this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
314 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
73967 readers
3365 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So... there's been a lot of Europeans looking at America and laughing at the stuff we're going through, smug that the US is getting this.
I'm not going to say as someone from the US we don't deserve the kicking, as a country the attitude of the US has had a bad problem of exceptionalism
But this right here should be the warning to Europe not to fall into the exceptionalism trap... your oligarchs are waiting to take everything over as well. And before I get called overreacting and unconnected, this is smelling quite of the "Patriot Act" we got.
Their "oligarchs". LOL.
That's a different part of the world, it's not "oligarchs", it's just the government and politicians and a significant part of society in every European country. Eastern Europe might even be a bit better in this regard than Western, because of relatively recent historical memory.
You have to deserve "oligarchs" first. They didn't. You ask some granny in any European country, that granny will likely be in favor of full-on totalitarianism because they are a law-abiding society and there should be order, and people thinking they have natural rights are extremists.
You in your land of the weird joke about "freedumb" and "mass shooter rights" and "free hate speech", not understanding that the reason Europeans too joke about those is not them seeing your problems as they are, but because they (except for France and maybe some Scandinavian ones, and, eh, maybe Switzerland) unironically have problems with the ideas of freedom, equality, limits of mandate, right to rebellion and free speech. Half the European nations are monarchies or recent monarchies or recent fascist nations or ex-Commie nations.
You there joke about these treating it as a given that you have those rights, just some jerks abuse them, while Europeans joke because they don't have those rights and don't treat them as certain. There's nothing in UK's or even Germany's constitutional laws that admits that their citizens are free people with right to rebellion and to freedom of expression and association, even if someone in some other law writes that they are not.
Mhm. Show me where in the US constitution it says that people have a right to rebellion.
And then please show me how this right to rebellion was applied when an actual rebellion occured.
And please also take into consideration any laws regarding treason or domestic terrorism.
I said constitutional law, not the US constitution alone. Including declaration of independence and the surrounding history of discussion and all. Also not "says that people have", but recognizes it as an inherent right. Naturally if such a right exists, either no law can retract it or it would be meaningless.
I don't see how this is relevant. If you think it is, please explain how, explicitly and not implicitly.
(Also one would guess that slaveholders' right to rebellion is in significant doubt.)
Can't override constitutional and inherent rights. Also if you don't recognize the latter, it's too bad but your country's founding documents do as a basis. Basically the US constitution is toilet paper compared to unstated but mentioned in d.o.i. inherent rights, and any normal law is toilet paper compared to the US constitution.
And people who made that system were very well educated, also very practical, and explained very thoroughly why should any system of formal rules be possible to discard by force and why inherent rights not prone to degeneracy of any formal system driven by power should exist in philosophy. They were not XX and XXI centuries' idealists with overvalued ideas, or idiots dreaming of totalitarianism with those like them on top.
A law that doesn't apply is worthless.
Thinking that this somehow makes you or your anachronistic shithole of a country somewhat better is just plain delusional.
First, my anachronistic shithole of a country would be Russia.
Second, I said right, not law. Rights are more transcendent.
Rights don't exist. They are social conventions based in law. If you don't have a law or the law isn't enforced then you don't have a right.
Contrary to the name, there are no basic, inalienable human rights.
If your right is not supported by law, it does not exist.
That's your opinion which was a minority one in most of the world for most of history. Including such counterintuitive parts of it as China.
Says who and based on what?
And from which hairy arse would a law gain justification to determine someone's rights?
You are likely from one of the countries with English-derived legal system, where the precedent mechanism literally means that there are non-codified rights outside of the law, which the interpretation of the law has to approximate.
Ok, lets put it in a way you might understand.
Let's say there's a basic human right to life, liberty and security (Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). That's quite basic.
You say you live in Russia. What good does that right do if your holy leader decides that he doesn't like what you posted online and sends you to the front in Ukraine or into a Gulag? Are you going to tell the military police that they can't touch you because you got rights?
Or lets make it more extreme: Say you live in Gaza. Are you going to tell the IDF that you got rights and thus their bombs and starvation just won't touch you?
Nope, I don't live in a country with English-derived legal system. A law is a law and judges interpret laws and not judges.
But even in a precedent-based system: Precedent means jack squat if the country's leadership doesn't care, as seen by the US.
I say it once again: Rights, laws, constitutions, all that are fine and dandy, and they are somewhat useful as long as the rule of law is mostly upheld. But:
Look up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All 193 member countries of the UN ratified these. And yet there are articles in there that every single of these member countries violate. And having these "rights" means absolutely nothing in real-life terms if there's no mechanism to enforce them or get any benefit from it.
As a russian, how much do you e.g. enjoy the "right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association" (Article 20.1) and the "right to freedom of opinion and expression" (Article 19)? How much does "having these rights" help you if you go on the street and protest the war?
It'll just be a violated right. As that's treated always.
And you don't seem to understand that when "right" is treated as a thing separate from "law", arguments functional against "law" are not arguments functional against "right".
Which doesn't change if it's a right or not. It's in the word. You are either in the right or in the wrong. If you're in the right, that doesn't guarantee you anything in the physical world. That's the point of such an entity.
Wrong. Having a common frame of reference means a lot as a precondition for other things.
Say, having a program supporting some Kademlia-based protocol doesn't guarantee you to find other nodes supporting it, or to find a file or other resource you look for on them, or that someone won't block it. But it's better than if people can't agree on any protocol, but, suppose, MS and Apple can.
I think you shouldn't treat things you don't understand so arrogantly.
Are you seriously applying your half-knowledge about programming to legal and philosophy?
You are so lost that you don't even know which topic we are talking about and still think that your arrogance has any basis in reality?
This is pidgeon chess, and you are a delusional pidgeon.
You may think whatever you want, you don't even need to have negative feelings about it.
But you've got no clue at all.
The Dunning-Kruger is strong with you.
Yeah, and not with the guy who after saying something outta their ass went straight to insults.
Also why do you care? If you don't, why did you write this?
Also Dunning-Krueger is strong with everyone, that's what follows from that study.
If you mean that you have achieved something in some specific thing IRL and think I have no similar achievement, then (suppose you're right, most likely true) your achievement is in that specific thing only, and doesn't make you one bit more qualified to talk about anything else.