Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

There's two ways to look at this that others commenters have hinted at:

1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy, and somehow people aren't trusting them as they rightly deserve. Then this lack of trust is a big, big problem! It's a mismatch and we need to figure out why people aren't trusting these otherwise great, selfless, highly competent institutions.

2. The institutions are incompetent, looking out for their interests vs the public, and doing things that otherwise make them untrustworthy. In this case, the lack of trust isn't a mistmatch between deserved trust and realized trust, it's the realized trust being in line with deserved trust.

Everyone might have their own take on if we're in a case 1 or case 2 scenario. I personally think it's more of a case 2 situation at this time.

Trying to identify your priors about what you expect as a baseline level of competence from a big org just based on them existing at all and having an authoritative name might help you learn something.

> Trying to identify your priors about what you expect as a baseline level of competence from a big org just based on them existing at all and having an authoritative name might help you learn something.

To your latter point, the US became significantly more bellicose after the War Department became the Defense Department (merged with the Navy Department). This coincided with escalating dishonesty about the wars the US was making. The Korean War was at the time a "police action." The casus belli for full commitment in the Vietnam War was the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident. And then, of course, who could forget the the invisible WMDs in Iraq?

I used to think this, but then I read the essay, “War is a racket” which (iirc) was written pre-military-industrial-complex. It seems we’ve always been pretty dishonest about most of our aggressive actions.

The US had two fraudulent wars, separated by several decades, before the MID became a thing after WWII. The first was the Mexican-American War, where President Polk ordered US troops into disputed territory between Texas and Mexico. When the Mexican Army attacked the US Army for a violation of Mexico's sovereignty from their perspective, Polk informed Congress that US troops were attacked without provocation. Polk did this to fulfill campaign promises and admit some other state as a free state to counterbalance slave state Texas in the Senate.

The Spanish-American War was likewise begun under suspicious circumstances, but it was the first fueled mainly by the press.

The US also engaged in pointless wars like WWI and unjust wars like the Indian Wars following the Civil War.

"War is a racket" sounds interesting, so I'd be curious to read the arguments. Maybe my interpretation is wrong or incomplete! I do think there was a significant shift from wars being perpetrated by elected officials seeking political ends to wars being largely planned and executed by the MID (and the press), with the elected leaders dragged along like the tail wagging a dog.

> To your latter point, the US became significantly more bellicose after the War Department became the Defense Department (merged with the Navy Department).

Did we?

After independence, we spent about a century engaged in war with native tribes until they'd effectively been wiped out. The conflicts spanned from Florida to California, Texas to the Dakotas.

We invaded and annexed half of Mexico. We attempted to invade Canada in the War of 1812. We fought in North Africa not long after securing our independence and would do so multiple times.

We were pioneers in industrial total war which we practiced upon ourselves in the Civil War.

We won Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain in a war that had much flimsier causes than WMDs in Iraq and lacked any semblance of a noble goal.

The Department of Defense came after WWII, and while we've had our fair share of at best misguided wars since then, it's not a recent development.

That's not to say the name isn't Orwellian in nature.

I'm not sure I'd count fighting back against pirates or even skirmishing with natives as saber-rattling. The serious Indian Wars happened after the Civil War if for no other reason than the US had a large army with nothing to do.

I made another comment conceding the point about the the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, which were fraudulent albeit separated by several decades.

Nevertheless, the thought of the US Government unilaterally dropping bombs or executing a raid on sovereign foreign countries like we have done in Iraq or Pakistan would have been seen as outrageous before the DoD days, notwithstanding that the United States is the preeminent economic and military power today. But I think that fits in with OP's point: the incompetence is a feature of giant, hegemonic power, not a bug.

That analysis sounds correct but I think it's missing a key part.

If we are on scenario 2, what do we do?

A lot of people think that the answer is "make the government as small as possible, because governments are always incompetent". There's an implicit assumption there about the free market and corporations taking some of the government's previous duties.

To me (an European) that is a bonkers way of looking at the issue. I have seen what decent government (not perfect, not even "good" government) can accomplish. But I understand how someone who has only experienced shitty governments (or has been convinced that their government has always been shitty) can think that way.

The other approach is "let's change things so that the government improves". I understand that this is a difficult, undefined, and risky endeavor. It might take generations. I understand how others can think that it is idealistic / impractical ("if that was on the table, why do we have a shitty government to begin with? people before us would have changed it for the better already. And I want improvements now, not in 20 years"). It still does sound like a better bet to me than "let corporations do what they want, the invisible hand will save us". That can turn bad in a single legislature.

There's another answer: make government more local, ie return to federalism. If you are European, you live in a country with a government that administers far fewer people than the US federal gov't.

Correct, but Europe is deep in our business ( budget, debt leverage, monetary policy )

If my favorite politician was elected at the head of my home country he probably would not be able to implement his program.

Also: state have rights in the US and they do use them.

That only shifts the dysfunction.

Now everyone would not trust the mayor and the sheriff. And there would be gobs and gobs of tweets about "who was sleeping with who and that's why this kid got the contract to fix this road over here" and so on. With that entire influence campaign probably funded by the oligarchs from the wealthy city-state 300 miles away who want to use an area of your city for waste dumping or something.

