Comment on Will they wake up before it's too late?
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoI’m not following. I can see how “laws are society officially agreeing on what is ok”, but conviction and enforcement of those laws has nothing to do with society.
I don’t see how society can officially agree, short of declaring the government illegitimate and starting a civil war.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Yeah I’m not sure what’s happened but we’re definitely talking about different things! Society (democratic ones), during its normal operation, officially agrees on things by creating laws that have the agreement of the public. Laws forbidding murder, and laws circumscribing how officials can use their powers, are of this type. So just because part of the government stops enforcing those laws doesn’t mean society didn’t (officially) make them. They’ve been (unofficially) suspended.
What Nazi Germany did (just to bring it back to the picture) was seized power (through illegal suppression of the democratic process) and then used that perverted legal process to - officially, but no longer democratically - change the laws.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I think our disagreement is that to you the law is unequivocally the effect of society’s will, while to me the law is simply what the government says it is.
Ideologically we agree, and as an anarchist I believe that kind of truly society-driven rules can be achievable, especially on smaller scales. But when you’re an authority that can make new laws to make the illegal things legal, that’s where they diverge. It doesn’t matter if you do that like Nazi Germany or whatever the fuck Trump is doing, my original point was that it simply makes no sense to talk about whether they are doing is “legal” or “illegal” - the words just lose meaning, and to me it feels like putting faith in a system that is itself part of the problem.