Neo-Constitutionalism to be precise. This is the aim. The spirit of the law, but of the original law, which clearly states that the greatest danger of all is Government.
A constitution to protect man from the law; this is the bare essence of what we are going for.
The moral superiority of law and state power is the self-check on its own power. Placing limits on use of force for the sake of that force and that use, and entrusting those meta-powers to those who are ultimately subject to uses of force. It’s the rational basis for civil structure, the only system that allows stable and rational justice and force-use without requiring necessarily to resort to deliberate lies, manipulation and tactics rooted in untruth. When you set truth structurally up as the base of a social order, by de facto removing the necessity for pathological anti-truth-based moves to keep that structure going, you at least make it possible that something resembling a truth movement can arise within culture, a will to something greater than mere animalistic power games. Something human can finally appear when rational self-limitation and mutual conditionality is established in place of “might makes right” types of justification, which of course even supposedly enlightened religious social structures always come down to.
But the problem of adequate codification of rights into a constitutional structure is a difficult one. There must be a will to the hard, gritty details, and a will to the whole gray areas of real world and imperfect situations and outcomes. Basically there must be a mass of lawyers and people who think like lawyers, needed to do the difficult work of crunching through all the complex and hyper-particular situations in order to make a constitutional system like this work. In short, systems like this naturally pressure life/consciousness into the middle and away from extreme polarities, providing an effective counter-pressure against the pervasive influences of pathology, mental laziness, archaic religious moralisms and mere animalism.
Laws mean nothing at all. Constitutionalists are a joke.
Culture and Civilization are opposites.- WL
Okay, with respect to issues like health care or abortion or hunting or animal rights or capital punishment or separation of church and state or crony capitalism or gun control, tell us where the line should be drawn between too much and too little government. What should or should not be against the law?
And how is this related to the manner in which you construe the meaning of VO?
The point is these are human issues and engendered in complex situations, there are no universal perfect maxims or black and white decisions. It’s a give and take over time, allowing for chance and adaptation, society as living organism.
Contentious social issues are signs of values, and of ways of valuing. Perfectionists, ideologues and hyper-moralists are always the enemies, because these people suffer from a defective valuing mechanism.
If laws or Constitutions were as good and effective as they were supposed to be we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we?
The fact that we are living in such a mess of a world I think it quite telling just how effective or good human constructed laws and Constitutions really are…
Nihilists- 1
Government morally idealistic bitch boys- 0
I agree. I think. It’s just that framing these issues “intellectually” in a forum like this one is one thing, actually configuring a policy and a program that takes into account these “complex situations” out in the world of actual flesh and blood human interactions, another thing altogether.
I’m just curious the extent to which certain philosophers think that part through.
Why the persistent positive correlation between anarchism and ignorance/idiocy?
I’d say, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
Your question makes no sense. Please try again.
And yet they are being enforced, by madmen.
I have no illusions, or I dont think the world can ever abolish ‘the law’. I think and feel that humans will likely keep inventing laws, simply because a certain kind of folk thrives by them.
What I can imagine contributing to however is a reorganization of law and state, so as to make it clear once and for all that it is not the state, nor the laws as they are being written to adapt, but the original reason for the conception of law-giving itself that justifies and ratifies the long armed king. This conception is in one way or the other that the world is will to power, or that all life wills to set the terms in which it values it; it wills to enjoy power; but on its terms. Once power is attained by quality A the world becomes colored A-like compared to the previous state. The Law of the USA is deeply explicit about human nature. It is a serious attempt to be bold in the face of overwhelming odds, so as to create, or evoke, The Good In Man; for which these men naturally had a far more savagelike instinct than we moderns, who recoil at the idea of people as livestock.
Strangely we’ve grown closer to the expressed ideals. The men that wrote them down knew perhaps that they would not personally have to suffer the consequences of their lofty ‘We, the people’.
Tyranny upon progeny is culture, tyranny upon populace is civilization.
Culture is tribal. In as far as family-standards fall away, man is civilized. The fairy tale is now read to children to remember where they came from, instead of lived out; except to the degree that we call ‘magical experience’. The life of the man used to be filled to the brim with the awe of its own unpredictability; its capacity to tell stories merely by living.
