I started reading about the “freeman on the land” concept because of that grandiose Manbook misogynist who (amongst other things) thinks he owns copyright on his current name because he’s composed it in a very precise format, which is one of the several super-duper sneaky tricks that the freeman woo-woos think means that laws (a) don’t apply against them; yet (b) can be used by them against others. From the looks of what else is documented in Rational Wiki’s pseudolaw section, I might not emerge for several days. I knew people are strange, but wow.
Theory on Brontosauruses by Anne Elk (Miss).
I thought there would be a handy meme pic of Anne Elk propounding her Brontosaurus theory that I could use for this post, but I had to go and make my own on Meme generator.
However, I did find this old xkcd comic while looking for Brontosaurus theory images:
Panel 1&2: Woman lowers a turtle to the ground and reaches for the hand of man sitting next to her on the park bench: “Our love is like a Turtle. Humble and simple, enduring by virtue of perfect design.”
Panels 3&4: Man reaches for woman’s other hand, looks into her eyes: “Our love is like a Brontosaurus, recognized as a mistaken combination long ago, lingering only out of a misplaced affection for an imagined past.”
Categories: gender & feminism, law & order
Abortion will remain in the NSW Crimes Act 
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Give a Voice to Harassment Victims: A legal fund for sexual harassment victim Karen Stollznow 
Hoyden About Town 
Oh, Rationalwiki is almost as bad as TV Tropes for eating up hours and hours of time as you jump from link to link and article to article.
re freemen: o … k …
Someone has SERIOUSLY misunderstood the social contract theory of law. *sigh*
re rational wiki: I really do live under a rock, don’t I? megpie, I can certainly see the time-eating potential!
Jo, the more I read about the various pseudolaw advocates, the more I think it nearly always boils down to a cynical huckster fleecing some paranoid rubes, because it hardly ever seems to be the originators of these schemes who end up in the courts, let alone pay any fines or serve any time. This leads me to speculate that they’re not actually following their own advice, they’re just running seminars and subscription services that very carefully stay just the right side of the legal lines that they’re telling others don’t really exist, and making a very nice living for themselves doing so.
Tigtog: Oh, the vast majority of them don’t take their own snake-oil (the ones who do are usually the most fanatical and deluded of the lot; fortunately this goes along with being barely coherent, so they don’t often tend to be the ones making the most money). Problem is, the people who believed them are already so far involved with the mindset that the government is out to get them, personally, with malice aforethought, that when things backfire, it all fits in nicely with their existing paranoid mindset. So the pseudo-law huckster in many ways is on a moral and ethical par with the weight-loss diet huckster – selling a product they know won’t work, to people they can be pretty sure it won’t work for, in the sure knowledge that should their product (predictably) malfunction, their clients will blame themselves rather than the person who sold it to them.
Viewed from an intellectual distance, it’s technically a lovely little scam. Doesn’t stop it being morally bankrupt, of course.
I almost disappeared for a day during my Wikiwalk – firstly, by clicking through to a Canadian legal website hosting a judicial publication of Reasons in the case of Meads vs. Meads which smacks down the entirety of dubious ideas promoted by sovereign citizens and freemen on the land — and secondly, by clicking to the page for Judge: David-Wynn: Miller, inventor of the bizarre not-English legal mumbo-jumbo called “truth language”, and thence onto his own website. My eyeballs may possibly have been glazed and then fried by the latter experience.