Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

The question of whether it is good to give a path to citizenship for people who immigrated illegally and have lived illegally in the US for many years is a major point of partisan political disagreement in the US. There are huge numbers of people who think that it is very bad that these illegal immigrants weren't arrested and deported many years ago, and want immigration enforcement to make up for the lax polcies of previous administrations, not give a path to citizenship to people who were by law not allowed to be present in the US to begin with.

> Also, unilaterally revoking Temporary Protected Status for folks is also a bridge too far. Those were originally issued by Obama for very valid reasons - the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and later humanitarian crises.

If you think that the presence of people given Temporary Protected Status many years ago by a previous president is bad for the united states, then not only do you want your elected officials to remove this temporary protected status, you probably want your legislators to repeal the law giving presidents the authority to grant this status at all. In any case, there are many voting citizens in the US who clearly do not believe it is a bridge too far, and want the president to revoke this status and not offer it in the future.

You find yourself in a reality of consequences wherein choosing to break laws is a really bad option in nearly all cases.

Because of that, one cannot call it a duty. A duty obliges ALL citizens to break laws. ALL and seldom/last resort are mutually exclusive, logically.

You have found yourself in contradiction. You can't both believe that breaking laws is a last resort and also believe that it is a duty based on subjective criteria like morality.

It is a logical impossibility.

Can you break unjust laws? Yes. Is that ever the best option? Yes.

Is that a duty? No.

It's almost NEVER a good choice. It is a last resort. It was a good choice in extremely rare cases and a terrible choice for the majority of humanity in the majority of cases so often that it's justified to generalize that it's never going to be good for you as an individual.

You need to be a megalomaniac to believe it's going to be good for you. That you are somehow special like MLK. And let's not forget it wasn't good for him either. Sadly.

Don't let your star struck glamorization of moral icons and historical outliers lead you to make statistically bad decisions. These examples are famous moral icons BECAUSE they are outliers. They aren't MORAL outliers, they are rare examples of cases in society where morality was not overwhelmingly agreed upon. That's the expected course of growth for nearly all legal frameworks of justice.

You are most probably not an outlier and when you are you won't know that you are because legal framework is derived from the same majority opinion from which your understanding of morality originates anyway.

It's safe to assume, if you are breaking laws in a democracy, that you are on the wrong side of morality because the laws themselves, in a democracy, originate in the majority's moral agreement.

There is no way in hell, given that the above is true, that it should be a duty.

That rhetoric of duty throughout history has been used to charge the public for revolutions, and most especially violent ones. It is by no means a rational, or scientific conclusion. That is the objective reality, sir.

Don't be a jackass. Obey the law. You're not smarter than everyone that made the law. When you are, we'll tell you. That's democracy.

I don't take the phrase "a duty to disobey unjust laws" as literally as you do. If it's more effective to overturn the law through legal means, then of course do that first.

Calling something a "duty" doesn't mean you get to turn your brain off and follow it blindly. Ships have a duty to help people in distress at sea, but they obviously need to first ensure that they don't put themselves in danger.

> That you are somehow special like MLK.

Believing that you need to be 'special' to act morally is one of the main causes of widespread societal injustice. As MLK said:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"

> Don't be a jackass. Obey the law. You're not smarter than everyone that made the law. When you are, we'll tell you. That's democracy.

I was in favor of gay marriage long before it became law, or even was supported by the majority of people. Yet now it is. So the law at the time was ultimately wrong and I was ultimately right. By your definition, doesn't that mean I am smarter than everyone who made the law?

I don't think you need to be smarter than lawmakers to identify unjust laws. You need only look at the progressive causes of today to find the moral norms of tomorrow.

No, I'm pointing out that we need to use our brains when considering glib generalizations.

If you want a more accurate phrase, you could say that:

"People have a moral duty to oppose unjust laws, beginning with legal avenues of opposition, followed by non-violence civil disobedience, followed by violent uprising as a last resort, all while giving a reasonable period of time between steps that is governed by the severity of the injustice being perpetrated, weighed against the actions being taken to prevent it."

However, that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. The point of a phrase like "Americans have a duty to disobey unjust laws" is to trade precision for concision. It's up to you to extrapolate what people mean, or just ask them to clarify. I'm guessing this is something you find difficult?

> You didn't have to break any laws for me to help you vote for gay marriage. We all knew it was wrong that's why it's legal.

What do you mean by this? It was only in 2010 that the majority of Americans finally believed that same-sex marriage should be allowed.

If we accept that same-sex marriage is moral, then we must also accept that the majority of Americans prior to 2010 were wrong. Similarly, people were wrong in the past about racial segregation, women's rights and so forth.

Doesn't this indicate to you that morality is not just what the majority think?

> And they take longer when you derail society into thinking that people who support gay marriage are violent law breakers.

Why are you so obsessed with bringing violence into this? At every point I've emphasized that violence is a last resort, and that breaking the law does not automatically imply being violent.

> Just accept that you're not smarter.

You've missed my point.

I didn't say I was smarter than lawmakers; I pointed out that by your criteria I was, thereby implying that your criteria was flawed.

It was a self-deprecating rhetorical device, but I see it flew over your head, so let me try to speak more plainly:

I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority, because to do so would imply that it was moral in 1950 to persecute people by the color of their skin, and that it was moral in 1980 to persecute people by their sexual orientation. I reject that.

I do believe that people have a duty to act morally, even if this means breaking the law. That's not to say that people shouldn't exhaust legal means of protest first; legal protests are less personally risky and in free societies can be very effective. But I can certainly think of scenarios where doing the right thing would necessitate breaking the law, and in these situations, people have a duty to do what's right.

Does this mean that you have no internal conscience? You just go along with what the majority of society considers to be moral?

You've indicated you believe that same-sex marriage is moral, but before that became a majority opinion, did you believe the opposite?

>> I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority.

> Then you agree with all the most reviled villains in history who also knew better what is moral for everyone else.

You mean like Jesus of Nazareth or Buddha?

The belief that morality isn't defined by the majority is an extremely common viewpoint. Probably the most common viewpoint, since its one shared by every major religion.

> Let's play this out. You break the law. People, known as law enforcement, who chose of their own free will a violent career path will arrive with loaded firearms. These individuals are intentionally chosen for their lack of mental ability and for their willingness to follow orders and endure violent and dangerous situations, aggressively.

So America's police force is so corrupt and violent that they'd think nothing of gunning down unarmed protestors in cold blood.

Why do you think that following the law would stop this?

I'm honestly trying to understand your thought process here. On the one hand you imply that most police officers are a hair trigger away from firing on a crowd; on the other, you seem to be insinuating that a individual's adherence to the law is an absolute defense.