Dutch beach volleyball player Steven van de Velde, who served time in prison after he was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl, won his second match at the Paris Olympics and received an even harsher reaction from the crowd on Wednesday than for his first match.
I think you underestimate how many laws you need to keep a nation functional.
Even Hammurabi had 282 written laws and his was a ‘whatever the king says is illegal is illegal’ empire.
You need laws to cover everything from murder to product safety to child custody after divorce. And none of those are able to solved simply every time because many cases have a lot of nuance.
On top of that, as I said, you need a lot of rules covering courtroom procedures. Expecting a random citizen to understand things like when something can be presented as evidence and what sort of questions a witness can be asked is expecting too much of them.
You make a great point - you do need a lot of laws… if the intent is to oppress people. Less so if you want a fair and equitable society.
You’re not really engaging with what I’m saying because you’re so assured and confident in your world view.
We don’t have to live in a hierarchical society where we are owned by our rulers. We can create a different world with our own rules.
I don’t know what those rules should be - no single person possibly ever could. My position is that the world we have is fundamentally, structurally, and intentionally unequal, unjust, and impossible to reform. We need to depose those who have created and enforced the current system and replace them with a new, fairer system designed from the ground up by all of us, not a new replacement elite.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but if we don’t end capitalism, we will instead live to see the end of the modern human civilisation.
A system of laws has nothing to do with capitalism. Pre-capitalist nations had laws, so did (and do) communist nations. Laws simply keep everything operating smoothly. And if you have an entity the size of a nation, you’ll need a lot of laws to cover the many issues regarding the many people in that nation. That has nothing to do with the economic system or the form of government.
There are no communist nations currently existing and there never have been any. I didn’t say that laws would not exist. I’m saying that the laws we currently have enforce and uphold capitalism, just as the laws of prior eras upheld feudalism, or monarchism, or whatever.
Okay, well then if laws exist, in your scenario, everyone would have to be equally familiar with them.
Sure. You can’t participate in a sport or a game without knowing the rules. So too is it unfair to expect people to participate in society without knowing its laws.
In our society, laws exist to be a cudgel wielded against the working class, but are not applicable against the ruling class except for internal power struggles. You already know in your heart that the people responsible for the climate disaster that we’re currently facing will never face justice unless we take it into our own hands.
First of all, that also has nothing to do with people needing to know the entirety of a system of laws if they are expected to be randomly selected to adjudicate.
Secondly, when are you going to take it into your own hands?
I didn’t say randomly selected, I said selected with some kind of fair and democratic process. Random selection I wouldn’t really personally feel is a good idea.
You’re still not engaging with my core point, you’re trying to pick holes. Forget everything you think that a “system of laws” has to be. Scrap it all. It doesn’t need to be complex or overbearing. It can be relatively simple. It doesn’t need people arguing over the specific wording of legal codes written in impenetrable legalese.
The intent is to have a system that is fair, equitable and just. Most laws can be replaced with the golden rules and the adjudication can be a matter of, “in this fair, or not fair? how can we resolve this matter fairly?” and deciding that with consensus in a way that does not itself break the golden rules.
It depends. The sooner that people like you realise that it’s our only chance, the sooner we can all take action. That’s why I’m taking the time to explain this. We need to work together. The few of us who already understand these ideas aren’t yet enough to make this happen.
A fair and democratic process requires a whole bunch of laws to ensure that process is, in fact, fair and democratic, so…