Comment by aric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aric | Hacker News Reader

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I prefer that rhetoric as follows.

'Anyone who supports the war on drugs has abandoned liberty and freedom.'

Terms like "the rule of law" encourage a mentality that's unempathetic and unconcerned with many forms of tyranny and suffering. It encourages complicit behavior through blind allegiance and rhetoric. That allegiance will probably remain until the faithful are personally affected and destroyed by the rule of law they so thought they knew.

The rule of law is a process that should be (and usually isn't) viewed as deserving of great distrust, fear, and delicacy rather than of great admiration and worship. The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law. The United States' Bill of Rights is not enough. Legitimacy doesn't fear it. Meaning is created. Meaning overrides meaning. Freedom and free speech may be eternal flames in the hearts of free minds. I hope that will always be so. Legitimacy, meanwhile, paves a path with new terms while nationalists are left clinging to the rule of law.

> The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law.

I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to.

Conflating secret law with law being the basis of our large scale interactions doesn't make for a strong argument, unless you can show that one necessitates the other.

Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it.

I'm curious what you'd propose as a stable large scale social structure that doesn't fundamentally depend on us establishing a mutual rulebook that we all agree to play by. I don't mean that sarcastically, I honestly want you to suggest one.

Talking about the systemically brutal consequences of people who have blind allegiance to the rule of law is not equivalent to inferring that humanitarian law (e.g. Bill of Rights) shouldn't exist. It's not equivalent to saying law isn't useful. You're conflating or projecting these sentiments. Unfortunately, conflation like that is a common consequence of nationalism. People who find faults are often derided or willfully misinterpreted. I'm not accusing you of this. It's just a point.

> "I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to."

Those societies didn't have "secret" police. They had police who operated (sometimes in secret) legally. Every nation is as fueled by law as the next group seeking legitimacy. This shouldn't be a point of contention. No one's conflating "secret law" with "law." In a land where "secret law" becomes increasingly legitimate, it becomes a fool's errand to stress over shallow semantics, as dire reality takes shape (e.g. a prison, surveillance, military economy legitimately escalating).

> "Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it."

Allegiance to "rule of law" is entirely nationalistic in this context of nations. I'm not talking about the 'laws' of physics. The violence that inherently serves as the foundation of all national laws isn't magic. Zeus and his jack-booted thugs aren't appearing out of the sky to magically enforce words written on paper. Maybe you're trying to say that one person's interpretation of a nation will vary from another person's interpretation and, therefore, this means that one particular nationalist is not the same as another particular nationalist in the same nation. That's true. Yet, it doesn't mean much. It's usually a source of delusion ultimately.

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