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Sovereign citizen has a totally sane question.
(lemmy.world)
Screenshots of people being insane on Facebook. Please censor names/pics of end users in screenshots. Please follow the rules of lemmy.world
SovCits are a symptom of the breakdown of the social contract, not one of the causes.
It's more a symptom of village idiots finding each other on the web and convincing themselves that they are not idiots. Its a feature of an interconnected world.
It makes sense when you realize they are truly stupid and have been taken in by a con. They get into situations they don't understand, people say magic words they don't understand and they get put in jail. Someone comes along and explains it in such a way only an idiot would believe about magic words and they want to get out. They don't actually understand the words they are using or the context/concepts thar the words that are being used against them represent... And suddenly here we are.
They have the morality of an atomized corporation. Always trying to externalise costs to the rest of the planet. All that matters is their own short term needs.
It's like a cargo cult of late stage capitalism.
It's rooted in white supremacy and anti-Semitism. They are the ones breaking the social contract.
Feels like people just say "It’s rooted in white supremacy and anti-Semitism" about anything now.
Well, anything associated with the right, which the SovCit movement very much is...
Definitely not a cause. For a while they were a pain in the ass. Courts and lawyers didn't know how to deal with them and they would keep coming back and back with appeals and collateral actions. Now there's a whole playbook for disposing of their bullshit, doesn't jam things up anymore.
It was originally a mail order scam targeting poor, uneducated people who were charged with crimes, desperate to believe any promise of help.
I know a lawyer about a decade ago who worked for a country government dealing with one. He told me that if the guy had 6 friend he could probably fully demolish the entire government of the county. They would be bankrupt from lawsuits, everyone would be afraid to do anything for fear of getting dragged in, nothing could get approved.
I don't know if he was exaggerating or not but I think there is some truth to it. Things do seem to work only because no one has decided to stop it from working.
Maybe they rattled your friend. A while back a Canadian judge wrote an excellent legal opinion, that is more like a textbook, on who they are, where they came from, and how to deal with their arguments. It's an amazing work of legal research and writing and actually made me sympathize with them. They are victims of a scam and desperate to escape the criminal justice system.
https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html
Or maybe they never got past the stage of development where they understand that other people exist.
I think they're more a symptom of some people wanting to feel special. Everywhere has selfish people indignant that they have to pay for goods and/or services they use.