Legal vs lawful vs moral; legally sanctioned yet immoral

[Stephen D. Williams]

On 9/15/16 1:12 AM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 11:20:31PM -0700, Stephen D. Williams wrote:
>> On 9/14/16 8:34 PM, grarpamp wrote:
>>> Leaking paper is one thing, disassembling the quiet
>>> handshakes and luncheons of conspiracy is another.
>> Much of what corporations do is legal, whether you like it or not.
> Legal, as in compliant with their statutory right to financially pillage
> and legally bully their way around arbitrary "privilege" monopolies,
> yes.
>
> Lawful, as in compliant with the common man's sense of right and wrong
> (the "common law" or "community law"),
> no!

I think common law could be defined more precisely.  There has always been a gap between what was considered illegal and what seemed
unfair to someone.

>
>
>> Actual conspiracies are seldom needed
> A fluffy and largely useless statement.
>
> Actual conspiracies are every day occurrences, widespread to the point
> of being universal.
>
>    From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
>    [gcide]:
>    Conspire \Con*spire"\, v. t.
>       To plot; to plan; to combine for.
>       [1913 Webster]
>             Angry clouds conspire your overthrow.    --Bp. Hall.
>       [1913 Webster]

In this context, I took that to mean 'illegal conspiracy', which has a much more specific meaning.  Using the general meaning to
justify the statement when that statement will be taken as indicating criminal conspiracies is misleading.

>
>> and usually not worth the
>> risk.
> People talk and plot in private, including corporate "leaders".
And usually there is nothing wrong with that.

>
> --Especially-- corporate leaders.
>
> Talking and plotting -is- conspiring.
But not necessarily illegal conspiracy.

>
>
> Example:
>    To conspire with other self interested corporate executives, to
>    combine bribery capacity (lobbying), to cause -unlawful- laws to be
>    passed by parliament, which institute 10 years jail time punishments
>    for sharing a file by bittorrent;
>
>    Such punishment being thereafter deemed as "legal" punishment, even
>    though such punishment is not, and would never be, lawful by the
>    moral standards of the community (cruel and unusual punishment,
>    punishment which does not fit the crime, punishment not comparable to
>    punishment for other crimes e.g. rape, murder, tanking the economy
>    ("white collar" crime)).

I can see that, although it seems weak.  And it is rebuttable by the right campaign.

>
>
> Stephen, you are brainwashed, and purveying your brainwashing upon
> others.
>
> The part of that which I personally, vehemently, object to, is that you
> do so with an endless air of authority.

I claim familiarity with certain things, and demand clarity, logic, and specifics in any argument.  I make little or no claims of
authority beyond certain first hand knowledge, experience, and conclusions after reading authoritative sources.  More solidly
grounded specifics will always have an air of authority over vague hand waving and ad hominem attacks.  I can't really help that.

>
> And with seemingly endless pro-statist views.

I'm not all that pro-statist, but I also don't ignore what is working or blindly denigrate systems that should and could work
better.  Often things somewhat broken can be fixed rather than tearing down everything that is working out of spite and blind rage. 
Alternatives to everything should be considered, but alternatives aren't better simply because they are alternative; there has to be
some reasoning and proof of some kind.

>> Many abuses have come to light, usually with a pretty good downside
>> for the corporation.  Harder to get away with really bad stuff than it
>> used to be.
> It's getting easier and easier for corporations to do bad stuff legally.
> They lobby, they get their pet "laws" (unlawful though they are) passed,
> and thereafter their crimes falling under those laws are "legal", even
> though they remain as crimes, and remain immoral.

Plenty of this has just been exposed in the last few years.  Some of that will no longer work.  There are some cases of this still.

>
>
>>>> Ioerror.
>>>> Institutional assassination
>>> Precisely. And it's disgusting.
>> What are the worst things that corporate heads and politicians are
>> getting away with?
> Endless encroachment upon our individual sovereign rights with "laws",
> making their immoral activities and enforcements against our individual
> sovereign rights, legal.

OK.
>> What's your proposed solution?  What's your proposed cypherpunkian
>> solution?
> Well, there are possibly the most useful things you've ever said on this
> list. Good question. There, I said it. You asked a useful question.

> In the current context, get your torrentz over Tor, I2P, possibly
> FreeNet, and also sneakernet - network in human space, N2N / neighbour
> to neighbour your neighbourhood.

OK, now that you have a secure overlay communications and identity network, how are you going to manage it and the community of
users?  Are you going to nullify IP rights?  What else?

sdw

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 7732 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20160915/211df0b7/attachment.txt>