That civil asset forfeiture has survived is simply because the courts are gutless about it.
There is a very long and plainly wrong string of Supreme Court decisions which stretches all the way back to the nation's founding. The courts are very good at precisely the opposite thing that you're describing.
I think most people kind of assume that the courts are this sort of shining beacon of enlightened liberal thought: they occasionally seem to have "duds" -- but those are intelligent and well reasoned duds. They're interpreting the constitution in a way some don't like, sure, but still upholding it nonetheless, right?
I mean, this thread here about civil asset forfeiture is a great example. If you ask any non-lawyer brained person whether it's wrong, they'll say, yeah, of course it's illegal for the government to just steal your shit. Why is this even a question?
Oh, but no, you see, the courts have wisely decided, using an argument that you might hear from a 5-year-old ("actually, this piece of property is actually a mystical ghost that we can treat as a people!"), that stealing your shit is, in fact, legal.
I really encourage anyone curious about this powerful and unaccountable institution to read some of the shittier Supreme Court decisions. They are often, simply put, stupid. Like, a regular non-lawyer person can read them and handily "eviscerate" their arguments.
Ignoring the fact that the point of a mask is to "sanitize" the germ filled air coming out of or into your mouth, the same law says "or other measures" as needed to protect the public.
It was such poor logic, especially considering the context of the original law at the time (fighting tuberculosis) and the potentially damaging aftermath of such a precedent (not hard to imagine a future, more deadly virus that some politicians decides is a political inconvenience).
Anyway, my point is sovereign citizens seem to see the system as a machine, the function of which can be manipulated by giving it cleverly formulated inputs. They have a hacker mindset. They see lawyers and politicians doing this sort of thing all the time, and believe they can do the same if only they find the right incantation. It's as though somebody witnesses the Fonz hit a jukebox to make it work, then figure they can do the same trick if they hit that jukebox in the same way. Except it will never work for them, the jukebox only behaves that way for the Fonz.
but the reality is that law was never this, and their life of protest is led against a straw man, and it's completely ineffective in bringing reality closer to that principle.
I do however find some sympathy with _one_ of their arguments, where they argue they never consented to be governed.
I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them. So I get where some people come from with a "naw fuck that" attitude, even if I see such resistance as futile.
Not directly sov-citizen related, but that does intersect with a broader community of people upset over how property works in the US. Namely, you don't own a damn thing. All deeds/titles are fee-simple, in that you merely buy and sell the right to rent that land from the government for as long as you can afford it. "Renters" in the colloquial sense are really renting twice, which is why "owning" is better. True ownership of property however no longer exists in the US.
Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars, where landowners are truly sovereign and the state only owns the commons. Enforcement then only exists in the commons (and optionally on property with the consent of the owner).
To paraphrase, Socrates says "Though not explicitly, I have by my actions agreed to be ruled by the laws of Athens by carrying out my life here and not choosing to move away to somewhere with a different set of laws"
[1]http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/wong/textclip.html @ [52b]
I believe Plato will say they consented to be governed by this state, not at birth, but throughout their life by choosing to stay in a place that is governed by this state and enjoying the benefits.
In modern times this isn't really the case. There tend to be immense legal restrictions on movement, let alone living + working in different areas. And the differences that do exist between even nations within the same "sphere" tend to be relatively negligible compared to, again, the sort of monumental differences you'd see just between different Greek city-states like Athens/Sparta.
There were extreme legal restrictions on movement in Ancient Greece, too. You couldn't just pack up your bags and move to Spara or Athens and become part of the citizen class.
And as a non-citizen, there were a lot of different ways that you could be abused by citizens, with little recourse.
Just because despotism and abuse was decentralized, doesn't mean that it wasn't despotism and abuse.
In your belief, from what comes Plato's link between place and state? Places exist before states and often afterward. Can a state exist without place? If a place can exist without any particular state, can a person have a link to a place independent of a state?
Imagine if I'd edited it to read: 'choosing to stay within the bounds of the government, and enjoying the benefits'
Sovereign citizens do enjoy the benefits of the US state, do not reject them nor make strides at moving away from them (from anything I've read).
Would you rather be born into a state of anarchy? I think Hobbes addressed this.
https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-abou...
