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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you.

Words won't protect you. Precedent won't protect you. Guns won't protect you. If you are in a society where others want you surveiled or dead or removed or heavily restricted, and you're outnumbered, it's already too late. As you say, for many people already "Constitutional" is just a weapon to be wielded when it suits them and ignored when it doesn't. But the reason why that's bad needs to be much more than "because this piece of paper says so," it needs to be "because these are things we all agree are important."

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Yes, absolutely. And what's changed is that we now have a massive number of people (on both sides) who no longer agree that these things are important, or at least who think that other things are more important - so much more important that "these things" (constitutional protections) can be circumvented when they get in the way of the "more important things".

Constitutional protections are largely running on institutional inertia at the moment. That's good - the institutions were supposed to do that - but it won't last forever.

It's not that the sides no longer agree that these things are important. They do. The problem is they don't believe they agree that they're important. They believe the other side has abandoned the constitution, and they know that puts their own side at a disadvantage if they stay with it.

The two sides are so frightened of each other at this point that all assumptions of good faith are off the table. So, note for next version of the constitution: Make sure the first amendment establishes strict separation of speech and money.

Money vs speech is a good example, I think, of people not agreeing that these things are important or not. And that the "Constitution" part is not the important part.

How would you get a Constitution to separate money when there are so many well-funded pushes for exactly the opposite, resulting in the situation where the courts say money needs to be protected?

Before you can do that you need to get everyone on board with the dangers of money in politics, and then if you can do that, you've solved the problem because now your judges won't interpret "protection of speech" as "protection of buying political influence."

You gotta win the debate either way.

> How would you get a Constitution to separate money

Not that I put a lot of effort into this formulation, but how about something like

> A well-informed and reasonable public, being necessary to the security of a working democracy, the right of the people to free and quick access to public information must not be abridged, but protected.

And then back that up with a multi-layer prescriptive dictionary to minimize judicial reinterpretation. The terms "right of the people", "free and quick access", "public information" would defined in layer N, while the terms "right", "people", "free", "quick", "access", "public", and "information" would be defined in some layers N - M.

We've had some centuries now to get better at technical writing, language engineering, and lexicography, to say nothing of IT. We should use them.

It's pretty hard to have good faith to people who have bullied and been deceptive to attain their goal of undermining bodily autonomy.

When you're talking about undermining bodily autonomy are you talking about Republican states banning abortion or Democrat states compelling vaccination?

And I'm certain that only scratches the surface.

just scare people enough and they will turn in their family members. Especially if you dress it up in being the right moral thing to do. we were so close during the lockdowns, one step away

Are you suggesting turning in family is never the right thing to do? What act would you draw the line at?

> never

I don't think that's what they're saying. I interpret that they believe the issues being faced during the pandemic hysteria weren't ones worthy of turning in family.

We weren't talking here about the pandemic OR turning in family so it's a confusing thing to bring up unless painting it as some sort of example of something where "government" should always come second?

> We weren't talking here about

This is a narrow framing. We were talking about "a society where others want you surveiled or dead or removed or heavily restricted" (emphasis mine). Bringing up recent events which exposed this side of society is not so off-topic.

Have you turned in your family members before? Just curious what it would take for you to do that? Jay walking or murder? I know in Quebec they had a curfew, and neighbours were ratting out neighbours. I come from the position that lockdowns did more harm than good. The damage to the economy and personal freedom, and eroding trust in government.

You're asking me what crime would be enough for me but not answering my question of if there's one that's enough for you? Cause for sure, murder. Quite likely others. It scales with family distance too of course.

Where's your line?

Very true. I have my issues with the Netherlands (no country is perfect) but the majority is atheist and religion holds no power here.

You're reaping the dividends of a much, much higher level of public education which I don't know when we'll see in a country as vast, federated, and new worldy as the U.S. :c

If guns will not protect you, why did Stalin, Hitler and Castro go to such lengths of seizing privately owned firearms?

The reality is that guns will protect you because 1) the sheer count of citizens is substantially and necessarily higher than military, and 2) citizens themselves are a critical part of the spoils of war. Poll Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for more information. Disarming is an essential predicate for coercion.

> If guns will not protect you, why did Stalin, Hitler and Castro go to such lengths of seizing privately owned firearms?

Yeah:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_argument

* https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/08/viral-imag...

Chenoweth et al did a study of over 600 movements since 1900, and found those that used violence/force succeeded about 25% of the time, and those that did not succeeded in their goals about 50% of the time. The list is in Appendix A of:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44096650

Americans learn the wrong lessons: the War of Independence wasn't won on the battle fields, but in the years leading up to it in the change of thinking (Madison wrote a letter to Jefferson on this; Chenoweth discusses in the above book).

Can this be a case of Simpson’s paradox? A movement will not resort to violence if there are non-violent ways for it to meet their goals. Violence is used in desperation so it would make sense that movements on track to not succeed would resort to it.

> Can this be a case of Simpson’s paradox? A movement will not resort to violence if there are non-violent ways for it to meet their goals.

According to the research cited in the book, the more violence the movement does, the more its chances drop.

If there is a movement where the 'core' is non-violent, but there are some 'adjacent' groups that use it (even against the wishes of the core), the the odds of success drop.

The reasoning seems to be that most movements start small, and the main way to success is to get more and more people on your side (or at least not against you). The moment any kind of violence starts occurring you start turning people off.

The primary thing that keeps dictators in power is small number of allies, who help them control information (mostly the message "rebellion will be supressed"). Guns are only a tool, without the operators, they are useless.

In contrast, democracy is protected by transparency, not guns. Guns are required only to the point where there are people who suppress transparency with threat of violence, which is usually only organized crime or foreign state actors.

There is no basis for the “usually only” assertion and distinction, either historically or in the future.

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