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Comment by beremaki | Hacker News Reader

Rule of law is when the state's power is effectively limited by law.

Rule of law is not about order nor safety

Rule of law is when laws as written by legislators are executed by the government as written and, when appropriate, judged by the judiciary as written, and at each step the words as written supersede the whims and feelings of the people involved. It doesn't imply that the state can't do anything meaningful because it's so hamstrung.

Statements like "the US does not have the rule of law" are laughable Reddit-tier comments that just make me sad for the current state of HN.

Yeah and the US doesn't currently have that.

When the president can just pick the judges he wants and then have them change laws that have existed for decades on a whim, any kind of meaningful rule of law is absent.

Reddit-tier comment, says the guy whos never had his face smashed into the hood of a car by a sheriff deputy. We got something in the US and it often wears robes and badges, but it's not law written by legislatures.

The president and his cronies are openly immune to any recourse from the law at the moment. They are doing widespread and overt corruption and insider trading on a daily basis on scales that have never been seen in human history before. There is not any attempt at stopping that by any organ of government.

Separately, internal security forces have been killing citizens without any cause nor investigation after the fact, in contravention to all of the supposed "rights" those citizens were once said to have.

These are the things the rule of law is about. It is meant to be a higher power than any individual, no matter their position.

The U.S. does not have the rule of law any longer. It's best to look the truth in the face rather than hide from it.

Mostly you should assess rule of law by threat to you and people you know and not by what it seems like other people are able to get away with.

Yes, a big part of the idea is that laws are meant to also apply to the powerful, but it's difficult to accurately assess situations that are far away from you.

First they came for those that were far away from me and I did not speak out because… I didn’t know them?

The specific complaint of the poster seems to be that certain people are NOT being "come for".

What a nonsensical statement. From a distance it’s pretty clear that there is no rule of law anymore in the USA. Yes, it’s partially functioning, but that’s not the rule.

So I can go out and kill my neighbor without having to worry about consequences, then? I mean, just say the word: he's been pissing me off recently.

I dunno. How rich are you ? And do you happen to play college football ? That would help.

And do you drive a car? Car owners get a (relative) free pass because "accidents happen".

Do you work for ICE?

If you're a cop, ICE agent, your neighbour is black, you're a US diplomat's wife (one of which murdered a young man here in the UK and ran away with no consequence, and the American state refused to send her murdering arse back), or you have enough money, by the looks of it you could do that without consequence.

I’m more inclined to agree with you, but the replies to this did strike me as darkly funny. These exceptions for the chosen in-group are some of the hallmarks of fascism, and this administration has leveraged several other popular tropes as well—fetishizing Greek/Roman mythologies, hobbling academia and the press, ethnic cleansing, Christian Nationalism, revisionist history, idolatry, eugenics, etc.. Fascism is a term I would have called absurdly exaggerated just a few years ago, but to the extent that the President and his administration are the leaders in both policy and diplomacy, I think it’s probably fair to level a judgement that their behavior is the contemporary set standard for the United States. This is a fascist country right now.

But I agree with you that nuance-free oversimplifications are likely unhelpful in any meaningful discussion.

These things don’t usually happen overnight, and for the vast majority of the public it will never be directly visible. It’s not like someone flips a “Anti-Antifa” switch and a bunch of ultra-starched uniformed troops start goose-stepping through Toledo. It’s a developing series of dynamic events, many of them will seem rational, justified even, but the result is concentrated executive power, a toothless legislature, a complicit judiciary, and a pliant mainstream press. I’m sure there are lots of people who will recognize these for what they are: an alarming number of dominoes falling towards a totalitarian dictatorship.

However the United States is a big, complex beast of a country, and the judiciary has not been fully captured, and neither has the legislature. All we need to do to stop this creeping authoritarianism is show up in-force and vote overwhelmingly against it this November. They will obviously try to confuse the issue with any close calls, and use such opportunities to assert dominion over local/state governments. We cannot let that happen. The best way to avoid such a scenario is to show up strong enough to make the results beyond question. That’s the ultimate test that we are still a nation of laws, and I am cautiously optimistic.

you can eat children alive and get away with it if you belong to the élite

What? No. Rule of Law should be assessed by how well the law applies to everybody. The wealthy often get away with serious law breaking in the US, the poor are hammered down with the law over petty crimes. That is defying the Rule of Law any way you try to look at it. The whole point of The Rule of Law is to prevent unfair application of the law to benefit the few over the many.

