Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

Yes and society needs to be extremely wary of laws and their effect on them. Society is built around oppressing some for the benefit of the other. Equality and prosperity require great restructuring.

No society is built around getting everyone to play nice with each other as opposed to clubbing each other to death whenever they want an extra mango or something.. Which it does with the law.

Edited by M84 on Sep 22nd 2019 at 12:29:34 AM

Are you proposing that an equal society would have no laws?

Law is something that’s required for a functioning nation. It is the basic building block of society. Your problem seems to be with unjust laws, not the concept of laws itself. That’s a bit of a different issue.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 21st 2019 at 9:30:01 AM

If anything, the fact that people have to be told to be nice to each other because of a rule imposed on them is pretty fucking damning and shows an inherent flaw in people at large.

Governments are one of those inevitable things that will spring up eventually whether we want them to or not (e.g. if someone in an absence of one gets enough people together to enforce their will, their the government now). But seeing how the one of the more effective ways of keeping governments from getting upity is to almost literally set different parts of it against each other, i’m not particularly inclined to call it innately good.

"Maybe.

I find something distinctly suspicious about people who overly romanticize the law given its traditional place as the boot on humanity's face."

This is inane. Law is about formalism, about producing similar results for similar actions, and providing methodology towards exchange of goods and services.Civilization needs a rulebook, otherwise violence is basically necessary and/or inevitable.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Sep 21st 2019 at 12:57:34 PM

I'm not disagreeing we need laws—ironically to prevent other abuse of authority. The more laws and restraints, the less we can fall prey to people who would use them.

I'm disagreeing that the law rarely functions in a manner that should be respected or treated with undue reverence. They're like toilets. Things you need but things that shouldn't be romanticized.

And also constantly questioned and revised.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 21st 2019 at 10:00:36 AM

What we specifically need are ‘’written’’ laws, so the king, noble, or village elders can’t just make up whatever ones they feel like that day.

Is treating the law with respect a way of romanticizing it? I could grant you that it might make things dull but it exists in various cases for a reason.

Can the law be perfected? Yes, but that doesn't mean we have to treat the law as it is a necessary evil. The reason of existence for the law is to create the internal order and stability by which a society can advance in peace.

Lastly, society requires generalizations in law because case-by-case interpretations are woefully impractical and often leave a shaky ground of what is allowed and what not.

You mean other than holding together our entire society and keeping it functioning, right?

Frankly, the view that law is evil and shouldn’t be respected is just as nonsensical as the view that the law is always right and should never be changed. Laws are a useful tool, and there are areas where they can be improved, but calling them a “necessary evil” doesn’t make much sense. That’s a libertarian-style misunderstanding of how society and government work.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 22nd 2019 at 3:38:04 AM

A lot of things keep society functioning beyond fear of punishment.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 22nd 2019 at 4:32:00 AM

TIL that Charles is a bigger anarchist than I am.

Though I can see why. When someone has deeply held religious beliefs, it's easy to have that view.

After all, when it's your view that people should behave a certain way out of love for or acceptance of god, a system that tries to coerce that same behaviour through fear of secular punishment feels like a necessary evil.

Which is not a bad take.

See, this is that “libertarian-style misunderstanding” I mentioned.

The law isn’t simply fear of punishment. It’s the system that makes it possible for a society with many vastly different people to function. It’s a system of formal dispute resolution, it protects vulnerable people, controls the administration of government, and lots more. I mean, consider how many areas of law there are. Zoning law, labor law, consumer protection, finance and securities, and the list goes on. Pick one off that list and imagine we didn’t have it, and tell me how that might affect things.

Moreover, the argument “other things keep society running too” doesn’t really mean anything. Sure, lots of things keep society running. Law is one of them. Viewing it as evil is just as shortsighted as viewing it as perfect.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 22nd 2019 at 6:05:19 AM

The law is the social contract written down so society knows what its rights, responsibilities and penalties are.

It's not just all penalties and dues all the time. Rubbish pick-up? Laws. Health and safety at work? Laws. Consumer protection? Laws. Housing contracts that ensure landlords can't waltz in and take everything simply because they like the look of the carpet you brought with you? Laws.

The law is often an ass. It can be lopsided. It all too often is misapplied. But, when it is all of those... It's down to members of society not giving a toss and having the pull to play silly buggers, often despite the law.

The law requires constant gardening because people are people, not ideals of sweetness and light (and definitely not Rational Actors™). And, laws are only as good as people are, but they're the best method we've got of dealing with other people.

