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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as a rules-based, open world. International relations is a state of anarchy and perpetual conflict that only fleetingly resembles peace during those periods where there's a global hegemon that can enforce those "rules". Within a country, those courts are the hegemon.

"Each country having a strong interest in remaining within that system that outweighs any short-term benefits from skirting its responsibility" was the theory prior to 1914 as to why the Great War would never actually happen.

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> There's no such thing as a rules-based, open world.

You're living in one right now. Anarchy need not be synonymous with chaos, especially if disputes and conflicts are relatively unimportant (due to easy defense making 'rights' self-enforcing). The point of courts is then to arbitrate disputes in a publicly-visible way, enforcement is relatively less important.

The only reason courts have authority to arbitrate disputes is because they are backed up by the will and authority of the government, which in turn has a monopoly on the use of force in society.

Now you are bumping on the reason I think the founders put the 2nd amendment in the bill of rights. Govts have to be balanced at some point by the will of the people

The Founders also raised an army to put down a tax revolt in Appalachia—though to their credit they ultimately resolved the dispute through negotiation rather than bloodshed.

Of course, ultimately politics is controlled violence

Of course that’s the reason. Different people use different euphemisms, for the same reason we do now. (“Defend against tyranny.”) But we’re talking about an amendment the founders wrote shortly after they took up arms to overthrow their government. It’s clear what they were talking about: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/second-amendment-hist...

> Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

That was Noah Webster, dictionary guy. He’s clear that the second amendment embodies a personal right to bear arms (so the citizens aren’t disarmed, like in Europe) so they can overthrow the government.

Note, the point is not to overthrow the government in any real sense, but rather to make it incredibly costly and perhaps outright infeasible for the government to actively use state-organized violence against its own people, as dictatorships everywhere are wont to do. Combine an armed populace with a strong tradition of being loyal to the Constitution and its principles first and foremost, even in the context of a standing army or similar, and it's especially clear what the 2nd Amendment was supposed to achieve.

The federal government is light-years ahead of whatever private citizens can get their hands on; 71% of americans are overweight or obese; 30% of americans have some kind of chronic pain.

If a shooting war broke out between the federal government and private citizens, the National Guard would just steamroll right on through them like they were made of thin air.

I think that the best way to exercise the second amendment is to organize militias at the state level, but even then, there still isnt enough cash for proper defenses against the federal government.

> ...the National Guard would just steamroll right on through them...

Even assuming that they could do this (which is plausibly quite wrong, as defense tactics can be very effective), what's the incentive? The people who serve in the National Guard are citizens themselves (who have sworn to uphold the Constitution) and every bit of effective defense makes it that much easier for them to defect while keeping plausible deniability. By contrast, if you've confiscated all the guns away (or bought them back) that dynamic just can't happen, at least not nearly as easily.

The presence of an armed citizenry does make for a huge difference in this scenario. No doubt about it.

Their incentive would be a manufactured one, painting the citizenry as part of some conspiracy/extreme party etc. Just look at how many Republican news outlets continuously portray the other side as extreme and crazy and dangerous.

Just having possession of armed weapons makes absolutely no difference to a modern, well equipped American military force. We’re talking about Armored Personal Carriers and Tanks rolling through cities, all communications being monitored or cut off. The arms may make it hard for the occupying force as there will be more shootouts but retributions will keep most of the populace under control.

The dynamic of Armed militias being a deterrent to a military occupation made sense in the 18th century but don’t make much sense today.

> We’re talking about Armored Personal Carriers and Tanks rolling through cities, all communications being monitored or cut off.

Assad literally used tanks against the civil uprising, and wasn’t able to stop it. (And doing so caused part of the army to defect.) Gaddafi was killed by the National Liberation Army, which initially armed itself by capturing tanks and weapons from military stockpiles.

Was either the Libyan or Syrian populace armed to the teeth? Did the availability of weapons (or the lack thereof) have any impact on what happened?

Comparing Syrian and Libyan military forces to American ones is also a stretch. We’re talking about orders of magnitudes of difference in armaments and intelligence.

I think Ghaddafi's soldiers defected because he ordered them to shoot up a non-violent protest in Benghazi, killing at least 500 unarmed civillians. That's when the protests turned into an armed insurgency, and Ghaddafi's supporters began leaving to join said insurgency.

Look at what happened in Afghanistan. A bunch of Toyota pickup trucks and AK-47s collected on the cold bodies of soviet soldiers is all it took for mujahideens to win the war, despite 20 years of war and trillions of dollars spent.

