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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what the laws are. A law gains no special moral quality via the legislative process. Immoral laws exist.

OP was arguing that because they don't like the law it's immoral to enforce. Whether or not OP likes the law really has nothing to do with whether the law is immoral.

Not sure I read it that way, but okay. But that reading requires you to ask "why", and sometimes it feels very much like the government lost the consent of the governed a looooong time ago..

If the government had lost the consent of the governed it wouldn't have been elected / it won't be elected again. That's basically what all this is about. Sure, democracy, elections, all this things may not be the best system, but it is very effective at damage control. You don't govern well? You're out after four or five years. All other system known have far worse damage control.

Alternative view: The government has lost the consent of the governed, but people are so engrossed in other stuff that they don't do anything about it due to how painful the upheaval would be.

In other words, it's tolerated rather than accepted.

Roman poets would call this "bread and circuses".

Every revolution in history is proof that this doesn't really work. If the government really looses the approval of the governed and not just of a small minority revolution will follow.

But now is the first time in history with simultaneously our standard of living, access to information, and most relevantly access to distraction.

I'd wager (but don't have the chops to prove) that if you could plot displeasure with government on a graph, and and draw a line where overthrow historically results, the height of that line would roughly correlate with the increase in leisure time, access to entertainment, and decrease in GDP per worker.

I wish I could believe you. I also agree with the sentiment. However, I have worked at Agencies, and ultimately the career bureaucracies are the real governance. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-deep-state-goes-to-w...

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