Comment on Sovereign citizen who kidnapped her child sentenced to two years' jail

Letstakealook@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• brisk@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  We import all sorts of fringe political positions from the US. There’s even a cohort of “second amendment” gun advocates, despite having no bill of rights. The actual second amendment lets the federal government take over state debts.

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  • sqgl@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Including the not-so-fringe idea that voting for a minor party is a wasted vote.

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    • Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Wrong, ken the voting dingo!

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  • eureka@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    For what it’s worth, plenty of the Australian SovCit stuff was also thieved from Canada (given our similar situation with UK legal history).

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• BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve seen it cited that the sovcit movement exists in 26 countries

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  • quokka@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It exists wherever they say it does surely?

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• Nath@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  We may have actually exported it to the rest of the world! In 1970, we had the Hutt River Province secede from the nation of Australia. To be fair to old Prince Leonard - he had valid grievances and was not just a nutter. The Australian Government was imposing wheat quotas on him when he was just about to harvest, and frankly didn’t exactly offer him much in the way of services.

  According to my 2-minutes of Wikipedia research (which makes me an expert on this topic, don’t you know?), the Soverign Citizen Movement appeared in the USA in the “early 1970’s”. Which sounds to me like it may have drawn inspiration from the waves that Prince Leonard was making in Western Australia.

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  • TimePencil@infosec.exchange ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    @Nath

    Some more "research" materials regarding unrecognised "micronations":
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation

    As usual, Australia punches above its weight in this regard...

    @Letstakealook

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  • Letstakealook@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Interesting. I know in the US they are closely tied to white supremacists, though there’s been some branching out.

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• eureka@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Tom Tanuki created a two-part summary of the two main Aussie SovCit movements:

  p1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea_7jUU489g

  p2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIrcWtuLkdA

  A couple of interesting notes I remember:

  • Being more closely tied to British monarchy, our versions seem to stem more from the Canadian variant than the US, but there’s def plenty of crossover.
  • Not sure if this is a big factor in the US movement too, but there’s a big focus on the family courts, so plenty of them are disenfranchised divorced parents who lost custody and have engaged in collective harassment of ex-partners and legal workers like judges.
  • One of the main movements comes from an indigenous liberation perspective. It’s just as much a scam and stands in the way of actual resistance efforts, but there’s more to it than just ultraliberalism (e.g. US Libertarian ideology)

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• null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I think you most commonly encounter them in tax-related situations.

  I know someone who works for the local government and issues notices for local taxes. In some ways it’s a fairly natural progression to go from not wanting to pay your taxes to inventing some bonkers ideology explaining why you in fact do not need to pay taxes.

  Comically, the city’s first move with delinquents is to simply stop their refuse (garbage?) collection service.

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• quokka@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There’s a few in Perth. They occasionally paste some laughable text in the local papers proclaiming that they are sole bodies and not beholden to taxation. Or some other bumph. It’s odd that all sovshitness seems to come down to not paying taxes, while still using all the facilities that taxation provides.

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