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by colesantiago·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Laws and borders are just a social construct, we don't really need them.

Even if we do, the community can govern themselves.

6 comments
When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why? I recognize there's a difference but this license makes no effort to distinguish between those two things.

And if your starting point for why a term of a license is "we don't need laws", what exactly is the point of having a license anyway?

As I understand it, the difference is that law enforcement exists to maintain a state's authority and control of its monopoly on violence, whereas community policing claims no such authority or interest.
There's nothing inherent to the words "law enforcement" that necessitates that they are state run or makes any claim about the state's position on violence. I get that's what the authors are getting at, but it's not clear.
Yeah... there's a reason people hire actual lawyers to write these things.

The authors probably thought the meaning would be obvious to everyone because it was obvious to them, but that's not how binding legal contracts work.

> When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement?

It is 'community enforcement', they volunteered didn't they, it's not by force, by state, or are being paid to do it.

Sure, that's fine - my point is that a blanket "you can't be law enforcement" doesn't make this distinction. If you want to include something like that in your license, you need to be a lot more clear about what "law enforcement" entails. Right now it makes no mention of whether it's speaking about professional law enforcement, state-operated law enforcement, or anything like that.
> When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why?

The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.

> "we don't need laws"

This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are consent and cooperation.

> The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.

So law enforcement chosen by the community is not law enforcement?

It is not what people call law enforcement today, correct.
> This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are consent and cooperation.

I'm not the one making the claim that laws are a social construct and we don't need them.

> I'm not the one making the claim that laws are a social construct

Now you're confounding two further ideas. Laws are obviously a social construct, nobody serious is going to disagree with that. We create them, unlike the laws of nature.

You created a straw-man by omitting "and we don't need them" from your quote.

Laws are a social construct. We do need them. Civilization has proven this time and again over thousands of years.

Ah yes, countries like Somalia do so well without a system of functioning government and laws. With the added benefit of no taxes! But you might have to pay protection money to your local warlord so YMMV.
Good luck and have fun enforcing this software license without the social construct of law enforcement and judiciary.
Just curious as to where this has ever actually worked out well?
Chiapas is a good example. Here's a list [1] of others.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities

That worked so well with CHAZ/CHOP...
Yes it did, CHAZ/CHOP was the stepping stone for a zone controlled by the people, until the totalitarian police got involved that it was unfortunately destroyed.
Yes we've recently been reminded of how well this works with CHAZ/CHOP.
CHAZ/CHOP actually succeeded by being formed by the people but as always the police ruined it and dismantled it.

It would have been entirely different had they not got involved.

That's not correct. The deaths, assaults and racial segregation occurred without the involvement of police.
CHAZ/CHOP is a horrible example since most of the discourse about it is based on falsehoods and exaggerations, and it existed in a state of constant conflict with local law enforcement. There were certainly many good things about it, but I'm not sure you can learn much from it in the grand scope of things other than "it won't work out well, because most forces don't want it to exist".

There are definitely examples out there of more successful self-governance, though.