[vertex-four]

The Constitution is a piece of paper, and might influence certain parts of Government to some degree, the same as any other piece of paper. But the beliefs of the people are what really matters. And if the people don't actually entirely agree with the Constitution to the point that they're willing to fight for it and drag their representatives out of Government over it, it's as useless as any other piece of paper.

[micaksica]

+1. Nice philosophies and platitudes are not power, and it does otherwise smart people a disservice to their rationality to confuse the two.

A piece of paper and its surrounding political philosophy may empowering in theory but is decidedly not in practice. At the end of it all, it is the threat of adverse action, hopefully through re-election or worst-case through violence, that keeps power in check. The majority is too unwilling or too ignorant to oust those that are given the power to strictly enforce the philosophy, and thus the Constitution is emasculated.

[lettergram]

Have you ever tried to get a group of people to protest anything? Like seriously, the black lives matter are more effective, than people regarding the NSA, privacy, or encryption. Even though some of the stuff we know about the government is WAY scarier.

[bdavisx]

Not to downplay the NSA issues -- but it's a lot scarier for a black/brown person to realize their life can be ended when they get stopped for having a tail light out.

[lettergram]

I do agree that people will think that way, but it's actually not scarier. Giving the government the power it has, implies the government can basically do what ever it want. It has secret courts, secret arrests, and secret police. That is way more horrifying than the very small risk of being shot - which the numbers don't even fully support that it's getting worse, unjustified, or even preventable. I recommend the Through the Wormhole episode: are we all bigots?).

That being said, I do think we whould always be wary of police and generally question the government. It's important we keep into perspective what's actually a threat and whats just unfortunate. Both should be improved, but one (the NSA) can prevent any sort of improvement, the police shooting rate seems to be more of an over reaction and mistake that almost everyone agrees should be fixed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a...

http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/through-the-wormhole/...

[optimuspaul]

I don't think you can say what is scarier for another person.

[matt_wulfeck]

What's the difference than someone saying it is scarier? This reasoning "only people who are X can say what it's like to be X" makes no logical sense.

[vertex-four]

"Needles are scary."

Well, actually... no, I don't find needles scary.

To be scared is an emotional response, and you can't really tell pother people what their emotions are.

[kbenson]

Yes. As these things go, every day existential threats generally trump threats to our liberty. I can't fault anyone for that.

[vertex-four]

The issue is more that there's an incredible amount of people who just don't care about the Constitution. Or pretty much anything else that isn't affecting them in a really direct way right that moment in time.

And so, in giving a democratic Government ridiculous amounts of power, we give it power to harm pretty much any minority it chooses, so long as it doesn't piss off too many other people.

[flubert]

I think you'll enjoy: The Myth of the Rule of Law...

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

[chx]

While it's great to harp on the inconsistency of the body of law, the importance of rule of law is how powerful people equally get prosecuted and sentenced and cases are not determined by who can pay a bigger bribe to the judge. Both happen in the negative in, say, Hungary.

[filoeleven]

> the importance of rule of law is how powerful people equally get prosecuted and sentenced and cases are not determined by who can pay a bigger bribe to the judge

But the law is not equally applied in the US, though it's more often here a case of being powerful than being rich. See how General Petraeus was treated (for retaining eight notebooks full of "highly sensitive information" and giving them to his biographer/paramour) compared to Stephen Kim (who discussed one classified report about North Korea with a reporter): the former was fined, the latter was jailed.[0]

Now, Kim has since been released due to the outcry over the disparity of the sentences, so in this case the subversion of the rule of law coupled with public pressure ended up working out. But that is not an inspiring system. It did little for instance to help Jeffrey Sterling[1] (charged with espionage, in part for doing something that sounds a lot like what Hillary Clinton did with her emails).

This is to say nothing of things that have gone the other way, such as a complete lack of prosecution for those behind the 2008 financial crisis, retroactive telecom immunity, etc. The message that this sends is, "The rule of law applies to you unless you are close enough or important enough to whoever is in power." Which is not really the rule of law at all.

[0]https://theintercept.com/2015/03/03/petraeus-plea-deal-revea...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Alexander_Sterling#Con...

[alasdair_]

Think of essentially any major US-based scandal in the last twenty years involving extremely powerful individuals (presidents, billionaires etc.). I think it is highly likely that in each case, the most powerful people managed to avoid prosecution and sentencing unless the people they harmed were even more powerful than themselves.

More importantly, these powerful people effectively write the laws themselves - why break a law when you can simply cause whatever action you wish to take to become legal?

Torturing prisoners? Crashing the world's financial system? Spying on millions of Americans without any kind of warrant? Lying about the spying to congress? All no problem! Just make up a law and get it passed, or if you forgot to do that, get retroactive immunity granted or just ask the President to pardon you directly.

The only thing that matters is how much power (influence, force, money etc.) you can bring to bear and who your opponents are. Law is irrelevant. To put it in plainer terms: people who own nuclear weapons don't have to pay their parking tickets.

[vertex-four]

I've read over that, and while I found the majority of the article interesting, I found the conclusion jarring. Especially as a true Marxist would agree with many of the ideas throughout the article, but come to an entirely different conclusion - that the solution to law being imposed on society isn't to allow people to choose which entity they'll allow to impose on them, but to allow society to directly create its own order.

Of course, just as you might look like the article's Socrates for suggesting free markets of law, you'd look even more like him for suggesting that maybe some issues are best resolved through means other than markets or monopolies.