Singapore-based Brit who thought masks were pointless gets jail for 6 weeks and deportation

The “movement” also has a view of the law as though it’s a series of magic spells. Like if you find just the right rhetorical loophole in the wording of things, judges are somehow forced to say “Oh my gosh, you got us! That misplaced comma means the whole idea of taxes is not enforceable! You’re free to go, you wild genius, you!”. Of course, sane people know that judges are humans who understand what the spirit and intent of laws are for the most part. In the broad strokes of life, liberty, and taxes, anyway.

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OK, add another month in jail for spitting in public…

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That explains a lot about how the far right act, not just the sovereign citizens. It doesn’t help that they don’t understand half of the words in the spell, or have substituted any words they don’t like for ones they do.

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In Britain, “masons” usually means Freemasons rather than stonemasons.

EDIT: I delved into his Twitter feed and saw that he referred specifically to the Freemasons. There’s nothing odd about a conspiracy theorist ranting about the Jews one moment and the Freemasons the next. They’re just different flavours of secret rulers of the world.

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It’s hard for white people to hate immigrants, if immigrants can be white people. So they call themselves expats instead. Just one of the many ways that racism perpetuates itself.

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Ah yes, the Trump Philosophy, proven to work 100% of the time…

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To be fair, for many many years the legal profession (although probably just as often people not in the legal profession) justified their existence with the rationale that:

The law is far too complex, inscrutable and powerful for the likes of working professionals and tradesmen to understand.

There’s a mystique to it. We can often read the plain language of a law, and then watch as courts make rulings that don’t make any sense if you don’t know the mysterious and opaque labyrinth of case law, stare decisis etc. And then of course you have all of Trump’s appointees throwing out that stuff and just ruling along their political alignment anyway.

For all intents and purposes, to a layperson the vast majority of the law is opaque magic without much logic. Why wouldn’t some special words negate the law? It’s ALL WORDS anyway.

I’m not a sovereign citizen. But when you see corporations every day obviously breaking the law, prevailing in court, being handed pittance punishments. It very much seems like there’s multiple sets of laws to tap into and if only one knew how, they could get all the privileges of corporate sovereignty or even national sovereignty.

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I think the mistake here is thinking that rich and powerful people know some magic words that get them out of trouble. They get out of trouble because they are rich and powerful, the words are made up to justify that.

Being equal under the law is an ideal we can strive for but it isn’t current reality. What these sovereign citizen people don’t seem to get is that they aren’t rich. White supremacy can make up some of the difference, but not all of it.

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Oh? They stopped caning people?
When did that happen?
I was wondering why the number of whacks wasn’t mentioned.
Or in this moron’s case, Sovereignity Swats…

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He should have asked Michael Fay.

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There’s a certain amount of magical thinking in law.

“COMES NOW, your Plaintiffs Sadler Brothers Oil Company, Inc. d/b/a Sadler Travel Plaza, Slip-In Food Marts, Inc., and CHN, LLC (“Plaintiffs” or “Sadler”), through the undersigned counsel, states as follows for its Complaint for declaratory judgment and temporary and permanent injunctive relief against Defendants the Commonwealth of Virginia (“the Commonwealth”), His Excellency Ralph Northam (“Governor Northam”), in his official capacity as Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Mark Herring (“Attorney General Herring”), in his official capacity as Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (“ABC”), (collectively, “Defendants”):”

is structured like an incantation, with certain names changed around.

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The law is magical because it’s very much meant to not be understood. At least american law. How will you fill all the for-profit prisons when joe average public actually does know his rights, and can understand the laws from a plain reading?

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I’ve always been surprised that “sovereign citizens” don’t like the freemasons, after all, masons through their skill and highly requested abilities were just about the only people without titles who could say no to kings and emperors…

Here I am hoping for sense from bricks again.

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You’re overthinking it by remembering the Freemasons’ supposed origins in medieval stonemasons’ guilds. For conspiracy theorists the Freemasons are not freethinkers who stick two fingers up at the Establishment. On the contrary, they are the Establishment.

P.S. There are conspiracy theories claiming that income tax was invented by the Freemasons, which explains why sovereign citizens would hate them.

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They, like… sold out.

sigh

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There does seem to be an inherent contradiction between these two propositions:

  1. Law is complex enough to require those allowed to practise, interpret and argue about it to undergo vocational education and training similar in length and depth to that required of, e.g., doctors and engineers.

  2. Ignorance of the law is no defence.

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From the Daily Mail way of thinking. If you’re white and rich and living in another country without taking part in the culture then you are an ‘ex-pat’. If you’re brown and poor then you are an ‘immigrant’ or ‘migrant’.

Same way the right considers state pensions for wealthy people to be an ‘entitlement’, but giving tiny sums to the poorest so they can live are ‘benefits’ that they have to earn.

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He does have some very odd ideas.

“In England, if the judge leaves, I’m free to go, because he’s abandoned the ship.”

My bench, like all benches have a Retiring Room - specifically to enable us to leave the court to deliberate. I think we might have noticed if whenever we come back all the accused have been released.

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And this, folks, is why you should do a bit of research on a country before you visit. At least they didn’t catch him chewing bubblegum while maskless; then he would have been in some real trouble.

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It’s one of those irregular nouns.

We are ex-pats.

And therefore by definition better than you and not required to integrate into your society or take any notice of your quaint foreign laws or customs.

You are an immigrant.

And therefore required to integrate and immediately drop or at least hide all your strange foreign ways and habits, you unfortunate benighted creature, you.

They are economic migrants.

And therefore… see the Daily Mail, Telegraph, sides of vans, busses and other political advertising, etc.

/S

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