Comment by maeil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maeil | Hacker News Reader

The assumption here I'm seeing by some of the naysayers that US Law in 2025 is a good arbiter of ethics, morality or justness is something I'd like to touch on.

I wonder if those people also believe this to have been the case before Civil Rights.

Or even in the slavery era. Slaveholders were just law-abiding citizens! Slaves trying to escape were the scoundrels!

If not, then surely you can see how there's no way that "back then, the execution of US law was awful, but now in 2025, it's wonderful and should always be treated as delivering justice". Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways.

Which means just like in the Jim Crow era, you can't use the US execution of law as an arbiter of justness, ethics, morals, and what will improve society. Absolutely not.

Everyone who has such tendencies certainly has people they look up to who are murderers. They've definitely voted for them.

Lifted from another comment [1]:

"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642740

I cannot agree with the quote for 2 reasons:

1) That person has respect for justice, not law. These are separate concepts and people need to see them as separate.

2) It reinforces the view that by making yourself a victim (of the state), you are somehow more virtuous than if you avoid punishment. That only works in societies with sufficient inclination towards justice. It will not work under authoritarian rule like Russia or China, you will just end up in a gulag freezing to death or on your town square bleeding out.

Whether an action was just is determines solely by what preceded it, not by what followed. Making yourself a victim is just a practical way to attract more people's attention.

Practicality and morality are as separate as legality and morality.

That is not how I read the quote at all: the respect for the law stems from the understanding that the only meaningful way to change common law is to challenge it, and defend your actions in court.

> 1) That person has respect for justice, not law.

Willingly accepting the penalty means having respect for the actual law that establishes the penalty.

Fair point, i understood the quote differently (as promoting respect for the law even if unjust)

New just laws are created by injustice. Unjust laws are repealed by injustice. The only vote that matters at the end of the day is the vote cast in lead.

> It will not work under authoritarian rule like Russia or China, you will just end up in a gulag freezing to death or on your town square bleeding out . . . Making yourself a victim is just a practical way to attract more people's attention

Allow me to quote from the Wikipedia page of the Arab Spring:

> The catalyst for the escalation of protests was the self-immolation of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi. Unable to find work and selling fruit at a roadside stand, Bouazizi had his wares confiscated by a municipal inspector on 17 December 2010. An hour later he doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire. His death on 4 January 2011 brought together various groups dissatisfied with the existing system, including many unemployed persons, political and human rights activists, labor and trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and others to begin the Tunisian Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

Did Bouazizi make himself a victim, or a martyr? The only reason the Arab Spring fizzled out was due to directed intelligence and military operations supported by the US and Western regime, not more authoritarian regimes like Russia or China.

I have the highest possible respect for self-made martyrs around a good cause. Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, etc. all pushed the needle and eventually paved the way for both white and non-white citizens to share in our nation's bounty.

Is the civil rights movement finished? No. We need more martyrs.

> The only reason the Arab Spring fizzled out was due to directed intelligence and military operations supported by the US and Western regime

Fizzled out due to the same US/Western countries that bombed the pre-existing governments in Libya and Syria?

There are a lot of bad actors in the world, not just the US and Western empires. You can find honest politicians today, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an honest government anywhere.

Solidarity is one of our most important weapons against the degeneration of political systems, and the solidarity of the Arab Spring is what scared multiple governments into suppressing it.

Similarly, Corpgov is not all that scared by the actions of Mangione. What scares them is the public solidarity behind him.

Thanks for mentioning Claudette Colvin.

> Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways

I'm not from the US so I try to avoid having strong opinions on US issues... But is it really just as flawed now? I mean, there's no slavery anymore, there's women's rights, and all races are legally equal (even if in reality it doesn't work out that way). This seems like an improvement, despite massive flaws still existing.

A charitable interpretation of OP's statement would be:

You cannot really use lawfulness as a measure of morality, and this is true now just as much as it was back then.

Or a different take could be: moral progress happens all the time, but the law often lags behind, so the delta between our moral ideas and the law is just as big as it has been in the past.

Just to be clear, the answer to this doesn't impact the point I was making, so it doesn't matter for the topic at hand.

But entertaining the question:

Who says there haven't been new flaws introduced since? Note how I mentioned the execution of the laws specifically. There was, for instance, a point in time where anti-trust laws were upheld much more vigilantly, despite the same law being on the books. Laws only matter if the people tasked with upholding them choose to do so. And their effect changes immensely depending on how the people who apply them, interpret them. Both can and do drastically change over time.

But even if you argue that modern laws as executed in practice are "less flawed" than in a certain point in the past, it doesn't really make any difference. Given that reasoning, one would argue that at the time of civil rights it was already less flawed than at the time of slavery. Yet you'd probably agree the civil rights movement was necessary, the laws at the time were flawed, and the vast majority of cases of breaking those laws to further the movement was the right thing to do and positively impacted society.

Now let's talk about semantics. Is a tshirt dyed in RGB (255,0,0) just as red as one dyed in (254,1,0)? There isn't a correct answer to this. When viewed by a person, without knowing the RGB values, they will say both tshirts are entirely red, without one being redder than the other. If you put a gun to their head asking "which one is redder", they'd pick one at random at best. So are they just as red? To a human they absolutely are, to a computer they aren't, but we're here discussing among humans - hopefully!

> Who says there haven't been new flaws introduced since

I'm absolutely sure there have been new flaws introduced since the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.

My point is that those flaws don't seem, to me, to be just as bad as slavery.

Reminder that slavery is not banned in case you have comitted a crime in the US. See the constitution.

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