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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

"Today, corrupt politicians put on another dog and pony show while continuing business as usual. Is our democracy secretly a farce? Details at 11."

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Or, everyone could get off their asses and carry their weight as a citizen in a democracy.

Nihilistic dismissal of the right to vote is lazy.

Nobody said upholding your rights was going to be easy. Organization, affiliation, communication all take work.

Get involved in primaries, for either party! Fewer voters and even more power there.

Yard signs are cheap. Make your own. Make this an issue.

Or, if you need to hear it in Tom Hanks' voice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_ctZ4lUCk

And belief that the masses organizing and voting can have power over Leviathan and its bureaucrats is delusional. They just keep pushing these policies and power grabs until they go through, and/or lie about the components of them. There's no practical check on deep state power such as this in today's so-called-democracy.

You would need some counter-elite faction that already has foothold on power to oppose current power structure. Revolutions (and that's what is necessary to change current policies) never come from the bottom up.

I don't think that American electoral systems allow proper accountability of political leaders. That isn't a criticism of democracy, it's a criticism of a two-party system with no ability for change from the outside.

Decades of a democracy that worked has created generations of complacent people who do not participate, follow the rules, and expect things to continue to work out as they always have. I highly doubt anything except absence of democracy will change this perception.

It's "our" democracy, not our democracy it seems.

The difference between a representative and a true democracy.

A representative democracy would require at least some politicians representing working cutizens.

We do have some of those. The only problem is that they have a rather unfortunate habit of dying.

No. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.

We cannot have unprotected, open borders for decades, and then expect to identify and track foreign internal threats AND not provide the USGOV the means to detect and surveil.

We cannot assume that because we're an HN regular who thinks power corrupts (it certainly does) the cost of that corruption is greater than what we pay if/when a foreign adversary acts against the US.

We simply cannot fulfill our obligations to our citizens or our allies if we cannot protect our home.

We cannot have it all. Welcome to the ugly real world.

So lets give up the "destructive expansionist ambitions lead to global threats" part

No. We can. Protect the citizens' rights. Detect and surveil non-citizens as a result of open borders all they want, but don't trample on the rights of the citizens in the name of safety.

Ok, so let’s deport everyone who came in through said unprotected open borders. That’s literally why borders exist. To keep foreign threats… foreign.

Weird how the most prominent example of terrorism on American soil from foreign agents was perpetrated with completely legal non-land-border penetration. Seems like we have locals lot more dangerous than anyone coming through the land border with Mexico to work or seek asylum in the US. Actual foreign terrorists just aren't as ignorant as you want them to be.

Okay so your solution is: open borders and heavier government surveillance to balance it? Fantastic.

I think you missed the point.

So what? Sorry but this is not even a bad argument, it's just not an argument at all. Most shootings are not in schools, so school shootings aren't a problem? Most drug addictions come from prescribed drugs, so heroin and fentanyl being sold on the street is fine?

In 2023, more than 160 people on the terror watch list have been caught illegally crossing US borders:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/number-pe...

Given that there are 600,000 who were observed entering but got away in 2023 alone, and more were likely crossing unobserved, there's very good odds that they are already here.

And yet we still only have the handful of incidents from foreigners, most of which come over legally anyway. Right wingers have been fearmingering about foreigners for decades. Are they just using illegal entry now when they didn't before and waiting a really long time? You do know domestic terrorism is just as common as foreign terrorism in the US, right?

Sure, but how many of them are “I can trace my lineage to the mayflower” domestic terrorists and how many are citizens of immigrant/non-citizen parents?

Mayflower? wtf does that have to do with anything? Ohhhhh! That's code for "but are they white", isn't it?

Pathetic.

Exactly, this "open borders" nonsense is a right-wing talking point, like "fiscal responsibility." It sounds great in TV interviews and speeches, but they mysteriously only trot out when there's a democrat in the Oval Office.

is that why the republican mayor of NYC is loudly sounding the alarm on this? my mistake, he is a democrat.

So… close the borders. Completely.

Fun fact, "open borders" is a complete myth.

fun fact, no its not.

Fun fact, all those helicopters, horse patrols, infrared cameras, drones, aid groups, and vigilantes are fake news. Hacker news is better than this, everyone.

Good point.

Complete myth is a stretch isn't it? "closed border" doesn't pass the sniff test either.

Those are not the only choices. A border can be controlled.

Well, our borders might be legally closed, but with 2.2 million people illegally crossing them from the southern border per year, that is the entire population of Houston, maybe it's fair to say they're closed but effectively open. Coupled with the fact that if you're caught, you can just say you're claiming asylum and you get to stay.

They are not "legally closed", they are controlled. A closed border permits no crossings, which is clearly not the state of reality.

The borders are legally closed everywhere except designated border crossings.

"Borders with a lot of CVEs?"

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