A lunatic with a bloodied axe could be ringing at your door!

Some kids who apparently don't grok or don't like Qntraⁱ made their own thing, upon which there's an article about the Bitcoin ISP. Without going into a discussion of the thing, there's one bit that sent me musing. It says :

Illegal Activity Is Still Punishable By Law

All of the above sounds like a thrown-together mad scientist project, with total disregard for legal or illegal activities. Don’t be mistaken, as illegal activities will still be punishable by law

For one thing, the original article is quite explicit on this point :

Note that this is strictly different from your "legally defined" interests. We really don't give a shit what the pretend-sovereigns do or say, and we do actually have the means to enforce this. If you are indulging the delusion that you can go complain to your "democratically elected national government" about the activity of wilful subjects of the Most Serene Republic, you are facing the following gamut :

1. your soi dissant sovereign is more than willing to fleece you, so you will pay through the nose for his "services".
2. your soi dissant sovereign is neither actually sovereign nor is he able to actually do anything effectual, and so he won't.
3. you will likely piss off one or more Bitcoin people, and that right there's the end of your future.

If you are interested in actually obtaining redress, such as it may be available, rather than wasting your meagre resources on the altar of propping up the position of a dead entity in a battle it's already lost, you will follow procedure.

For the other thing... what exactly is this "law" ?

"Obviously" enough, to they disinclined to spend any time thinking about it, as well as to they directly interested in maintaining the illusion that fiat legal systems are still relevant or important (as they derive financial benefits from it), "the law" reduces to whatever fiat sovereigns claim it may be.

To me, the law is quite strictly the law of La Serenissima, nothing more, nothing less. Apparently, this is a major conceptual bomb for most people, at least judging by the emotional reactions it tends to engender. At any rate, if or when those emotional firestorms die down, the single response that I ever hear is something along the lines of "war is still interested in you", which is to say that whether or not I care what the pretend-sovereigns call "law", they nevertheless care, and will act accordingly.

Which is all fine and dandy, but consider! A lunatic with a bloodied axe could be ringing at your door! According to him, you broke whatever he imagines, on the spur of the moment, to be "the law" and so now you're getting beheaded, or else your furniture's getting trashed, or whatever. Maybe it's because that's what Jesus told him through his pet tamaguchi. Maybe it's because he read it in the Gluffington Post. Whatever it may be, he has his ideas just as well as anyone, and he has a shot at using force to impose his ideas upon others, just like anyone. Just like anyone!

And before you go for a second emotional explosion : no, there is exactly no difference. The "laws" of random fiat pretender to sovereignity are exactly as reasonable, coherent, sensible, logical, what have you as the hazy mental representations of your average lunatic. The advantage the lunatic's worldview has over the various governments' is brevity. Other than that, you're more than welcome to try and make sense of the mess. Go ahead and try your hand at it, perhaps even come up with a mathematical model that allows provability.

Do the lunatic's ideas change, randomly, in an arbitrary and impredictable fashion ? So does the law, of the US, of France, the Phillippines or what have you.ⁱⁱ Do the lunatic's ideas defy simple ennumeration ? Find a jurisdiction where one can actually list all the laws! Are the lunatic's ideas contradictory, requiring "an expert", ie, the lunatic himself to "explain" them, thus "resolving" the contradiction ? Sheeeit, the pretend sovereigns have special institutions for this job. You are more than welcome to come up with a usable means to differentiate fiat laws from lunatic babble. And no, ad baculum is not that - the lunatic has his axe, remember ?

This problem is not resolvable. I will simply follow reason, in complete and explicit contempt for any "law" issued through any means outside of my WoT. If that results in lunatics coming at me, I will obviously shoot them if I get a chance, but whether I do or I don't I will still qualify them as "terrorists" or whatever you call the twerps engaged in that line of business. Which is exactly the most you do too, when the lunatic shows up at your door. There's precisely no difference, there.

The only difference is that I've been living as a free man for at least three amply documented years, and who knows how many before I started bothering with documenting it. Honestly, three years should be enough for anyone. At any rate it's way more than what most everyone gets. (Yes, this includes "the President", whichever one you care about).

1. Seriously now, why the heck would you start a snowball's chance in hell "Bitcoin news site" out of the jam between your toes ? What's wrong with getting in touch with cazalla, making monthly shares which trade for BTC, live like respectable people ? [↩]
2. No, law != US law. Get over yourself. [↩]