Why it's not actually in your best interest to allow a hired third party to speak for you in criminal proceedings

Tuesday, 27 November, Year 4 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

If you are a citizen, you have the unassailable privilege of speaking for yourself in public. Wives, in those countries and systems where the woman is property, do not have such a privilege, and consequently all their public speech must be conducted through the agency of their owner, generally a husband, father, whatever. Children, in those countries and systems where children are propertyi, do not have such a priviledge, and so all their public speech must be conducted through the agency of their owner, generally the parent(s)ii.

That privilege means a few things. To many it means first and foremost voting : you vote for yourself, you can't delegate votes and so forth. To the few that are sensible, it means first and foremost representation in court. (I'm deliberately leaving money out of this, arguably even more important a thing, because I'd like to finish the article before New Year's).

Sure, voting would be a more frequent occurence, seeing how it happens yearly nowadays. It's also a triviality : the actual value of your vote to your own affairs is negligible, which is why graft and corruption are such problems ever since time immemorial. Buying voters is the simplest, cheapest and most effective electoral strategy there isiii, so obviously it's not ever going away. Representation in court may be rarer (in fact, most people can reasonably expect to live out their entire lives without ever having to defend themselves in court) but it is so very much more important that no comparison can possibly stand.

The problem with allowing a third party to infect this fundamental right of self representation in the courts is two fold. Firstly, and quite importantly, is that third parties need to be paid. Because of this little loophole increasingly many innocent people find themselves caught in a nasty trap : plenty of slanted legislation allows either the outright confiscation or (much more frequently) the locking down of one's property. This means you won't be able to pay, and you suddenly find yourself, in the immortal words of "that guy in the Matrix", without a voice.

matrix-no-voice

That may all sound pretty bad, but it's not the worst. The worst is that a third party can not be trusted, and this is indeed quite the problem. Let's start at one edge of it : Jack Marshall does a pretty good job of succintly presenting the age old problem of the Lying Defendant.

When the lawyer does know, the accepted options are few. First of all, the attorney is required to explain in the most emphatic terms how risky and stupid lying on the stand is. This includes telling the client one of the two “remedies” lawyers with lying criminal clients have to follow, depending on the jurisdiction. The first is telling the judge that the lawyer has to withdraw from the representation, without saying why because saying why would violate the attorney-client privilege. This, of course, has the result of letting the judge know that 1) the defendant will be lying, and that this means that 2) he’s guilty, and thus the “solution” violates the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality anyway. The other option, favored by New York, California and Washington, D.C.iv, requires the attorney to let his or her client testify in narrative fashion, asking the defendant to tell his (fictional, perjurious) story without the assistance of questions, prodding or framing by the attorney. Then the attorney cannot use the defendant’s lies in the closing argument. Since attorneys only behave like this when their criminal defendant clients insist on lying under oath, this “solution,” like the first, also has the effect of alerting everyone that defendant is guilty of both the crime being tried and perjury.

So basically, if you hire someone to make closing arguments for you, that someone will tell on you if they think you've done it. This builds the corresponding implication that if they don't tell on you they don't believe you've done it. Obviously some will afford to pay a lawyer enough to make it worth his while to lie (or however you'd call it), which has the necessary effect of raising average prices, which then institutes an inflationary circle of payjacking across the board. Obviously some lawyers will get paid enough to become able to buy their way out of the "don't lie" requirement - even if they don't buy it with money but with "respectability" or whatever other such soft currency - which then will breed a circle of corruption going through politics to reach judges.

You want to understand where exactly the engine of modern day corruption lies ? Why, it's buried right here : hiring third parties to represent you in criminal proceedings. A responsible citizen will hire counsel exclusively in the job of a paralegal : send them to do the legwork for you, make them do the research, make them prepare arguments, proofread filings, do all the little jobs and dirty work servants are made for. A responsible citizen will never allow the libertus (which is what lawyers were to start with) to speak for him in the forum (which is where the courts started). Lawyers are not there to decide case strategy for you, that's your job. Lawyers are not there to speak to the court, that's your job. Lawyers are there to carry your briefcase, put the paper in, shine your shoes.

