Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mnottertail
no, you have not proved that a right to travel DOCTRINE (as it deals with basic assumptions in our law) relieves you of the right of obeying common to all statutes, commercial or otherwise.
That being said, a doctrine of a minimum transitionary period in any enforced lifestyle change on the order of at least one or two generations would not be a bad thing. It might make things cumbersome when population growth causes densities to reach a critical level, but that's just going to force a bit of planning to start a few years before the bridge would have to be crossed anyway. Just imagine the yammering that will happen when density no longer permits private land ownership, and the state has to confiscate all land to start rebuilding residential areas more densely packed, or the eventual transition to arcology style living. Of course, without economic growth, we're already past the maximum density, so it might be an avoidable future.
As an avid walker, I'm more concerned with countries restricting the ability- and sometimes even the legality- of human powered movement in the world. For instance, even if I were swimming, rather than rowing or sailing, I could not enter the USA without a visa, and would not be permitted to approach the shore to unload goods and load other goods with no money exchanged. A purely human endeavour, with no reliance on the states involved and of no inherent concern, which has been made legally and practically impossible. Taking a hot air balloon over there would likely lead to a meeting with a UAV, for a brief but spectacular demonstration of modern AAM rockets. Doesn't matter if I'm visiting someone which owns their own piece of shore, either. At least, that's my understanding.
These days, the nation that owns you must hand permit you to leave, and the nation you visit must permit you to do so, not the person you visit. If you want to move, the nation that owns you must make the proper transfer of ownership to your new owner, and the paperwork must be updated as surely as any brand. That strikes me as unreasonable. To carve this world into domains of ownership, along with the people in it (who are born into this slavery), doesn't strike me as a particularly decent thing. A necessity as a function of lifestyle, perhaps, but not decent.
And for anyone doubting the term slavery, consider that the primary defining aspect is ownership of humans, which has a set of characteristics duplicated by the relation between nations and citizens, and the secondary defining aspect is control, which is again duplicated, while the final piece is threat or force, which is both duplicated and strictly monopolized. That is before we look into the right of nations to set laws that compel labor, regulate bodies, or whatever else one feels like.
Regulating life in the arenas that are possible as a function of having a society is fine, as those are extensions of society, products of cooperation and governed in cooperation. Signs on a buggy while it is on a road built by cooperative effort, such as tax funded labor, falls squarely into this category. Regulating life in areas that do not depend on this cooperation moves into the private sphere, and requires that humans be livestock. Preventing a person from walking across a line on a map falls into this category. And, let's face it, we're governed by the numbers, just like running a farm. We just have more complex requirements than farm animals, and are harvested for other things than our meat. That erases the conceptual distinction between citizenship and slavery, with the formal distinction being gone as per the above. Even the USA has crossed these lines, by now irrevocably so.
As such, curbing regulation of any sort, including regulation of Amish buggies, seems like a reasonable thing to do when possible, regardless of which sphere it falls under, until the government is back on the right side of the leash, and a nation is back to being the function and product of its people, incapable of agency and not possessed of rights. Consider that a nation having agency and rights in relation to its citizens is directly analogous to, and a logical precedent to, affording the same to other abstract entities like corporations. Which, in turn invariably results in these virtual life forms tending then to their own matters, paying no more attention to "baser" life (e.g. humans) than do their creators. Which is detrimental to us all. There's no need for Skynet in order to have humans considered obsolete by a different kind of being; we have that already. We just don't have much of a resistance movement, s'all. Guess what I find most unrealistic about T1-T4? ;)
Wholly a digression, so let me tie it back into the topic: the Amish, on some level, see these things. That there is a point where human life ceases to be human life, unless guided by strong principles to remain human, and that it ends itself at some point if not prevented from doing so. Evolution is not a friend to humans, just something we've benefitted from in the earlier stages of our existence.
Biblical imagery and advice on life isn't all about sodomy and pork.
It's about human nature, human needs and the nature of coexistence. The Tower of Babel doesn't need anyone striking it down to fall. The Tower eventually falls because it relies on humans and crushes them in its foundations, so humans eventually have to tear it down themselves. Like the Amish, the Rastafarians incidentally also know this, and use the term 'babylon' for what the Jihadists call... well, less flattering things. These groups just all happen not to explain it in terms that are less dependent on the ability to grasp creative imagery, i.e. "baser" language, as modern languages have been optimized for.
Amish seem backward because we're used to something different, but there's little to suggest their way of life is less healthy or less desireable for humans to pursue. We seem just as different to each other and to other cultures around the world. The question is whether we require monoculture. And, going from my own nation's recent experiences with the Sapmi and Romani, monoculture does not seem like a good idea. Neither does it seem so from a simple evolutionary perspective, since diversity is crucial to surviving when fitness optimality changes. Incidentally, Romani suffer worse, in some ways, from recent developments than others, as they are a "nation" without land, which worked well when there was land to go around, or even when people were allowed to travel. That's no longer the case, and they're obviously quite consistently subject to the laws of the lands through which their "nation" moves, which are increasingly intruding on the private sphere, thus no longer just regulating their interaction with us, but also who and what they may be, and how.
Amish will notice that development more in the future, and it's sad to see cultures marginalized and wiped out, not by other people, but by the inhuman second-order persons other people have created to inherit the Earth from humans, such as corporations and nations. In the final analysis, humanity and individuality are as much commonality as we can have, and to let the ambition of our creations set aside humans for its own ends is pretty creepy. "Will to dominate all life", indeed.
Nothing wrong with demanding stickers on a buggy, but perhaps we shouldn't...
... at least until people stop using cell phones in their cars.
Health,
al-Aswad.
CEO, Black Man Woolgathering and Route Diversification, Inc.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Amish Jailed - 
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