• @StrayCatFrump@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    No, traditions and customs aren’t laws. Sorry, but that’s some big-brained liberal nonsense, designed as apologetic propaganda for the legal injustice system. IMO Peter Gelderloos provides a pretty good functional definition:

    Anarchists take an entirely different view of the problems that authoritarian societies place within the framework of crime and punishment. A crime is the violation of a written law, and laws are imposed by elite bodies. In the final instance, the question is not whether someone is hurting others but whether she is disobeying the orders of the elite. As a response to crime, punishment creates hierarchies of morality and power between the criminal and the dispensers of justice. It denies the criminal the resources he may need to reintegrate into the community and to stop hurting others.

    In an empowered society, people do not need written laws; they have the power to determine whether someone is preventing them from fulfilling their needs, and can call on their peers for help resolving conflicts. In this view, the problem is not crime, but social harm — actions such as assault and drunk driving that actually hurt other people. This paradigm does away with the category of victimless crime, and reveals the absurdity of protecting the property rights of privileged people over the survival needs of others. The outrages typical of capitalist justice, such as arresting the hungry for stealing from the wealthy, would not be possible in a needs-based paradigm.

    The existence of law is 100% a bad thing, even if sometimes some not-awful stuff happens to be encoded into it (generally due to concessions made by the powerful to prevent revolt over the rest of their oppressive garbage).

    EDIT: Not sure if people realize, but the criticism is addressed toward the idiot liberal lawyer who’s a guest at the beginning, not toward Abi’s video overall, which is generally much better than his tripe.

    • @vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 year ago

      I’m not sure you disagree all that much. Did you watch the entire thing or just shut it off five minutes in to type this in a fit of rage?