Rant

When confronted with an unjust law, a good citizen feels the need to disobey it. Compliance with an unjust law is complacency, and eventually you allow it to become part of the social contract. That is why it is so important for those with nothing to hide to oppose any and all unreasonable searches and seizures. That is why all jurors should know about nullification. That is why bodily autonomy, the missing right in the many, needs to be exercised and covered as a religious freedom (TST). It is your civic duty to defy unjust laws.

Most people used to have an internal moral code that would lead them down the road of life. It seems that internal moral code has been replaced with "getting money, no matter how".

Humans are natural creatures. Humans created laws.
Bees are natural creatures. Bees create honey.

If honey is considered natural, then so too are laws.

Laws are really just a social construct, but they are also a social agreement.

Cheaters always exist. It’s unfortunate their cheating will continue to destroy human existence. But that’s why we fight. For laws that we created as a social agreement to fight back against the cheaters.

Can’t be too cynical, not if you want to keep fighting

Someone else has probably mentioned David Graeber. He wrote an article on how people typically behave even without law or threat of violence. The article can be read at: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-maysurprise-you/.

I agree the law is made up. Also, ethics is not neccesarily the same as law.

There's no law that says you must follow the law either

Do you... Commonly run into people that think otherwise? 🤨

One thing that bothers me is when people go, "They wouldn't do that. It's illegal."

Like what? They're doing that right now.

Slavery is illegal. But we GOT modern day slavery.

Laws of physics don't exist either. What we have are our descriptions of the organized ways in which things seem to work based on our observation and experiment. But a hard coded rule doesn't exist anywhere, which is why we adjust our laws sometimes when we find new behavior through different or better measurements.

To get to your point, laws and rights are agreements within a society that things should be a certain way, and can be changed by the public or those who govern them, positively or negatively. As George Carlin said, you don't have rights, you have privileges. And those can be taken away, even the ones claimed as given by a creator. That's just core agreements, and even they aren't perfectly adhered to, especially if most people aren't paying attention.

I agree with the sentiment generally, but not your reasoning in this post. Although to be fair to you, I can't really put my gut feeling into a cohesive argument here either.

However I did notice as well people seem to overestimate what law can do. I joined an ecoactivist group in my community, yet everything they do is petition the local government to pass or veto something, which obviously then get ignored.

But really even IF those petitions weren't ignored, drafting a petition is the easier part.

The harder part is aligning power structure incentives with yours, or building your own superior power structures. Otherwise law isn't worth shit, because power structures such as police or media or courts or Big Tech will prevail using more money, media influence, and thugs with weapons than you ever did.

I am not a tankie, but I believe Stalin was right on this one: "the only power comes out of a long rifle"

Just because someone "can" break the law... doesn't mean the law is useless. You're right, that it comes down to enforcement. But enforcement requires that law to exist in the first place, otherwise there is nothing to enforce. It's a self-sustaining loop.

If that loop is broken for some reason, that doesn't mean the law is no longer important. In fact, it often means the law is more important than ever, because it is more obvious than ever, that it needs to be enforced. You are watching the consequences of not having that law, unfold right in front of you.

Simply saying, "Oh, well. I guess that law doesn't matter anymore, since no one enforced it", is that point in Lord of the Flies when everything starts to spiral out of control.

I don't think the people you are complaining about actually believe that these things aren't physically possible because of the law. If I say "ICE can't search your car without a warrant" the" legally" part is implied. Of course they'll do what they want, but making sure that people know that what they've done is against the rules, gives them grounds to file suit. (Hopefully before a less crooked judge)

I get what you're saying but you're losing the thread by framing it the way you are. Cuz there's quite a few layers between animals and fascism and Lord of the flies barely encompasses one.

I read your argument as "People should not blindly expect someone is going to save us from fascism." Which I agree with.

But IMO the rest of your philosophical argument is besides the point and distracting to the audience.

Laws may be "made up" but we all operate by them (by greater/lesser degrees) nonetheless.

Especially social laws which we all follow to get along.

So not sure what your rant is about. We all conform to varying degrees, and there are consequences to how much we choose to conform.

The law is made up. It doesn’t exist in nature.

Look at cats, dogs, birds, or ants. They do have their own sets of laws even if we cannot decode them.