Obviously, all this is hard. Speaking in court, hell, screaming at the judge if the judge is being uppity ? You can barely work up the courage to talk to your dorky coworkers. Knowing what to have these people research ? You can barely read.

Well... here's the bad news. The mousy are not citizens. The illiterate are not citizens. Freedom starts with taking control, and as a point of fact if you couldn't defend yourself in any criminal proceeding whatsoever right now, you're already in prison.

You're already in prison, you just don't know it yet. Or don't you ?

———
  1. O, wait, we had no idea aforehand that majority rules also relegate these subject to them to the status of a chattel, rather than citizenship ? Heh. []
  2. Although the imposition of the State rather than parents as owner of children is becoming more and more fashionable, at least on the silly side of the Atlantic. []
  3. Recently worked marvels for Obama, the least competent US President since at least Dan Quayle and the one US President with the worst record in recorded history. []
  4. Which would be the courts that see the most practice. []
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31 Responses

  1. Considering the way most people are little more than parrots these days, repeating the last meme thrown at them from their 'tribal group' asking them to speak in court seems a rather doomed endeavour.

    tribal group = political party/religion/facebook friends/etc.

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Tuesday, 27 November 2012

    That'd be a problem.

    Then again, maybe restructuring education so that the goals of 12 year's schoolings is "kids with the ability to represent themselves in the marketplace, court and generali in public" isn't such a bad way to go about things.

  3. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    3
    Mircea Popescu 
    Thursday, 12 November 2015

    And in confirmatory news, http://btcbase.org/log/?date=12-11-2015#1322483

  4. His strategy of depending on hired counsel sure didn't work out for Trump...

  5. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    5
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 14 November 2020

    What the fuck was he gonna do, 90yo walk behind his buggy from court to court?

    His strategy of sitting around thinking he's won for four years, and especially his strategy of "controlled appeasement" did not work (nor can it ever work, "compromise" is the in-house exact equivalent of "anticorruption", it's specifically constructed to not work).

    Once 2017 rolled around and Clinton's dumb ass wasn't in jail the writing was on the wall.

    And since I mentioned the "sitting around thinking he's won" strategy : dude should be thankful, really, seeing how my being significantly more powerful than ever could he hope to be did not actually work to my advantage. Yes it's true I closed down a banana republic by my own decision, as opposed to "democratic process" or whatever nonsense forced upon him ; but this purely cosmetic, ego-protective "difference" aside he got it for four years, didn't have to waste my nine. Four is cheaper than nine, and since the determination's precisely the same it really doesn't matter how exactly the experiment ended.

    How come sitting around thinking you've won works for some people but not for others ? It is of course because some people's inept youths spend their time outward, genociding the Gauls and things of that nature, making a space for themselves out of the world while not bothering the seated more than absolutely necessary ; whereas other people's inept youths spend their time inward, coming up with clever puns (hey, branding lives matter rite!!!) and self-importantly "commenting" and "discussing" the sittings of their betters, as if there ever could be such a thing as their discussion of their superiors.

    In the end Trump's problem's that there's nothing left in "America" actually capable of producing anything besides "the US", so the US it's gonna be. This is to say that the weird dude's actually correct in his (deeply held) suspicion that really, at fault's everyone but himself, which is of course hysterical in context (and en passant the statement makes for decent illustration of the power differential alluded earlier, how come I can say what he wants to say but I don't need him to say what I want to ???).

    This comment isn't "contextualized" by twitter because when I was Trump I got the FCC to close them down and prosecuted the entire workforce for treason, resulting in a bunch of executions.
  6. Donald J. Trump Retweeted
    @realDonaldTrump
    ·
    Dec 17
    I will Veto the Defense Bill, which will make China very unhappy. They love it. Must have Section 230 termination, protect our National Monuments and allow for removal of military from far away, and very unappreciative, lands. Thank you!

  7. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    7
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 18 December 2020

    The "Defense Bill" is not so much a bill as the silent domestic implementation of a minutely negotiated peace treaty, cementing the US's role as a client state. It's unavoidable in that sense, because war with China => US becoming a sort of San Salvador, only hungrier.