Steven Pinker has muddied the water with quite a lot of nonsense in The Better Angels of our Nature. An interesting, better-sourced and less cherry-picked read is a 2013 paper in Science[0].
There is an appeal to the thought that humans in a natural state are peaceful. Because if modern society has made mankind violent, then we can hopefully roll back it's influence and restore us to that peaceful state. But that's not what our evidence suggests.
This article examines existing hunter gatherers: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/nobl...
For a book that dives into the archaeological evidence, see War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat.
There is also an idealogical appeal by the likes of Pinker to the idea that nation states are the only structures that can prevent us from a return to a kind of endemic violence amongst hunter-gatherers. This thought has historically been exploited by those who would steal their lands, and do it "for their own good".
You might call it "doing a Chagnon" - precipitate violence, use that to characterize a people as warlike, then use that as a pretext to take even more resources.
Of course it's possible to find a hunter-gatherer society which is more violent than a particular modern nation state. It's also trivial to find an inverse example. When you look at what evidence we do have, you see that hunter-gatherers are no more or less violent than the rest of us, and when violence does flare it happens for the very same reasons it happens anywhere else.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
- the "ethnographic evidence", which I accept you're not defending, largely features indigenous peoples during an active genocide.
- the archaeological evidence is, naturally and obviously, extremely few and far between. Much of it doesn't relate to hunter-gatherers at all. As for the rest? Taking one at random: the 12% violent death share at Ile Téviec. Read the sources and this is extrapolated from three (3!) bodies. Two of which were apparently not violent deaths after all. The remaining body? We have no clue if the incoming arrowhead was from warfare or a hunting accident. How unfortunate if a single 6,000 year old hunting accident is labeling entire peoples violent and uncivilized. Either way, it's nonsense all the way down.
What was the historical rate of violence amongst, say, the Zo'é people? They are very isolated today and violence is apparently unheard of, but what happened in the past? We can't possibly know. What of the Awá? No hint. The Sentinelese, even? Who knows?
My point is that all of these data are so limited, so compromised and often so cherry-picked it's revealing nothing very helpful. What little we do know is that rates of violence amongst different hunter-gatherer peoples today, despite them all being under immense outside pressures, are extremely variable... as it is between all other different groups of humans. That observation doesn't sell books, though.
Incorrect. Plenty of hunter gatherer societies are highly isolated and are not experiencing active genocide or displacement. Even ignoring those outliers that are in such a situation, they still exhibit rates of violence many times greater than modern societies.
> - the archaeological evidence is, naturally and obviously, extremely few and far between. Much of it doesn't relate to hunter-gatherers at all. As for the rest? Taking one at random: the 12% violent death share at Ile Téviec. Read the sources and this is extrapolated from three (3!) bodies. Two of which were apparently not violent deaths after all. The remaining body? We have no clue if the incoming arrowhead was from warfare or a hunting accident. How unfortunate if a single 6,000 year old hunting accident is labeling entire peoples violent and uncivilized. Either way, it's nonsense all the way down.
Correct, no sane anthropologists would use a single sample to draw conclusions. But there are many such sites and estimates are drawn across a wider body of samples.
> What little we do know is that rates of violence amongst different hunter-gatherer peoples today, despite them all being under immense outside pressures, are extremely variable... as it is between all other different groups of humans
For the third time, no, this is incorrect. Rates of violence among hunter gatherers, even among those highly isolated from other societies, is much greater than modern societies. You're probably reading sources that claim that few death occur due to war. But that's because the authors of these papers just categorize the motivation for killing as something else, like revenge. The rate of death is usually in the 10-15% range.
- much doesn't relate to hunter-gatherers at all - some is a tiny sample size (in the only case I dug into, n<=1!) - the bulk of it involves peoples under pressure from encroachment (and worse) - by its nature it's woefully incomplete, some of it cherry-picked, and ignores the majority of hunter-gatherer peoples
It's a fascinating and important question, though.
They have three options. One, they can choose to live and operate under those rules. Two, they can work within the system to change the rules. Or three, they can go somewhere that has rules more to their liking. This isn't a prison; they can leave any time they choose. One could even argue that by staying in the country, they are (informally, implicitly) consenting to be governed by its rules.
