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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

People tend to think of there being a unified "US government", but the reality is that there's a large number of mostly separate organizations connected only loosely by a theme. Sometimes they lie to each other. Sometimes they lie to the politicians in Washington, who are nominally in charge but who seem to have less real power with every passing year.

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God I wish more people knew this and understood that it's a feature, not a bug of our system.

In this case, that message is not quite exact because MAJCOM commanders have the POTUS as their boss. But between state governors, POTUS, Congrees and the Judiciary, there is an intentional and functional disconnect.

Federalism is great when your side benefits from it.

Not totally sure what your meaning here is. All frameworks of government could be put in your statement in place of Federalism and it would still be true.

To the citizens of nations that are being bullied by those organisations it's NOT a feature.

Right, but the concerns of those citizens quite frankly aren't a primary concern of the United States.

Governments that maintain such shortsighted positions will eventually find themselves superseded on the world stage.

Odd comment, in this context. Have you read the article?

I'm curious, do you have any examples to point to?

It's based on intuition and is only a response to the direct parent comment. If the US of .3 billion people ignores the needs of 6.7 billion people, eventually those people will find a way to escape the needs of the US.

I'll note that the HN article title used to be significantly different, so some of the conversation makes less sense without the "accused of lying to the president" in the title.

The US itself?

That's an incredibly dehumanising way of viewing the world. A view I guess is shared by the ones who conducts your tortures and carries out your murders. Shame on you.

Can you point me to any government in the world that cares more about non-citizens than it does about its own citizens?

That's not what the comment said. The word "more" wasn't used.

The original comment was "the concerns of those citizens quite frankly aren't a primary concern of the United States".

Right, that's basically saying that the US should care about other countries' citizens, not that they should care more about other countries' citizens.

I guess we just disagree on what that sentence is saying then. To me it says not that the US should care about non-citizens, but that, as a baseline, it cares about its own citizens more than it does about non-citizens.

> on you

Many Americans did not choose their burden and instead were born into it. Shame should be placed somewhere, but I think this person's got nothing to do with it.

Separation of powers is a feature; however, since we do have essentially feudal, warring states of government power, we also need to be aware of their infights and lies, and that they should trust the government no more than they would trust their neighbor, because the government is their neighbors.

And, yet, having been in dozens of states and many different rural, suburban, and urban areas, the U.S. is surprisingly homogenized. All that unnecessary political conflict, posturing, and inefficiency, just so we citizens feel like a good fight was won when we get our same crappy, mediocre policies, laws, and regulations.

It would be so nice if states / localities actually were somewhat different. Then, we could at least experiment and see the real effects of different policies.

One funny example of this is that the US Government both funds and works to defeat Tor simultaneously.

FBI versus John Kennedy is one of those moments.

Not the assassination part. I mean the communist mistress part.

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