I often wonder if it's possible to encourage lawmakers to pass laws in the opposite direction.

I.e., to instead pass laws that guarantee the right of citizens to share information, make content, etc in ways that shall not be infringed. Laws that affirm freedom of expression and free speech in the digital space, instead of laws that increasingly punish common behavior in the name of copyright or "think of the children" type rhetoric.

I don't have much experience in law so I don't know if something like this is even possible. Can laws only dictate punishments? Is it possible to use legislation to make encroachments of freedom harder, or does that require a constitutional amendment? Is it a question of financial lobbying power?

Perhaps a more legally informed user could chime in about how feasible it is to push for legislation in the other direction.

That’s called the Bill of Rights, and the entire point of the government (originally) was to protect the rights enshrined therein. Unfortunately that ideal was lost long ago and our legislators no longer operate in good faith. So asking them nicely to reform the system they so dutifully corrupted isn’t likely to do it.

More specifically, the idea is that we as humans just have certain rights and the Bill of Rights is supposed to prevent the government from infringing in any way on those rights. It seems that many elected officials do not understand that or have realized that they can seemingly get away with things as there is no direct way for any of us to challenge them.

> Is it possible to use legislation to make encroachments of freedom harder, or does that require a constitutional amendment?

This phrase just drags me into darkness. Things are so broken, that such legislation is impossible to imagine today.

IANAL, but theoretically, yes, we have the ability to pass and enforce laws that would protect individual and societal rights. In practice, you would need a complete overhaul of both the rules and incentives of the current political system; however, such an overhaul would need a fair and just system to be here in the first place, otherwise it'll just entrench the authoritarianism and/or refuse to enforce the good parts, put in there only as platitudes. So, actually, no.

"I often wonder if it's possible to encourage lawmakers to pass laws in the opposite direction"

How can you encourage them to do anything when people "vote #color no matter who"?

Our First Past the Post electoral system [1] encourages this blind tribalism. Attempting to vote outside of the two party system puts #otherside in power.

Representatives have no incentive to be anything other than not the other political party.

People are forced to vote against someone they don't want in office, rather than for someone they do want in office.

(1) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Restrictions and punishments always have concrete beneficiaries - dark, broken personalities with a blind lust for power and money. On the other hand, freedoms don't have concrete beneficiaries, so it takes a Lincoln-caliber person to advocate for them.

It's very possible. Simply outspend the other side Disney et al on lobbying and campaign donations.

Yeah, run for office. If you're in a red state run as a Republican, blue state Democrat. All politicians lie, so just play their game, support the issues that will get you elected then stand up for what you really believe in when you get in. You may only make it one term, but at least things will change.

Can't believe this simple method hasn't been tried before.

Trump kinda?

So we only need a small loan of a billion dollars to get started?

Running for election even at local levels is not cheap... Let alone federal offices. At least if you want to have any chance of winning

> Is it even possible to win this battle?

Yes, but technologically, not legally. We need technology that's impossible for them to police. "The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics." -- Bruce Schneier

> Is it even possible to win this battle? Things like this keep coming up year after year

Most fights worth fighting are like this. Resistance doesn't guarantee success; indeed it usually loses. But that's no reason not to fight, and it makes you appreciate the precious wins when they do come.

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.” - IF Stone

No.

Pick up the can, citizen.

"initiate accelerated backhop..."

But in all seriousness, I unfortunately agree.

The only way to stop it is to pass a law (or Constitutional Amendment) explicitly protecting the behavior being attacked. But if you're just continually on the defensive, then you will continue being attacked.

I think you mean free speech, which is already in the constitution. If money is speech, so should sharing of content be.

We have the right to bear arms for a reason. Governments will eventually push citizens to a breaking point.

The right to bear arms was enshrined when the US didn't have a standing army. The military never dissolves back into the populace, rendering a few poorly trained people with a few guns (no APCs, no tanks, no hellfire drones) completely ineffectual. It's completely pointless today.

I have this argument a lot being a self identified liberal with liberal friends.

Two points: 1. Although it wasn't the intention, the 2A creates the conditions for insurgency. Super powers don't do well against insurgency. 2. The military by nature is much much less likely to turn against the citizenry. The militarization of the police is much more likely.

> 2. The military by nature is much much less likely to turn against the citizenry.

While comforting, is this actually true?

We have seen this happen very recently with protests occurring - yes the police were there and heavily armed, but so was the actual military, who came swiftly to the president's beckoning.

