Comment by bhupy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhupy | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it is entirely possible for multiple things to be true at the same time.

1) the US has unique protections of individual liberties (free speech, associations, arms)

2) the US has systematic repression of certain minorities, especially among the police (the vast majority of which is illegal and just inadequately prosecuted)

> Since I know that someone is going to reply “like what?!?” here’s an example I recently learned about: it wasn’t until 1963 that public defenders were widely available as a result of a supreme court ruling. So equal protection under the law was clearly not available before 1963. We all know the rich Can afford better defense to this day, but can you call it justice if you don’t even get a lawyer?

Right, at the risk of diving into a rabbit-hole of negative vs positive freedoms — the US was never ever the land of positive freedom. It has always been the land of negative freedom, and uniquely so. You can dislike the implications of that all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the US truly is the land of negative freedom — and that's not a normative statement.

Being attacked by a court runs directly contrary to negative freedom though. And with a single systematic infringement of negative freedom, the overarching ideal has been lost due to the contradiction of needing to respond by engaging with a system that requires you to jump through arbitrary "voluntary" hoops.

Sure, but there is no country in the world that satisfies the platonic ideal, in which you are totally immune to attack by the court.

No country on the planet is absolutely free. The US just happens to be the most negatively free country.

If you're trying to do justice to the concept of negative freedom, then what definition are you using? To me, it's about being free to be left alone and go your own way, as opposed to being provided for (eg freedom from hunger, or whatever).

I would classify a public defender as a mitigation of an impingement on negative freedom rather than a bona fide positive freedom. There are surely other countries where you have less of a chance of being harmed by the courts, because they compensate for their general infringement of freedom by giving you better protections to defend yourself from it.

> The US just happens to be the most negatively free country.

The US has some of the most draconian copyright laws in the world. Are those outweighed by something else, or should we dispense with this notion of "most" ?

> If you're trying to do justice to the concept of negative freedom, then what definition are you using? To me, it's about being free to be left alone and go your own way, as opposed to being provided for (eg freedom from hunger, or whatever).

Yes, and for most people in America, this is unquestionably the case.

> I would classify a public defender as a mitigation of an impingement on negative freedom rather than a bona fide positive freedom. There are surely other countries where you have less of a chance of being harmed by the courts, because they compensate for their general infringement of freedom by giving you better protections to defend yourself from it.

It's debatable that the US public defender system somehow mitigates this impingement less effectively than any other Western country, indeed most western countries have similar public defender systems.

For the sake of argument, even if we were to accept that premise...the majority of Americans spend far more of their lives exercising the uniquely strong negative liberties extended to them than interfacing with the one aspect of American life in which a globally uniform impingement of negative rights is allegedly mitigated the least.

> The US has some of the most draconian copyright laws in the world. Are those outweighed by something else, or should we dispense with this notion of "most" ?

The US's copyright laws are on par with those in most of the Western world. All EU countries are signatories of the Berne Convention, and the copyright length in the US is the same as it is in France, Singapore, Switzerland, South Korea, Italy, UK, Australia, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark...

Just stop. This guy has already made up his mind that the US is one of the worst countries in the world.

"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."

If you don't seem to react to the content of outside information and if we know what you're going to say before you say it, you're not thinking independently, you're just buying into someone else's beliefs.

I don't see how it's remotely possible to form that conclusion based on the mere two comments I said before yours. What specifically from my second comment was so predictable?

> Yes, and for most people in America, this is unquestionably the case.

Maybe you should start questioning it. AFAICT, people in other developed countries enjoy comparable day to day freedoms.

> It's debatable that the US public defender system somehow mitigates this impingement less effectively than any other Western country

The original argument you engaged with was about a complete lack of public defenders in the past.

> The US's copyright laws are on par with those in most of the Western world

Empirically this is not true - eg most VPN providers prohibit torrenting on US exit nodes. And international copyright infringement inducers (eg Kim Dotcom) aren't prosecuted strongly in their own countries, but rather extradited to the US.

Overall, this refrain of "freedom" is actually blinding and counterproductive. And this doesn't change when it's limited to "negative freedom". Unquestioning assertions of "We're #1" erode our rights - detailed critiques preserve them.

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