Self-declared sovereign citizens, who believe Australia’s laws do not apply to them, are having a serious impact on the family court, experts say
Kind of odd to me becase even if you do believe this, the judicial institutions have armed police and jails on their side and you have your thumbprint, (unkess your name is Train I guess, which was a whole other thing) seems a losing battle from the get go? Whats the upside ?
I don’t think there is necessarily an upside for the people who fall for this stuff hook, line and sinker. But there does seem to be an upside for the grifters selling all kinds of sovereign citizen passports, IDs, licences, certificates among other things online.
The “upside” for the people who fall for it is that they feel like they discovered some big secret and that they get to feel smarter because of it. SovCit ideology is basically just magic. This odd idea that if you say the right magic words, things will always go your way.
@Aradina @maniacalmanicmania
Yup. It’s an illusion of control and safety.
Which people like to feel very smug and superior about, while generally doing it themselves in less conspicuous ways.The puzzling thing is that after the magic words don’t work the first time they don’t give up on it.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Our society is held up by a lot of unspoken rules and guidelines, and frankly it’s a miracle shit is rolling along as well as it is (which isn’t well btw, but still amazing)
When they first learned about sovcitz they probably started testing some boundaries. Maybe they stopped paying for parking or something, and didn’t get a ticket (because you don’t always get one) and they thought it was because of the note they wrote on their dash.
Now they swap their licence plate for the stupid “traveller” one, and stop paying their renewal. Hey short term they win. Nobody pulls them over (because nobody notices or even worse a cop does and thinks “no thanks. Not worth my sanity”) and they realize they have cracked the code.
There are tons of little things like that, little encouragements that lead them to believe they have it figured out when it’s just luck or the odds or they didn’t realize nobody cares what ID you show at the door. When something finally gives, it’s usually a serious issue like child support or a criminal matter, and that’s when shit gets real fast and if they weren’t grown adults who should know better, I’d kinda feel sorry for them for being blindsided.
Tl;dr you can go a long time doing stupid shit and not have any consequences, but that’s not helpful to society and also the FO phase of this type of FA is very sudden and usually very serious.
They want to be part of the class that the law protects but does not bind.
Kind of odd to me becase even if you do believe this, the judicial institutions have armed police and jails on their side
It’s a kind of magical thinking. They think they’ve discovered a magic loophole that means even by the institutions’ own laws, they can invalidate the institutions’ power.
sovcitz get one thing right: our laws are kinda meaningless and a stupid game played by the powerful.
Then they forget: Even when it’s being nonsensical the state is fucking terrifying and armed men with guns will torture you until you comply.
And instead of trying to improve things they start filing paperwork they’ve jizzed on under a full moon while one foot is in the ocean and the other dry land like it means anything.
sovcitz get one thing right: our laws are kinda meaningless and a stupid game played by the powerful.
Oh, i completely agree, that’s not really the point though. They have guns, jails and lots of people to taser and beat you for non compliance. Your thumbprint and belief in your convictions isn’t going to cut it
I obviously can’t speak for all the sovcits, but I get the impression that they typically haven’t seen the tough side of the system until a legal dispute like custody in a divorce, which pushes them into the movement. Some other people are well-exprienced with the contradictions between the legal system and state violence, but those sovcits are used to law being the highest power and see what they’re doing as legal and therefore righteous and protected, they have faith in legal loopholes. They’re not criminals! They don’t get beaten and tasered and jailed! Not sure what they think of all the cops ripping down car windows in the US… clearly power prevails over ideals when you challenge the status quo.
Compare and contrast with, say, the anarchist movement who are more than familiar with guns, jails, tasers and beatings.
Yeah, it makes them very conflicted figures to me. They’re often quite antisocial (not in the shy sense, in the parasitically harm society sense) and self-oriented. Something in the law comes up and it defies their will and they melt down. At the same time, they’re closer to understanding the contradictions in our society than many of the people who never noticed how bullshit the justification for a lot of our laws are.
Like it really rarely comes up that someone is trying to use sovcit arguments to make the state feed school kids, or house homeless people. It’s almost always someone that wants to park like an arsehole or avoid paying childsupport.
Complex feelings, I do wonder if there are people teetering on the edge of their bullshit that might he sympathetic to a more hollistic and pro-social critque of the justice system.
If a way, they’re closer, but in another way they’re further - they are so trusting in the law that it’s their chosen weapon of resisting laws they consider unjust. It’s an individualist ultraliberalism, doubling down on the delusion when they notice contradictions, but perhaps it provides a potential moment of radicalization when their faith in the law is shaken by bad experiences with police. And I hope (blindly) that ends up driving some of them towards the left than towards neo-Nazism, who have intentionally targeted the anti-vaxx movement for recruitment with very mixed results.
‘I don’t believe laws apply to me.’
Cool, you lose custody. Next.
All well and good until they start forming armed harassment groups, as at least one lot of them here has. Then you need to say more than “next”.
All the more reason not to entertain their bullshit.
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