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Comment by jslezak | Hacker News Reader

Their next move - and the Rubicon none of us can uncross - will be defying the court orders that are inevitably issued to stop the flagrant criminality

Once they defy those, it’s done.

The enforcement of federal laws including court orders requires the Trump justice department to act. And his first moves (naturally) were to fire all oversight people, install extremist hardcore loyalists at the top, and fire anyone underneath who was not equally loyal. Anybody who thinks any other administration has done anything remotely comparable in the modern era is just uninformed

All of us should take a moment to acknowledge all the Peter Thiel-adjacent folks in this community who drove us directly to this moment

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That's what worries me the most despite generally agreeing with the goals of DOGE.

The Supreme court has only a few armed police, basically no teeth. There is nothing really holding the executive to listen to them, and the legislators won't check any fouls either. There is surprisingly little beyond tradition to stop them going off the rails.

Indeed. The collapse of the "mos maiorum", the unwritten set of social norms, was a big part of what dragged the Roman republic to collapse.

Norm violations have a way of accelerating in a tit-for-tat way, because once your opponent does it you will lose if you don't respond in kind. This didn't start here, and it definitely won't end here.

  "All of us should take a moment to acknowledge all the Peter Thiel-adjacent folks in this community who drove us directly to this moment"

This is why this community in particular needs to be talking about these things instead of flagging them as irrelevant to the hacker ethos, as if we don't have direct responsibility for what's going on right now.

"Move fast and break things" is a culture we promulgated. Yes, me, you, everyone commenting here. The people we looked up to for years - mentors and thought leaders - are the ones planning and directing this effort. Hackers apparently are the ones implementing it. If we want to talk about it in our cultural terms, these guys are imo acting like black hats and we need to grapple with that.

Clearly we as a community are not ready for these conversations, but flagging them and burying them isn't going to make the need for them go away.

Yes my main takeaway from the musk flagging discussions on here is that tech people are no where near capable of taking responsibility for their central role in this mess. If I call all my sins "politics", say discussing politics is off the table, then magically you can't say anything bad about me!

It's because there's this pernicious meme throughout the tech world that political aloofness is a sign of intelligence. It was pathetic years ago and repugnant today.

Wow, haha. A real one. Never imagined I'd see a comment like this in the wild. I do think it's a stretch to, say, blame the community, but what breaks my head is how everyone is acting like this is normal? Kids going in and Ctrl-F'ing "dei" and "gender," deleting the former and replacing the latter with "sex." Making false claims about government spending about things that have been online for years and available to see... Never realized what a cult was until now!

Agreed, except I am more on jwz’s side with regard to the “hackers” here. Despite the name and occasionally intelligent discussion, HN isn’t really about hacker culture. It’s about Silicon Valley venture capitalism, with hacker-relevant topics largely used for tech cachet and recruitment. Real hackers are, on the whole, aligned with anarchism and socialism and are generally incompatible with SV culture. They would certainly want nothing to do with Thiel’s ridiculous politics.

And Vance is already saying they should ignore the judges: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance...

AOC said the same thing herself. Looks like both sides unfortunately agree.

This already happened. Andrew Jackson openly defied a Supreme Court ruling and forcibly removed Native Americans from their homes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

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

The only reason Brown v. Board of Education was enforced was because the President sent troops from the 101st Airborne Division to ensure black children were able to go to school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education#Re...

I have no doubt the Rubicon will be crossed this year, probably already has.

I'm preparing for a war on American soil, by "Americans" or whatever they're going to call themselves - MAGA I guess.

"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."

The thing is, even if Trump said something similar, I think we'd still keep going about things in the same ho-hum way we are now. Left-wing newspapers will have headlines, Fox will have nothing, and Democratic congresspeople will have some kind of protest. Maybe there will be marches in a few big cities.

I honestly think nothing will rise to the level of an actual crisis until the military is ordered to do something that some percentage of officers refuse to comply with.

One or more states may choose to intervene. That is terrifying as it may trigger a civil war.

Trump ignoring court orders is the last straw, really. And he's doing that today. We have a president hell-bemt on destroying America, and no, that isn't hyperbole. I'm not sure how you think we'll have business-as-usual with the dismantling of the US government.

> And he's doing that today.

Indeed.

> I'm not sure how you think we'll have business-as-usual

Are you seeing general strikes? Chaos in the streets? Democratic congresspeople being successful at stopping anything? The Supreme Court stepping in?

No, none of those. Trump went and had fun at the Superbowl last night, and some editorials wrung their hands over Vance saying that Trump doesn't need to obey the courts. Most people in the country are ignoring what they see as some typical partisan bickering.

The administration need not defy court orders. Federal judges can be impeached and removed, with loyalists installed. Already, there are enough Trump-appointed judges on the bench where it won't take long for a judgment in the administration's favor to be reached.

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