The State ominously hinders this. History and the ascent of a thousand years (more like 4000) will begin only at the moment where to walk free and owe money or identification to no one is as natural a rule as gravity. Not before surprised looks on the faces of anyone who is confronted with an order; and the automatic violence that swipes such an absurdity from the window.
Self-organize; allow the Earth to dominate the affairs of life. This means; to push out government by drawing it into itself; almost as if government becoming a philosopher. Pensive, searching for a standard that can justify its depth, its power.
I have heard that there is a law that is actually a thing of great beauty in the eyes of the religiously atheistic man. I have never heard it formulated.
Hail King Alexander!
runs away
^^^^Jakob
Might makes right. Law and order is enforced by the barrel of a gun. Law gives the illusion of equality and an impartial social system even though that beyond the illusion neither exists.
The very wealthy and the state controls justice or the courts all the while making themselves immune to both.
Any questions?
That will entirely depend on the cases argued.
If one argues by the terms of self-determination and the pursuit of happiness for all, and if this is always the overruling argument, then I have faith that the worthiest decisions - worthy to the ones involved, in as far as they are worthy unto themselves - will be reached in the greatest amount of cases.
Laws are usually arbitrary and only intended to guide mans natural responses. The USA is based on a certain instinct that came out of the Frankish culture (Holland and France) combined with the royal brilliance of England; it is extremely lofty in its power-foundations, comparable to ancient Athens in the type of glory and illumination it represented, and still must represent as there is no alternative.
Therefore, my instincts pull me to reestablish it in its strengths, which is the People.
Simply because government is indeed of the people, but not usually the best type of people. You use the worst elements to administer; the ones who can not go out to hunt. But keep them in check. They are clerks. This is how a home owner used to stand before the FBI. Property was sacred as to produce holy fire and holy rights.
Value is directly related to property. Thus, so is self-value. Of course ones body is ones most invaluable property. But not the only thing. Clothes, for example. And anything in the pockets make life so much more unpredictable and pleasurable; the ride into the night becomes possible. True adventure is undertaken voluntarily.
Ownership is a means to enlightenment.
Raising standards.
No, because the concept of constitutionalism isn’t Neo or Original, in the beginning. It just was for them, and applies equally to them as now, so it’s outside of time, every era holding equally. Not a linear construct until clauses change, then it becomes like a new creature that always was.
Think of a Root System of a plant and Precedents in Common Law:
Our common law system has roots extending back into the dark ages, basic judicial ideas the bonded our various judicial practices together into similar concepts, that judges could share in circuits with other judges, to give predictability to law in advance.
These precedents are balanced out against their longevity first by anthropological understandings of what we call natural law… if such rulings are consistently in conflict with human nature, judge after judge experiencing the friction of trying to promote these judicial precedents their forefathers tried to promote for positive growth in the rational exploration of the law, one of them will chuck a given precedent, but in doing so, will give good reason for doing so. Think of it as a orderly, rationalized, third person perspective on Nietzsche’s Ethical prescriptions (which he promoted in the first person).
Judges, especially ones of genius and insight, when they do this, are expected to come up on these occasions of friction against conservative judicial practices, be they nullifying them, or modifying, or further clarifying, to come up with a axiomatic formulation of how to handle such situations in the future.
Basically, it’s a furthered adaptation of the concepts at root of the Indo-European Hittite Code, noting what Law Was, and how Law Is now. We further it be identifying what the difficulties of the old method of judging was, and how to move forward in new cases, by standards, oftentimes criteria listed step by step.
Civil Law (be it from king or legislature, in the US legislation from Congress always trumps Executive Actions, unless martial law is in effect) can modify and trump court precedent. Civil Law usually trumps speculations of Natural Law, except when it consistently can’t (historical patterns of revolution, or pointlessness in trying to enforce a ineffective law nobody understands). States that use Unwritten vs Written Constitutions have different views on this exact process, US always uses written laws (save maybe in America Samoa, and Liberia uses a similar division between federal legislation and native laws out in the bush which may well be unwritten- their system is descended from ours, a take perhaps on our courts dealing with natives and whites in the 19th century).
