Many people here are talking about how more powerful people are also corrupt and are getting away with it. All corruption is bad. This soldier put the life of everyone on the mission in danger by doing this.
This is true, just like "all lives matter" is true, and it misses the point in the exact same way.
Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
On top of the harm the powerful people inflict directly through their corrupt actions, there's a secondary effect on the society at large. Unlike trickle-down economics, trickle-down corruption is a real thing. People see those in power get away with corruption and say "Why should I do the right thing?"
Of course, the usual answer from those in power ends up being "because we have the power to punish you and you don't have the power to punish us". And that's how you end up with the arrest and prosecution of a US soldier on the same 5 counts that the top politicians and their cronies are getting away with on a daily basis, aided by the president himself.
> Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice" when the reason where not bringing war criminals to justice isn't for lack of concern, it's just that we have no coercive power.
Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
It most definitely isn't. At no point did anyone in this discussion say "we shouldn't worry about small time corruption". In fact, I explicitly said the opposite. And then I highlighted it after you essentially accused me of doing so, as you're doing again.
> Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
No, it's not. No one is "creating" an "urgency chain". Justice isn't binary. Things can be more or less just, they're not either perfectly just or completely unjust with nothing in between. Similarly, different people have different levels of impact. That's the definition of power in this context: the level of impact your actions have. No one is "creating" these concepts out of thin air.
What is happening here is that people are complaining about injustice and other people -- like you and the person I initially replied to -- are trying to delegitimize those complaints by stating that "all corruption is bad".
Let me repeat this, in case it got lost despite earlier repetitions: yes, we all know that "all corruption is bad". Just like we all know that "all lives matter", but pointing out that banality only got popular after the "black lives matter" slogan surfaced in response to a systemic injustice against African Americans.
You're doing the same kind of thing here.
> Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
On the contrary. If you always give up on caring because you don't have coercive power, you will never rectify injustices caused by imbalance of coercive power.
What ? we SHOULD ABSOLUTELY create an urgency chain
40 billion of corruption is way more corrupt than 400k.
And what’s more is penalizing the 400k without penalizing the 400b means the people getting the 400b look better.
It's not that we "don't choose to"... We obviously want to, but we can't, because there is an inherent principal-agent problem that exists with high-level corruption.
Again, it's like saying "let's not take the time to charge someone with manslaughter, because there are people out there who have committed war crimes that have killed tens of thousands of people." We all want to bring the war-criminals to justices, but we can't, so it's moot.
We should spend our resources on law enforcement where we can. Otherwise it's a race to the bottom, because with justice, perfect quickly becomes the enemy of good.
Inequality codified into the law, literal separate rules, is worse still.
> prosecutors said Van Dyke bet more than $33,000 on Polymarket between December 27, 2025, and January 2, 2026, that Maduro would soon be out of office and that U.S. forces would soon enter Venezuela
Maduro was taken on January 3.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-soldier-charged-...
When someone bets 32k that a political opponent of the US is going to be kidnapped I think its fair to say some will assume it was placed by an insider.
You also have to think about leaning information: if people do this, bodyguards around the world are going to monitor betting markets looking for unexplained changes. The military doesn’t like anything which can leak timing information since that increases the risk of a mission failing.
What would be far larger source of risk is if they bet _against_ the operation and then personally sabotaged it. That's far more understandable but it's not what happened here.
It apparently and sadly needs to be said on Hacker News, I'm not defending him, and he should be punished, but I genuinely can't apprehend the risk assessment logic here.
But also don’t forget that this guy’s trades are a drop in the ocean compared to the rest of the likely insider trading that’s visible in the Polymarket logs. (Eg on timing of Iran attacks, Trump tariff announcements, etc)
It's a short step from the Congress people taking advantage of foreknowledge, vs them MAKING self advantageous opportunities. And it's not guaranteed their "making" is in the public interest.
This soldier deserves his punishment. I just wish they would enforce these laws on our congressmen.
In all decent democracies elected politicians have immunity or similar safeguards, since the separation of powers (as theorized by Montesquieu in the middle of illuminism) which represents the foundation of democracy demands that both the legislative and executive power be separated from the judicial one.
“Making the politicians pay for their crimes” is often just a populist argument, while there are ways to incriminate them, expecting that they can be prosecuted like us normal citizens is not compatible with democracy.
You may not like what I said but I said it. Go read the original works by Montesquieu, he understood it first.
This is a classic “who will guard the guards themselves?” dilemma.
These are just the (little) costs of democracy. If you aren’t ready to pay them, you haven’t really considered the alternatives.