It's an organization that prioritizes rank, the chain of command, and doing what you're told without question or hesitation. There even seems to be quite a lot of perks (think education, monetary reparations) to getting your hands dirty so that elected officials don't have to.

It's a matter of economics. The US government wants (has) to rule, not just nuke the country and call it a day. If the whole country's armed, it becomes more costly to have boots on the ground everywhere enforcing the occupation. It at least shifts the equation more in the direction of concessions from the occupying force.

It's the same economics for both sides though. A large-scale, protracted guerilla civil war would be economically devastating for both sides.

There are myriad historical scenarios where large-scale protracted guerilla civil wars would have been economically preferable for the would-be guerillas compared to the alternative (or rather, default).

There's plenty of scenarios where the utility benefits of guerilla warfare (to the guerillas) outweigh the economic costs. To go right to Godwin's law as an extreme example, if every jew in 1930s Germany had engaged in guerilla warfare against the government instead of meekly getting on the trains, the utility benefits to them as a group would have wildly exceeded the economic costs of the hypothetical civil war.

Of course, the best gun is one you never need to fire. A rational alternate-universe government would foresee this, and know that by pursuing policy goal X they would create conditions where guerilla war was utility-positive for group Y, which would hurt the economy and so also the utility for the government. So the government would be (depending on the hypothetical ability of group Y do impede it) incentivised to pick policies that don't leave group Y no recourse but to start shooting.

Mutual armament as common knowledge leads to incentives for both sides to cooperate.

The idea that a few people with guns are ineffectual is a common fallacy. A person with a gun at the right place and right time can easily be effective.

Also look at stuff like the Millennium Challenge, in which the United States Navy had multiple battleships with the latest and greatest technology sunk to the bottom of the ocean because of a couple guys riding around on bicycles passing notes and some small rafts with explosives.

An individual can do a lot.

If it is pointless, the amendment should be formally removed (voted, ratified), not breached, otherwise any existing law and right can be breached with the excuse "this is completely pointless today".

That is essentially impossible with the high constitutional requirements for amendments and the current extent of polarisation and constitutional hardball. Even for things which are almost objectively broken: the electoral college, for example, has never worked in the way the Founders anticipated and no-one would dream of writing a similar system into a constitution today. So talk of amendments is pretty fantastical, regardless of the merits of the second amendment.

But we no longer have the right to bear the same arms as the government. Obviously, gun control is complicated, and I'm not advocating that anyone should be able to buy military grade armaments, but at the same time, it does concern me that the citizens last resort against tyranny becomes less and less viable.

When things actually come to this, I don’t expect US military to actually use its superior equipment to mow down the opposition en masse: you’d more likely see various factions in military take it out one upon another.

> But we no longer have the right to bear the same arms as the government.

You hardly need it.

You can see what guerrilla forces do to the standing army of a superpower, by looking at Iraq and Afghanistan. They can't stop it, its demoralizing, and even if the superpower kills at a 2 to 1 or greater ratio, the losses are considerable. And in this case that force would be domestic, so all the negative PR/image consequences are radically amplified (your army might kill at a 2 to 1 or 4 to 1 ratio, but every one of those citizens that you kill makes the general population hate you more and brings out more recruits for the opposition).

The US has maybe 12 to 15 million functional, trained former soldiers, many of whom have been to war, they know everything the military knows, they have experience in every aspect of combat, and they have a vast number of arms and a hundred million sympathetic people behind them. It makes Afghanistan look like a cakewalk. A standing army trying that in the US would be butchered, they'd bleed like a stuck pig. And that's to say nothing of the vast internal sabotage and assassinations that would immediately begin to occur and would never cease; it would instantly split the military into factional pieces that would fight against eachother.

I don't know why more people don't understand this. Is it because they have no exposure or experience in military matters? I don't understand how so many people think the 2A is obsolete... it's just as effective today as it ever was.

It is obsolete since you are comparing apples to oranges. Comparing hardened people who have been fed arms and resources by various superpowers for decades vs. your average out of shape medicated American who buys their shotgun at the sporting goods store.

The kill ratio in Iraq is 100 to 1.

And we still haven't won

The side that is getting killed at 100x the rate isn't winning either.

There's an old apocryphal story about the Chinese and the Japanese duking it out in the prelude to WWII that applies here, but there's also a poem far closer:

> That though all lances split on you, > All swords be heaved in vain, > We have more lust again to lose > Than you to win again.

~ G. K. Chesterton - The Ballad of the White Horse - Book III https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm#link2...

The side that is willing to loose one more time than the "winning" side is willing to win ... they win in the end.