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Comment by rprasad | Hacker News Reader

USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People.

I suggest you read up on your U.S. history. Despite its problems, the U.S. is the closest to its intended purpose than its ever been in history. Women, minority, and slaves were not citizens when this nation was founded; people did not directly elect their senators for several decades; free speech and freedom of religion was generally regarded as an "ideal," not an absolute right, until the start of the 20th century (or in the case of religion, until nearly WWII).

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You've got to be intellectually negligent to believe these two (appointment of senators was part of the intended purpose, by definition) areas of progress represent the entirety of today's civic zeitgeist.

Centralized government dictates most laws to the states. The citizens are completely disarmed with respect to government. The entire population being tracked, surveilled, and permanently recorded. There is a complete lack of due process, including presumed guilty until plea bargained. There is a standing army occupying our conquered yet not-incorporated colonies. And around one third of everyone's income is taken as taxation to support all of the above.

Now you may not consider the above facts important, and your livelihood may even depend on ignoring them. But please stop pretending they do not exist or were even somehow part of the original plan for a country of self determination.

You should consider that instead an attenuation of due process rights, which is what you perceive, we have instead a consistent level of access to justice through the court system, which seems otherwise because technology has given us more insight into the workings of our criminal justice system than we've ever had before.

If you were screwed over by federal prosecutors in 1952 as a result of an anti-Communist prosecution under the Smith act, to which message board would you have appealed?

If you find my observation credible, you are of course in no way prohibited from making the case that our system is unjust or ineffective or capricious. Progress maybe be slow; progress towards greater justice can always use acceleration.

It is possible for you and 'rprasad to be right simultaneously. Nobody has to be "negligent".

I'm quite receptive to the argument that connectedness is causing things to look worse even as they get more open, and this does apply to a few of my stated points. But it's a huge leap of faith to go from there to insisting that this implies progress, or even just non-deterioration, across the board. For example, what kind of process dictates the quantity of federal government employees?

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