James A. Donald <[1]jamesd@echeque.com> wrote:

     In practice, it is pretty obvious that most practitioners of civil
     disobedience believe they are above the law, that they usually *are*
     above the law, and that in particular Swartz believed he was above
     the law, and was shocked to find that he was not.
     There might be some sincere practitioners of civil disobedience, but
     Swartz was not, and the big heroes of the civil disobedience
     brigade, Ghandi and Thoreau, were not.

   It seems in practice that there is a relation issue involved in
   who judges and determines lawfulness in the shared situation.
   oftentimes, the person who judges is actually 'the criminal' and
   can "represent the state" and 'the people' though misleadingly,
   subverting this relation. such that, a person who exists within
   and operates in a criminal way, including relying upon lies as
   a day to day framework, then convicts those who may break
   one law or tell one lie in their lives or go beyond a boundary
   out of principle and larger ethics that question the ruleset
   and what happens or appears to is that all the power is with
   those who cheat, lie, and steal within the state along with
   their accomplices, and that these people 'are the state' that
   then judges and determines the fate of otherwise law-abiding
   citizens or those who seek to serve its best interests, not least
   by enforcing its framework or utilizing its freedoms, testing the
   parameters only to find they are not observed, are fiction only
   (else, perhaps other more active strategies exist though are
   correct in principle, in not adhering to laws that are inaccurate
   or overbearing and allow the corruption its continuing power)
   what this is to suggest is that the judge-convicted relation is:
       99.99% falsity + 0.01% truth   vs.  99.99% truth + error
   (in that the evaluation occurs in a warped framework where
   judgement is divorced from its own adherence to truth, via
   the same corrupted constitution that allows for this relation)
       99% wrong  ---> judgement ---> 0.01% wrong
   and yet this viewpoint (based on power) is itself based upon
   LIES and deception, unaccountable to the same rules and
   thus is beyond law. and thus it _must show falsity in another
   yet never allow this to be accounted for in its own viewpoint
   or actions-- which is how authoritarian, totalitarian, and the
   secret dictatorship triumph in these conditions, because it
   is beyond accountability, it is just about believing in higher
   power that is based on lies and opinions, as it filters down
   into culture via illiteracy, loss of education, social relations,
   normalization of vice, oppression, exploitation, criminality
   this is why the state must be abolished, because it has
   become thoroughly rotten from the inside out due to the
   outdated source code that provides loopholes to oppress
   citizens and humans and the planet and animals worldwide
   due to loss of truth, and making this lying 'legal' as a basis
   for 'shared power' by who shares and is in on the lie, as this
   then scales and becomes organization, authority, judgement
   fjisw  sosip  wsznx

References

   1. mailto:jamesd@echeque.com