A Journal Discovered Among the Papers of Thomas Kjar  

Had another one of those arguments that seem to arise spontaneously and then dissolves into nothing. I hadn't noticed that closely but apparently there has been a great opposition to the Chief Justice. A referendum has been circulating to kick her out of office.

It's always a ploy on the part of one group or another to gain influence through the fear and anger of the common citizens who are naturally afraid of crime.

They want to throw her out because of her method of working. No one has shown me a complete list of the hundreds, if not thousands of cases she has made decision on and the complaint against the majority of these decisions. All they have done is culled out several cases that don't appeal to them. There is no cause of removal from office. No; this type of action is really mobocracy because there is no thought behind it; it is emotion, fear, reaction, hate, revenge. All those habits of thought that destroy democracy rather than contribute to it.

There is no intelligence behind it because 1) as I mentioned before there is a relation between the Chief Justice and the number and severity of crime in the State and I have never seen a full appraisal of her full record of decision- I would guess that most of people would agree with 85% of these decisions- so the question is not one of competency.

The other argument I hear is that she has used her power to release criminals on technicalities as a way to subvert the death penalty- which the conjecture may hold some bit of truth to it- while this would be poor practice it still is not an intelligent argument because there is no correlation between the death penalty and crime. And the stated purpose of those trying to get her out of office is to effectively control crime. —

It sounds as if the real purpose is to get some ideological advocate for themselves who will be no doubt corrupt, incompetent and conditioned by the 'will of the mob'

You must think intelligently in a democracy- anything less and you go sliding back to mob rule- the lesson has to be learned over and over again- You can't think with your emotions.

Odd discussions will bloom from fear and boredom. There was nothing dirty said or done and later in the evening, under the influence of wine, we talked about baseball and sports in general.

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