    Nor does it have anything to do with Biden, Joe or Schmoe. It's simply that long-standing nativisms and assorted naivites popular in some obscure corner of the world, so far able to survive by broad disinterest of the actual world, had to come to some sort of wind-down eventually. These bizarro notions whereby the US Congress is free to act etcetera... gimme a break, it requires the exact same sort of willing suspension of disbelief involved in not noticing the deeply statist undergirth of that dekulakization v2.0 that's gingerly not labeled, so'll just discuss as "all that '''privilege''' yak".

    Everyone will do what they must, and there's nothing special about "that blessed soil". Each soil is equally blessed in exactly the same way : raising happy grass for the scythe.

  8. Behold a Pale Horse`s avatar
    8
    Behold a Pale Horse 
    Sunday, 20 December 2020

    In the end Trump's problem's that there's nothing left in "America" actually capable of producing anything besides "the US", so the US it's gonna be.

    One mistake Moldbug makes is not concluding that if neither side wins the election then the proxy for civil war yields eventually to actual civil war. Trum pmay attempt to Cross the Rubicon with the Insurrection Act if there’s no contingent election in Congress to overturn the corrupt Electoral College, corrupt Supreme Court, corrupt State and local governments, corrupt Big Tech, corrupt mass media...what a beautiful mess nature creates to cull the herd down to 500 million.

    Appears that China bought off every government official? Where are in you in that nexus? Did you really order Hillary’s defeat in 2016? Seems there’s some connection to Wikileaks (which you’ve mentioned recently). Someone said Assange was living with and using Rothschild’s attorney.

  9. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    9
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 20 December 2020

    By the very meaning of things in an "enblightened state" (as opposed to "feudal", "absolutist", "monarchy", whatever the hell you call the states pre-Calvin, Napoleon & friends) it's not possible for ~everything to be "corrupt". That's the collective guarantee of security the oprichniks give themselves, also known as "can't go to jail buying IBM" or whatever, "throwing the curve" in younger exemplars. If you replace kings ruling by the divine right of kings with a herd of bureaucrats ruling by the "everyone can't be wrong together" because "man is the measure of all things", you get what you get (nominally also what you were asking for, but that can sit to the side for now).

    In short, every possible form of social organisation is a delusion ; and delusions, like all things of fiction, rely on willing suspension of disbelief. You know this is true by that unmistakable sign that in any polity there are things that can't be said ; in yours they're "the corrupt Electoral College, corrupt Supreme Court, corrupt State and local governments, corrupt Big Tech, corrupt mass media...". Things just don't work that way over there, and the thinking in that manner is more a symptom of alienation than anything (not that alienation doesn't occasionally produce re-alignment in mass delusion ; but to imagine that resolves the alienation is perhaps the ultimate measure of naivite).

    Nevertheless, if one operates by a "the most interesting outcome wins" heuristic (as is adequate for fiction, aka The Rule of Cool) I suppose the reasonable thing to expect is Lich #2 managing to croak before investiture, leading to an investiture controversy v2.0 : since the chick they're trying to backdoor in hasn't yet been sworn in as a vp, she can't take over like they intend, and since the supposed "electoral choice" is dead she can't be sworn in, so they'll have to...

    In my household we're baking popcorn (not because of this ; but we've been watching a bunch of old films).

    PS. As to China "buying" every government official... look here, when you're top dog you don't have to buy anyone. I don't buy my girls, Chicago doesn't "buy" the rural countrysides, buying is for everyone but the city.

  10. Behold a Pale Horse`s avatar
    10
    Behold a Pale Horse 
    Sunday, 20 December 2020

    You’re preaching to the TMSR choir. Theymos permabanned me for (among other iconoclastic, transgressions such as pointing out that CoinJoin is a nonsensical concept) regurgitating the heretical truth-telling that legacy Bitcoin disrupts Core USAFantasies. I’ve blogged more than a year ago speculating that assassinating Trump before the midterm 2020 elections might catalyze civil war. If they keep the Alzheimer candidate in place for the first two years the totalitarian, bitch-in-waiting can “serve” for two subsequent sham-elected terms. Perhaps Trumps steals back the stolen election and institutes significant election reforms threatening the Demonrats with loss of the majority at the midterms forcing them to resort to assassinations to flip it all back. My memebots are in jest — I don’t root nor cheerlead for the red-blue versus blue-red veneer.

