> I thought: whatever is not explicitly banned is allowed
I can't find it anymore but I remember reading a story, either on or linked from HN (probably linked), where someone recalls a realization they had in their teen years. It went something like this:
Rules do not exist because people like making arbitrary rules for no reason. It is sometimes even okay to break rules, so long as people do not mind what you are doing. Only when you make people angry, new rules are made to stop you from doing that. You can abide by the rules or break them, but you only get in trouble if you make someone unhappy.
(The original was a lot more coherent/consistent, I'm just paraphrasing / mixing wordings that might have been in there.)
So in the legal sense, yeah, you are technically right. But if you make a country's rulers angry, they'll just decree a new law. (Which is why I never really understood trias politica, by the way: the elected rulers can just make a law for something when the court case didn't go the way they wanted, and the unelected lawyers can create case law with far-reaching changes. But that's another topic.)
I can't find it anymore but I remember reading a story, either on or linked from HN (probably linked), where someone recalls a realization they had in their teen years. It went something like this:
Rules do not exist because people like making arbitrary rules for no reason. It is sometimes even okay to break rules, so long as people do not mind what you are doing. Only when you make people angry, new rules are made to stop you from doing that. You can abide by the rules or break them, but you only get in trouble if you make someone unhappy.
(The original was a lot more coherent/consistent, I'm just paraphrasing / mixing wordings that might have been in there.)
So in the legal sense, yeah, you are technically right. But if you make a country's rulers angry, they'll just decree a new law. (Which is why I never really understood trias politica, by the way: the elected rulers can just make a law for something when the court case didn't go the way they wanted, and the unelected lawyers can create case law with far-reaching changes. But that's another topic.)