Comment by elliptic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elliptic | Hacker News Reader

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An odd rant. The judge in question appears to be an alcoholic, and came to the court drunk. Surely this is professional misconduct (and to my mind warrants firing), but it really doesn't justify the author's charges of system-rigging. Seems to me that Clark is trying to mislead people into thinking that Pollack was under the influence of e.g heroin. Pretty despicable.

Also, the smallest bit of Googling shows that Pollack heads was responsible for the creation of some sort of special "marijuana court" which expressly sent users to rehab, not jail.

I don't know much about this Clark guy (girl?), and I agree with some of the points in the article, but he/she seems pretty close to a flat-out liar.

It reads like a classic stir-the-pot rant fueled by cherry-picking a few extreme examples of misconduct, which can always be found.

So he wants to burn it to the ground. Then what? What will replace it? How will it be better? Most revolutions produce tyrants. Only a few have produced anything arguably better than what was in place before.

"...burn it to the ground. Then what? What will replace it?"

This is what I keep coming back to. Even if he/she is 100% correct, suggesting we burn it down without offering suggestions for how to make it better afterwards is nothing more than a rant.

Which is fine, if they have something to get off their chest. But this should be recognized as such.

The alternative is very simple and was already tried in Ancient Greeks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

How about campaign finance reform? At the moment it's like "one dollar, one vote".

There's also the issue that becoming a politician takes money, free time and a degree from somewhere where the College Republicans/Democrats have a really active chapter. I have no idea how to fix this problem.

Here the author doesn't care about the veracity of their anecdotes since the argument is emotional.

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