    Yesterday Trump publicly ruled out the Insurrection Act, thus only EO 2018 or a contingent election in the House remain for extending the delusion to the precipice of Ideal Money monetary reset.

    I’ve understood that you’re actuarially sovereign but in the meantime I presume you were still vulnerable as Bitcoin was still vulnerable before ASICs arrived. You’re ostensibly not yet powerful enough to waltz into the U.S. unmolested. We plebs are vulnerable to sinking with the Titanic. Normally I would have been figuring this all out circa 2010 but a medical condition intervened. Heck I was trying to design Bitcoin in 2008. I was selling silver to Risto and helping him wiggle out of quagmires until he went totally off the rails. I suppose fate will have it that my raison d'être is finished or I will somehow make another miraculous come back as I have several times already in my life. It’s difficult to perceive how one can reboard the train after failing to do so before 2017. At least I didn’t facepalm my BTC from legacy to Core addresses — I spent it on medical-related expenses.

    Bitcoin’s Nash equilibrium may fail when the coinbase reward shrinks relative to the transaction fees. If you didn’t invent Bitcoin then is the long-term intent of the creators to enslave you? Ascent to power is a neutron star at its apogee but there may be no good alternatives other than walking with nothing as Jesus purportedly said.

    I’m not as articulate nor well read as thou. I’m just a computer programmer.

    P.S. Bill Cooper predicted 9/11 on my 36th birthday.

  11. Behold a Pale Horse`s avatar
    11
    Behold a Pale Horse 
    Sunday, 20 December 2020

    Typo: midterm 2022 elections.

  12. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    12
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 21 December 2020

    > You’re preaching to the TMSR choir.
    > Theymos permabanned me for
    > I’ve blogged more than a year ago

    The expiration date for such faits d'armes of bare boish life was obviously before the closure. That is the substance and only meaning of that cataclysmic event of your lifetime : the last possible moment up until which you could've done something came, and went. Eversince March this year there is absolutely, literally and definitively nothing you can do anymore, and I stand profoundly disinterested in whatever day's worth of spurious pretense to the contrary.

    The case of whatever idiots idly pretending to "names" is entirely no different : the expiration date for Curtis Yarvin was back when I summoned him. That's the last time he could've been something, be that something "mencius moldbug" or whatever else. Exactly the same goes for Mark Cuban, Max Keiser, Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky, Stock Locklin, Andrew Auernheimer, Christos Ballas, Elliot Rodger along literal thousands upon thousands of randos that history has not remembered and this enumeration can not bear.

    Speaking of which : seeing how the... I dunno, ten ? Fifty ? Seeing how whatever handful of weirdos actually interested in their bullshit perhaps scattered among Trilema's hundred million strong readership already know about 'em, it'll prolly save everyone's time if you stop linking. Not like anyone's going to wake up to give a shit now or anything, aite ? I certainly ain't about to go "oh, I wonder what fuckwit-in-default has to say these days", at all, even though historically I'm by very far the most inclined to indulge boihood's sweet delusions. It ain't going to happen, I'd rather read the varmints than the beings an engineer.

    > You’re ostensibly not yet powerful enough to waltz into the U.S. unmolested.

    Don't be ridiculous. The situation is exactly opposite.

  13. Can't believe everyone missed this piece from October 2020.

  14. Old Crow`s avatar
    14
    Old Crow 
    Tuesday, 12 January 2021

    > This comment isn't "contextualized" by twitter because

    But wait, it gets better!

    Rosemary Vrablic and Dominic Scalzi have tendered their resignations to Deutsche Bank effective as of year-end, which was accepted by the bank

    These being the private banking folks who took over the Trump org accounts once the commercial section of DB blacklisted it.

  15. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    15
    Mircea Popescu 
    Tuesday, 12 January 2021

    But of course. After all... what are "banks" even for ?

  16. Thinking through all this logically...or at least trying to....

    1.If it is true that Trump lost the Presidential election because someone stole it from him, then who stole it from him?