While Civil Law always trumps Judicial Precedent, newer Civil Laws can cancel out older laws. Likewise, some civil laws become unpalatable once they become archaic but never were recended, like prosecuting witches. Judges can decide simply NOT to deal with such considerations in courts, overlooking it or dismissing such cases, when they realize society wouldn’t any longer tolerate such a old law being enforced… our laws exist outside of time, are expected to be eternally enforceable without expiration date, but a judge us elected in real time, and expected to know better, and to represent the people of trifling matters of archaic incompatibility.
We also have Jury Nullification… when Juries consistently refuse to convict someone of a crime… it’s taken that the people no longer expect such laws to be enforced. It should be multiple times, not one off, and fairly consistent… something you can plot a clear curve to and scratch your wisdom whiskers to. No point going through pointless court cases no jury convicts people over anymore.
The Constitution is what, under US law in particular, empowers and drives the state. We don’t have confused, cross eyed Nietzdcheans in a state of drug induced Neronian ecstacy proclaim “I know what the law is, and it should be this” without limits imposed on the capacity and function of the office or corporate legislative body pronouncing upon it. The powers to enact laws is clearly delineated in advance. The US took it’s understandings of the constitution from the turmoil of the ancient world, it’s why our architecture and art is so blazedly modeled off it, why Latin and statues of Greeks and Romans are everywhere. We don’t merely mimick, but try to learn from the down falls the occurred again and again in history. Our constitution was very carefully crafted by the most learned representatives of every state, with a deep awareness of the classics, understanding of war and revolution, and concepts of the best state. The best state isnt a Platonic form always ecisting, but a evolution avoiding the worst and embracing the best of past civilizations. An American has every expectation that a future constitution, if we ever choose a new one, to incorporate ever greater understandings of this correct age and ages since. It was written prior to the Napoleonic era, but seems to of better grasped human nature better than any constitution in Europe.
Our constitution allows for judges (and encourages executives and the legislation to consider) to consider the balance between The Tyranny of the Majority vs The Tyranny of the Minority. This forces us to consider various groups at play in any era, never going to the full extent of a degenerate Nietzschean autocracy stamping out the rights of all below it, or to a absolute demogagury of virtual democracy, stamping our others rights to continue on. We still carry concepts of Positive and Negative Law Nietzsche later on adopted, but from his sources, like Marsilius of Padua (who understood the concept better than Nietzsche), but it’s not recognizable under that name anymore. Its spread across several more advanced axiomatic structures.
This is what allowed us to create a state that is both strong and vibrant, strong in military virtues as much as intellectual, strong in economy and democracy, and the top exporter of ideas as well as importer, host to countless religions and ethnicity, all tied together in a common desire to stamp on your throat, and any other idiot desiring to loard over us with their petty, poorly thought out ideals.
That’s America, our constitutional theory in a nutshell, but not the constitution itself. It takes far more than a lifetime to pronounce upon it.
Laws are meant to restrict or forbid specific human natural impulses and instincts. Fixed it for you Jakob.
Ownership? I think you’re conflating that with ownership of other human beings.
It is a part of the large monster “Life” that takes it easy on itself until the floodgates break. We need it to have something to laugh at us and our efforts. It is happy to be this function. To us it clarifies the joy of doing work, causing change, willing to power; carving at the buildings of time, some men are born to smash hammers into old edifices and others to plan great strata of opulence, some are meant to hang against lampposts and smoke cigarettes waiting for a prey to appear.
In as far as law is concerned, I believe that USA was on good track with its self-evident pursuit of happiness bits - its appreciating self-hood. I like that and also think many people like it, and I think the workings of the state counteract and try to change the law into a wanton justification of force in the name of a visible god. Also a natural impulse - but one that I rather see subdued than unleashed.
The desire to create or will to power you’re utilizing as example does not consist of all humanity equally but instead pertains to a small segment of individuals that rules it. It’s one of exclusion not inclusion.
We both know nothing changes and the only change that exists are those in power with the much larger population’s loss of power for their own increased limitless exponential gain. The whole world’s expense and their gain.
Let’s not play coy or naive amongst each other. We’re beyond that, don’t you think?
hence emphasis on courtrooms and them being open.
law before state.
Customs become laws, laws become states.
Customs based upon culture. From whence does culture come from in origins?