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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

The USA is moving away from concepts like 'laws' and 'illegal' and more towards a system based on vibes and bribes.

"Vibes and bribes" is such a wonderfully apt description of our current regime.

Hey now, the system of “checks” and “balances” is still holding up - the checks clear, and the balances go up.

Laws and morality have always been bendable. It’s just that doing the bending requires a certain competence that was somehow lost.

It used to be they had enough shame to try to cover it up. That certainly is in the past!

I hate these free floating quotes and sayings, but maybe the “malice vs. incompetence attribution” idea applies here.

‘sufficiently persistent incompetence is indistinguishable from malice’? or did you mean a different quote?

It’s always been a case of ‘if they can’t catch you/enforce it, it didn’t happen’.

It’s absurdly blatant now, however, and backlash is likely to be pretty crazy in 5ish-10ish years once it’s impacted enough people.

By then the opposition will have been renditioned to black holes or killed.

The current opposition maybe. No empire/government/strongman lasts forever.

Russia has been a basket case for the better part of the last 1,000 years.

History sucked for a very long time. It is not a natural law that things will just get better.

Sure, but it is a natural law that the specific strongman in charge dies eventually. So far at least.

Every tsar was different, Stalin and Lenin had their own flavors, etc.

Sure it may suck, but the flavor does change? And that is something!

Not if the democrats can help it