The main difference in the US would be that militias are even better equipped and better trained. Your tanks and APCs are completely irrelevant; they're useful to capture land, but by definition the US government has no land to capture in the US.

>what's the incentive?

I expect the federal government to invent one. If it worked for Iraqi Freedom, the Spanish American War, Vietnam, maybe it'll work in Wyoming. Otherwise, we already condition our kids to solve conflict through violence, first by beating them when they do things we don't appreciate, and then by sitting them down in front of the TV where they can watch and learn as their only adult role model saves the day by inflicting grievous bodily harm onto other people (superheroes, star wars, fortnite).

Also, war is a lot less personal these days. There are a dozen or so Air National Guard units with access to weaponized drones in the united states. The public didn't even flinch at the onboard camera movies coming back from iraq and afghanistan showing people being blown up in their pickup trucks and SUVs.

Fighting against your own government isn’t like fighting against a foreign power. You have the advantage of asymmetric warfare, and also the advantage that the military will not follow orders to just “steamroll right in through” citizens. Egypt has F-16s, but that didn’t stop the government from getting overthrown when the military decided to stay neutral. Libya had advanced Soviet weaponry, but Gaddafi was overthrown and killed by rebel forces.

Unless you’re willing to level your own country (which for practical reasons even tyrannical dictators are not), fighting armed citizens is nothing like fighting a foreign war. (Also, the track record for advanced nations losing wars in places like Afghanistan with vastly inferior weapons is significant). The Syrian civil war also started with a civil uprising, with armed civilian guerrillas fighting government security forces. Again, there were defections when soldiers refused to fire on citizens, and that led to establishment of the Free Syrian Army, comprised of defectors from Assad’s regime.

Here is how it played out when Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan. The Pakistani military was armed with modern US made aircraft and weapons, launched Operation Searchlight, which killed at least 300,000 Bangladeshis. Civilians took control of arms depots and started shooting back. That precipitated Bangali units of Pakistan’s military to mutiny and start fighting for independence. Military assistance from India helped win the war, but that started many months later. Without being able to take control of those arms depots to begin with, Bangladesh never would have been able to start the war that led to independence. (The American Revolution, by the way, played out more or less the same way. Guerrilla attacks at first, seizing weapons and supplies, creating a more formal militia, and then getting assistance of a foreign power.)

It’s not some crazy NRA fantasy. We have numerous examples of despotic regimes with modern weapons and aircraft being overthrown in civilian uprisings. I come from a country that exists because of such events. The Second Amendment is there to preserve that option. Had Bangladeshis been armed like NRA wingnuts in 1970, hundreds of thousands of innocent people might have been alive today, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women may not have gotten raped by the Pakistani military, etc.

The firearms are not enough. The Mukti Bahini were heavily assisted by members of India's Research and Analysis Wing. India provided weapons, ammunition, logistical support, and many of the refugees who volunteered were recruited and trained on Indian soil. Months before the revolution had even started Indian spies fabricated evidence linking Pakistan to the 1971 Indian Airlines hijacking, which India used to justify a ban of all Pakistani flights across its airspace, preventing Pakistani carriers from resupplying East Pakistan by air. Indira Ghandi herself was basically a foreign ambassador for Bangladesh, traveling the world not only to drum up political support for the cause, but to also to justify India's impending war with Pakistan to the international community. India and the USSR went to bat for Bangladesh at the UNSC, and India was the first U.N. state to give Bangladesh diplomatic recognition. Bangladesh also had many allies among warsaw pact countries such as the GDR (East Germany), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union, during the war. All of whom supported the cause in some way, be that medical services for wounded soldiers, diplomatic/economic support, scholarships for Bangladeshi students or other things.

That's what separates Bangladeshi force from 99% of NRA wingnuts: training, organization, support from foreign allies. Because of these differences, I do not expect a similar international response to occur in the event of a civil war in the U.S. And I think such is ultimately what will make or break an insurgency.

India undoubtedly assisted. But Operation Searchlight began in March 1971. The first civilian response began March through May. Members of the Pakistan military defected in April. The order for the RAW to assist the guerrillas was given in late April. The Warsaw Pact countries declared their support in August. Direct military intervention from India ended the war in December.

Without armed resistance from the people, there would have been nothing to support.

