Scotty

The Left, socialists etc, were a big part of the movement to oust the Shah. They didn't get long to enjoy their victory before the Mullahs started executing them.

A lot of people are suggesting the Muslim Brotherhood, the only organized opposition group, could quite possibly take power. This is a country where a strong majority believe in Sharia law and death to apostates, after all. And it is a country which a number of observers have stated is becoming more and more religiously conservative.

Conservatives, in the streets, with guns... Unregistered guns!

Am I going to stick to a position you invented and gave to me? Uhm no. It's your position. You can attack or defend it as you wish. You can do both if that amuses you. It's really irrelevant to me. I have my own positions to discuss. I remember reading about the witch hunts for 'satanic cults' in the 80s. Supposedly there was this mass of Satan worshiping child molesters who were preying on every other daycare and preschool. Anyway, I saw a show on one such case in which about a dozen people or so were charged with child molesting. Whether they were guilty or innocent depended entirely on how much money they had. Those who had enough money to hire their own criminal defense lawyers were all acquitted. All those who were too poor, and had to rely on public defenders were convicted and got long sentences.

Every nation in the middle east commits serious human rights abuses. Do you disagree?

I think they're so extreme you can't really refer to them as 'conservatives'. I think such people, filled with paranoia and conspiracy theories go beyond the political template and are just out there on their own, with no politically handy reference points to relate them to anything anywhere near the mainstream. I mean do we call the Maoists "liberals"? Are the Marxist Leninists and that ilk Liberals? I don't think so. And how many of those crazy groups are there anyway? I've never met one. And I know a lot of people. In any event, they're not the ones harassing Jews at universities, now are they? And in most of the cases I've seen where the police have made an arrest for firebombing a Jewish school or temple it hasn't been the crackers from the extremist fringes but 'new canadians'.

The law stated that when the new mortgage was registered that was that. People lost their houses over that, even though they had done nothing wrong. The law didn't care that it was fair or unfair. The law said the banks get the house because they gave a mortgage on it. That they gave the mortgage to fraudsters was apparently beside the point. Mortgage Fraud

Now you are temporizing. There are only very limited circumstances in which a judge can set aside a jury verdict. The fact is the jurors, ordinary people, get to decide which of the stories told by the two sides they want to believe. They can be swayed by skilled lawyers far more easily than an experienced judge. So why do they get to make the decision as to who wins the case? Especially if regular people are generally pretty stupid, as small C suggests?

It would be if it were true. Unfortunately, it's not. The rich can certainly buy justice. The middle class don't even have access to the system in which justice might be obtained.

The story was basically a non-story, with all sorts of people speculating that perhaps the Tories did it, for some ulterior, sinister motive. But there's not a single shred of evidence of that. Filling a news story with what is basically alarmist suspicions seems kind of unprofessional to me. In that sense it resembles their other "news story" which was basically Liberals speculation as to what evil things the provincial tories might put in their election platform next election.

You are temporizing. The point remains that though we call the judge 'judge' it is the jurors who make the decision as to who wins. But if you don't trust the ordinary people then why do you think they should be jurors? Why not just have the trained judge rule as to guilt or innocence, as to right or wrong, as to plaintiff or defendant in all cases?

Maybe it was those outstanding commercials the Tories ran.

Nor is it based on fairness.

Then why do we have a justice system which insists on having ordinary people sit in judgment of all important cases - as jurors?

You don't think the average person wants justice, and would reward judges who give it? Or is it that you think the average person doesn't know what justice is?

So you think the system is fine even though the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has openly stated that this system excludes just about everyone but the rich, and those fortunate enough to get government paid lawyers? The system is hideously expensive and time consuming in almost every way. Whether it's criminal trials which should be open and shut and over within an hour which drag on for months to lawsuits which bankrupt people and take years, whether it's injustice or lack of justice, whether it involves refugees who can bounce from one appeal to another for DECADES despite obviously having no legitimacy, people's freedom to speak being suppressed because of the cost of nuisance lawsuits, our system is NOT fine the way it is. Far from it.

No, it considers those previous decisions in order to base the existing decision on them, but if the previous decisions were unfair that is beside the point. And if the current decision is unfair, that also is beside the point. The law is the law. Fairness just isn't that important in the scheme of things as compared to interpretations of law. Give you an example. A few years back an emerging practice was for criminal fraudsters to sell the house right out from under people. They would pretend they owned it, take out a mortgage with a bank, and then walk away. Now according to the law at the time, that meant the bank owned the house. The fact this was fundamentally unfair and unjust under ANYONE'S interpretation was utterly irrelevant. The law said once the registration had been changed that was that. People were actually evicted from their homes because of this sort of thing. And it only stopped when the government changed the law.

Then they are failing.

I believe you're mistaken there. As one example I posted earlier this week demonstrated. A woman took her former employer to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for firing her. The woman was represented by a government paid lawyer. When the findings were appealed to the courts, she was again represented by a government lawyer. When the case went against her and she was ordered to pay $10,000 legal costs to her former boss, the Ontario government's legal assistance program paid it. In addition, my brother in law was harassed for years by his former crazy wife, who, on welfare, had government paid legal assistance. I agree with you completely here. Keep the law simple and the rules simple and let people tell their stories to the judge. However, the law as it stands now requires researching precedents in order to cite them to the judge, along with other legal arguments based on precedent or based on a variety of laws, and the ordinary person wouldn't be expected to know enough to do that.

Justice is not the overriding concern of the law, and nobody says it is. There are innumerable cases of law, in torts, in criminal law, where fundamental injustice has been done - and which everyone concerned admits was done, and yet the law does not care. The law cares about interpretations of legal statute, which includes evidence which the statutes say ought to be admitted, and discards evidence which should not be. It's all about interpretations of words on paper, not about fundamental justice and what is right or wrong.

We have a legal system, not a justice system. In a legal system, justice is immaterial, or at least, of secondary importance compared to the letter of the law. Thus however unfair it might be for, say, a nasty guy in a top hat and black coat to push a mother and her orphans out into the cold having swindled them out of their home, well, that's too bad. If he did it legally that is what the system cares about. If we had a justice system, then justice would have to ultimately prevail, regardless of what a contract said, for example. Defining justice might not always be easy, of course.

Or maybe not. Turkey has been slipping slowly and quietly towards Islamism for years now, with an Islamist oriented government which has been carefully whittling away at the powers of the Turkish military and encouraging more and more religious conservatism in the country.

Do people still fondly remember the Iranian mobs who stood up and "earned their freedom" thirty years back?

I think you're talking about something akin to "libel chill" wherein the cost of going through a lawsuit is so expensive that people give up just for being threatened with one. Or that they self censor for fear of a lawsuit, regardless of whether what they wanted to say, or do or write was entirely true and legal. Because in a lawsuit, given the costs and extensive consumption of time, even when you win, you lose. Unless, of course, you are rich. But even big corporations adjust their quite legal and proper behavior for fear of lawsuits because legal costs adversely affect the bottom line.

My perception from reading complaints from Jews on various campuses is that anti-antisemitism is not at all uncommon, and that it's largely coming from ethnics, principally Muslims. I don't think there is a lot of anti-semitism among Canadian born people of Left or Right. However, I do think some on the Left, because they've taken up Israel as their cause de jour, fulminate about those they think supports Israel, and so would be inclined to be very suspicious about Jewish Canadians for that reason.