[aric]

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.