Highest Rated Comments


MrJohz48 karma

I liked her a lot at the start, but her character never really developed after the first season, and when all of the other characters got a lot better in the second season she was somewhat outshone by comparison.

MrJohz43 karma

What would you say the biggest sin in the world right now is, and what should Christians be doing to stop it?

MrJohz23 karma

Yeah, as a Brit living in the Germany, so many people told me about this being on in the UK this year, like it was really important, and I should be aware of it. Unfortunately, I was not in the UK for New Year's this year, and the British people that I've talked to did not, in fact, take time out of their schedules to watch it, so most of these conversations have been a bit disappointing.

MrJohz6 karma

In the perfect world, that's exactly how it should be. If two equal parties attempt to win in a court of law, the winner should be the one that is right. That's basically the fundamental reason for an adversarial justice system, and it works surprisingly well. If you're invested in ripping apart your opponent's argument, you should do the best possibly job of it, and if you're invested in protecting your argument, you'll also do the best possibly job of it. A well-trained judge then has the job of sorting through the wreckage and tatters and then reconstructs the truth now that pretty much everything that anyone can find out has been brought to light.

It's a really good system in almost all cases. However, it breaks down under a small handful of problems. Primarily, this doesn't work if one side is more powerful than the other, because the lesser side doesn't have a hope in hell's chance of ripping apart even the weakest argument that the greater side is giving. That's why many countries have various forms of legal aid (fuck you, David Cameron) to ensure that everyone has the basic amount of representation in court that they need to have a fair trial.

The other issue is where the judges aren't educated enough, and give too much weight to some arguments and not enough to other arguments. It appears that that is what happened in this case - the expert witness was given too much credence, and the defence couldn't rip their argument apart properly. This is scarily common - I have a friend struggling through legal issues where the judge has made poor calls because of a lack of understanding of the issues. Equally, this happens in the big silicon valley judgements that everyone roundly criticises. This is a harder problem to fix - how do you train judges properly that they aren't experts enough to have formed pre-judgements, but are experts enough to know when an expert is wrong?

Tl;dr - The adversarial justice system is a really good system if you want to get to the root of the problem. The issues are if your system is unbalanced, or if your judges cannot be critical enough.

MrJohz5 karma

There's been debates about this in /r/webdev. I'm not a fan, although it's far better than Ted Cruz's. I mean, seriously. What the fuck is happening there... :P