If Groups No Longer Recognize the Legitimacy of the Law...

[JodyH]

The flip side of the coin is if people don't think the punishment fits the crime or that the enforcement isn't applied equally.

Not to dwell on the covid/mask thing.
But when the Governor threatens 6 months in jail for people not wearing a mask, while at the same time is ordering the release of repeat violent offenders from jail or is forcing businesses to close under threat of thousands of dollars in fines, while not only allowing but participating in mass protests...

Then you no longer have the consent of the governed either and you get a lot more "fuck you, make me".

[olstyn]

The day after our Governor Karen went on TV and talked down to everyone (she really has a grating kindergarten teacher way of speaking) and said masks were mandatory and a jailable offense, mask usage dropped by about 90%.
No shit.
It went from quite a few people wearing masks to hardly anyone wearing masks.

I think even beyond that, people are just getting complacent about COVID-19. I went to the first USPSA match I've been to in about 5 months yesterday, and I was the only competitor wearing a mask, and basically nobody was maintaining any kind of decent distance from each other. The lack of masks I could sort of handle since it was outdoors, but constantly having to back away from people you're talking with because they keep getting too close is really irritating. I may just be skipping out on matches for a quite a while yet.

[UNM1136]

The flip side of the coin is if people don't think the punishment fits the crime or that the enforcement isn't applied equally.

Not to dwell on the covid/mask thing.
But when the Governor threatens 6 months in jail for people not wearing a mask, while at the same time is ordering the release of repeat violent offenders from jail or is forcing businesses to close under threat of thousands of dollars in fines, while not only allowing but participating in mass protests...

Then you no longer have the consent of the governed either and you get a lot more "fuck you, make me".

Grants mayor and Floyd protesters...

Who/what you side with is more important than the facts concerning who gets punished.

pat

[Joe in PNG]

Historically, you tend to get organized vigilante groups. If the elected government won't keep the criminals down, then the people tend to go and go it themselves.

And this is not a good thing. Vigilantes tend to not get too concerned about the chain of evidence, or other such niceties.

[Pacioli]

Just like law and order, money is also a consensual hallucination. Money, like the law, only has value and power if people believe it does. After all, money is just some special linen with words and symbols printed on it and coinage is just base metal alloys stamped with roughly the same words and symbols.

And once the ability to enforce the law is gone, the value of the fiat currency is sure to follow. The dollar is what it is because the US can project force. If fed.gov cannot get US citizens to follow laws, then why would anyone believe a dollar is worth anything?

I've thought about this a great deal and I don't believe the dollar will be susceptible to meaningful devaluation in anything short of a global SHTF. Short of that, the USD is the global reserve currency and that puts a floor under it. Even if there is widespread social unrest, the FedGov will continue along and the Fed Reserve Bank will plod along as well. That's not to say there couldn't be inflation caused by normal economic forces and exacerbated by events such as we've seen recently. But i think the issues would be more on the goods (food, TP, etc) supply side than the payments side.

In fifty years the Chinese Yuan could take the reserve currency position and all bets are off at that point, but I'll be dead so IDGAF.

[MistWolf]

...and the sovereignty of the nation...can they be defeated via the courts and the rule of law, or does their (violent) resistance have to be met by greater force than they bring to bear?

Where is the tipping point?

Please discuss...

Death is the ultimate persuader

[farscott]

I've thought about this a great deal and I don't believe the dollar will be susceptible to meaningful devaluation in anything short of a global SHTF. Short of that, the USD is the global reserve currency and that puts a floor under it. Even if there is widespread social unrest, the FedGov will continue along and the Fed Reserve Bank will plod along as well. That's not to say there couldn't be inflation caused by normal economic forces and exacerbated by events such as we've seen recently. But i think the issues would be more on the goods (food, TP, etc) supply side than the payments side.

In fifty years the Chinese Yuan could take the reserve currency position and all bets are off at that point, but I'll be dead so IDGAF.

