Order and Chaos
26th November 2021
ZMan attempts to read the witch-hunt tea leaves.
Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.
The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.
This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.