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Those weren't "mistakes of the past". They did it on purpose. There is no pathway from educating regular people about ways to circumvent court orders to strengt
by cormacrelf 5y ago
Those weren't "mistakes of the past". They did it on purpose. There is no pathway from educating regular people about ways to circumvent court orders to strengthening the rule of law. Yes, interesting from historical and legal perspectives and thinking about how to design enforcement mechanisms to resist these things, but we weren't talking about that, and Hacker News is not a law reform commission. I am specifically putting up resistance to talking about it in public. It undermines people's confidence in these systems, which are actually very strong, and the resulting reduced participation in the systems that make up the rule of law (e.g. this guy, who is already losing confidence in his local democracy, choosing not to use the courts thinking that his chances of success are slim, and giving up) frees the stage for people who wish to undermine it. I don't propose that this argument is relevant to very many other things besides the kind of abject disobedience you described.
- plutonorm 5y agoIf the processes stink, the correct answer is not enforced ignorance, it is reform. How can we reform without knowledge?
- cormacrelf 5y agoJudicial review of executive actions like these and its mechanisms of enforcement do not stink, rather they are one of the greatest achievements of human civilisation and arguably function better than literally every other part of society in any democracy you care to name. They do not need reform. If they needed reform beyond small calibrations of penalty units, the correct answer would more likely be a civil war.
- dannyw 5y agoI don't agree with your position that regular people shouldn't know about cases where rule of law failed, because it might make them question the rule of law. A strong and resilient democracy is built on transparency, not on hiding information. Anything that people put resistance towards public disclosure is always a strong smell; not dissimilar to this township refusing to swear in an independent auditor.
- cormacrelf 5y agoIt’s a fine distinction. I didn’t say people shouldn’t know. I said we shouldn’t talk about it so casually in a public forum. The information is available to anyone who wants to know.
- ttybird2 5y agoI learned most of the things that I know without explicitly looking for them. I am glad that this topic came up in this very thread because I would not have learned about Little Rock Nine otherwise.
- cormacrelf 5y agoI am not an American. Maybe neither are you. But I feel compelled to contend with the fact that many Americans are right on the edge of abandoning their democracy. In these circumstances knowledge is not neutral. My aim here was simply to not permit that tiny chunk of non-neutral knowledge to go without context, and I think I have succeeded. Edit, to put this slightly better: there is a huge difference between keeping something a secret and saying “before I teach you this, I think you should learn these things first”. If the first thing you learned about American civics was that it’s all an illusion and anyone can do what they want, the lesson has utterly failed. You’ve not learned any civics at all.
- giantg2 5y agoOr you've learned how the system actually works.
- mise_en_place 5y agoThat’s elitism and is actually an undemocratic ideal. The freedom of ideas is paramount in a Western democracy. And what I was trying to teach others is that the State’s monopoly on violence is what keeps the whole thing running smoothly. For example, the Magna Carta would have meant nothing if it was not backed by the armies of landowning noblemen.