If courts treated the JK defense — just kidding! — as an aggravating factor that justified harsher sentencing, the overall social and political results would be much better. JK isn’t universal: not every culture in the world has sunk into an endlessly trollish pit of sorry-not-sorry. The JK defense itself is a by-product of a culture in which meaning it, intention and deliberation, is treated as a legal threshold (think of the steps from first-degree murder to negligent manslaughter). If you don’t mean it you’re less culpable, so not meaning it — just kidding! — has become an all-purpose, reflexive, default corollary of transgression: to say without saying, do without doing, mean without meaning. And all because, in the penalism and litigation that’s consumed much of our culture, we’ve fetishized intention, the interiority that comes before the event, rather than consequence, the external effects that come after. Historically this is a metaphorical dead end, and futuristically it’s an empirical dead end. We need to move toward a view that prioritizes external consequence and, as a result, JK becomes something people would never say rather than their first recourse.