Let me get this straight.
We want law and order.
But we don't want law-yers.
How exactly does that work?

...now there is a sight - cops beating lawyers.

What an abnegation antipode antipoleonomatopoeia malapropism judipoxidoral!

It will render adverse antithesis in turn would breed contradistinction, and contraposition differentiation.

Consequently heterogeneity incongruousness will cause obverse opposition apriorism to occur.

Now how's that for 25 cent words?

...Gadzooks it is 11pm! Time for my meds.

I like the way the comment reflects the internal struggle that occurs within every common man caught between his wife's divorce lawyer and his own, knowing he's paying for them both.

It's "Shakespeare meets Spurwing Plover".

Its kinda like picking a scab. It hurts, and you know you aren't supposed to, but ya GOTTA!

'spritzing ass in Pakistani politics'

"Let me get this straight.
We want law and order.
But we don't want lawyers.
How exactly does that work?"

In Canada, it would work a whole lot better if we could get rid of the Charter and go back to the British Common Law. Of course, the amending formula to change the Charter was set up by Trudeau to make this virtually impossible.

Our Charter has sometimes been described as “The Charter of Fights and Fiefdoms”: it separates Canadians into tribes that the Charter protects and those it doesn’t. (The rights of “British” Christians, especially men—the very group that introduced “Responsible Government” in Canada—have been virtually pushed out of the public square.) The Charter has made Canada a much more pugnacious—lots of spoils for the taking—and litigious place, with lawyers earning huge amounts of money to protect the Charter rights of all kinds of “diverse” people, many of them miscreants—often on the public dime.

Has anyone else noticed that almost every time the rights of a favoured group of Canadians increase, the rights and freedoms of the rest of us are diminished? (Heck, one doesn’t even need to be a citizen to reap the benefits: thanks to SCC feminist Judge, Bertha Wilson.) E.g., Via the Charter and left-wing, activist judges, while end running Parliament, the homosexual agenda has trumped religious rights and freedoms (if one is a Christian) every time. (Some equality!)

So, in a nutshell: no Charter = fewer litigious clients and fewer lawyers. Win, win! (I’m just daydreaming, of course.)

Sorry, Vitruvius, somehow attributing to you the quote in my post above got left out.

"common man caught between his wife's divorce lawyer and his own, knowing he's paying for them both."

Which is why divorced men (but not women) are denied Firearm Acquisition Certificates in this country. You see, it is generally understood by the state that divorce is such outright theft that the state takes the extraordinary step of disarming divorced men.

In this context I really feel sorry for some broad in Asia who has to wear a hijab. That's a big, pressing concern of mine.

Feminists, the lot of you. And traitors. You care more about broads in Asia then your own fellow countymen WHO PAY THE TAXES THAT MAKE THIS COUNTRY HAPPEN WHEN THE ECONOMY GOES TO HELL YOU PEOPLE ARE GOING TO MAKE TASTY TASTY SCAPEGOATS ID START AT LEAST PRETENDING TO BE CONSERVATIVE IF I WERE YOU

"Let me get this straight.
We want law and order.
But we don't want lawyers.
How exactly does that work?"

Well, Vitruvius, you can imagine that all the lawyers are Warren Kinsella, for starters.

lookout - agree with you about the Charter. In my view, the Charter is primarily about inserting Quebec as a major political force in Canada. At least half of the Charter is about bilingualism.

This sets up a fictional Canada, for the reality is that we are not and never will be, a bilingual country. Yet we have spent and continue to spend billions both asserting and attempting this. We are a nation with two basic languages, each with a major spatial location. I think this reality should have been recognized (as it is in Belgium)rather than attempting to force the entire population into a bilingual mode.

The Charter also destroys Ontario as a political force. It does this by diminishing the powers of the individual and privileging the powers, not of the group as a whole population, but privileging the powers of only minority groups. Therefore, Ontario moves out of being a civic political structure where each individual is equal, and into a, yes, tribal political structure, where identity groups have power over the individual. And in Ontario, these identity groups are the minority groups. Therefore, Ontario can't 'get its act together' and speak as one voice, one Set of people who have a basic commonality as Ontarians, because it is set up as a collection of Subsets. Each subset is given massive funding by the Liberal powers; this sets them up as closed and adversarial - and as faithful voting blocs.

So, the Charter sets up Quebec as a political force, with due attention to its demands because it has that political power in the House (75 seats minimum); it forces the rest of the country to pay dues (bilingualism); and it removes the most populous province, Ontario, from any coherent voice by balkanizing it into privileged subsets.

