Gödel's Loophole | Hacker News Reader

Gödel's Loophole

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21 pointsm-hodges11 comments

Article V is likely the loophole he saw. It is however monumentally hard to amend the constitution even with the extreme gerrymandering of today. I was surprised it has actually been done once within my lifetime but I doubt it will happen again without a cataclysmic change of public opinion.

There was a lot of consternation about this in 2017: "Article V allows an alternative method of proposing constitutional amendments, which cuts Congress out entirely: two-thirds of the state legislatures can call for a constitutional convention. To be in a position to do this, the G.O.P. needs to gain control of just one more statehouse".¹ At the time, Republicans controlled 33/50 state legislatures.² Today they control 29/50.³

¹ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/republicans-an...

² https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Elections/Legis_Control_0...

³ https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/About-State-Legislatures/...

I think he was a little too far up his butt on this one. Laws are created by people and followed (or not) by people. It doesn't matter what the internal logic of the system is, fascism means dismantling it and replacing it with direct power.

I agree, this is full of the engineer's tendency to treat the law as a system whose rules are inviolable natural extensions of the universe and not things that can be enforced or ignored by humans on a case by case basis. Fun for thought experiments, but in the consensus reality the tendency is much less like designing a magic the gathering deck that carefully exploits the rules and allows you to amass tons of power in a way that your opponents have no choice but to concede to you and much more like just organizing more violence than the people trying to stop you from doing what you want to do.

> fascism means dismantling it and replacing it with direct power.

Fascism is created by people and followed (or not) by people. Every government/system is created by people and followed (or not) by people.

> fascism means dismantling it and replacing it with direct power

Is that true? Why is that the label and not "monarchy" for example?

They are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms, you could have a fascist monarchy as much as you could have a liberal one. Monarchy describes the system of government as ruled by a regent. Fascism describes the attitude of a government (or movement) to conserve an existing social order, or regress to one. This is done with mechanisms of direct power e.g., single-party rule (totalitarianism), military power (military-dictatorship/police state), or via the commands of a single individual (dictatorship).

> you could have a fascist monarchy as much as you could have a liberal one

I think you've transposed fascist and authoritarian. Fascism isn't a synonym for authoritarianism. Fascism and some types of monarchy are both authoritarian.

I think what distinguishes fascism from plain authoritarianism is that, with fascism, a segment of the population is enthusiastically participating.

But that's true for all the socialist nightmares in the 20th century as well.

Also discussed on HN in 2021 (132 comments).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26577062

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