Kim Kardashian’s Hot Wet Machinery

In a recent Twitter post, Kim Kardashian lamented the “cold machinery” of the US justice system.

This is the cold machinery of the Death Penalty in America. In just over two weeks, an innocent man could be put to death. My heart breaks for Julius [Jones] and so many others who have suffered from such tragic miscarriage of justice.

https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1460481867220598786

The alternative Kim prefers, is presumably the hot wet machinery of celebrities like her deciding who lives and dies. What Kim misses is the US justice system already operates on the hot wet machinery of human impulses. Only it is the impulses of humans other than her.

The US justice system is marketed in detective books and TV shows, as such a cold rational process. But the reality is it is anything but. At every step, it is run by dirty humans with biases and motives and agendas and impulses. From police who fake evidence for sport, to judges who need 51% to win an election, to jurors who want to get revenge on the world.

Jurors are supposed to move the decision as far as possible from corrupted and interested parties. But jurors are themselves filthy benighted humans. And every case is already filthy from human hands, by the time it reaches the jury.

Double blind drug trials are a rational, scientific process. Because they know, if people knew which was the real drug, they would say yes, it works. Regardless of whether it does or not. The justice system is designed in the opposite manner, to produce, rather than avoid such bias. The justice system is designed to capture bias at every opportunity, from racism, to elections.

Drugs are rationally expected to work, so they hide which is the real drug. Criminal investigations do just the opposite. They begin with an imagined idea of who committed a murder, or what might have happened. They pick a person with a past arrest who it makes sense would do a crime like this. They then broadcast a hypothetical narrative of what might have happened in in the news. And then people assume what they read in the news is true. It is like saying “This drug works!”

They take a theory about a person who might have committed a murder. Then they manufacture witnesses and evidence with a bias towards proving that person committed a murder. Then they tell everyone that person did commit a murder. And like a drug trial that is not double blind, everyone says yes, that person committed a murder!

They fake evidence, to produce the result that the mob wishes for. And when confronted with evidence that a person is innocent, they say but look what a bad person he is. Don’t you want to punish him anyway? Do you really want to punish police, for taking a bad person off the street? And judges and police and prosecutors literally have to run a case driven on mob irrationality and misinformation, to win elections. Or else they will quickly be replaced with someone willing to cater to the mob.

Unlike a drug which has to work, a person doesn’t actually have to have committed a murder. They just have to make people think he did. And they get all the benefits just the same as if he did. So basically, police and prosecutors pick between witnesses and narratives, to manufacture whatever outcome will taste best to the mob. And it never needs to be true, only believed, the opposite of a drug which needs to work.

Kim Kardashian should have fought long ago for a justice system that is actually cold machinery like a drug trial, and not based on hot wet impulses. But her way to improve the justice system is to make it even more human and impulsive, for people like her to swoop in like a final jury, to decide who lives and dies.