[pavlov]

The Nobel Prize in all fields has become an award for lifetime achievement, even though the wording of Nobel's will could also be interpreted as meaning that it should be awarded for work that had the greatest impact during the preceding year.

[simonh]

I don't know, but I suspect the interpretation is that the impact should be during the preceding year, the wording doesn't say the work has to occur in the preceding year. So arguably the work could have been decades ago, but if the impact has only recently become apparent that counts.

I think that's fine. Often it's not really possible to assess the impact of a contribution until long after, it takes a lot of context to be able to do that.

[justonceokay]

I don’t think we should consider too strictly the intention of someone who has been dead for 130 years.

[kzrdude]

Strangely enough though, there is a conflict around the foundation managing Hilma af Klint's art collection and they are now trying to change how the works are displayed and loaned based on stricter interpretations of her words.

[stevenwoo]

This is a sensible and reasonable proposition, which is ironic considering the USA is run based on interpretations of intentions of slave owners or those copacetic with slavery who have been dead for almost twice as long.

[zeroonetwothree]

France has had something like 16 constitutions since 1791. I think I’ll take the US model.

[rzzzt]

Which has 27 merged PRs in its git repository.

[simonh]

Which is basically a cut-and-paste of the British constitutional model of the 1780s, but with an elected King George III and upper house. Presidents are just elected kings. The modern parliamentary model is much better.

[rsynnott]

This is a pretty common model for countries which became independent of the UK; Ireland did more or less the same copy-paste job, but in the 1920s, so ended up with a _way_ weaker president than in the US model (the Irish presidency is more or less a standin for a constitutional monarch, with ~no real powers) and upper house, and stronger lower house.

[nautilius]

Sure, stick to the Model T, why not. It had wheels and seats, so there's that.

[pavlov]

Conveniently those interpretations can be whatever suits the current lifetime-appointed guardians of the sacred legal text. It helps that the text is old and originally ambiguous.

When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he crafted a French constitution that he wanted to be “short and obscure”, the better to enable his authoritarian power. The United States has ended in the same place.

[reliabilityguy]

> When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he crafted a French constitution that he wanted to be “short and obscure”, the better to enable his authoritarian power. The United States has ended in the same place.

What is “obscure” in the US constitution?

The first amendment is the one thing that makes it impossible for authoritarian US to be reality.

[watwut]

Authoritarian US is becoming the reality right now and the first amendment provides exactly zero protection. We are watching US constitution collapse right now.

Second, its meaning IS obscure. It get reinterpreted and modified by supreme court to unrecognizable degree. The words dont mean what they used to mean back then, because court used some alternative history to achieve their political goal. It is also not like the court was grounded in contemporary reality when making those decisions and explaining them.

Most of constitutional protections are weak. There is no recourse if your rights are broken, only ever increasing maze of special conditions and requirements you need to fill if you want those protections to apply.