a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts

that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things, generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then we wont hold it against you the first time"

*the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to value judge your actions in superficial ways

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kingstnap 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen

I feel like this is basically the case in everything.

* A lot of people don't read the article before commenting.

* Nobody reads TOS for things.

* Most people don't read academic papers.

* MIT or BSD license is easy, but how many people here have actually read the whole GPL, Apache, or Mozilla licenses.

* Voter turnout in Municipal elections here in Ontario is incredibly low.

There is too much information out there for one person. Everything is done with value judgements.

	▲	thephyber an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Everything is done with value judgements. Less about value judgements. More about outsourcing to people/brands we trust. When it comes to software licenses, we aren’t lawyers, so the informed people will use a primer created by a trusted 3rd party. Maybe GitHub’s “which license is right for me?” Page. Who to vote for in local elections is usually decided via one of the following: (1) I know/met the person, (2) I trust the party they affiliate with, (3) I trust the newspaper/news source which recommended them. Academic papers are usually thick, long, and inaccuracies are difficult for anyone not in that field of expertise (or something relevant like statistics) to identify. Most people require an overview of the article by an expert. Hopefully (but unlikely) they can choose one which is impartial / minimally biased and who can give an opinion on how definitive or significant the findings are.
	▲	order-matters 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Which is why its backwards and makes no sense that we allow / cater to "well nothing said I couldnt do that" as a reasonable defense. The value judgement system should go both ways. then a lot less would need to be written down to begin with, because it wouldnt be an arbitrary set of rules on every front but the codification of a specific value judgement system with clarifications on how to align yourself to it. We really shouldnt be allowing things like, "this is a location dedicated to peace and non-violence" and then section 32 subsection C part 2 (a) says "we can kick the shit out of you if you photograph the premises". Just a random made up example for communication purposes, but it applies to all sorts of things. Personally, I think it should apply to social media. there was a implied sense of privacy to it, that people could not see my information if i did not approve it - and then the fine print says except for the company running the page who can sell the information to whoever they want. Like WTF was that about? I wont say its an ignored thing, there plenty of outrage over it - but i think its incredibly fundamental to whats going wrong and feeding this information overload in a dangerous / stressful way. Companies shouldnt need 10 pages of TOS to say all the obvious things, and appealing to this idea that only whats written down is what matters shouldnt allow for just any arbitrary set of things to be written down and called reasonable

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mekdoonggi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have never considered this perspective, but this fits very well with people's actions. Thank you for sharing.

To me, the system of codified law and courts makes intuitive sense, and most people misunderstand or abuse the system. But other people's intuitive understanding of the law as you mentioned is a much easier way to understand and actually IS a rough approximation of what the system does.

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goatlover 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The other caveat is if you're a historically persecuted minority group, then those assumptions toward law enforcement don't usually apply. And now the political opposition to the current US administration is also feeling that way.