Sovereign Citizens That Follow the Law?

[grixit]

As a child i was always impressed by Sergio Aragones. Here was someone who got paid to scribble in margins. When i did that, they made me rewrite my homework.

[wserra]

"Now Groo does what Groo does best!" (Well after the early Mad, though.)

[JamesVincent]

Always liked the Far Side better though.

[JohnPCapitalist]

Cracked was nothing more than a pathetic failed attempt to compete with Mad. It failed quickly. Mad really had no significant competition and did well until the times went against it.

I subscribed to Mad Magazine until well into my 50's, BTW.

Cracked did have one moment of glory: they picked up Don Martin, "Mad's Maddest Artist," after he had a falling out with Mad publisher Bill Gaines.

Cracked may have croaked as a newsstand publication and as a Mad clone, but it does surprisingly well today as a web site, with a lot of original written content (as opposed to artwork-driven material like its print version and like Mad). I suspect that someone picked up the name after the print magazine folded; I don't know whether there was any editorial continuity there. They arguably adapted to the Internet era better than Mad did.

[RSVPini]

I recall there being a Sick magazine at one time also but I don't recall whether or not it was any good. MAD was the best. I don't remember if it was on every cover but I remember when it said on the upper righthand corner of MAD "25 cents - cheap. 30 cents in Canada - not so cheap".

[fortinbras]

Does anyone remember GRUMP magazine?

[Pottapaug1938]

I recall there being a Sick magazine at one time also but I don't recall whether or not it was any good. MAD was the best. I don't remember if it was on every cover but I remember when it said on the upper righthand corner of MAD "25 cents - cheap. 30 cents in Canada - not so cheap".

I remember Sick magazine. It had, as its Alfred E. Neuman ersatz, a blond kid in a baseball cap. It was okay, but not up to MAD's quality. Cracked was about the same way. The modern Cracked web site is better than the 60s version of the magazine was.

[MRN]

What if sovs actually followed the statutory law that exists in dealing with the many problems that they see or at least think they see in dealing with local governments?

I think if you follow the law, you're not a SovCit, exactly. Maybe a sympathizer.

I spent far too long trying to work out the necessary and sufficient qualities of a SovCit last night, and eventually fell asleep and lost the draft, which is probably just as well given that this is the shorter version.

This is as far as I got with trimming away the stuff they often do but that doesn't make them a SovCit:

If you work within the law to change things you hate, I feel like that's just being an activist, of whatever sort. Even if you're being maliciously compliant by deliberately taking advantage of unforseen or unintended consequences of a law, where such exceptions actually EXIST, I'd call that Uncivil Obedience or possibly Being Really Bureaucratic (not intrinsically either good or bad. I can think of a lot of bad examples, but then, Oskar Schindler was a bureaucrat too.)

I was a tax resister for a number of years, without breaking the law, and I don't think that I was ever SovCittish.

I didn't think that either the legal or the moral obligation to pay taxes if you want to live in a complex society with considerable interdependence and infrastructure had stopped applying to me. I had just concluded that a very specific thing was a more important moral problem.

If you deliberately violate the law as a means to challenge or alter the law, that's civil disobedience. But that's a specific strategy that relies on you getting your day(s) in court, and nobody in their right mind does it if they're not prepared to be arrested and jailed.

If you don't really have opinions about the law or its enforcement, and you know it applies to you in principle but you violate it because you don't think the law applies to you in practice, (because you think you can evade or intimidate it), you're a criminal.

If your objection is to the whole concept of law as a thing the state can impose by force, you're an anarchist. I have always loved Utah Phillips' characterization of Ammon Hennessy as a "Fundamentalist Anarchist: someone who doesn't need a cop to tell them what the right thing to do is." I strive to follow in Hennessey's footsteps, to be honest.

But most of the anarchists I know have a pretty solid grip on what the law says and how it functions. They're not in denial about the current state of play, and in fact know they can't afford to be. Heck, one of 'em's a lawyer.

SovCits seem to have a relationship with The Law that isn't so much about breaking it in the ordinary sense as

a) wilfully not actually understanding how law works: Donald Neolitizky points out that they treat laws as if they were mystical spells.

You get little echoes of the ritual thing in 'normal' people — I cannot tell you how many protest planning meetings I have attended where someone solemnly announced that if there were any cops present they were required to reveal themselves or depart — but once people realized that that did not actually work, they didn't mess about trying to devise the perfect wording, they stopped doing it. In the same way, the word is out that you can't expose an undercover cop just by demanding they break the law in front of you.

(Mind you, if you're planning something perfectly legal along protest lines and someone in the group suddenly proposes that to Really Make An Impact We Need To Be Willing To [dangerous and harmful thing that carries a maximum sentence of ten years] — you probably have found the cop. And if you haven't, you've found the lunkhead. Either way, have them out immediately, is my advice. )

b) And, wilfully not accepting what law IS: they not only treat The Law as if it were a stack of papers with Laws on them, which are actually magic spells that they can cast to their advantage, they act as if that were ALL it were.

They pointedly don't acknowledge that the judge, lawyers, police, legislators, and so forth that compose the various branches, and the decisions those people make, are collectively The Law.

I think that's their thing with trying to insist they're interacting with judges, etc, on the judge's "personal liability".

You'd think if you considered the law to be a bunch of spells that have to be done just right but which, if successful, will give you immense power you'd be wary of what the high priest/priestess at the front of the courtroom, who does this all day, could do with them.

Nope.

They're just genuinely astonished every single time it turns out that they're wrong about their ability to push people around.

Astonished and furious. Hypocritically. Guys. You LITERALLY conspired with your friends to not pay taxes/drive without papers/evade your child support payments, whatever. Where do you get off complaining when the judge "takes the prosecutor's side" because The BAR or something.

And though they're endlessly trying to improve their approach after each loss, they try to fix it by tweaking their rituals, not by asking if their sacred knowledge is at fault or if ritual is even the tool for the job.

It's amazingly solipsistic. They honestly think that the world not being the way they want it to be is some kind of clerical error that everyone will leap to fix as soon as they find the right words. The agency of other players don't enter into it.

One of the reasons I, at least, have a strong gut reaction to many SovCits gurus is that I associate that kind of unexamined solipsistic entitlement and permanent victimhood routine with a particularly nasty flavour of narcissist, bully or abuser.

They're always incandescently furious about what you did to them, and also completely unable to grasp at all what they did to you. What they did to you is different, because they're ALLOWED.