Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 hours ago
Genuine question, are you using AI to edit your comments? Going on a rhetorical side quest in a straightforward discussion about policy, law and politics is…well, it’s not on topic.
For what it’s worth, I’m not seeing a failure of communication. I’m seeing a failure of scoping. You’re arguing on the basis of specific legal mechanisms by which power is expressed. I’m arguing the real motivations of and political constraints on decision makers are more fundamental in this case.
That isn’t universally true. Power predicted what Trump would do with tariffs (again, analogy). Legal analysis predicted his constraints (which SCOTUS affirmed). In this case, SecDef has the legal authority to do what’s described. He doesn’t, however, have the political freedom to do so. That turns the latter into the germane constraint, not a litany of proscribed powers.
Put another way, the people—here—are fundamental. (Market reactions, too, though again largely because the people in this administration have chosen the Dow as a lighthouse.) The legal justifications are worse than surface level, they’re ex post facto findings of retaliatory paths. It may feel more substantial to quote DPA statute versus discuss Hegseth and Dario’s motivations and relationships, but that’s, again, missing the forest for the trees.
It takes two to tango. I bowed out nicely and put in a good faith effort to communicate why. Maybe on a different day in a different forum, we could have a useful conversation for both of us. I would look forward to that.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into being a jerk. Posts like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175955 are the kind of thing we ban accounts for, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
It's true that there's a lot of grey area and turbulence right now around which HN posts have been LLM-generated or LLM-edited, and it's compounded by the fact that there's no way to tell for sure. We all have to find our way through this—both the community and the mods. But we can and need to do so without breaking HN's rules ourselves in the process.