For a variety of reasons, mostly historical, I disagree. Historically the reserve currency has been the currency of the dominant world power. After WW II, that was the USA and the dollar became the currency to settle trades like crude oil. But we already see some erosion of that with oil contracts now being settled with euros and, more importantly, yuan. With further internal dissent, the USA has less influence overseas as domestic issues absorb attention. From 1860 to before WW II (1931 was when the UK abandoned pegging the pound to gold), the British pound was the reserve currency. When the British lost the ability to project power, so did they lose the reserve currency and its advantages. The winner of WW II was the USA because not only did the country win, the manufacturing base and the ability to project power were both present.

Flash forward to the present. The manufacturing base is mostly gone - gone to China. Printing dollars via the purchase of Treasury debt and other debt obligations means there are more dollars sloshing around the system. Many people got $1200 to spend as an advance on a tax credit; that money was created by the Federal Reserve buying Treasury debt. Today I saw the results of a four-year, ten-month (five-year reopening) of a Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS). The sale price was $104.470612 per $100 of face for a nominal yield of 0.125%, meaning buyers were willing to pay 0.951% above face to yield 0.125% above inflation for just five years. The bid-to-cover ratio was above six, meaning that there was more than six times the demand for every $100 of debt offered ($157 million offered and $25 million accepted). That suggests that the smart money sees inflation coming and just wants a return of capital, not return on capital. That does not bode well for the dollar.

We already see record low interest rates, pushing housing prices and demand to bubble levels. When one puts a house on the market and gets five offers above asking in a day, there is a bubble. And every bubble, from tulips to mortgage tranches, has or will pop. I cannot say when, but I can say it will.

And the current administration is speeding the process along by withdrawing from treaties and organizations like the WHO. There is an old saying about being part of the solution or part of the problem. Withdrawing from international bodies does not allow a country to have influence on the solutions. Instead one becomes a helpless observer as the remaining members press forward with their own agendas. Is the USA better not being a member of the WHO and, if so, how? Would it not have been better to push for reform from within? Or if one is to withdraw, form a replacement entity that others wish to join?

So I am not too sanguine about the future of the dollar as reserve currency.

[rcbusmc24]

This essay pretty much describes where I am with the whole thing..... Legitimacy of the law must be supported by the use of violence by the State and it's agents sent to ensure compliance with the laws of the state against those who violate the law. Failure to support this action destroys the state's legitimacy faster that any thing else. Any anger people have with the laws that currently exist must be addressed with the politicians who enacted them at our behest, not with the agents of the state sent to enforce them. If the law is no longer considered legitimate than I would submit that we must consider the state as failed already....

Violence is Golden- by Jack Donovan

A lot of people like to think they are “non-violent.” Generally, people claim to “abhor” the use of violence, and violence is viewed negatively by most folks. Many fail to differentiate between just and unjust violence. Some especially vain, self-righteous types like to think they have risen above the nasty, violent cultures of their ancestors. They say that “violence isn’t the answer.” They say that “violence doesn’t solve anything.”

They’re wrong. Every one of them relies on violence, every single day.

On election day, people from all walks of life line up to cast their ballots, and by doing so, they hope to influence who gets to wield the axe of authority. Those who want to end violence — as if that were possible or even desirable — often seek to disarm their fellow citizens. This does not actually end violence. It merely gives the state mob a monopoly on violence. This makes you “safer,” so long as you don’t piss off the boss.
All governments — left, right or other — are by their very nature coercive. They have to be.

Order demands violence.

A rule not ultimately backed by the threat of violence is merely a suggestion. States rely on laws enforced by men ready to do violence against lawbreakers. Every tax, every code and every licensing requirement demands an escalating progression of penalties that, in the end, must result in the forcible seizure of property or imprisonment by armed men prepared to do violence in the event of resistance or non–compliance. Every time a soccer mom stands up and demands harsher penalties for drunk driving, or selling cigarettes to minors, or owning a pit bull, or not recycling, she is petitioning the state to use force to impose her will. She is no longer asking nicely. The viability of every family law, gun law, zoning law, traffic law, immigration law, import law, export law and financial regulation depends on both the willingness and wherewithal of the group to exact order by force.

