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Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of what you say (and thank you also for the link), but not "all is well".

Quite possibly the importance of this law should not be overstated, and I agree with you and your children carrying on with your Coursera courses. But apparently you will be doing so in violation of the law.

Should not unjust laws be protested, if perhaps also disobeyed? I would not exactly be afraid to continue using Coursera in Minnesota, but experience has taught me that law enforcement should never be trusted 100% to be reasonable.

That said, you mentioned that you will be speaking with your state legislators -- you are doing as much to fight this as anyone reasonably could, and for that you have my gratitude. If 10,000 other Minnesotans took the same action as you, this would die as it deserves to.

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Marginal Revolution University has stated they plan to ignore the law and continue offering their course in Minnesota. They claim they'll fight to the point of going to jail for it.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/mar...

Good for them, but I seriously doubt Tyler Cowen would give up his life of leisure for prison.

> But apparently you will be doing so in violation of the law.

Clearly not. According to the article, the law deals specifically with institutions provide education, not individuals soliciting the courses.

This is much like poker laws that made it illegal for banks to process financial transactions, but never made it illegal for players to participate.

If people protest laws they dislike, but not protest against the whole democratically elected dictatorship board with all their laws and regulations, it won't you get anywhere. But once people realise it's not legitimate to aggress against people based purely on "majority rule" with disregard to basic property rights, the government will dissolve.

Property "rights" are a construct that is meaningless without government. In the state of nature, you have no rights as against someone who is stronger who can take from you what he wants.

The creation of property rights is an imposition of the dictatorship of the majority. It tells the strong that they cannot use their natural gifts to further their own interests under the penalty of collective force. If the will of the majority dissolves, property rights are meaningless.

Representative democracy's like the US are not based on "majority rule". The most obvious example being all the presidents that lost the election while winning the popular vote.

>Should not unjust laws be protested, if perhaps also disobeyed?

I, and millions of people around the world, have been disobeying the draconian drug laws for years and it's getting us nowhere. What advice do you have?

I don't think it's getting you nowhere.

For example, I am about to vote to legalize marijuana in Colorado. I don't know whether it will pass, but you can bet that measure would never have been on the ballot were it not for the decades of data--on the medical and social effects of the drug and its criminalization--provided by people breaking the law.

In my experience it has nothing to do with evidence. People are emotional creatures and said emotion pervades every choice they make, whether they think themselves to be rational or not. Incidentally, the rational ones have the most trouble accepting their emotions which in the grand scheme of things makes them among the most ignorant of society.

I think that the changing attitudes are simply due to the old guard dying from old age and disease. When there are sufficiently few people who grew up in the era of hardcore anti-drug propaganda then there will be a policy change.

There's a difference between publicly disobeying an unjust law and privately disobeying an unjust law.

Oh right, that's why it's not working. So if we all take drugs on the streets then the law will change. Will try this weekend and report back, assuming that I won't be in jail for the next 5-10 years.

I don't think you're getting above DH3 here (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html).

Aside from that: I wonder what would happen if all the people in the country who are using marijuana at least semi-regularly were to go to some very public place at the same time and light up a joint.

I think it's pretty obvious what happens when you light up a joint in public (in the US anyway). You may not get arrested every time, but keep it up and you will.

That obviousness surely elevates their response to DH4.

Yes, it is obvious. So obvious that assuming that that's what the grand-grandparent is proposing is either disingenuous or extremely uncharitable.

Instead of a posting a glib response, a reasonable thing to do would be to read the wikipedia article on civil disobedience and realize that a single person randomly disobeying a law in public is not how it works.

Well gee, sorry I didn't refute your argument in the form of a DH6 retort in the form of refuting the central point. What most people on the internet seem to miss is an incredibly profound insight.

We are on the internet. Most of these conversations will go nowhere beyond where the people reading them will take them, which is nowhere. I am not interested in writing essay after essay debating things with people who have no power to change them in the first place. This is a waste of time. The internet primarily exists as a form of entertainment. This may be against the spirit of HN but I would argue that HN is against the spirit of the internet. My proof of this is that the vast majority (99%+) of the internet is nothing like HN.

Anyway, to address your point - numerous people take drugs publically at events like music festivals. The result of this action is a lack of arrests and a lack of policy change.

The point is to overwhelm the system. Public civil disobedience brings the issue to the public. Ghandi didn't protest in private.

What you would want to do are:

1) Bring the issue to the public. Make sure that it ends up on the evening news more often than not.

2) Dispel most of the myths associated with drugs (e.g. all drug users are out-of-control crazed lunatics on a homicidal rampage to kill you and your kids!).

3) Get more people on-board. If more and more and more people are getting arrested very publicly for using drugs, then at some point, the government will have to do something, because they can't afford to have a significant portion of the population in jail.

These are the end-goals. Mostly to change public perception and to get the majority of the population on your side. Then you want to bring the issue to a head.

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