No, momentary abuses of power do not mean the US has no rule of law. The law is what put Trump in office in the first place.

If you aren’t glued to the news and doomscrolling you wouldn’t know anything about Trump and ICE. Day to day for nearly everyone is exactly the same rule of law where you can call police for a murder and roving gangs can’t setup shakedown checkpoints.

Define rule.

Excuse me. The law(14th Amendment section 3 specifically) clearly prohibited Trump from being eligible for federal office. That the Supreme Court abrograted state's rights to run elections free of federal interference, not to mention the lack of recusal given the blatant conflicts of interest, is a separate matter altogether.

That’s how the US got here in the first place. Not much of what the president and his friends and family are new to the US, now its more daring and freely talked about and normalized, like in a state where there’s no rule of law. You don’t need to be glued to doomscrolling to learn that a government is turning laws to punish terrorists inwards but you need to be glued to something to know its been in the making for over 20 years.

> Day to day for nearly everyone is exactly the same rule of law where you can call police for a murder and roving gangs can’t setup shakedown checkpoints.

Is that your threshold for "rule of law"? And I'm sorry, but what separates ICE from a roving gang setting up shakedown checkpoints, and executing at point blank range with no repercussions dissenters?

> If you aren’t glued to the news and doomscrolling you wouldn’t know anything about Trump and ICE.

This is such an outrageously privileged and out-of-touch statement. Maybe YOU wouldn't know about Trump and ICE if you didn't read the news, but that's your personal microcosm. Please be more mindful about damage and harm done when you're ascribing your personal worldview onto others' actual reality.

> The president and his cronies are openly immune to any recourse from the law at the moment.

How do you reconcile that proposition with the observable reality of the courts routinely blocking the current administration's excesses?

It takes months or years for courts to intervene and even then they often set aside rulings because they expect appeals. All the while the abuses continue. How many years do you suppose we'll have to wait to see the Trump family subject to tax law?

> It takes months or years for courts to intervene and even then they often set aside rulings because they expect appeals.

Interesting. Again, how do you reconcile that theory with the with the large number of court cases involving Trump's specific actions that managed to make it all the way up to the Supreme Court, leading to many clear rulings against Trump, all within the first year and a half of his current term?

Why can a single person do so much damage, if only temporarily? Are you in a monarchy or something?

A year and a half is a long time to cause a lot of harm. Way, way too long.

Ruling against someone who's immune from repercussions does nothing. Especially when they've already done the thing.

Like demolish a whole wing of the White House without any review or control. Starting a wa... sorry. Special Military Operation unilaterally etc.

All illegal but whatchagonnado when they already did it?

U.S. democracy is still very strong and freedoms are protected, when compared with with other superpowers like China, Russia. My personal metric for comparison is: in those countries if you would make public jokes about the leader of the country to a large audience, at best you would end in prison, at worst you and your family would be death.

Dictators expect that people fear them, they control by fear and terror. If you can make jokes about leaders you show that you don't fear them, you show that they don't control you.

But the increase in corruption in US goverment indicates slow progress towards authoritarianism. This can be slow process, it can take years or decades, as was seen with Hitler and Stalin.

ICE excessive force use, encouraged by Trump and welcomed in large part of US population, could be the next step. This piece by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller describes the progression of authoritarianism:

    First they came for the Communists
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a Communist

    Then they came for the Socialists
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a Socialist

    Then they came for the trade unionists
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a trade unionist

    Then they came for the Jews
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a Jew

    Then they came for me
    And there was no one left
    To speak out for me

Kirk?

Does anyone remember when you posted on a place like Something Awful or Facepunch getting banned for a day for saying something so fucking stupid you needed to learn a lesson? No? Anyone?

The almighty 10bux. I do indeed.

The quality of the posts in Reddit grew worse and worse. To the point that I stopped visiting it frequently and my use of hacker news grew and grew. Exactly the same thing is happening to hacker news. I guess as it's reverting to the mean.

There's still reasonable civil debate here. But recently I was surprised to be called a fascist for pointing out the Nazis were national socialists. The poster included comments like "don't engage with this person he's obviously x y and z." I'm starting to see this kind of nonsense more and more on hacker news.

Eternal September comes for us all.

Well I had to Google that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Amazing!

have you ever heard about "Epstein"?

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