That Charter, along with the HRAct of the same period, has frozen Canada into silence.

By the way, Vitruvius, just a point, but I thought that the agenda of Lawyers was to WIN. Nothing to do with justice, truth.

Posted by: Vitruvius at February 10, 2008 1:00 AM

"Let me get this straight.
We want law and order.
But we don't want law-yers.
How exactly does that work?"

Well duh, Vit. It goes something like this:

In the event that the party of the first part, described as the complaintant for the purpose of this agreement, fails, in a reasonable and timely manner, to respond, in writing conveyed in triplicate, to the party of the second part, described as the party deemed in default for the purpose of this agreement, there shall be declared a default in the proper application of said LAW. In ORDER that the proper and expedicious response of the party of the second part shall be deemed timely, as defined in Subsection B, Part 2 of Subsection 3, Part 4 of the duely ammended agreement dated January 23rd, 2007 , the subject response from the party of the second part shall be conveyed to the party of the first part according to the provisions outlined in Subsection N, Part 33 of the Original Agreement, dated December 22, 2006. The penalties described within shall...

Well, you get the point. ;-)

In the event that the party of the first part, described as the complaintant for the purpose of this agreement, fails, in a reasonable and timely manner, to respond, in writing conveyed in triplicate, to the...Gadzooks!

...I got some extra meds Yoop

;-)

ET: Wow, strange how when you explain tribalism in the Canadian context, I get it!

Vitruvius:
It's been my observation that lawyers are not interested in justice -- only manufacturing (a large number of head legislators are lawyers) inordinately complex rules which, er, require their de-coding. They hate and despise the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid). Simplicity = reduced income. Same with accountants and tax law.

The Rule of Law, of course, is beautifully simple: We are all treated equally; and the Rule of Law nevers envisages any outcome that would favour one group over another.

This might get me flamed, but here goes: I've been under the impression that the Rule of Law has been seriously weakened with the increasing numbers of women lawyers who it seems are pursuing "social justice" which is verily the negation of justice.
It has become a bit of a hobby of mine to start reading one of those depressingly frequent articles describing the latest head-shaking legal outrage while saying "I bet it's a female judge" and it too often is, it seems.

Mind you, I'm one of those dinosaurs who thinks that men and women are different and nodding to PC lingo, differently abled!

"seriously weakened with the increasing numbers of women lawyers"

...I'd like you to say that to the face of Marilyn Burns.

A single mother of 4 who put herself through law school, came second runner up for the Alberta Alliance party and wants a better Alberta, even her son is into politics.

http://www.maburns.com/

MND wrote, "Mind you, I'm one of those dinosaurs who thinks that men and women are different and nodding to PC lingo, differently abled!"

I'm a woman and I fit that description exactly.

Re Marilyn Burns. Good for her! But she's definitely the exception, not the rule. (Besides the law, look at public education and the Protestant denominations that have been taken over by mushy brained, bleeding heart women: disaster zones.)

ET, I altogether agree with your analysis. Canadians have sure had the wool ("pur laine"?) pulled over their eyes. Result? A bloody mess!

As usual I was probably trying to be too clever and thus did not express myself clearly. Sorry. My complaint here and often elsewhere is the lack of understanding (or at least application) of basic logical quantifiers, resulting in the production of logically false statements.

Consider the following excerpt from Stanley Peters and Dag Westerståhl's 2002 draft of their book Quantifiers[1], from chapter 3, "Basic Properties of Natural Language Quantifiers", section 3.3.4, Symmetry:

"It is a notable fact that some determiners in natural languages (and their corresponding denotations) are symmetric and others are not. The (a) and (b) sentences in the following examples imply each other, but the (c) and (d) sentences do not.

a. Some lawyers are crooks.
b. Some crooks are lawyers.
c. All lawyers are crooks.
d. All crooks are lawyers.

a. No lawyers are crooks.
b. No crooks are lawyers.
c. Most lawyers are crooks.
d. Most crooks are lawyers.

a. Several lawyers are crooks.
b. Several crooks are lawyers.
c. Every lawyer is a crook.
d. Every crook is a lawyer.

a. Three lawyers are crooks.
b. Three crooks are lawyers.
c. All but two lawyers are crooks.
d. All but two crooks are lawyers.

a. More than six lawyers are crooks.
b. More than six crooks are lawyers.
c. Two thirds of the lawyers are crooks.
d. Two thirds of the crooks are lawyers.

a. At most four lawyers are crooks.
b. At most four crooks are lawyers.
c. The lawyers were crooks.
d. The crooks were lawyers.

a. A woman was a witness.
b. A witness was a woman.
c. The woman was a witness.
d. The witness was a woman.

