Charles Stross on Justice

"On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me."

"It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and—stripped of the ability to get drunk on it—wine was just sour grape juice."

"Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder."

"Let’s just say that you can’t always trust the historical record and move swiftly on."

"I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs."

"I don’t hate him—he’s just a bore but that isn’t a capital offense. Usually."

"The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors."

"The iron law of bureaucracy doesn’t help: everybody working to ensure that the organization continues to pay them a salary, rather than necessarily achieving its objectives."

"I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like."

"When they went looking for someone to represent the agency in public and picked me, they weren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were fracking for oil in the basement."

"Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts."

"Mhari looks at me. I look at her. “No comment,” we chorus in unison. Then I add, “We’re just the performing monkeys; if you want a policy statement you’ll need to send the organ grinder a memo."

"Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy."

"I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest."

"They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob."

"But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done."

"Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun."

"A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless."

"Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal."

"“I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?"

"The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage..."

"Annette’s communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School."

"Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to...well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep."

"“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states."