Too many damn laws.

[kintaro]

The biggest thing contributing to big government is that there are simply too many laws on the book. I think constitutions need to be amended so that the government have to repeal two laws for every new one they create - on a temporary basis until the level of laws on the book is reduced to a sound figure. When it goes too far over this figure again, the statute comes into effect making them delete two laws for every new one.

They could just roll it into bigger bills - so perhaps it should be clauses or whatever that are limited in number. I am not a lawyer.

Thoughts?

[Refalm]

The multitude of laws turns everyone into a criminal.

I ignored red stop lights more than I can remember, I used fireworks on other dates than new years eve, I swam in waters where it was considered a health risk, I drove a car while not having a valid drivers license, I drove my bicycle on the footpath, etc.

All of those things are illegal, but I don't think they make me a bad person. But because those laws are in place to "protect" you, you do feel that you're doing something wrong. And because you feel that way, it's easier to commit actual crimes that hurt someone else, like shoplifting, because you already feel like a criminal by riding your bike on the footpath.

Hate-crime laws are also redundant. It creates the sense that the life of a black female Muslim lesbian paramedic is more valuable than that of a white male Christian straight bank clerk. Which is contradictory to the idea that all humans are equal.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Another problem is that the judicial system tends to uphold the law, when they should focus more on the spirit of the law, even though this may mean people get away with breaking the law every now and then.

[Calum]

there's an excellent quote about this that i heartily agree with: "if having fun is a crime, only criminals will have fun".

I thought it must be from some clever political speaker, the internet suggests that this quote is actually from Huey Morgan, singer and guitarist with Fun Lovin' Criminals.

Basically legislation like the Anti-Terrorism, Terrorism and Criminal Justice And Public Order Acts just make pretty much everything illegal, though much of the content of these acts are not enforced.

This has two benefits for the police (and other administrative agencies), 1) the public don't notice, and assume for the most part that these laws are protecting "us" from "them" (whoever "them" are, possibly terrorists, hippies, drug dealers, travellers, anti-war/nuclear/roadbuilding protesters, socialists/communists etc) so they don't make any effort to lobby their government representatives to change these laws and 2) all of this means that at any point, if the police or government wish to arrest anybody, there is already a legal framework in place that guarantees that person will be doing, or will have done, something illegal. Like getting Capone on his parking offences.

The downside to this is that if the police/government aren't careful, the public might notice and rebel against them, though i think the likelihood of this has been expertly marginalised over the years by the powers that be.

I mean in this country it's illegal to be in a group of nine or more if a policeman asks you to disperse, peaceful mass action (eg: a protest march) is technically illegal (but currently they are usually tolerated), it's illegal to be in a group of three or more people if "repetitive beats" are being played (what other kind of beats are there after all?), and it is LEGAL for a police officer to search you without identifying themselves in any way other than to tell you which station they are based at, including removing your bags and searching them themselves. There are hundreds of similar examples. Nobody seems to care about these things. Do they not know about them? Do they think these laws will never apply to them? Who knows.

Apathy coupled with ignorance balanced with fear, if governments were more concerned with policy rather than propaganda think how much more advanced we'd be as a society.

[Calum]

just wanted to comment after a couple of things refalm said too.

All of those things are illegal, but I don't think they make me a bad person. But because those laws are in place to "protect" you, you do feel that you're doing something wrong. And because you feel that way, it's easier to commit actual crimes that hurt someone else, like shoplifting, because you already feel like a criminal by riding your bike on the footpath.

true, yet more evidence that prohibition of something is never effective and is pretty much a waste of taxpayers' money to legislate against stuff. Prohibition of anything i mean. How many people, who are about to commit murder, for example, are really thinking "wait a minute, murdering somebody's illegal, maybe i'd better not do it then". Prohibition never works, addressing the motivations might work, but is socially harder in our current setup.

Hate-crime laws are also redundant. It creates the sense that the life of a black female Muslim lesbian paramedic is more valuable than that of a white male Christian straight bank clerk. Which is contradictory to the idea that all humans are equal.

yeah, i see what you mean, and i'm not happy about "positive" discrimination either, however hate crimes are terrible, and while just prohibiting them won't stop them (it simply gives us a way to prosecute offenders), they're some sort of attempt to address the fact that lots of people do still think that eg a white english middle or working class male is worth more than a dark skinned muslim woman.  By the way, i doubt there are any muslim lesbians, though i suppose anything's possible.

