09.26
It is impossible to say just how many of those justices are ill-informed or abusive. Officially a part of the state court system, yet financed by the towns and villages, the justice courts are essentially unsupervised by either. State court officials know little about the justices, and cannot reliably say how many cases they handle or how many are appealed. Even the agency charged with disciplining them, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, is not equipped to fully police their vast numbers (free registration is required).
When I was in law school I interned at the China National Legal Aid Center working on rule of law issuses including eliminating judicial incompetence, pushing judicial training and raising judicial standards. At the time I would never have guessed that many of those same problems, unfortunately, also exist in some parts of the US. Still, if anyone wants a primer on some of the more complex issues that are confronting China’s legal reform, this article, while speaking to circumstances in New York state, illustrates them in detail.
Two women are on a cross-country balloon voyage. One night they entered a heavy fog. Afraid of landing in an unknown place, they drifted off course. Eventually, the fog lifted to show a sunlit meadow below. As they descended, they saw a man walking his dog.
One of the women yells to the man below, “Where are we?”
The man yells back, “About a half mile from town.”
As the balloon continued drifting, the woman said to her partner, “He must have been a lawyer.”
The other says, “A lawyer! How do you know that?”
The first says, “That’s easy. The information he gave us was accurate, concise, and entirely irrelevant.”
This little story pretty much sums up your postings.
If you want to criticize China, be bold. Do it! Make a point. Don’t hide behind silly cryptic remarks or some esoteric legal reference. Your postings are totally irrelevant and, because you allow no rebuttal, they make you appear silly.
Lawyers, especially American lawyers, are not known for their integrity. This is especially true for some minority lawyers, those allowed into law school because of “affirmative action.” Their class background did not allow them the luxury of learning honesty, fair play, courage, or fortitude. As a result, they are weak, shallow, and equivocating.
If you plan to maintain a blog, at least have the integrity (guts) to allow others to disagree with your views and comments. If you only want to see your ramblings in print, well, that indicates an immature vanity.
I challenge your comments and views because I believe the Chinese people, after suffering untold hardships and humiliations, are trying to build a strong, prosperous country. I understand the problems, mistakes, and short-comings they will make in this attempt but I do not think vicious, snide, criticisms are any way to encourage a hard working people.
Oh. please make the corrections to your “gibberish” about Chinese parents not allowing their children to play “little league baseball.”
“They’re” is a contraction of “they are.” “Their” is a possessive plural pronoun. The few people who read your blog will think you quite uneducated. The grammatical mistakes you made would be easily recognized by Chinese students who were busy studying English rather than playing “basketball.”
bbb
This blog was begun (and continues) with the purpose of keeping ME interested in China. Accordingly it is, as one of my favorite bloggers likes to point out about his blog, an open notebook to myself…a way to memorialize where my mind was at that time on a particular subject. Commentary then, while a nice addition is not necessary to my goal of continuing this blog. Where commentary is interesting and useful to either myself or the few people that happen across my blog, I will post them. Otherwise, I consider commentary as a useful way for readers to comment, critique and connect with me. As for the spelling mistakes…I am of the old blogging tradition where once you posted you did not edit…it puts pressure on me to proofread before posting or else suffer consequences.
Is the extreme “touchiness” of Brad typical of the Chinese attitude to any form of criticism? In your experience is it a nation of people willing to display much introspection?