Just like we steamrolled through Iraq right? Easy-peasy

A de-facto monopoly on the use of force is a domain of easily-defended rights within a broader context of anarchy. The two notions are more or less equivalent. Going from that to matters of "legitimacy" or even "authority" is all about taking that state of things as given and building a sensible set of rules and institutions around it.

No, I’m living in a world dominated by American hegemony. International institutions like the UN are valuable but when the other Western countries tried to set up a rules-based international order after WWI it only lasted 20 years.

the reason the league of nations failed (in many, but not all regards) has more to do with the economic and geopolitical situation at the time then it being a non american institution.

the strife of the great depression and it's results on politics was probably it's biggest factor.

literally any institution today is either dominated by, or boycotted by ... yanks!

examples of domination are NATO, WTO, WHO, UN, ... while those that get boycotted are things like ICC, or climate summits (Paris etc). There is no middle-ground for them. It's either "their way or the highway" as they like to say.

The reason these organizations aren't successful is because of the power imbalance in them. They aren't a neutral territory or in any way an inclusive and neutral platform. It is a lie.

To get an idea of how yanks really feel about the rest of the world just look at Trump. He very openly treats foreign leaders literally shoving them out of the way. If you think Trump is alone in his arrogance - he is not. Just look at the wikileaks cables or look at the files that got leaked into archive.org by a misconfigured .htaccess from State Department. These US politicians don't think we are peers. That much is clear of how they speak in their internal comms at embassies and consulates. Most of them don't even know how to read a feckin map.

It's world full of multilateral agreements: World Trade Organization, United Nations, Bern copyrights, Paris Agreement on climate, Geneva Conventions, nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Antarctic treaty, etc.

So how are those multilateral agreements doing, anyway?

The Geneva Conventions are an admirable code of conduct, but they don't in any meaningful way define international relations, since at least one belligerent in virtually every armed conflict since and including the Second World War has flagrantly flouted them. Countries that are decent enough to follow the Geneva Conventions don't get into wars with each other anyway. The Berne Convention similarly doesn't deter developing countries that pirate IP and shrug it off.

How did the UN work out in Rwanda? Why is it that the UN Human Rights Council typically contains most of the worst human rights abusers in the world? The UN can be a useful tool for addressing certain situations, but that typically only happens when someone--usually the US--makes a concerted effort of forcing the issue, as one of our most underrated presidents did in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Left on its own devices, it doesn't work.

The rest of the stuff likewise relies upon the US to make it work. The Paris Agreement is fundamentally untenable now that the US has withdrawn; not only does the US produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, but they also provide the needed economic counterweight to push other non-compliant countries like China into compliance. And I don't think the Paris Agreement is the only instance of this.

Not to mention the WTO taking serious damage with the US imposing trade sanctions whenever if feels like it. It's not impossible that the entire system would fall apart if the current US hostility turns out to be more than a four year aberration. I wouldn't be sad to see the Berne Convention go, at least, but I'm not sure what state the world will be in by that point.

The Paris Agreement proves OP’s point. The US left the agreement and now the agreement is worthless. Who is going to bully China into compliance? If the rest of the countries meet their climate targets does it doesn’t even matter. Pebble in a lake.

How about the Iran deal? The US needs to be bullied into compliance and yet noone is up to the task.

Except the U.S. does not recognize the ICC and has a law to invade the Netherlands at will, were any of its numerous war criminals ever prosecuted.

There's no global government so there's no global court. The global/international level is considered anarchy.

Anarchy means no ruler, not no rules.

There are no "rules" on the international stage. There is no way to impose any rules on a sovereign state. As such, what you perceive as "rules" are merely the lowest energy states that will change when the sovereign state decides that it doesn't want to abide by them anymore, and there's not a single thing anyone can do about that short of imposing sanctions or declaring a war. "International law" is a fictional construct, since there can't be any enforcement.

The concept is about the lack of a governing body that can enforce "rules". By definition "rules" (as in laws) cannot exist without a ruler (as in one who can enforce laws).

Someone who enforces rules doesn't need to be a ruler; two parties could agree on mutually acceptable rules with a designated external enforcer/arbiter. This is actually how Israel was ruled in time of the Book of Judges (although the unfortunate story there is it didn't work out so they ended up with a king). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritarchy

No ruler means no rules.

Doesn’t have to be, just have to disarm the world powers and create a one world government. I’m sure everyone will be fine with that.

Exactly. Rules must always be enforced by some higher authority. Because the highest functional units of governance are nations, this means that there will always have to be some "most powerful" nation enforcing order.

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