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Comment by prometheuspk | Hacker News Reader

You can object to the law. Petition your lawmaker to change the law. Be vocal about hating the law. But until its not the law, you have to follow it.

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I practise my objection to the law by downloading whatever I want. If somebody has a problem with that they are free to sue me :)

Getting sued will be the least of your worries.

There's a litany of incidents where the FBI has raided homes just to snag one pirater.

With how politically weaponized the FBI has become in recent years, I personally would want to do everything I could to avoid attracting any attention from them.

Not worth it to watch some shitty trash TV or movie, personally.

I understand that you believe that, but you didn't say why. Is this a foundational belief or is there a deeper reason?

It's a foundational belief of the social contract we've signed by agreeing to democracy

Democracy exists at all because people did not follow a blind adherence to law.

At any rate, "the law" is a body of rules so large and complex that likely almost no one actually manages to get through a month without breaking it a couple times.

I agreed to no such thing. The social contract I've been forced into seems to have a lot to do with enriching power and moneyed interests, at the expense of the individual. I want no part of that.

In a democracy you don't always get what you want

Please show me where I signed

> The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind any body but themselves.

Lysander Spooner goes on to expand this theme greatly.

Foundational essay, well worth a read: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/spooner-no-treason-no-vi-t...

Strictly following the law because it is the law is precisely amoral. You are taking moral judgement out of the question.

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