"Thus, no, some, three and other numerals, more than six, at most four and other modified numerals, are symmetric, but all, every, all but two, and most and other proportionals, are not. Aristotle devoted a good part of his syllogistics to codifying the different inference characteristics of these two classes of quantifiers."

/End of Peters & Westerståhl excerpt.

It's all well and good to run around claiming that it is rhetorically valid to say "Lawyers are Crooks" (for example) without having to say "Some Lawyers are Crooks", other than the minor detail that it is not logically correct: the universally quantified statement is false (while the existentially quantified statement is true), and, moreover, the universally qualified statement is defamatory libel against some lawyers. I would have thought that given that Aristotle had this stuff figured out 2,400 years ago, it would no longer be so difficult for folks to grok.

Yet ET says, "I thought that the agenda of Lawyers was to Win". No, the agenda of some lawyers is to win (typically trial lawyers), and the agenda of some lawyers is to negotiate and draft binding contracts mutually agreeable between two parties with the express purpose of not having to fight (go to court) in the first place.

Yoop then goes on to provide an example typical of some contracts. On the other hand, the contracts some lawyers draft aren't like that (I only need one example to prove this true, and our corporate lawyer is one example).

MND says, "Lawyers are not interested in justice". Really? Not even one?

And Irwin says, "You can imagine that all the lawyers are Warren Kinsella".

No, I can't.

[1] www.stanford.edu/group/nasslli/courses/peters-wes/PWbookdraft2-3.pdf

Hey not all LAWYERS are crooks and not all crooks are LAWYERS. But there are a hell of a lot of LAWYERS sucking the blood of the taxpayer what with all those billing hours to Dept of Indian affairs the Dept of Imigration the Dept of Political Correctness the Dept of well you get the picture.Thats why I just love this new Prime Minister the first PM in a long time that is'nt a LAWYER.OH also thanks Kate I had to laugh when I woke this morning.

Correct, because only some lawyers are upper-case lawyers.

Heck, viturvius, I didn't know you were discussing the difference between the universal and particular quantifiers. I did that a few weeks ago and got my head bitten off (The/Some British are Coming!).

I'll change my tune; I'm not talking about Lawyers as a logical class of beings - and I completely agree with your comments on the validity of differentiating between All and Some..

But I'm talking about them as a class of beings whom I have categorized within my own personal Set of Classes of Humans and Aliens. That moves them out of the realm of reason and logic and into the realm of pure subjective idiosyncratic opinions. That also means that I can say ANYTHING I want about them, because the validity of such an expression is referenced only to My Own Personal Set of Classes of Humans and Aliens.

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less"..."they've a temper, some of them, particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs - however, I can manage the whole lot!"...."when I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra"...

That's how capitalism deals with words. (Humpty Dumpty). Now, dealing with words using logic...

Yes, well, I agreed with you in the "Some British are Coming" argument, ET, although that case is slightly weaker because contextually the original The did not necessarily imply all, and because as you considered above the object of the sentence was a verb, not a noun.

Anyway, it is in that sense that in this thread I am continuing my agreement with you on the importance of logical quantifiers in syllogistic statements. It's all well and good to say, if one chooses to, "I don't like lawyers", but that's because the I is an existential quantifier.

Indeed, in my opinion, the two greatest causes of the low signal to noise ratio in blog comments, and the excessive generation of heat without a lot of light, are people abusing universal quantifiers, and people saying (or implying) "It is the case that..." when what they mean is "I think that...". (Oh wait, that's only one cause, the latter is a subset of the former.)

Humpty Dumpty should have read Confucius, who said:
"When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty."

Me No Dhimmi"seriously weakened with the increasing numbers of women lawyers"
...I'd like you to say that to the face of Marilyn Burns.
Posted by: tomax7 at February 10, 2008 3:53 PM

You know what: I'd be super-comfortable saying this to "her face" and you know what else: she would most likely totally agree.

Mind you, I might still be a bit miffed by my experience being executor to a $2 million estate. I asked some lawyers for quotes for probate; I got $40,000, $10,000, $5,000, until my curiosity got the better of me: thinkin 'man, this I gotta look into'. Bought a Self Counsel Press booklet, looked it over Friday night, prepared the documents Saturday morning, and went for a ride early afternoon. I'm guessing, 4 hours. Done.

