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Comment by wand3r | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is something more people really need to take to heart. As Americans are seeing, a lot of rules are unenforceable and really came down to norms and pressure. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few years and it is roughly encapsulated in this tweet I saw a while back.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that.

This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. High trust societies with less corruption and a strong justice system try to limit these circumstances.

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> When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that.

I'm imagining that IQ bell curve meme, just with you at different ages.

> This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice.

You raise the standard for justice to perfection. There also has never been perfect corruption and anarchy.

> Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law.

That's like saying night has always superceded day. Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history. That means for the great bulk of US history, it was different. Why doesn't 99% of US history outweigh the 1% (picking numbers very loosely) in determining what is somehow inevitable to you.

In fact, law is universal among human cultures. We are naturally social and live in groups with rules. Those that violate rules are generally outcasts.

But the most fundamental and significant error is attributing the current situation to some unavoidable system instead of the actions of people, especially those that stand aside and allow these things to happen. Many of them stand aside because they are told - probably messaging ultimately from the lawbreakers - that they are powerless and should despair.

The law wasn't in the state that you ascribe to it for the other 99% of its history if you were, say, African-American. Other less-extremely obvious examples also abound.

Liberal democracy with sometimes-fair application of it is the aberration.

By that reasoning any advance is an aberration and thus hopeless, but we've had liberal democracy for a long time. Again, certainly not perfect.

Advance or regression is not the way you probably want to look at it. There isn't a lot of evidence for historical inevitability.

And no, we have not been a liberal democracy for 'a long time'. We have been an illiberal democracy with very limited suffrage and distribution of rights for a very long time.

> There isn't a lot of evidence for historical inevitability.

You're the one arguing for that; I'm saying it's up to us whether we advance or go backward. Generations before us have moved us forward, so it's definitely very possible.

The definitions are just a distraction.

> Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history.

i dont?

this is how the US has always been. its who americans are. the odd time was the obama years

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