When an environmentalist demands that we “save the whales,” he or she is in effect making the argument that saving the whales is so important that it is worth doing harm to humans who harm whales. The peaceful environmentalist is petitioning the leviathan to authorize the use of violence in the interest of protecting leviathans. If state leaders were to agree and express that it was, indeed, important to “save the whales,” but then decline to penalize those who bring harm to whales, or decline to enforce those penalties under threat of violent police or military action, the expressed sentiment would be a meaningless gesture. Those who wanted to bring harm to whales would feel free to do so, as it is said, with impunity — without punishment.

Without action, words are just words. Without violence, laws are just words.

Violence isn’t the only answer, but it is the final answer.

One can make moral arguments and ethical arguments and appeals to reason, emotion, aesthetics, and compassion. People are certainly moved by these arguments, and when sufficiently persuaded –providing of course that they are not excessively inconvenienced — people often choose to moderate or change their behaviors.

However, the willful submission of many inevitably creates a vulnerability waiting to be exploited by any one person who shrugs off social and ethical norms. If every man lays down his arms and refuses to pick them up, the first man to pick them up can do whatever he wants. Peace can only be maintained without violence so long as everyone sticks to the bargain, and to maintain peace every single person in every successive generation — even after war is long forgotten — must continue to agree to remain peaceful. Forever and ever. No delinquent or upstart may ever ask, “Or Else What?,” because in a truly non-violent society, the best available answer is “Or else we won’t think you’re a very nice person and we’re not going to share with you.” Our troublemaker is free to reply, “I don’t care. I’ll take what I want.”

Violence is the final answer to the question, “Or else what?”

Violence is the gold standard, the reserve that guarantees order. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. Violence transcends the quirks of philosophy, religion, technology and culture. People say that music is a universal language, but a punch in the face hurts the same no matter what language you speak or what kind of music you prefer. If you are trapped in a room with me and I grab a pipe and gesture to strike you with it, no matter who you are, your monkey brain will immediately understand “or else what.” And thereby, a certain order is achieved.

The practical understanding of violence is as basic to human life and human order as is the idea that fire is hot. You can use it, but you must respect it. You can act against it, and you can sometimes control it, but you can’t just wish it away. Like wildfire, sometimes it is overwhelming and you won’t know it is coming until it is too late. Sometimes it is bigger than you. Ask the Cherokee, the Inca, the Romanovs, the Jews, the Confederates, the barbarians and the Romans. They all know “Or else what.”

The basic acknowledgement that order demands violence is not a revelation, but to some it may seem like one. The very notion may make some people apoplectic, and some will furiously attempt to dispute it with all sorts of convoluted and hypothetical arguments, because it doesn’t sound very “nice.” But something doesn’t need to be “nice” in order for it to be true. Reality doesn’t bend over to accommodate fantasy or sentimentality.

Our complex society relies on proxy violence to the extent that many average people in the private sector can wander through life without really having to understand or think deeply about violence, because we are removed from it. We can afford to perceive it as a distant, abstract problem to be solved through high-minded strategy and social programming. When violence comes knocking, we simply make a call, and the police come to “stop” the violence. Few civilians really take the time to think that what we are essentially doing is paying an armed band protection money to come and do orderly violence on our behalf. When those who would do violence to us are taken peacefully, most of us don’t really make the connection, we don’t even assert to ourselves that the reason a perpetrator allows himself to be arrested is because of the gun the officer’s hip or the implicit understanding that he will eventually be hunted down by more officers who have the authority to kill him if his is deemed a threat. That is, if he is deemed a threat to order.

There are something like two and a half million people incarcerated in the United States. Over ninety percent of them are men. Most of them did not turn themselves in. Most of them don’t try to escape at night because there is someone in a guard tower ready to shoot them. Many are “non-violent” offenders. Soccer moms, accountants, celebrity activists and free range vegans all send in their tax dollars, and by proxy spend billions and billions to feed an armed government that maintains order through violence.