There's no quick easy way out. We really do need to actually fix the problem. Restructuring the corruption won't help here. Mostly because it's still corruption.

Well, no, because people know the major and sherrif, they are close enough to the reality that propaganda won't override their own eyes.

First, I think you are grossly overestimating the number of people who know their mayor or local sheriff.

Secondly, the idea that professional influence campaigns won't work because, "the target 'knows' everybody" is naive in the extreme. It betrays a lack of knowledge about what it is you're up against. These campaigns work, and they work well. That's the reason everyone from corporations to intelligence agencies put so much resource into them.

Lastly, none of what you said actually makes the mayor and the sheriff "not corrupt". Which is the fundamental issue. How do you ensure non-corrupt officials? Or at a minimum, decrease corruption. Your idea probably doesn't even shift the corruption, because corruption is already there. It just gives the corrupt local officials more money to steal in the end. Them knowing everyone increases the opportunity and possibilities for corruption. It doesn't decrease them, which is what you want.

What we need are ideas on how to be more effective in decreasing corruption. So less, "shift it to the local level" and more "reignite and reallocate more human resources to the public corruption segment of the FBI". But people will not want to do the latter, because it would catch their corruption. Whereas they would want to do the former, because it gives them more opportunities to participate in corruption.

> To me (an European) that is a bonkers way of looking at the issue.

Came here to say exactly this. If you do not trust your democratically elected institutions you need to improve your democratic system.

> "Popular sovereignty is the principle that the authority of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political power."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_sovereignty

Don't get me wrong, this is not an actionable solution, but I'm a bit surprised that it's not even discussed conceptually? Why is that?

And also half the government is trying to undermine them

That may be true, but I rarely see the pro-government party spending political capital on boring but important changes to fight this.

There is no pro-government party. Just two pro-business parties wearing different hats.

How about IRS funding

We are in the third scenario: institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing, but at the same time they are being targeted by partisan propaganda which target them not for their actual flaws (for which you need to understand how they operate) but make things up in a grotesque but effective way (Yes I'm talking about Fox News and a big part of the GOP since Trump, they're not the sole culprits of that, but definitely the worse because they are the most mainsteam).

So, you choose option 1, but decided to call it option 3…

I don't think his comment implied that all institutions are capable and trustworthy which option 1 did.

Don't you see the difference between:

> 1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy

And this:

> institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing

?

"They are not perfect, but doing as well as you might expect given the difficult job they have" is basically option 1, in that it doesn't prescribe radical changes.

You write this sentence inside quotes, but that's not a quote, I never said that.

I've never said that they do poorly because their job is hard. I said that they are flawed because all humans endevor is, and need to be actively criticized and fixed. Even though they will nevers be perfect no matter what, that doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.

Real life isn't like a simplified story. No one's 100% good or evil, nor entirely perfect of imperfect. That's the third option, somewhere in the middle / "well, it's complicated".

Government is particularly bad as inherently if an exception to a rule is required for society to function well that's where it has to happen.

An active process to strive to be better and to fix problems, constant vigilance, is the best stance for a high quality organization. To strive for that (reasonable) perfection.

> not for their actual flaws (for which you need to understand how they operate)...

People who say that go to Washington then vote to start new wars. Being a well known member of the military industrial complex works is not a selling point. There may be a need to understand the system, but the consequences of America's forever wars are getting so disastrous that smashing things is starting to look like a sensible option. The financial burden of the ongoing death and destruction is starting to bleed the US out soviet-style.

"Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies" may not be the whole truth, but it is a lot closer to useful than the people who want tweaks around the edges to the US foreign policy.

And institutions often have multiple goals for which they are more or less capable/flawed. And not all goals are equal: some things are intrinsically hard and we should expect failures that don’t undermine either the goal or the institution.

Institutions are in many cases just names for necessary functions: if you got rid of the institution then you would need to recreate something like it with a different name (i.e., if you abolish the police/irs you still need people to enforce laws, collect taxes).

Abolish is a stronger claim than reform therefore it requires much more evidence, however, reform is apparently less sexy in our current cultural context. It seems the default view for any problem (and there will be problems) is abolish.

"Defund the police" is a large attack on an institution that's not coming from the GOP. It's unfortunate that people immediately blame the other side in a knee-jerk reaction.

"defund the police" wasn't a call to get rid of the police or cut their funding in a vacuum, but instead to spend less on police while spending that money on social services that would handle many of mental health and domestic issues that police are called to but ill-equiped to handle.

It was a terrible/name slogan.

I don't think it is just a marketing problem. Lots of evidence to conclude that as a policy initiative it is flawed and detrimental to the communities that adopt that approach.

Nuance is not something that exists in most of the conservative universe.

Not to defend the conservatives in any way, but nuance is a scarce good when discussing about politics with most people, no matter their political orientation.

I think you missed the part where the parent post said (emphasis mine):

”Yes I'm talking about Fox News and a big part of the GOP since Trump, they're not the sole culprits of that, but definitely the worse because they are the most mainsteam”

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