[kintaro]

Vague laws have been used seemingly since the beginning of recorded history itself as a means of expanding a state. The state at that point doesn't need to worry about law breakers and then only its enemies. Vague laws often provide a wide variety of statists with this tool. In Nazi Germany for example while Hitler was writing laws to stop jews, his vague writings gave a tool to people. They could say that a person is a jew, and get rid of them. Anti-terrorism laws provide the public with the same tools. I mix with some of Melbournes best trolls and one of our weapons is known as "SWATTING."

I have had a night of trolling turn into a morning of questions by counter-terrorism officers before already, so I know what Calum means. For example the sedition laws in Australia are so vague anyone who has a problem with the Government can be arrested. The only reason I've never been arrested is because I am not a muslim. When a muslim is found to have said anything against the Government during an investigation sedition laws can be invoked. Now, this guy might have only said negative things about mining tax just like me, but its used as a weapon against him.

I think the bigger problem is vague enemies. The sponsors of terrorism give terrorists a vague enemy and so they vaguely attack random groups of people. In response, neocons gave their military a vague enemy that is any Muslim. We get vague wars for vague reasons as a result, like the war on Iraq. It's pretty vague if Bush wanted to find weapons of mass destruction or free Iraqi's. The latter is noble, but if he didn't fail he surely expected to find weapons of mass destruction. Politicans do this a lot, they give two positive outcomes hoping at least one will come to pass. Rarely does it so happen that neither come to pass, which can be said of the war in Iraq.

One thing is sure, radical Islam has declared war on all of us. They have defined a vague enemy. Emulating enemy tactics is stupid, we need to stop doing that, and define clearly that we will not tolerate radical anything. We should never tolerate the initiation of force, and we should never respond to it with inept retaliatory force (such as defining an enemy as vague as our enemies have, and trying to fight it). We certainly all have the moral right to preemptive self-defense. If you know someone is trying to kill you, it isn't wrong to stop them in advance. Yet, if I knew someone was trying to kill me, I also know killing his wife and child will only worsen the situation. To expand, killing innocent women and children is losing the war on terror. As a supporter of a war on terror, just not the war on terror, we must fight like our enemy. We cannot be centralized. Any attacks prevented because of the war on Iraq and Afghanistan were simply moved. The only reason there have been no attacks on US soil, is because Americans have made it easy for them to attack them without even leaving the country.

I am all for a free-market war against Islam. To fight a decentralized enemy, we cannot blindly go after Muslims collectively. This single mistake has wasted tens of thousands of good soliders in the last decade. Instead we must fight separately and independently, just like our enemies. Unlike our enemies however, we should not repeat their mistake of targetting collectives because when doing that you throw strategy out the window. We have clearly done that. I think we should be using intelligence to put prices on the heads of real targets, real terrorist training camps, and real terrorists. After that we just need to wait for people to collect the reward. How we fight them cannot be central - as it is at the moment. All we seem to be doing at the moment is building targets for our enemies that are not made of innocent civilians.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I don't think there's any big brother conspiracy, it's just that successive governments have put more laws into place and haven't bothered to repeal obsolete ones because they're so old, they had forgotten about them.

Going to war with Islam is a waste of time, we need to go to war with terrorists, be they Muslims or Christians.

[Off topic]
I'm glad to see that the Christian extremists decided not to antagonise the Muslims by scrapping their plans to burn a Qur'an yesterday.
[/quore]

[Calum]

going to war with anybody is ignorant, stupid and backwards.

name me any war that had a positive outcome.

[Refalm]

going to war with anybody is ignorant, stupid and backwards.

name me any war that had a positive outcome.

The American Civil War, the French Revolution and World War II.
Those are the only three I can think of.

[Aloone_Jonez]

The cold war.

[Calum]

so basically, you guys are saying that for all those wars, all the death and suffering was more than balanced by the amount of positivity that came out of it.

Even though taking for example the second world war, it has directly resulted in the middle east problems (yes, all of them), the USA's predominance in the world as a military power (which is only "positive" subjectively), and it also divided Germany's capital city into two segregated halves for forty years, just off the top of my head.

The French Revolution apparently they had piles of heads in the streets, i don't consider that to be "positive".

But where there are humans, there will be war, and there will also be justifications for war.