[FoRK] Kindle first impressions

[zuzu]

On 5/5/08, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
>  And every one of those power relations frequently fails to prevent somebody
> who is sufficiently determined from violating the law or obligation or
> social norm or power relation in question.  (Cf. 9/11.)  That's generally
> called "crime" and all of those things (law, social norm, threat of coercive
> enforcement) are usually aligned to codify and discourage behaviors that
> most people agree are "crime", and when they aren't that's generally
> transient, something gives eventually.
>
>  I'm not saying that crime doesn't exist, I'm just saying that the idea that
> law can *prevent* crime other than in some statistical sort of way is an
> illusion.  It can punish, it can threaten to punish, and it can hope that
> this threat by itself discourages the crime enough.  When discussing
> something as ephemeral as intellectual property, it's no surprise that the
> law is equally ephemeral and often ignored.
>
>  What I'm really objecting to, here, is the mystification of law.  It all
> comes down to simple (hypothetical) economics.  Law, after all, is the
> endeavor to control other people by writing on paper, a practice of
> sympathetic magic;  to the extent it succeeds or fails, it succeeds because
> people want it to, and fails when they don't.  Faith in the law is just
> that.  (Hence my objection.)  Economics, on the other hand, purports to be a
> study of human behavior, and it succeeds when that behavior can be captured
> in large statistical strokes or fails when the models can't capture all the
> variables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Durkheim