Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You're effectively saying "[The rule of law] is shit", which as the article notes, might also result in the new Trump administration refusing to defend this administrative action (which would be legitimate unlike the cases where the executive of a government refuses to defend a law passed by the legislature in front of the court system (just to lay out our general pattern of 3-4 branches of government (4 when you count the "administrative state"))).

Or more simply, the ends do not justify the means, even if, as you point out and I agree in principle, the ends in this case are potentially good.

The prospect of Trump in power in what's arguably no longer a republic run under the Rule of Law has gotten a lot of people to reconsider their position on this (and I share a concern, despite or perhaps even more because I voted for him), and I'll close with the classic Man of All Seasons quote:

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

No, that would be a strawman argument. Whatever legal principles are at stake here do not rise to a repudiation of law itself.

All I heard was strawman and no actual arguments. Even I can do that.

Well, I perceive that SubiculumCode is among other things arguing that this legal procedural issue, and the possibility that the administrative rule making did not follow the law, something we ought to accept as legit given that Obama nominated the judge and the hurdle to get a preliminary injunction is very high, as Sacho abily discusses in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13028904, "is shit".

I certainly could have gotten his intent wrong, but for now his words have to stand as written, and the issue of the Rule of Law is both entirely relevant to this case and to current events in the US.

Even if they were suggesting that the legal process in question was flawed, that would also not be equivalent to repudiating the rule of law. You may have an axe to grind on that topic, and I am sure that it's a wonderful rejoinder to a wide variety of political dissent. It is a strawman argument however you slice it. If questioning legal processes amounted to an attack on law, then all lawyers would be anarchists, and Congress would be...a pathology, perhaps. So far, there are few issues before the American public in which anyone is claimed or claiming to be above the rule of law, and it has precisely nothing to do with this case.

The more charitable interpretation of SubiculumCode's words, and the one that does not need to assume facts not in evidence, would be that "This is shit" should be taken to mean, "This is terrible news". Which would either way be a normal human reaction, and a valid opinion, despite your attempts to portray otherwise.

Indeed it is terrible news: Poverty is rough.

To be precise, the law and regulations were appropriate decades ago, when it protected workers, but in its current form, oppressed them into long underpaid, non-livable, labor. In my view, the Obama administration change in regulation, now blocked, was restoring the original effects and outcomes of those laws and regulations, and probably as originally intended by those whom passed it.

I certainly was not arguing that. I mean that the judge fucked Christmas up for a bunch of poor folk by blocking a well deserved change in regulation that no longer served its original intent in protecting laborers.

I mean that the judge fucked Christmas up for a bunch of poor folk by blocking a well deserved change in regulation that no longer served its original intent in protecting laborers.

All I can say is that I'm now quite certain I wasn't misreading the narrow part of the intent of your words that I initially commented on.

"You're effectively saying "[The rule of law] is shit", ..."

That is too much of a reach. There's a considerable distance between criticism of a law (or the lack of one) and of the rule of law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com