the result of a trial, but of a guilty plea. As I wrote a couple of years ago, people plead guilty for many reasons, only one of which is that they are actually guilty. But that’s another matter.

“Every guilty plea involves the creation of something called an ‘agreed statement of facts.’ The Crown and the defence agree that the set of facts in this statement are true, and those facts are then read in court as justifying both the charge and the plea of guilty …

“The thing I learned from my experience is that the key word in the phrase ‘agreed statement of facts’ is not ‘facts,’ but ‘agreed.’ The key to the statement is that the two sides agree to it and that it contains enough information to justify the charges and the guilty plea. It may contain statements that one side would not regard as factual, and it certainly will omit facts that most outside observers would see as highly relevant to the charge. In many cases the ‘statement of facts’ will not provide an adequate understanding about what happened and why. It was quite unnerving to me that the only official account of what happened in relation to my charges was so limited, if not misleading …” ~ What ‘agreed statement of facts’ really means by David Dorson, LAW360 Canada

A shortcut then, whereby the “official” record of events is built up from a framework of mutually palatable fictions wherein “agreement” may be more inferred than real, and “palatable” for some participants may be more of the order of, “It’ll fill you up if you can choke it down.”

For the aforesaid then, we can credit the practice of Law, as the profession charged with offering an alternative to duelling in resolution of interhuman conflicts, and thereby for the state of affairs we now enjoy — the majority of litigants leave the proceedings both alive and equally unhappy. Such a weighty endeavour leverages its own special brand of hubris so that its lexicon of accepted nomenclature stands before the world as an unassailable grimoire, penetrable only by the Initiated.

From this foundational unassailability comes concepts such as “Justice” by which it is asserted that Truth may be found as an objectively absolute means of sorting guilt from innocence. The expectation that the accused, those accusing, witnesses to events, and those enforcing the Law through all its phases, will tell, “The Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth,” as though such a thing exists.

“Because God and the devil could be one and the same thing, and everybody understood it in his own way.” ~ Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Fencing Master

Such an irony that the very wellspring from which we draw the “Agreed upon statement of facts” is itself an agreed upon statement of “facts”.

This should come as no surprise as the same framework defines all human remembrances; written, spoken, or spontaneously realized; that may come to be widely embraced absent measurement against “real world” conditions; i. e., observed in an uncontrolled environment wherein existing factors were oblivious to your existence prior to arrival, but may now be subject to influence by your reactions to what you think is going on, should happen, how you feel about any of it, and what role your presence and behaviour may play in the continuum of events.

Source: HERE

The “real world”, as it turns out, is not where most people live, nor are they required to as it is just as possible to live an entire apparently fulfilled life absent any attempts at objectivity or even half-hearted use of critical thinking as it is to work for years with someone whose name you can’t remember without ever once giving the game away.

Your own “real world” may be a self-made, and workable within your own context, version of an agreed upon statement of facts. Right now, most of what has come to be called “content” offered up to be eagerly gobbled down by the masses comes from sources tailored to validate this propensity which is innately human with genesis far before the current century, and well before Phineas Taylor Barnum is credited with audibly observing, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Well said Albert, even if you didn’t actually say that.

To indulge in it doesn’t make you a sucker although it can render the unwary vulnerable to being one. Even repeatedly.

And from this comes the combined promise and threat of Artificial Intelligence which will be the topic of our next gathering.