But instead, they try a fourth alternative: Stay, but pretend that the rules don't apply to them because of laughably bogus legal theories. That doesn't work, no matter how many new legal theories they try, and no matter how much bogus logic and philosophizing they throw at it.
We've got a lot of non-sov-cit people who don't consent to the rules. We call them "criminals".
That's an illusion of choice, though. There isn't any unclaimed, habitable land anymore. If your views don't align with any of the 195 existing countries, then this isn't actually an option. It's just 1 or 2, but in a different location.
You can't be an anarchist, ever. There's nowhere to do it. If you want to live somewhere that pledges itself as a Christian theocracy, you better hope you're Catholic. Ditto for most religions, really. Or if you want to live in a sovereign entity with the population of a small town.
The options are really just "suck it up" or "spend your whole life trying to change it". I'm genuinely curious what the sovereign citizens would do if they were allowed to secede any land they own. It's not for me, but I am curious whether they'd actually leave or if they just don't want to follow the rules.
Getting a work permit in another country is usually pretty hard, for instance.
Still, even with that, I think we (as a society/civilisation) need people like that, challenging the system in all sorts of ways. And not everyone not obeying the rules is a "criminal" — none of the civil offenses qualify, for instance, even in the legal sense.
Of course, some of those "challenges", especially most of those criminal ones, should be dealt with proper "retaliation" (prison sentences, large penalties...) from the society so it's obvious which "challenges" are not welcome. But let's not forget that many of the things we take for granted today have been criminal in the not so distant past.
It's also not trivial (Next to impossible, actually) to survive alone, completely independent of society.
If you want the benefits of society, you have to abide by its rules.
I still think it's good that all norms are being challenged even if it's often times hypocritical or selfish.
The sovereign citizen material, though, really does leave the impression that there must be something underlying the absurdity.
Mental illness? It generally comes across as the type of homegrown rant material you'd find stapled to a telephone pole.
I get hung up on what happens if you choose not to opt-in.
I expect what forms on Mars, at least initially, will resemble the high seas a lot more than it does any country. You'll have facilities owned and commanded by corporations operating under flags of convenience, more or less free to engage in any nastiness they like (at least until a navy or coastguard with guns shows up to enforce their will on the facility.)
They also never consented to birth.
They are free to renounce their citizenship, however. Nobody is forcing them to stay US citizens.
> Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars
Hate to break it to you, but Mars colonies (assuming they ever exist) are going to be dictatorships. Lifeboat ethics don't leave a lot of room for arguing, let alone voting.
The questions of where you'll go and how you'll support yourself are something that you'd best figure out before starting that process, because after you start your country of origin may well say 'not OUR problem anymore' about you.
But Sovereign Citizens are rugged individualists who don't need no handout, eh?
> You also can't renounce without obtaining another citizenship
That is false for US citizens. See:
You seem to be speaking of property tax on land. Did you know not all land is on county assesor tax roles? Have you researched how to find land not in the county tax catalog?
I do think people should be allowed to sue their parents for wrongful birth, though.
Nah, not when there's an obvious and simple remedy.
Of course a social contract is not at all the same as a real contract, a social contract is not a document that you sign, it applies to you whether or not you ever consented to it. But when language that seems to conflate the two is used to persuade people who don't really have a firm grasp on the way the world works, it seems cruel to laugh at their confusion.
Edit: see this comment from elsewhere in this thread with a link to a scholarly history of civil asset forfeiture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449092
Where things went off the rails is when they started applying this to cases where the owner of the property was known, and that owner should have their normal fourth amendment rights.
The Presidential Surveillance Program was justified using Smith v. Maryland. The argument was that, if Smith had no reasonable expectation of privacy for metadata in isolation, no aggregate of citizens had an expectation of privacy. Therefore mass surveillance of metadata is legal. You let the government see the phone records of one citizen without a warrant and decades later you have something like 33% of all email, TCP/IP, and phone metadata being collected and analyzed by a government agency without a warrant.
The old saying that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was an argument a Supreme Court justice used to justify jailing a man for handing out anti-draft pamphlets. You let the government regulate speech that poses a clear and present danger and they use that to make it illegal to oppose a draft.
This whole 'you can't yell fire in a crowded theater' thing is not a real thing.
