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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   32382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Why is this judge's decision not simply part of the process by which "the country" decides who to let in and who to expel? Are the president's desires the sole legitimate expression of the national will? We have a government of laws, not of men, or at least that's how it was intended.

No, but there is asymmetry.

Repeatedly spamming the same comment at multiple points in a thread is obnoxious; please do not do this. Consider this a warning.

Aaand we've got another poster deleting their top-level and comments - same person as before?

At this point the first and second top level comments are deleted by author.

To be fair, this platform does not permit a single comment to include responses to multiple comments (as, e. g., Xenforo and 4chan do), and which workarounds for that limitation are best is not immediately obvious. Maybe you should clarify what your preferred workarounds are—e. g., one long response with a bunch of username alerts at the end, or a combination of one long response and a bunch of short responses consisting of links to the long response.

I would like to note that it's not a rule or requirement. The OP was modded for being obnoxious; copy-pasting a tweet is only one part of his offense.

I generally post substantive replies in one spot, ping the other people the comment would also be directed at, and add a "see here" with a link to the big comment in other places.

Whenever I hear German politicans speak about international relations, there recur phrases like "democratic rule of law". In public discourse in general, democracy and rule of law seem to be considered much the same, or at least inseparately linked. I feel like this is a lumping-together of two very different concepts, and the two are at least as likely to be at odds with each other as they are to be mutually supportive. In my personal estimation: Far more likely to be conflict than otherwise. Western liberal societies have perhaps managed to have both, to some extent, for a while, but it's always been an unstable compromise. As the cracks show more clearly and people learn how to exploit and subvert these systems, I will not be surprised if the US or any other Western country needs to decide between either rule of law or democracy.

I think some people certainly conflate "rule of law(s), which happen to have been established by a democracy" and "rule of law(s), which are by their nature inherently democratic", with the latter paving the way for tyranny. This intersects with disagreements over the definition of democracy, where one side claims it means "following the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government" and the other claims it means "the majority get to dictate policy with absolute unconstrained authority (at least whenever I agree with the majority)".

I would add that "rule of law" is worth little when the laws do not preserve freedom, which I consider a much more terminal goal than democracy or rule of law.

It just so happens that in large polities, enshrining freedoms in laws is the best way to establish them, and that democracies are less terrible about preserving such laws than the other forms of government that have been tried. This is how we get freedoms, rule of law, democracy as a package deal.

Agreed, with an important addendum to recognise that the “we” from “ the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government” is often a very specific and not-at-all representative group: the secular army in pre-Erdogan Turkey, or the powers running postwar west-Germany, or (in many ways) Tony Blair in the UK.

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