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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

The bullies are in charge. Prepare to get beaten to the curb and your lunch money stolen.

i mean.. you need power to enforce your values. and UK hasn't been in power for a long time.

"If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful. You are harmless"

Unless you can stand on equal field - either by alliance, or by your own power - you aren't a negotiating partner, and i say that as European.

> "If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful. You are harmless"

this is exactly the value that caused so much war and death all over the world, for decades and thousands of years. still, even in 2025, it's being followed. are we doomed, chat?

US sending clear signals to countries that they should start thinking about their own nuclear proliferation, even if that means treaty-breaking.

The emphasis is the word capable here. I think there's a difference between a country using their capability of violence to actually be violent and a one with the tangible capability using it for peace.

There are peaceful strategies that are temporarily stable in the face of actors who capitalise on peaceful actors to take their resources, but they usually (always?) take the form of quickly moving on when an aggressor arrives.

Eg. birds abandoning rather than defending a perch when another approaches.

We're typically not happy to do that, though you can see it happening in some parts of the world right now.

Some kind of enlightened state where violent competition for resources (incl. status & power) no longer makes sense is imaginable, but seems a long way off.

Just to clarify, who's the aggressor in what you write? The US?

No one in particular. Russia would be one current example, Israel (and others in the region at various times) another, the US and Germany historically, the Romans, the Ottomans, China, Japan, Britain, Spain, warlords in the western sahara, the kid at school who wanted the other kids' lunch money.

The idea though is that if everyone suddenly disarmed overnight it would be so highly advantageous to a deviant aggressor that one would assuredly emerge.

Yes and we don't know if the US is on the blue side this time. It's scary.

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

yes.

i would also recommend The Prince as light reading to better understand how the world works.

I think peace is more down to the good/peaceful guys being better armed than the bad ones.

It been that way for... 300 years?

Those with the biggest economies and/or most guns has changed a few times but the behaviours haven't and probably never will.

If you’re making sweeping statements like that, why the arbitrary distinction at 300 years? What happened then? Why not say “since the dawn of humanity”?

It's not some arbitrary distinction from 300 years ago, it's something called "the Enlightenment".

The bullies with most guns and biggest economies have been in charge since the Enlightenment? Huh?

Probably referring to the period that pax Britannia and pax Americana have been the global hegemon.

I was keeping it simple for the majority.

That's what Europeans thought for centuries, until Germany overdid it. Then we had new ideas, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...

The declaration of human rights, like a lot of other laws, declarations and similar pieces of paper signed by politicians, have zero value without the corresponding enforcement, and are often just there for optics so that taxpayers feel like their elected leaders are making good use of their money and are on the side of good.

And the extent of which you can do global enforcement (which is often biased and selective) is limited by the reach of your economic and military power.

Which is why the US outspends the rest of the world military powers combined and how the US and their troops have waged ilegal wars and committed numerous crimes abroad and gotten away with it despite pieces of papers saying what they're doing is bad, but their reaction was always "what are you gonna do about it?".

See how many atrocities have happened under the watch of the UN. Laws aren't real, it's the enforcement that is real. Which is why the bullies get to define the laws that everyone else has to follow because they have the monopoly on enforcement.

The same is true for the HN comment I replied to, which was basically going *shrug*, but also without any army to enforce that. So I pointed out that some people went beyond just shrugging, because it could not go on like this; and here is what they wrote. Just reading these things does a person good, and to stand up for these things you first have to know them.

> Laws aren't real, it's the enforcement that is real

Well, yes. This is why people have been paying a lot of attention to what exactly "rule of law" means in the US, and what was just norms that can be discarded.

I think the saddest fact about it is that not even the US state weilds the power. It is some sociopathic bussinessmen.

Businessmen have been far more powerful than states for at least the last 20 years

Generally I can't help but see 'more powerful than the government' claims forever poisoned from their shallow use in the context of cryptography.

Where it was used in a rhetorical tantrum throwing response to their power refuse to do the impossible like make an encryption backdoor 'only for good guys' and have the sheer temerity to stand against arbitrary exercises of authority by using the courts to check them only to their actual power.

If actual 'more powerful than the states' occurs they have nobody to blame but themselves for crying wolf.

My response to "the bullies are in charge" has been downvoted and flagged yet what I am responding to remains up. It's a different opinion on the same topic started by GP. Either both should stay or both should go.

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