www.UNRforLiberty.com

It's way prettier.

As a response to the presidential election between Obama and McCain, we as a club illustrated the stark similarities between the two candidates. As a result, the club distributed one of our best Liberty Reports – “McCain = Obama”. Within that issue along with many other items, we discovered that Obama is just as much as a war promoter as his counterpart. As the media and the rest of America are becoming increasingly occupied by homeland issues, a new war in Pakistan appears to be brewing. America is using military action to bomb probable targets which are believed to be Taliban militants. Unfortunately, reports are coming in claiming that many innocent civilians are also being destroyed. Is there a quicker way to create an organized resistance against the United States in Pakistan than by invigorating more recruits to avenge the deaths of lost innocent loved ones? Possibly, but it is saddening to see an elected official who ran under the principles of peace to be pursuing more aggressive military action.

How is this making us safer again? How are we paying for this again? What in the Constitution permits us to send foreign aid and troops to countries such as this again? And most importantly, in the spirit of our last meeting, what justifies the killing of innocent people again?

Globally, the United States has degraded al Qaeda's ability to pull off another 9/11 by employing operations that look a lot like police detective work. Most of the greatest successes scored against al Qaeda, such as the snatch-and-grab operations that netted Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, have not relied on large numbers of U.S. troops. Intelligence sharing and close cooperation with foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done more to round up suspected terrorists than blunt military force.
- Obama's Wise Approach toward Afghanistan

I have, for the past couple of days, held before my mind a constant conundrum that I cannot adequately answer for myself. I pose it here to see if anyone can elucidate the issue more than I can.


If one is the voluntary citizen of a country (or a club or whatever) they agree to follow the rules of that country (or club or whatever). That is, they are responsible for abiding by the laws and in a sense agree to be punished should they "break the law." But an implicit assumption is this agreement is that it is possible to know and follow all laws. If a body of law is unknowable--if one person is simply not capable of learning every law--is the citizen still responsible if he breaks that law?

The two solutions that I've thought of is:

1) Yes, of course he is responsible. Simply failing to learn a law cannot be held as an excuse for failing to follow it anymore than not taking driving classes excuses one from running into other cars. In this tact I believe we see law as not words written on a piece of paper but as a visceralization of "nature rights." We already know that murder and rape and stealing are bad...they are violations of property rights that (the vast majority of) people inherently acknowledge.

2) No, get with the real world. The amount of laws on the books are entirely too much for anyone, let alone the average citizen, to come to know and comprehend. Admiralty, agricultural, aviation, banking, bankruptcy, civil rights, constitutional, consumer, corporate, criminal, education, elder law, employment, entertainment, environmental, estate, family, general practice, immigration, intellectual property, labor, liability (of all sorts), malpractice (of all sorts), media (of all sorts), military, municipal, personal injury, real estate, securities, taxation, trusts, wills...not mention all the ones I cannot think of and all the subspecialties (FDA, EPA, IEEE, etc..) that many people simply cannot think of. And these are just the laws on the books, these are the vast pieces of legislation that get passed everyday throughout the country: federal, state, county, city, district, neighborhood. There is just simply too many laws for any one person to know, thus, you cannot "fairly" be said to be responsible for every single one.

1's Response) That's just tough shit. Just because something's hard doesn't mean you get a free pass. If you don't like it, leave.

2's Response) Once again, get back in the real world: there's no place for me to go. Should everything just be "tough shit" simply because a bunch of people have conspired to screw my life over?

I do not know which side I should come down on. Thus is life.

Thoughts?

Periodically I check out what the VisLupiEstGrex kids are up to and periodically I am disappointed. Recently they blogged about some rule being violated (sound familiar?) and how this is...important? or meaningful? or...something.



What they were complaining about this time is that the personal information of a few College of Liberal Art potential-fillers-of-the-empty-seat students had been blacked out. They called it redacted because it sounded scarier. What information, what crucial, vital, essential pieces of information needed to be shared with the world and whose being blacked out was a violation of LAW and which was done with NO PRECENDENCE!? The students' addresses, student numbers, telephone numbers, email addresses, and cumulative GPAs.

You know, the stuff one doesn't generally doesn't want to see floating around on blogs run by anonymous people who use the word "redacted".

When a commenter responded to the post by saying, "I dont think you are being fair. Censoring home addresses and phone numbers is perfectly understandable before they are confirmed. Let's try not to be unreasonable guys" one of the VisLupiEstGrex people retorted:

"This is isn't about fairness. This is about the plain meaning of the law. The Senate has never before, to our knowledge, redacted such information [...] I do not believe it is unreasonable to make a reasoned argument backed by legal authority. It may be unfair that this is public material, but it is not declared by law to be private." (emphasis added)

But this couldn't be more completely wrong. Laws have no authority in and of themselves. Laws derive their only power, their only sway insofar as people are willing to uphold those laws. There are laws against jay walking and speeding, but how many times have you broken these laws even within the past week? Would all the VisLupiEstGrex people be willing to say they never drank underage, never drove over the speed limit, have, in fact, stopped at every "Stop" sign 100% everytime they've seen one?

Of course they shouldn't have to say they've done all those things: those things are pointlessly stupid laws in many instances. Dumb laws should be ignored. Bad laws shouldn't be followed simply because they're laws. They are first and foremost "bad" which makes whatever it is they advocate lose any sense of "necessity." Don't ever be fooled into thinking there is such a thing as a "necessary evil." There isn't. Such a ploy is only held up by those too weak to carry meaningful ethical principles.

or quite simply in graphical terms:

Classic...

Join us for the last meeting of the year as we discuss the principles and importance of critical thinking. Many times good arguments go awry due to a lack of critical thought, and it is the goal of this meeting to arm you with the skills necessary to identify problems with argument structures and resolve them accordingly. We will also be discussing ideas for next semester as well - don't miss out!

Thursday, April 30 - 7PM - JCSU 423