#lawmaking

it feels to me like a symptom of a much wider tendency

which also comes up in regard to original creative works like small-time published novels, with some people both unashamedly pirating others' work and aggressively marketing their own

but it also comes up pretty much every time policies and laws are discussed

the tendency of people to think about any policy, any law-- any generalization about what people should do-- from only one side

either "what it would be like if I had to follow this," or "what it would be like if other people had to follow this."

and often the same person even seems to hold two contradictory opinions on the same rule-- one from each viewpoint, but reasoned completely separately

it's morbidly fascinating and I wonder how such a thought process works

i mean. I guess I had an experience that was maybe sorta like it.

I used to get really angry in crowds. When I was in a hurry to get somewhere and wanted to walk fast, I used to HATE people who wanted to walk slow in front of me. and when I was tired and wanted to walk slow, I used to HATE people who wanted to walk fast behind me.

but the moment I actually thought about both these experiences, I realized that the fact that I hated both those kinds of people meant I WAS both those kinds of people... and I got a hold of myself and managed to subdue the hatred down to just mild irritation.

Any power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself be bound by them. So law has to come from somewhere else. In the Middle Ages, the solution was simple: the legal order was created, either directly or indirectly, by God. God, as the Old Testament makes abundantly clear, is not bound by laws or even any recognizable system of morality, which only stands to reason: if you created morality, you can’t, by definition, be bound by it.  The English, American, and French revolutions changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty—declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity called “the people.” “The people,” however, are bound by the laws. So in what sense can they have created them? They created the laws through those revolutions themselves,  but, of course, revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order. Cromwell, Jefferson, and Danton were surely guilty of treason according to the laws under which they grew up, as surely as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again twenty years later. So, laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, have the legal right to beat you up). It’s okay for police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then, is:  how does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob? There is no obvious answer.

[...]

This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted, we cannot help but admire the “great criminal”: because, as so many movie posters put it, “he makes his own law.” After all, any criminal organization does, inevitably, begin developing its own—often quite elaborate—set of internal laws. They have to, as a way of controlling what would otherwise be completely random violence. From the right-wing perspective, that’s all that law ever is. It is a means of controlling the very violence that brings it into being, and through which it is ultimately enforced.

[...]

In Ultimaeus, you work on your secret goals while passing laws that change the games rules, all the while bribing, cheating, and referencing secret rules for the game.

Sumire is the only one who has expressed interest in him that way.

Just because Sarada helps her teammate does not mean they should be in a relationship. Or that she has romantic feels for him.

Individual 1 promised to run America like a business and he's doing it. Unfortunately for us he's running it like a Trump business (while lining his pockets with taxpayer dollars).

With expected revenues of $3,700,000,000,000 he has proposed spending $4,800,000,000,000 in a budget that would give us our largest budget deficit in 7 years.

Part of that spending includes $2,000,000,000 for the wall he swore Mexico was going to pay for.