EVERY ONCE IN A VERY GREAT WHILE, especially if I'm sick and don't feel like thinking or reading , I might watch one of those videos of a "sovereign citizen" getting pulled over for a minor or major traffic infraction by the police. The ones in which if they'd just hand over their registration and license and didn't mouth off to the cop they might have gotten a ticket or being let off with a caution but due to their insistence on their "rights" and their "rights under the CON-STI-TU-TION!" they end up in cuffs and on their way to jail.
The ones where the wife in the passenger seat keeps telling her husband to shut up and ends up driving herself home as hubby goes to jail are kind of satisfying, though you have to wonder why she stays married to the libertarian jerk.
But usually I am not in the frame of mind to listen to the twenty or thirty minutes of libertarian bull shit.
Considering how much stock modern People put into the idea of "rights" and "liberty" and "freedom" and "democracy" (that is liberal democracy, not egalitarian democracy) we spend remarkably little time or care in determining what those mean and the conditions under which they not only exist but are practiced in real life and the real world apart from theories about them.
One thing that we need to get clear about is that all of them are not abstract entities but are series of acts done by People, in terms of human law and life.
And with that comes the as necessary but seldom considered matter of rights, liberty, freedom and democracy and their impact on the rights liberty, freedom and life under democracy of other People, whether as individuals and groups. And the total folly of believing any of them can be in some imaginary way an absolute value and practice.
That in regard to those "rights" both enumerated and misidentified as such in the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution it is the lawyerly and judicial fantasy that any such "rights" can be exercised responsibly and as an absolute thing is one of the greatest engines destroying equality and so real democracy and in the process destroying far more important rights than the right to lie and to con and cheat and pretend that people getting conned and cheated are entering into contracts, and other lawerly bullshit into infinity.
Witnessing the combination of laziness, cowardice, and complicity in the American judiciary in regard to the criminal career of Donald Trump, his family, their allies and other Republican-fascists - often the matter of class, party and financial interest of the judges and most of all "justices" facilitating that decades long crime spree, I have come to the conclusion that without a total reappraisal and change of all of the things that contributed to that - NONE SO MUCH AS THE ABSURDITIES PRESENTED AS MATTERS OF "RIGHTS" UNDER "LAW" - we are idiots if we don't expect the crime spree to continue and expand to the total destruction of whatever is held to be good about the United States.
All of that has certainly contributed mightily to the serial overturning of any and, eventually, all measures of progress towards equality and democracy and the securing of a better life for all. As I said recently that is the history of the United States as it really is, not as it is taught or presented in the load of lies and bullshit that the popular presentation of that history is.
I am thinking of writing a few posts on that this week, it's looking like it's going to be a hard week for me so it might not be every day. I will certainly go into the absurd "rights absolutism that refuses to acknowledge that all "rights" are not created or practiced equally. That absurdist AND REALLY, LET'S CALL IT WHAT IT IS, SELFISH ASSERTION OF "RIGHTS" is supremely destructive and in a very real and consequential way it has become the lawyerly and judicial and Supreme Court articulation of "rights." The idea that the right of a topless dancer to dance without pasties having the same status as an MLK jr. agitating for voting rights, civil rights and economic justice or students at Columbia University protesting against their University investing in the genocide of the Palestinians is destructive of real rights while promoting things that are rather stupidly considered to be matters of "rights" has essentially trivialized and bastardized the concept.
You can say everything that Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying on stage and which George Carlin's rather stupid and derivative night club act said you'd never be able to say on TV but you can't effectively advocate for economic justice, oppose genocide, oppose Trumpian fascism. As I said the Warren Court, with the ACLU advocating for it, creating the "right to lie" for the NYT and the Burger court making millionaire money and now billionaire money equal "speech" was imagined by them to be a way of ushering in ever increasing democracy and liberty but which has brought us closer to fascism than we have been at any time since the Civil War ended. That is how stupid the Best and Brightest minds of the American judiciary really are and have been all along.
I will also go into the folly of the secular assertion that morality has nothing to do with it when morality is either the basis of all of it or equality and democracy are of no surpassing value. At least that's my plan this morning.
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