    2.If it is true that The Deep State, The Pizzeria Pedos, The Liberal Media, The Whatever Else can steal a Presidential election if they want to steal a Presidential election...then why did they not steal it the first time? Their appraisal of Donald Trump has changed little since 2016 if it changed at all, if they could steal in 2020 why didn't they steal in 2016?

    3.Could it be true that nobody stole Trump's 2020 victory from him, but that in fact someone stole Trump's 2016 victory for him? Someone who also stole lots of other things, such as, someone who actually said he's going to do just that, mid-2016? Someone who demonstrated he in fact can do that kind of thing, somehow...

    4.If it is true that instead of some evil cabal stealing Trump's big win from him, it was MP who didn't steal a marginal win for him this time, like he did back in 2016....why could that be? Could it be that an illegitimate, or at least delegitimized President is much more valuable to MP's own agenda than a returned Trump? Is MP vengeful enough to gut someone who failed to do his bidding, which apparently he actually published just after the 2016 election results were announced?

    January 2014, Bitcoin Baron Keeps a Secretive Open Source OS Alive
    January 2021, Bitcoin Baron Turns Off MAGA
    What the fuck!

  17. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    17
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 30 January 2021

    Things change, dood. That's why they're things. To change.

  1. [...] distinct privilege of a citizen is the "unassailable privilege of speaking for yourself in public" and this includes the right to speak to your actual ignorance on matters to which you are [...]

  2. [...] against abuses of the state, as represented by, you've guessed it, judges, prosecutors and defense counsel. Yes, all three together, just like the good cop, the bad cop and their supervisor all work for the [...]

  3. [...] moral of this story being : the next time some naive normie tells you that tired old "whosoever represents himself has a fool for a client", remember that whatever sort of fool you as the client may be, none could [...]

  4. [...] huh. Go for the death penalty, irrespective of what your "counsel" says -- he's too dumb to know his ass from his face, which is why he's [...]

  5. [...] in dealing with USG.bureaucrat "doctors", to go with the one we already have for dealing with USG.bureaucrat "lawyers" and the other one, for dealing with USG.bureaucrat "scientists" : never take any SWAG-drugs. If [...]

  6. [...] growing up. Or whatever else, not like it makes any difference to me (though it probably will, to you -- but then again... what can you do). [↩]I'm not going to belabour the difference between [...]

  7. [...] Public defenders ain't a good idea, everything's "iron" to them. [↩]Da fuck's that mean, "wasn't now available". [↩]Pocket. [↩]Here's the problem : this guy, "a wealthy white fence and gambler", necessarily knows it ain't possible for a kid to turn all the shit he had stolen into a few hundred in cash within twenty-four hours. If nothing else, then because had he actually been invovled in the theft he'd know it was worth a lot more than that, and not likely to value time over cash so harshly as to take merely a few hundred for the whole bundle. Moreover, he'd assuredly keep something -- I mean he was dumb enough to keep the key ?! [...]

  8. [...] on mute at a demographic that's disinterested in them or anything to do with themii that whatever, Biden really really won or somesuch [...]

  9. [...] addendum for the hardware and training modules 2 & 3. Day changed to 2020-11-29 [04:38] jfw: MP on the shockingly!! stolen US election Day changed to 2020-11-30 [05:11] jfw: cruciform: how goes with the proposed contract, do you need [...]

  10. [...] btw, isn't my great and fabulous luxury of saying whatever the fuck I fucking feel like quite the enviable priviledge ? God knows your "President" or whatever you call the scapegoat these days can't afford it, to say [...]

  11. [...] if unintended aesop on over-engineering : by the time your friends at Vault-Tec are done with it, "learn how mail-in ballots are safe" and things. [↩]Good god they're magical. For one thing there's only two kinds of medicine, [...]

  12. [...] perceived from the inside) ; and it continues happily, in the undisturbed manner of the insensate to the present days. There's a strong vein of nude and rude me-too-ism and wanna-be-ism born of utter and unfixable [...]

  13. [...] you suppose Donald McRonald has weapons of mass distraction ? [↩]This isn't to imply we've spoken recently. We haven't ; [...]

  14. [...] as owners and operators of the channel, server and network. Indeed it's quite likely that being able to speak at all will come to depend on being a somebody or else having a somebody to temporarily grant you [...]

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