Even though the law often wears an ass' head instead of a blindfold and forgets where she put the scales. At least she knows she should have some somewhere and can find them often enough.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 22nd 2019 at 2:41:40 PM

I draw a sharp contrast between Rule of Law and economic contracts and social traditions.

Like I said, I believe in the law. I had to give up anarchism because while I intellectually would love to preserve as much freedom as possible, I was unable to reconcile the Power Vacuum Paradox.

Basically, if you remove all of the laws and government by mutual consent then someone else will fill that vacuum. By force if necessary. One of the things that happened without the rule of law in Kentucky (or lax rule of law) was that the corporations filled the void with their strike breakers and Private Military Contractors. Indeed, plenty of nutjobs want to get rid of the government so they could burn and pillage.

So, indeed, for the protection of freedom you need people to restrict it.

Very depressing.

Undoubtedly my religion plays a role in it but it's also more a deep disenchantment with the culture of the area where the racism, corruption, and oppression is deeply built into the system. Its hard to think of the government as beneficial when it is so actively controlled by a corporate-run state government.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 22nd 2019 at 7:17:58 AM

Totally unrestricted freedom isn’t actually a good thing.

Isn't that what I said?

You do it and then it gives way to authoritarianism in a Horsehoe Effect.

If there's no law to cripple the tyrant, the tyrant will rise.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 22nd 2019 at 7:19:54 AM

I think Charles is acknowledging that tho. Saying why Libertarianism would lead to Corporativism.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 22nd 2019 at 9:23:48 AM

Right Libertarianism leads to plutocracy, corporatism refers to ordering society alongside corporate lines (i.e interest groups like Academia or Labour, not just commercial entities). They're not the same thing.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Sep 22nd 2019 at 7:25:51 AM

I was directing that at the comment that it’s depressing some freedoms need to be restricted to protect society.

Is it really so depressing that you don’t have the freedom to drive drunk, or commit securities fraud, or pump industrial runoff into the ocean? The law isn’t perfect, but acting like it’s some evil, depressing grip on your personal freedoms is an utterly nonsensical position to take.

It's important to remember that the reason a lot of laws even exist in the first place is because something happened to make people think "hey, maybe there should be a law".

Shit, we even have a trope for that: There Should Be a Law.

Edited by M84 on Sep 22nd 2019 at 10:46:50 PM

Speaking as a Catholic, I never had a problem with having a legal body detailing the laws and rules of each country, mostly because these laws are (in theory) both to protect the decent and common people from being played or exploited by the strong/cheaters and to inform how to behave in a given situation, which is often derived from prior experience as @archon mentioned.

I’m not ashamed of saying that there are many things I don’t know, and in the same vein, there are things people know that their counterparts don’t in various aspects of life such as the professional one, taking that into consideration, the law exists as a guideline to everyone to compensate for the disparity of knowledge.

This conversation reminds me of a scene in John Adams, where Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin discuss the coming Constitutional Convention while in Paris before turning towards government and people in general.

To wit: The topic of the Constitution comes up and Jefferson glumly predicts that it will be as compromised as the Declaration of Independence. He then goes on to say that no generation has the right to bind the next to its "laws and judgments" anymore than an independent country has to another. In essence, he doesn't like the idea of a constitution being the law of the land forever.

Adams says greater national laws are needed to bring stability and ensure the long term legitimacy of the United States. Jefferson responds that he fears they will "prove a breach in our revolutionary ideals from which will pour forth the forces of reaction." He thinks a Constitution will pave the way for a tyrant who will have federal authority to back him up.

Adams calls Jefferson a walking contradiction, for his pet idea of "cordoning off a space where no power exists" in completely at odds with his public work leading and creating governments and power structures up to that point.

Franklin chimes in that "We're all contradictions," to which Adams agrees and says "And what is government but the putting into effect the lessons we have learned from dealing with the contradictions in our own characters." Adams acknowledges that too much power in a system can be a bad thing, but still insists that there does need to be a system and it needs power to function. The important task then is how to artfully arrange that power.

Jefferson says that Adams has a, "Disconcerting lack of faith in [his] fellow man."

Adams responds, "Yes, and you display a dangerous excess of faith in your fellow man."

Edited by Parable on Sep 22nd 2019 at 10:18:40 AM

That's interesting.

I honestly Take a more pessimist view on that, without rules (Writen or not), then...humanity would stagnate at best, fall into a violent mess at worst and in the most likely case...just create new laws after some messy period.

(The Writen or Not is to count Anarchist Communes, who might have no "written" laws, but in practique, it certainly would have).

A commune can totally have written rules, the key thing is that everyone is equal and has an equal role in making the rules without a hierarchy, written rules have just a method of recording things, they’re not connected to the existence of a hierarchy.