Per @popehat:
5/ '"shout fire in a theater" is a rhetorical device used in 1919 to justify jailing people for writing anti-draft pamphlets in World War I. The First Amendment standard (to use the term generously) applied in that case has been dead for more than a half-century.'
6/ 'The same judge went on to smirk "three generations of imbeciles are enough" to justify forcible government sterilization of persons deemed undesirable by the state, so you know, he had a way with words.'
7/ 'So when you trot out "you can't shout fire in a theater" in response to a First Amendment question, you're using the catchphrase a eugenicist used to support jailing people for criticizing the draft in a case that hasn't been good law for a half century.' [1]
That's true, but it's also true to criticize anyone citing the constitution by pointing out that it was written by slaveowners and perpetrators of genocide.
For some reason, though, that argument never goes over well. Maybe it's because the character of the person who made an argument hundreds of years ago is only relevant when you disagree with the argument.
The building was part of the person's effects. I don't understand how your argument is legal (not that I don't believe you - civil forfeiture has been going on long enough that I assume SCOTUS has heard a sampling of cases).
It beggars belief that this practice has stood for decades.
Another angle of defense might be to ask if it's even possible to violate the 6th amendment. What would violating the 6th amendment look like? I suspect the answer will closely resemble civil forfeitures.
If I use a payphone to order a hit, is it reasonable for the government to come rip it out of the ground? What if I use a freeway to smuggle drugs? Now the road must be torn out?
Money is fungible and has all sorts of uses. Any particular pile of cash is no more or less likely to be intrinsically criminal in nature. Just like phones and freeways.
I'm pretty sure that's been modified to US people on US soil, at least 100 miles from a border, have constitutional rights, but those rights were all intended to mean something different than what they actually say.
The hack they came up with is to just disable type checking and pass in whatever object they have available.
TFA describes the inevitable runtime errors
I’d mourn for the US, but it seems it’s been dead & gone longer than I’ve been alive.
The civil libertarian language comes from being heavily seeded by small Protestant cults, but not wanting to fall into European-style religious wars over it. Also, ironically, to protect the rights of a slaveholding minority.
[edit] Well, two problems: frequently the entity seizing the property gets to keep it and add it to their budget - or split the proceeds. This creates an incentive for them to move forward this way.
There's also the problem of you have no rights at the border anyway, even though you should.
I just can't make sense of the "vs" in the case titles, in what way is the object fighting back? Why is there a case at all and not "here is a list of contraband seized at the border" ?
I would assume the legal procedure is what determines what actually happens to the object. Just like the police arrest people but don't sentence them or put them in prison directly.
That practice should be a crime, by itself.
The difficulty comes when you stretch the concept like with civil forfeiture. It's not even necessary: England and Wales has the Proceeds of Crime Act to allow seizure and forfeiture of criminal property and all the cases under that are ordinary in personam actions between the state and the putative criminal.
You can sue the owner. If they don't show up that doesn't mean that they automatically win the case - if anything, it's the opposite. If you can't identify the owner you can make the case against John Doe and still have a state appointed defender represent the owner's rights. You can get a court-ordered injunction to detain the ship until the case is resolved.
I don't see why you need to invent a new legal concept here at all - other that it makes things easier for the state to seize things when they don't need to worry about such pesky things as rights.
Your use in this comment make me think that usage is tied to this legal concept of in rem.
Any sane court system would believe that charging an inanimate object with a crime is beyond bonkers.
Bringing a civil suit doesn’t change the fundamental fact of this being unreasonable seizure. It’s seizure. And it’s unreasonable.
Naming it something else or inventing a process for doing it doesn’t change reality.
Hope it has a good lawyer then I guess?
Property is an asset, not a corporation (though could a corp. be an asset of a holding company?) but philosophically-speaking, "property itself as a defendant" and "corporation as a legal individual" seems connected.
In the case of Florida, if it isn’t struck down, it’s going to caused the cities in the surrounding area to have to pay higher taxes and take on Disney’s debts.
Which leads to some pretty hilarious case titles:
"United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls"
[edit] "South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats"
[edit] "United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster"
In my opinion this tactic should be illegal.
[edit] As far as I know this only really exists in the US, and in Canadian admiralty law (so, only in the US).
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction