Comment by phtrivier
14 hours ago
I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference.
But it feels million years away.
It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level.
Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those positions ? How long until the only ones who want to put their toes in the swamp are those who really enjoy the mud ?
Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ?
Those that got fired where the good ones. Sometimes the best career move is to get fired. Reminds me of the old faces running the BRD after the war. Democratic floatsome in a thin crust residing over an ocean of collaborators.
The coup has already happened.
We'd have to look at the longest-running democracies and observe how they handled periodic refactorings
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
― Alexander Fraser Tytler
> the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Except, of course, that this is historically wrong. Transitions from democracy to dictatorship are common, but I cannot think of one that happened because of "loose fiscal policy".
2 replies →
Pithy. But a made up quote by Tytler, he never said or wrote that.
Tyler expressed some skepticism of Democracies but nothing like this. The too on-the-nose nature of this often passed along bit of propaganda should also be the giveaway that it might be one of those rare things on the internet that someone may have been less than honest about the origins, and go look and see.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ― Voltaire 1767
Tytler's quote is trying to say too much. It might be acceptable as historical commentary, but it carries little weight to me; it seems overly confident about what the future might hold.*
Tytler died in 1813. We have learned much since then: much about human nature, institutions, experimentation, statistics, evidence, constructing good theories, and governance.** Sure, the quote is worth some reflection; it has grains of truth, but it should not be given undue weight.
* I am not saying "we can predict nothing"! Far from it. I am ok with predictions (even bold ones) to the extent they are deeply rooted in the best understandings and models we have available.
** I'm talking about what motivated people figure out through careful reasoning and evidence, not simply how the median person funnels information from their ears to their mouth. And I'm certainly not commending the effort and thought that the median person puts into stewarding their democracy (if they have one). While we (in the USA, for the time being?) have something like one.
1 reply →
The whole reason the US founding fathers are amazing is that they proved him concretely incorrect. US will celebrate 250 years of democracy this year.
5 replies →
You know, it's very funny. This is the most reproduced quote from Tytler, and yet you also have these chestnuts:
1 reply →
The quotee would be surprised to see how little voting is being done by the people receiving the largesse in the last 20 years.
Not to mention how little voters had to do with the decisions which caused the deficit to rise the most. The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy.
4 replies →
Well….they tended to collapse after a couple centuries.
> border-line (to be polite) corrumption
Hard to imagine what would constitute "full blown corruption" based on this standard?
Maybe it's borderline because it's coming from the other direction. Corruption presumes some kind of "covertness", when you break all the rules without even trying to be discreet can you still talk of corruption?
Yes. Only people who are used to living in non-corrupt countries presume corruption is covert.
> Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge?
This is how all of them started.
But once you have a liberal democracy, people will refuse another purge. For very good reasons.
>It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level.
you get out when the thing dies because these kinds of organizations always end the same way; competence is usurped by sycophancy and flattery until there's no one left to keep it functioning and it collapses under the weight of it's own bullshit.
hopefully, there will be something to salvage but the longer these folks are in charge the bigger the splash will be when they finally bottom out
>I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference.
HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different.
The first one is, in the words of a federal District of Columbia judge: "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency". [1]
The second one is the malicious leaking of some private emails. These emails are frankly none of our business (unless you are part of Kash Patel's family or friends).
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-l...
Not sure why this is being down voted.
There is a difference for sure between hosting your own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications.
The issue that seemed to completely disappear related to the use of Signal messenger for official white house communications seems more aligned to the email server issue. It was reported heavily at the time what the reporting requirements were and that they would have to submit the full chat histories within 30 days or something like that to stay within the law. I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.
I think we all know the answer to that…
HN is overrun by partisans whose majority does not care about factual interpretations of current events and flags level-headed comments in favor of cheap shots, double standards, hyperbolic misconstructions, and ad hominem. I don't think it's difficult to be critical of the government without resorting to such low-brow commentary, but it is what it is. I once offended some people by comparing HN to Reddit, but the lines are getting more blurred by the day.
1 reply →
It's beind downvoted because "but, her emails..." is not saying it's the same thing, but rather, that so much fuss was made about her emails, and then when something similar happens, the right conveniently ignores it. For example, as you mentioned, signalgate, or the times members of the Trump administration used their "own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications."
It's being down voted because it's attacking a strawman. No one is saying they are the same exact thing. It's that you will see people activatley defending this as a big nothingburger when in truth, it's still a security breach that has the potential to lower our defenses.
> I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.
It wouldn't be the first thing related to her that died https://web.archive.org/web/20220331092216/https://www.arkan...
> HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different.
But it is literally no different than what the Trump administration did [0] after all of their finger pointing. Idiocracy runs deep across both political camps.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/18/federal-officials-n...
We know for a fact that the current DoD are using private Signal messages for coordinating military action. We know they are constantly using private emails. We are sending the president's son-in-law to negotiate with foreign countries despite not being a government employee and also have massive conflicts of interest.
> HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different.
That's not what the "but, her emails..." reference implies. It's not saying they are the same thing. It's saying that the amount of attention and excitement made about her emails was a show. And you know it was a show, a mockery, because with cases like this where something equally bad happens and nothing will come from it. Same thing with the signalgate from last year, or all the previous times the Trump administration used private emails or private communication for government business as well.
So, no. The fact that it is not the same is immaterial. Which makes the rest of your comment immaterial.
> And you know it was a show, a mockery, because with cases like this where something equally bad happens and nothing will come from it
How is this case equally bad? It's just his private email being hacked, he did nothing wrong.
There are probably about a thousand things you could point to in the Trump administration that are worse than Clinton's private email server, but this isn't one of them.
Was it equally grave when Colin Powell did the same thing?
Yes. That man lied us into the Iraq war. He is a traitor.
2 replies →
Why not look for historical examples? There should be hundreds not to mention the obvious ones?
Referencing Hillary’s email would be kinda silly. She self hosted the email account she used for official government business. It was loaded with classified information.
This guy, while incompetent, had his personal email hacked.
Important distinction.
You are correct.
On the other hand, Patel's emails "appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence". We already know that people in government - this isn't a partisan point: folks of all factions do it - use private communication channels to discuss "official business" specifically to avoid mandated disclosure and archival requirements. If (and I emphasize "if", because we don't yet know if this was the case), if Patel was doing that, and especially if he was sharing / discussing classified material, then the facts of the case would bump right up against what Clinton and Powell did.
Please. Same shit, different day.
Trying to distinguish between the two acts is like splitting hairs on the same arse.
Just makes you look silly.
Sorry, as much as I despise Trump (though I'm thankful it caused Europe to wake up to the idea that the US is an unreliable ally); "Her emails" were:
A) Used for Official business as secretary of state
B) Full of national security strategically important decisions.
C) Improperly secured.
FBI directors personal email feels less cutting in that context.
Breaching my personal email (or my own mail server, I host one) will tell you literally nothing about my employer except perhaps the conversation from when I joined and my own employment contract.
honestly, look internally. after the plane from qatar. after the son-in-law's real estate dealings. after the visible-to-everyone kalshi and oil futures bets frontrunning the administrations announcements. for you to still feel the need to frame things as "border-line (to be polite)" is, in and of itself, the perfect example of the overall problem.
take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out.
until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse.
"no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.
"no politics" is the immune response to the social-media-fueled, conspiracy-theory-driven "we are the good guys, you basically deserve to die" craze.
Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere.
If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.
"Both sides" is the biggest cop out of the last decade.
How was Cambridge analytica debunked?
I'd say the bigger issue in 2016 was the Russian interference, which has been proven and has lead to convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
> Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump
I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
2 replies →
> In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen
This is not even remotely true.
One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, culminating in a violent attack on congress itself.
The other party had concerns about foreign interference in our elections.
[dead]
> can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ?
Absolutely, it happened before on January 30, 1933