> And the second goes for the people affected by the muddled laws too, who have way more discretion than the police.

Are you arguing that the fault for being on the wrong side of the powerful lies with the people who could have just decided not to be on the wrong side of the powerful?

We're discussing here laws where someone, whether the police or some other authority figure, is going to be deciding whether you're subject to them based not on plain and objective facts, but on subjective criteria - which inevitably, and unaccountably, will include your other activities. They're designed to offer a fig leaf so that you can be prosecuted for something whose punishment is comparatively palatable, without having to acknowledge the actual cause for offense.

Of course one can argue whether any particular law falls in this category, but I think it's difficult to argue that the designed consequences of such laws are the fault of the person subject to them.

> Are you arguing that the fault for being on the wrong side of the powerful lies with the people who could have just decided not to be on the wrong side of the powerful?

No.

I saying that people are responsible for their actions.

In western society (democratic) laws are implemented by people put in a position of authority by the very people those laws apply to.

I'm not really sure I understand the rest of what you're talking about, so I do t want to assume anything, but it sounds like you're after perfects laws no one can misinterprete? I don't think that's possible. Bug free software will likely come first.

Either way the conversation about power and who has it and who doesn't doesn't strike me as helpful.

> I saying that people are responsible for their actions.

> In western society (democratic) laws are implemented by people put in a position of authority by the very people those laws apply to.

Right (although I think that the latter sentence is, first, not limited to western societies, and, second, not ubiquitous in them), but the issue here is not whether people should escape consequences for actions that have been democratically deemed unacceptable (through direct democracy, or through people electing representatives who make the relevant laws). Rather it is, I think, the danger of using the cover of one action, that people have democratically agreed is unacceptable but that the makers or enforcers of law are not actually seeking to curtail, to regulate another action, that has not been democratically agreed to be unacceptable, and might actually be professed to be allowed or desirable while being indirectly and sometimes covertly suppressed.

> Either way the conversation about power and who has it and who doesn't doesn't strike me as helpful.

No matter what your philosophy of society and the role of law, it strikes me as hard to have such a philosophy that is of any use in actually helping to govern a society without paying attention to power, who has it, and who doesn't.

So are you suggesting that the enforcement of the laws in question, per the article, are actually a cover to suppress something else? If you are you'll need to spell it out for me since what the article covers as criminal seems to fit what the laws state as criminal.

Power balances or plays in any society are inevitable. I just don't see it as relevant in this scenario. Certainly it's fashionable today to demonstrate how hard done by you are but in this context the people affected in the article are certainly inconvenienced by police at their door but hardly any of them that I can see were powerless and suffered because if it. Everyone can have their day in court. It's the courts that decide whether you're guilty, whether the police were over reaching; case law is full of such things.