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Comment by reverius42 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of it is! We live in lawlessness (for those at the top) in the US.

Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."

It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.

When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.

There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.

All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.

I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget.

The US has long been a bit of a dual system, with the world-leading and technology and wealth coexisting with a lot of poverty, violence, and discrimination; but this seems to be the point at which it becomes fully Latin American.

Could be considered "imperial rebound", from all the School of the Americas decades in which the US made Latin America more violent, right-wing, and less democratic for its own purposes, culminating in the invasion of Venezuela. I'm sure they'd have started on Cuba by now if Iran had gone as planned.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)

This is fantastically interesting, thanks!

Today, I learned.

We are _in_ the weird stage. The President is someone who has realised the nonsense, because people around him for his whole life have enabled and facilitated the nonsense in order to earn some of his dad's money. And now, instead of his dad's money backing him, he has the US' money, he's got a whole new cabal of enablers and facilitators, and a line as long as roughly 30% of the US population awaiting to fill any role they could get to feed off that fat pipe.

But, yes, when this filters down, and it has started, there's going to need to be a significant amount of legislative strength shown in order to stop the wall from collapsing entirely.

We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely.

I fear I do not believe the US has that legislative strength, nor the will to build it. I want to believe that justice is still possible, but big E's island, and the lack of any justice has crushed any optimism out of my soul.

I do not see how a prosperous future is possible for my family, so long as that future is in the US.

'The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going "but a dog can't play basketball!" while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over' -@Arr

I love that analogy. Controlled opposition. A lack of action is the point.

The Democrats are not controlled opposition; they do not secretly want the MAGA agenda and only pretend to oppose it. They simply don't have any power to stop it and are really bad at getting power to stop it.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

The MAGA agenda is just a tiny sliver of what the government actually does (albeit, a particularly culturally obnoxious sliver). On most economic and foreign policy the two parties are in emphatic agreement. The Democratic Party mostly exists to keep itself in power regardless of the state of the country—in this sense, it is emphatically controlled opposition.

If they were effective opposition, half the party would be in prison right now.

Won’t matter as long as people have Netflix and Chipotle

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