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Well I hate to disparage a large group of people, but how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country,
by lordnacho 1y ago
Well I hate to disparage a large group of people, but how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it?
Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc).
You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.
On multiple occasions, I've met Americans who simply care about might-makes-right. It's skin-deep, as soon as you ask them why they support this or that policy, it's because they are powerful and the rest of the world is not. I've literally met Americans who thought their tax money allowed them to summon troops, more than once. (This ended up backfiring as it turns out, they did not know how to get US Marines to arrive, big shocker.)
The same kind of thinking seems to be prevalent internally. You can trample the law, because you can. You see it even in ordinary US-made popular media. What happens what a character gets in trouble with the law? Well, then of course it depends on who has the most money to hire the best lawyers.
In the current case, I suspect the government will just do whatever it wants and there will be no legal reckoning.
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- Y_Y 1y ago> You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small. The nice thing about the HN Small World is that it can be efficiently searched. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_w...
- sebastiennight 1y agoWell, one would have guessed that the service powering HN search would know about HNSW: https://www.algolia.com/blog/ai/a-simple-guide-to-ai-search https://www.algolia.com/blog/ai/a-simple-guide-to-ai-search
- jampekka 1y agoI meet these in my home country Finland all the time nowadays. They've probably been there all along but have been emboldened and riled up by the rise and normalization of the far-right. My read is that this is even further along in many places in Europe.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Well I hate to disparage a large group of people, but how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it? Quite often, and the answer is not many. It's why I've returned to a frankly elitist worldview, because this seems to be a historical pattern when power is diffused too widely. The lesson of our age may be that the Chinese political system, which seeks to restrit political competition within a small, carefully-selected group, is fitter than the American experiment.
- miloignis 1y agoYou think the lesson that the president of a democratic country is amassing power and becoming less Democratic is to just go all the way and remove democracy? I'll additionally note that China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military Agreed. I'm saying if we're accepting this as precedent, a Presidential republic is not a stable system. We either reject the military being called in to quell protests. Or we accept it as precedent and revise our system of government to remove that power from the madness of crowds.
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- lordnacho 1y agoWhy won't the Chinese system just collapse eventually? You have a small elite who perhaps currently are well-selected (besides the point) but what is preventing that elite from leaving the reins to someone who is not so good? With the added effect that the incompetent ruler will call upon the reputation for competence built up by previous rulers? Seems like it's just cultural norms all the way down. If people want to take advantage of the system, they can break these norms while pretending to be what they used to be.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago> how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it? This was supposedly a staunch conservative stance once upon a time. The last decade clearly shifted such mentality towards one not dissimilar to Russia. I guess the cold war never true ended.