{"id":4892,"date":"2010-08-09T09:44:41","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T13:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4892"},"modified":"2010-08-09T10:30:22","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T14:30:22","slug":"lovely-little-bit-of-legal-legerdemain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/08\/09\/lovely-little-bit-of-legal-legerdemain\/","title":{"rendered":"Lovely little bit of legal legerdemain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2010\/08\/09\/ive-read-this-novel-before\/\" target=\"_blank\">Colby Cosh<\/a> points out that <em>Catch-22<\/em> was really a highly accurate predictor of Canadian law:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>To put it another way, you can conceivably be tried for \u201cparticipating in or contributing to\u201d a criminal organization even if it didn\u2019t get around to committing any crimes, you didn\u2019t do anything to help it actually commit crimes, you didn\u2019t know what particular crimes it might be thinking of committing, and you couldn\u2019t possibly pick anybody else in the group out of a lineup.<\/p>\n<p>This might seem to make things pretty easy for the police and the prosecutors. Nonsense! According to them, their job can <em>never <\/em>be easy enough. Like farmers and civil servants, they cease complaining only intermittently to inhale oxygen, and there is no shortage of Joint Multi-Level Integrated Discussion Committees before which they can retail their grievances. <\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Justice Minister Nicholson, in introducing the new schedule of patently less serious and mostly victimless \u201cserious offences\u201d on Wednesday, offered a dazzlingly simple heuristic: \u201cThe fact that an offence is committed by a criminal organization makes it a serious crime.\u201d You will note that this introduces a curious logical circularity into our manner of upholding justice. How does the law define a \u201ccriminal organization\u201d? See above: a criminal organization is a group of people that bands together to commit serious crimes. How do we know what a serious crime is? It\u2019s any activity that is characteristic of criminal organizations. What, you thought <em>Catch-22<\/em> was fiction?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colby Cosh points out that Catch-22 was really a highly accurate predictor of Canadian law: To put it another way, you can conceivably be tried for \u201cparticipating in or contributing to\u201d a criminal organization even if it didn\u2019t get around to committing any crimes, you didn\u2019t do anything to help it actually commit crimes, you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[52,343,212,112,257],"class_list":["post-4892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-law","tag-absurd","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-freedomofassembly","tag-organizedcrime","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1gU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4892"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4894,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892\/revisions\/4894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}