It is when our ordered violence gives way to disordered violence, as in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that we are forced to see how much we rely on those who maintain order through violence. People loot because they can, and kill because they think they’ll get away with it. Dealing with violence and finding violent men who will protect you from other violent men suddenly becomes a real and pressing concern.

A pal once told me a story about an incident recounted by a family friend who was a cop, and I think it gets the point across. A few teenagers were at the mall hanging out, outside a bookstore. They were goofing around and talking with some cops who were hanging around. The cop was a relatively big guy, not someone who you would want to mess around with. One of the kids told the cop that he didn’t see why society needed police.

The cop leaned over and said to the spindly kid, “do you have any doubt in your mind about whether or not I could break your arms and take that book away from you if I felt like it?”

The teenager, obviously shaken by the brutality of the statement, said, “No.”

“That’s why you need cops, kid.”

George Orwell wrote in his “Notes on Nationalism” that, for the pacifist, the truth that, “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf,” is obvious but impossible to accept. Much un-reason flows from the inability to accept our passive reliance on violence for protection. Escapist fantasies of the John Lennon “Imagine” variety corrupt our ability to see the world as it is, and be honest with ourselves about the naturalness of violence to the human animal. There is no evidence to support the idea that man is an inherently peaceful creature. There is substantial evidence to support the notion that violence has always been a part of human life. Every day, archaeologists unearth another primitive skull with damage from weapons or blunt force trauma. The very first legal codes were shockingly grisly. If we feel less threatened today, if we feel as though we live in a non–violent society, it is only because we have ceded so much power over our daily lives to the state. Some call this reason, but we might just as well call it laziness. A dangerous laziness, it would seem, given how little most people say they trust politicians.

Violence doesn’t come from movies or video games or music. Violence comes from people. It’s about time people woke up from their 1960s haze and started being honest about violence again. People are violent, and that’s OK. You can’t legislate it away or talk your way around it. Based on the available evidence, there’s no reason to believe that world peace will ever be achieved, or that violence can ever be “stopped.”

It’s time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. History teaches us that if we don’t, someone else will.

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I believe that many, many people are rapidly approaching the " Or else what?! " stage..... and I submit that fighting may be required to restore order and tranquility.

At some point Balkanization might be the best that we can hope for. Yet, I can see a rapid end coming to the Second Republic in short order, and I do not believe that we will ever get lucky enough to get a Third Republic that can measure up to what we have enjoyed thus far since the ratification of the Constitution. The transition years will be bad enough, I've seen what happens when you completely dismantle a society, I never what to live in a place like that if I can avoid it...

[Borderland]

Just like law and order, money is also a consensual hallucination. Money, like the law, only has value and power if people believe it does. After all, money is just some special linen with words and symbols printed on it and coinage is just base metal alloys stamped with roughly the same words and symbols.

And once the ability to enforce the law is gone, the value of the fiat currency is sure to follow. The dollar is what it is because the US can project force. If fed.gov cannot get US citizens to follow laws, then why would anyone believe a dollar is worth anything?

Financial crises just around the corner. Gold up 28% and and silver up 24% in the last year. Massive inflation is coming because monetary policy is now a slave to fiscal policy. People always start hoarding gold and silver when the storm clouds gather. All of this because of mismanagement by congress and the administration. I'm going to blame the coming armed insurgency on the fed if it's OK with everyone.

To add, people are mostly missing the reason for the armed insurgency. BLM is just a banner they carry. Has nothing to do with the police killing a black man. They want to overthrow the government because of what it stands for. They want to defund the police who keep the order. No police, no order and effectively no government. People are starting to wake up to that fact.

My Friend who is an FFL told me today that in 25 years of being in business, last month was the busiest month he has ever had. He's retired and he said he's working harder in retirement than he ever did with a full time job. I don't know his age but I'm guessing over 70. Personally, I wouldn't want to be answering the phone every 10 minutes, which is what he does.

I'll nominate you for financial moderator. We have cops and a doctor. We need monetary leadership.

[Wendell]

Every Communist must grasp the truth; "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

-"Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm