The courts in Sweden are highly politicized. As is common in civil law countries (like most Western non-anglo-saxon countries), the Swedish court system is not based on principles such as the courts or judges discovering law (which is, originally, the case in common law countries) – they but enforce the law as decided by The Ruler, be he king or a faceless parliament – and trial by peers (the jury system).
The courts do, however, have a pseudo-jury system where a judge runs the show but a number of people are chosen to assist the judge in finding the defendant guilty or not guilty of crime. These people are appointed by the political parties with representation in the parliament. In other words, there is a kind of political jury system where the political elite gets to appoint who will make sure justice is upheld. That the same elite enacts the law that is tried in the courts is not a problem to most Swedes, it seems.
In this particular trial, a high-profile trial with international coverage, the politicization of the Swedish courts is extra troublesome. The road to the trial has been paved with scandals, where the entertainment industry’s organization Antipiratbyrån not only has done the police’s job at raides against private web hosting firms, but they have worked closelly with the police investigators and even hired or paid a number of them. Furthermore, the U.S. government has pressured the Swedish government into taking a number of actions that are not necessarily allowed in the Swedish system of “justice” – sometimes even outright prohibited.
This has not stopped the investigation, however, which is still partly based on what was found or interpretations made based on the illegal investigations. The propaganda war is also an important part of the story, where the public obviously supports and engages in file sharing (both the legal and the copyright-violating kinds) while the political elite is whole-heartedly on the side of the industry. In fact, the political elite has been enacting a number of laws significantly reducing the rights and privacy of Swedish citizens only to get to the small number of illegal file-sharers.
It is in this context that a trial with a judge and politically appointed judge assistants (nämndemän) is highly problematic. But, as I have already mentioned, this seems to not be a big problem in the Swedish public debate. The special interest owns the political elite, and the political elite both enacts and enforces the law.
Furthermore, the trial has been tragicomic. The defendants’ lawyers have very frequently objected to the prosecutor’s use of evidence not previously shown to the court. There are transcripts from the courts showing how one of the defendant’s lawyer objects saying the prosecutor is “doing it again” and that he “did it yesterday” and “will you never learn?” The court never disallowed the evidence even though the defendants had to react without any preparation whatsoever.
Also, the court has consistently misunderstood what the technology does. The prosecutor has repeatedly made statements about the “copyrighted files on the Pirate Bay server,” whereas anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the bit torrent technology knows that there should be no such files. The Pirate Bay had only a torrent library – a type of links that any search engine also has (but torrent/file links, not web links).
These problems set aside, what has caused a debate after the conviction is that new information about the judge has surfaced. Not only is he ignorant of this particular technology and allowed the prosecutor’s consistent use of procedurally prohibited conduct. He is also a member of the Swedish Organization for Copyright. In other words, he is a member of the organization that promotes copyrights and has done so since 1954.
Does this mean the trial is dismissed and needs to be done all over again? Not necessarily – the court could decide that his membership further his knowledge of the issue rather than makes him biased. And it is likely that the request for appeal from the defendants will generate exactly this assessment.
How, then, would the appeals court assess the fact that this same judge asked (asked, not ordered) one of the politically appointed assistants to step down and leave the court due to probable bias because he was a musician and member of the same organization? It would probably think this is a separate issue and that it was the correct call by the judge…
The fact is that this is a minor issue considering what has been going on for a long time during the investigations. Police investigators have been contracted by the Antipiratbyrån and then, when/if fired from the police, hired by them. The Antipiratbyrån folks have been assisting the police during raides even though it is strictly illegal to do so – yet the politicized system of “justice” has not reacted. The Swedish government has broken its own laws to please the U.S. government and a U.S.-based industry that is way off track and unwilling to change its business strategies despite the technological advances. And the entertainment industry has received legal privileges to take actions that not even the police has the right to take.
There are simply so many strange things going on that undermine the court system, the government legal system, the legitimacy of enactment and enforcement of laws for the sake of protecting a relic of intellectual property, that this doubtlessly will be known to future generations as something to be truly ashamed about. That is, if you are a statist. If you are not, then this was expected; what was not expected is that this has been going on without even trying to cover it up.
On Not Getting It
Friday, October 24th, 2008What I am referring to is the scientific world view. This is not the scientific drive, i.e. the motivation to find the truth and to learn about the world, but the overly scientific anti-identification of that which is studied. It is as prevalent in the social sciences as it is in politics and buesiness management. There are no people around anymore, there’s only statistics and faceless aggregates.
In economics this is very obvious – the study of human action is almost completely reduced to discussions on how to mitigate biases and avoid multicollinearity in econometric functions. Now, in what sense would you gain understanding of why people act in certain ways through tweaking regression models? The obvious answer – and it is so obvious most economists simply don’t see it – is that you don’t. You don’t gain any knowledge whatsoever of why people acted a certain way through running tests of heteroskedasticity and deciding whether or not to use “White’s estimator.”
Economics is the most obvious victim of what I would like to call scientism, the belief that anything that uses aggregates and that is seemingly universal – through (at any price) avoiding to acknowledge the identity or personality of the individuals studied – is more valuable as a science. Actually, the common view is that as long as you can hide the fact that there are individuals in “the data” any conclusions you might draw are generally applicable.
In a recent discussion with a fellow student, I claimed that the empirical study of people is totally worthless unless your aim is to understand why exactly those individuals acted in that exact way in that exact situation. My point was that if the “experiment” would be repeated with the same people (as “data”) the outcome would be completely different because people learn. And if it would be repeated, and the situation could be set up exactly the same way, but the “data” (the people) would be different individuals the outcome would still be different – simply because they are different people and therefore react differently in a number of ways.
And on top of it all, these examples are still ridiculous – it simply isn’t possible to create the exact same situation again and expose people to it. Even if the setting (or framework) would be the same, the people would have different subjective experiences (no matter if they are “the same” or “others”), which would affect the results.
One could argue that this is why we have confidence intervals and standard deviations. But that implies that people act in such a way that the outcome of everybody’s actions are nicely distributed in a bell-shaped curve. How often would you say that happens? That would depend on what kind of people you happen to have in your sample, wouldn’t it? The point is that one cannot study people the way one studies dead matter, simply because people are people, i.e. thinking creatures that learn from experience and that aren’t reducible to a “nature” the same way a rock would be.
This “scientism” is not only prevalent in the [social] sciences – it is a cornerstone of modern politics as well as business management. In politics there is no such thing as an individual; it simply doesn’t happen that politicians discuss a certain individual. And if they happen to use the word “individual” they use it as a stereotypical “nature” of the items in the population they rule. In my ten years in party politics, I haven’t heard one politician discuss how decisions or policies affect individuals – the best I’ve heard is the use of stereotypical examples of “the average family” or “the single mom.” But never did anyone care to add flesh and blood to their dead skeletons.
There is a reason for this, even though politicians are usually too stupid to understand it. It simply isn’t possible to propose or support policies that affect people’s lives unless you make sure to forget that they are real people. Even cold-hearted, ignorant, and self-centered politicians wouldn’t have the guts nor morality to put hundreds or thousands of people in misery through pushing a button. Most people simply don’t have it in them to coldly calculate plusses and minuses while radically and forcefully change the lives of a great number of people with the stroke of a pen.
The lesson to learn is this: would there really be wars if those waging wars would see each and every person they would have to send to their deaths? It is unlikely, even though there are some really, really disturbed people out there.
The same is the case in large corporations, where the CEO or president usually has no clue about the people working for him (or her). Of course, the nature of a corporation is distinctly different from that of a state – the corporation gives, and any punishment from a corporation is to “not give”; a state takes, and any punishment is to “take more” or “kill” whereas every “reward” consists of “taking less” away from that person. Corporations can no doubt be horrible, but they are not a state.
The problem we have here is the “scientific” way of approaching one’s work: scientists who have no idea that the statistics they’re using are really people, won’t mind drawing horrible conclusions; politicians not understanding there are individuals and individual suffering as a result of every decision they make, don’t have a problem with “redistributing” from some to some or killing off some for the benefit of others; and business managers can take irresponsible risks when they can “simply”, if something goes wrong, cut the corporation’s employment with “10%” rather than, which is equally true, throw hundreds of families into unemployment and misery.
Scientism is the problem, and it arises as an effect of centralization. Centralization calls for stereotypes and grouping, for one-policy-fits-all kind of decisions, and cold-hearted leadership for some unidentified aim. What this world so desperately needs is radical decentralization. The problem with our society is not only that there is a huge parasitic cancer tumor feeding off our lives and liberties (i.e., the State), but that it is too large-scale and too centralized. Not only must the State go, but we need to get back to seeing people as people.
Seeing people as people is what so many individuals in our world have forgotten. Be they scientists, politicians or corporate managers – they all share the same fallacy in thinking that scale is a good thing, that personal ties are “in the way” and a problem for efficiency or whatever.
I am a person and I intend to continue being one. You better start seeing me as one.
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