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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

If you throw away the rules, the rules stop applying to everyone, not just the revolutionaries.

The rule of law is not a tool of oppression; it's a check on the people with power and guns.

The revolutionaries do not have the power. So throwing away the legal system is far, far more likely to just lead to an unchecked re-entrenchment of whoever is in charge, not a new system.

If things are truly, truly catastrophic, maybe that's a risk you're willing to take. But since the average American is not, in fact, dying in the streets, most really want to continue living their lives in relative prosperity and relative freedom.

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Right, which is why modern revolutionaries favor "direct action" against an unfair system -- in addition to protests, this includes things like intentionally turning a blind eye to shoplifters (aka "no snitching"), stealing from your employer, or actively sabotaging their plans. It's easy to disguise as incompetence or laziness because there's no explicit coordination.

We all have to work to eat, but nothing says people legally have to do a good job in most positions -- and it's easy to get away with if you can talk a good game. The idea is that because the rules aren't enforced against the people at the top, why should the people at the bottom help enforce them against their peers? If the police are a tool of the oppressive state, why would you help them in any way? If you're systemically oppressed, why would you not be dishonest and game the system in every way you could?

You are literally advocating for at-will employment here, which says noone cares if you're genuinely or politically incompetent and will be fired all the same.

You have the causality reversed -- at-will employment is the norm in the US because union-busting prevents collective bargaining. Political incompetence is the result of this situation, not the cause of it.

Corporate leaders are generally on negotiated contracts that protect them in the event of genuine incompetence (the "golden parachute"), which reduces the motivation for political incompetence. Regular workers and middle management rarely get that luxury.

For causality to be reversed unions and collective bargaining would have had to exist and be the norm prior to at-will employment. More like unions and collective bargaining were successfully discredited by engaging in excesses of their own - some along the lines you advocated

Collective bargaining works just fine in countries that protect it. I'm way more ok with the excesses being spread among multitudes of workers than having those "excesses" concentrated in the bonuses of executives -- which is the situation we have today.

Fixing this requires having an honest discussion about how we distribute wealth between workers and owners. But it's not surprising the people who currently take the lion's share are actively preventing that conversation from happening.

None of this is particularly radical, and it's basically what Bernie Sanders is running on. His positions are solidly center-right by European standards, so it's not like he's proposing some radical thought experiment.

Pretty sure Bernie Sanders is not running on the platform of encouraging shoplifting or sabotaging your workplace.

He’s not; but the far left does. Bernie isn’t remotely far left. He’s advocating for solutions within the existing framework of capitalism, the far left wants anarcho-communism (the same way the far right wants anarcho-capitalism). That’s not gonna happen, so extremists on both sides say fuck your employer and steal.

Or the revolutionaries take the power and then behead the president, then the 1%, then whoever disagree with them, then whoever think that the beheading is out of control and then some random people that is not nice enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

I think that's what GP meant about "Americans aren't dying in the streets" -- the French lower class were. Their revolution was about survival, which made it quite popular among the poor.

One thing you seem to have overlooked is that the rules have already stopped applying to those in power. CEOs make murderous mistakes and leave a company with millions. Police regularly kill innocent people in the street (and their homes!) and walk away scot free. Politicians are completely unaccountable and can flaunt the law with no regard. I’m struggling to see how things would be any different in a bottom’s-up revolution.

By the way, I don’t believe such an action is the right way to make change, I just think that it’s a very privileged position to take that most people have something to lose by the demolition of our current institutions.

Which is why I advocate public intoxication and discussion of politics. It’s beneath the sort I oppose and would benefit the sort I support taking action.

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