The courts can't save our Republic. Only the people, through action, can do that. Only nationwide, sustained strikes will bring these people down. See Poland: Solidarnose.

give these dignified and hard-working public servants the respect they earn day after day.

#Judge #Liman is incredibly cool, calm, and collected --- yet assertive, no-nonsense, doing the needful work --- in the face of an outrageously contemptuous defendant. the legacy realist contingent of the judiciary continues to do thankless yeoman's work holding our crumbling society together.

it was such an interesting example of how our #ethnocentric biases can make us ignorant of the dignity of foreign cultures and their storied civilizations. i'm sure this is not a hallucination! but i am failing to locate it.

i've searched "ancient African legal diagrams" and similar terms, as well as dived through Wikipedia channels on African legal and writing systems, but can't quite find it.

the same information content was exhaustively elucidated, but not in a conventional literary manner that Western audiences would recognize as legal writing. my best analogy to Western records is the property "plats" (or maps) that officially record land ownership boundaries.

— detailed court cases and judgments were described with charts and arrows and other symbols arranged spatially (versus linguistically) to narrate the evolution and disposition of a dispute or other petition.

cross-posted from Mastodon:
mastodon.social/@RubyTuesday...

… because the alternative is to retreat into solitude — and that is how the flame of democracy flickers out. »

🕯️

These are the habits of the heart of democracy: not just a system of laws, but a life-practice of people who work together with others to set a collective destiny. And it is crucial in this moment that we hold fast to that:

I'm with you, I believe in these values, and I'm willing to stand with you if you'll stand with me in defense of them.

Because if we say we're willing to do that with each other, there's strength in doing that. Let's talk about what it means to stay in touch with each other, and united in defense of those values.