It's the tarriff mentality, the pulling of numbers out of hats with no reference to anything except they deserve lotsa dough; the "what can I take this sucker for" mentality. And the ARROGANCE -- instilled in first year law school, I'm guessing.

Mind you, I'm also bristling remembering a meeting with the son of a 20-year client who invited his lawyer wife along too for an extra free lunch and basically they intimated that it wasn't a matter of if, or when, but how how I was going to steal his mother's money, and on my dime. Told the mother: she tore several strips off the bastard. The lawyer couple is now divorced and he left the law and became a honest man.

I asked some lawyers for quotes for probate; I got $40,000, $10,000, $5,000

Note I said I asked "some lawyers". :)

vitruvius - I completely agree - I'm constantly frothing at people who assert a conclusion as if it were a Universal Truth, rather than personally propose an argument. Yes, exactly - the 'I' is an existential quantifier.

Humpty Dumpty and Confucius - I think they'd get along.

In over fifty years I've never had the kinds of problems so many people report having had with some lawyers, and I've dealt with more than a few lawyers. Either I'm doing something wrong (that's a joke, son), or I've been lucky, probably the latter.

Nevertheless, whether through error or fortune, it remains the case that I have seen that not all lawyers are crooks, not all left of center are communists, not all right of center are oligarchists, not all christians are saints, not all muslims are islamofascists, not all atheists are sane, not all libertarians are worth voting for, et cetera.

It turns out to be remarkably difficult to make statements like "all humans taxonomically subsumed by label X have characteristic or behaviour Y", largely due to the vagaries of taxonomization, but also significantly due to the degree to which individual humans lie (perhaps to themselves) about their filiation with putative collective taxonomizations.

If one wishes to engage in an argument, as opposed to, say, a mud slinging contest, then it is incumbent upon one to establish, via the use of quantifiers, the domain of discourse within which one is making one's argument. Otherwise, all your energy is going to end up in entropy, without having afforded you any enthalpy benefit. (At least, some of the time ;-)

ET-Vitruvius:

I believe that language and discourse, like clothing, should be occasion/venue appropriate.

I believe that blogs are not scholarly debating societies. That they are rough and tumble places for blowing off steam and that the allegedly missing qualifiers are implied.

Cliches get traction because they express enough truth to be recognizable to most regular folks. Stereotypes likewise.
Heh, did I ever tell you the one about the Englishman, the Irishman, and the Scot, and oh, by the way, I don't mean to suggest for a moment that ALL Irish, ALL Scots, AlL English are alike.

I believe that when you're trying to persuade someone of a different ideological persuasion you are wise to speak very differently than when you are just having fun on a blog designed for conservative/libertaarian fellow travellers.

I believe when people tell lawyer jokes they are not meaning to suggest that "all lawyers" are such and such. Nor do I think that a single poster on this thread thinks this.

I believe you've set up a straw-man argument here and are engaging in narcissitic intelletcual preening.

I had a very good experience once with a lawyer who helped me sort out a regulatory matter and whose bill was proportionate to the work done.

I do NOT believe that all female Chinese drivers in Vancouver are terrifying.

I believe I agree with you, MND, at least most of the time. I don't, and I won't, go on about quantifiers endlessly and over and over again. Nevertheless, I believe that it is important for us, even when just having fun blowing off steam on blogs, to revisit from time to time various principles of dialectics, rhetoric, and wit, that sometimes get lost in the noise. I, existentially speaking, like to see them kept loud enough to be part of the signal. So, sometimes I turn up the volume on those topics. But they're just my comment's; they're not that important.

My dearest old friend, who is a senior University professor, just read this thread and suggested by email that I post this comment, excerpted from Time Enough for Love, from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, by Robert J. Heinlein: "A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay -- such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients? It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers? And enormously higher than that of professors?"

As he mentioned, note that the quote uses implied quantifiers properly.

There ya' have it folks, I'm outa' here ~ best wishes, good night, & thanks Kate.

I remember when POOL was an acronym for Piss on Otto Lange and when WGTA was for Western Grain Transportation ACT and the 'Crow' was more than a bird ... and it wasn't just 'any rate'. Anyway, you mean to tell me Alberta Farmers are still getting ripped off on Beer Barley. I guess it must be standard to fill the summer house with empties as well. Sorry, I must still be thinking with the head cheese again ... some things never change do they.

I object to the coinage leftard.

I, myself, am rather leftward leaning, at least probably left of you, and I too am a ponderous learner so the suffix tard stings particularly. If anybody thinks that advances national dialogue then they're a filthy stink'n Nazi rightard. Kidding.