IS A MAN A PERSON?
When is a man not a person? According to strawman theory, whenever he is facing judgement in court, or having to pay those tedious things called taxes.
Strawman theory is a key concept of the sovereign citizen movement which has roots in Posse Comitatus, a US based resistance to federal rule and federal taxes. Like a strawman argument though, the theory itself is based on a false premise. The story goes that governments commit an act of ‘horrific trespass’ against us at birth, because a birth certificate is really a bond, traded on the stock market and somehow connected to a secret treasury account. This can be accessed with the right paperwork and, of course, a fee for same. Links to government bond calculators on social media, advise people to enter their birth certificate number and calculate the value so they can claim their thousands. Strawman advocates also claim that a legal fiction means the name on a birth certificate relates to a legal person, separate from the bodily man or woman. Answering to that name will bind a person in contract with the state and capital letters on legal documentation are cited as proof of this. They advise changing your name, renouncing your birth certificate, and presenting yourself as a man or woman, and then by magic the law will not apply to you. But these pseudolegal claims don’t stand up in court. In Canada, Australia and the UK they have been dismissed by judges as nonsense on multiple occasions.
So who gave birth to the strawbaby? It begins with a claim that the US federal government went bankrupt during the great depression and sold off its own people. This, coupled with ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘person’, adds fuel to the cause. The Greek, ‘prosopon’ meaning face or countenance, became in Latin ‘persona’, to denote both role in life and on stage. Later the christian trinity was expressed as ‘personae’ or ‘una substantia in tribus personis’, to envisage one being with several faces. But there is nothing secret about court being theatre. People appear as witness or act as plaintiff/prosecutor or ‘re-present’ themselves or others as defendent/barrister. However, an individual acting in his or her own capacity is under the law a ‘natural person’ and the legal personality refers to the actual human being. The natural and legal person are therefore one and the same. A ‘legal person’ on the other hand, is the term used for an office, a corporation or a ship. A natural person can thus create a legal person but a legal person is not created by the government to attach to a natural person. In the past people who were not considered to have rights, slaves or women and children for example, were regarded as property and thus not endowed with a legal personality. A birth certificate, however, is a just a public record, not under ownership, and not a piece of paper which makes you a slave under the law. The confusion in thinking the birth certificate is a bond is due to some parents choosing to take out bonds as savings options for their children. An online bond calculator proves nothing. It just spits out a value for what any bond in said number would be worth if there was one.
As for the other claims, capital letters do not signal a contract. A legal contract requires the knowledge of both parties. The Latin word capitalis stems from ‘caput’ meaning head. In medieval English outlawry ‘caput gerat lupinum’ meant ‘may he have head of wolf’. For the Romans, capitis deminutio was the term for the change in status afforded to different levels of exile, known as homo sacer. A Roman could not lose citizenship without consent, but coercion was used by denying him access to fire and water. There is a similarity here with vaccine passports, although today this is being used to socially exclude people rather than remove citizenship.
The strawman concept is straw words, no substance. To date there have been no recorded incidents of their tactics being upheld, instead they end in convictions. Judges reject what they call OPCA (organised pseudolegal commercial arguments) as making no sense, stating that laws are not made on an ‘opt in’ basis and individual consent is not required. In Canada, Meads v Meads (Judge D. Rooke), in 2012, sets a precedent, dismissing the tactics as baseless. He rejects the claim that interaction with court equals a contract and called one filing with the court ‘gibberese’.
‘The OPCA arguments he (Mead) has advanced have no effect or meaning in Canadian law. They offer him no rights, no indemnities and certainly not a pot of gold or silver to call his own’.
Strawman claims achieve nothing. There has been a push in the ‘resistance’ to promote the concept of ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ law’ Traced back this comes from the ten commandments and is bible based which is nothing new. Law is a man-made control mechanism, not a natural phenomenon which exists on a higher plane. And any phrase that contains the word ‘universal’ stinks of globalism.
So where is remedy in the land of covid? Maybe a constitutional matter. Proving that the situation is not unprecedented would make any need for emergency legislation redundant. But this is not easy when the rule of law has vanished with the fairies. With no rule of law, there is no remedy under it. Mass non-compliance is the way to go.
Competing in a game in court against those who invent the rules is a futile exercise. Perhaps the fairest system is no system. Power goes to heads, people lie, and any system imposed on one group by another group, or person, will become oppressive in the end. That is why anarchy makes sense. Nature is wise and she always holds the answers. And contrary to the fundamentalist beliefs of the ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ law advocates, there is no absolute law of nature, only that imposed on it by the will of man.