@dlakelan this video made me think of you. LegalEagle has been right on this issue for as long as I have followed them.
Thanks for thinking of me? He says things that I think represent the ideal position when you constrain yourself to having Enlightenment era liberal govt ideals.
If you selected representatives by random draw I'd probably even be able to get on board with much of it even today.
But I believe Enlightenment ideals of govt was *designed* to impose the will of elites on everyone else. They were even pretty explicit about it! And I don't agree with it.
@dlakelan most ideas, including good ones come from terrible places.
I have advocated for some kind of random draw for representatives for as long as I can remember.
We don't want legislators that ate good at wining elections, we want a fair representation of the populous.
I still think that, for example, if 53% of randomly chosen people decided it was a good idea and passed a law to kill off all transgender/jew/muslim/other-minority group it'd be bad even if legal and applied evenly and in a due-process manner etc etc. And that's the core problem of govt. It always imposes something on people through *systemic* application of violence. That's its literal definition.
@dlakelan no, it's not.
For it to be law it has to be evenly applied to all.
Their exist a lot of fundamentals of law that a lot of people get wrong.
Their is no law if it doesn't apply fairly to all people, regardless of their identity, or background.
Anything else is just thinly wield justifications for evil.
There's a quote about this:
"
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
― Anatole France
"
@dlakelan you can call anything a law, it doesn't make it so.
I don't know the background of the quote, but I suspect they criticised a specific application of law as unfair. Which would make it a bad law.
Well, a law that says you can't sleep under bridges is pretty straightforward. It can apply equally to all people in a region... in this sense it's "fair" in that all people are bound by it... But in another sense, it's deeply unfair because rich people don't want to sleep under bridges, the law has no negative consequences for them, while poor people may need to sleep under bridges to avoid flooding and it could literally be life and death for them... so there's not one defined fairness.
@dlakelan no, it's not fair to the person sleeping under a bridge.
With every law a constitutional test should be applied to see if it is in agreement with the constitution, where basic rights to dignity is established.
Many of our rights tie back to the Magna Carta, many others come from common law.
In the end, there's no such thing as equality per-se. Or at best there's a kind of "equality of utility" but utility is *unobservable*.
the closest thing we have to equality of utility is that people negotiated it and came to an agreement about whether it was acceptable... and that's what Anarchy is ultimately about. It's about not writing top-down rules imposed with systemic violence but instead negotiating *everything*. It's exhausting perhaps. But I've come to believe it's necessary
@dlakelan what you are describing is called rule of law.
It's a slow deliberate process that is constantly undermine by people that either don't understand it, or is exploited by those that would benefit from its failure.
In the end though, you need a law, and it has text, and it says something. And it can't *possibly* be equal. Because there doesn't exist a universal definition of "equal". nevertheless you codify it, and you enforce it with cops and guns. And so your codified violence enforces benefits to some and harms to others, and makes them relatively *permanent*. If that's what you want, then it "works" for you. But I've come to not want that.
And after a while, it becomes absolutely obvious to everyone that it's *not possible* to be "equal" under the law, and so instead what it comes down to is each group trying to grab a benefit for themselves and to hell with the others. And that describes everything I've ever seen in governance since I was old enough to be aware. The idealism we're taught as little 3rd graders just doesn't have anything to do with the reality imho.
@dlakelan fairness have nothing to do with equal.
What is fair is the universal application of human rights.
What's fair is that everyone has access to the necessities of a decent life with dignity.
That access in no way needs to be equal, or even easy.
I have nothing against billionaires, or Monarchs.
What I am against is children starving, or people being forcefully removed from their home.
@ekg
I have a LOT against billionaires and monarchs. And that's the point. Humans don't all have similar goals and desires, there **is no** equality, no universal notion of justice. Psychopaths exist! Religious bigots exist. What they want and believe is right and good and just is completely incompatible with what I want and think is just.
@dlakelan given that people don't have similar goals and desire, why are you against billionaires or Monarchs?
The way I see it is that we have all different lot in life by accident of birth. No one should be punished or belittle because of whom they are, or what life they where born into.
If someone is born into a dynasty, as far as I am concerned it's our job to not punish them for that. The same way we shouldn't punish someone for being poor.
A monarch isn't just someone born into a dynasty. It's someone who uses that dynasty to rule over others!
A billionaire isn't just someone who has a billion dollars because they were born with it, it's someone who made a billion dollars by exploiting the conditions available to them... or if they were born with it, it's someone who didn't give those billions away to others to better humanity. Those are choices, exploitative and violent ones.
@dlakelan billionaires don't always have their wealth in something that can be given away, it's actually extremely rare for people to have their wealth mostly in commodities.
Most Monarchs are popular, that is they have the support of the people. They couldn't surrender their role even if they wanted to.
The Swedish royal family was installed by one of the French republics. He spoke only French and he is most well known for a tattoo, and refusing to pay war debts, to France.
@ekg
All billionaires who made their billions during their lifetime exploited the legal system to enable themselves to extract that rent. If they inherited it, within a matter of a few years they could give it away to any number of proper charity organizations or even give shares of a holding corporation to each and every citizen in their country. Its totally possible, its just not done.
Monarchs could step down, even if many Brits like their tabloid bullshit etc.
@ekg
Not really looking to have a conversation on the merits of billionaires and monarchs. So I gotta do a bunch more stuff today, and am stepping away from this thread.
@dlakelan I fully understand that.
The reason I gave up on arguing against the accumulation of wealth is because I came to understand that is a losing battle, and my energy is spent better elsewhere.
That's why I wrote they generally speaking have popular support. I am not going to argue against something that doesn't directly do harm.
That a person sit on meme coins that according to thin markets is worth a billion dollars, is completely worthless to argue against.
@ekg
We could define fairness as, say, it has equal effect on people's health... or it has equal effect on people's time usage, or it has equal effect on their dollar cost, or equal effect on their childbearing capacity, or equal effect on their vision, or instead of equal effect, we could say the rule applies without knowledge of the person's characteristics, or without regard to what the outcome might be... people will argue that each of these is "right" in varied situations.