zlacker

A note for US people: treaties don't supersede US laws unless they're self-executing† (that is: unless they have language directly and specifically compelling their implementation, rather than requiring legislatures to enact enabling legislation), and self-executing treaties don't negate federal law (the "last-in-time rule" requires courts to enforce whatever the most recent act was, so Congress can change how even a self-executing treaty is enforced) --- and nothing supersedes the Constitution, so a (say) UK hate speech law could not be enforced in the US even after the adoption of this treaty.

† The previous cybercrime convention was; I don't know about this one.

>>tptace+(OP)
That's a fairly silly "don't worry." Any treaty signed has an expectation on Congress to pass corresponding legislation to make it enforceable in domestic courts. The Supremacy Clause is intended to force treaty compliance.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...

At this point, there's no good reason to trust people in government as they seem to all have been captured by oligarchy, including here in the U.S. So this isn't a "don't worry" situation, it's something that should actively be contended with at a political level.

>>slowmo+G5
It's not clear to me which of the things I said you believe to be incorrect.

>>slowmo+G5
How do you contend oligarchy. All countries seem to tend towards it. Past revolutions were localized, but this one needs a global one which seems impossible.

>>enligh+oa
I once had a discussion with one of my history teachers. In class, he had talked about how, in the waning hours of the Roman Republic, many of the intellectuals of the time wrote many books about the corruption of the government and pled for the preservation of what was. I asked him if this was a broader symptom of the failure of a governmental system. He thought for a moment and said "Yes," comparing several other periods with intense bursts of critical writing.

Then I asked him a question he didn't quite seem ready for. I observed that I was seeing the same thing, the writing of many books on the subject of preserving the Western traditions of freedom, and the subject of corruption and manipulation of the public. Then I asked him, "Has it ever worked?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Has the writing of these books, the sounding of the alarm bell, so to speak, ever worked to save them... to preserve them?"

The answer hung between us, and we paused for a moment, unwilling to continue the conversation to its logical conclusion. We moved on to discussing other topics. We did come back to the conversation a few weeks later. The small consolation was that future societies often used the criticism of the lessons learned in the past as guidance for forming new ones. Jefferson and Madison crafted the U.S. Constitution as much from the triumphs of Athens, Rome, and British Common Law, as from failures of these same institutions.

To answer your question more directly, I wish I knew. I only know of many ways that don't seem to work. Recording the fall as honestly as possible might help posterity, if the record survives.

Law code has some analogous structures to software programs, but the machines the law code executes on are made up of people, and it depends on the good intent and wisdom of the people executing the code. Good will, good intent, and especially wisdom seem to be in short supply, most especially among leaders beholden to the control of others. I think that's the underlying problem, the hardware of society, so to speak.

We've dismantled or corrupted most of the societal mechanisms that used to maintain the health of the said hardware, and we've failed to replace them with anything, or at least with anything anywhere near as effective. Mechanisms like education have been corrupted to steer our young people straight into the mob manipulation technologies of social media and ideologies of power maintenance for the new oligarchies. So we're back to "I wish I knew."

What do you think?

>>tptace+M7
> so a (say) UK hate speech law could not be enforced in the US even after the adoption of this treaty.

I believe the conclusion that it can't happen in the U.S. is incorrect.

>>slowmo+Ti
It obviously cannot happen in the US: neither the executive nor legislative branches have the power to bind any law that contravenes the US Constitution. It would be a pretty big loophole if they could simply agree to treaties to annul 1A. A ratified, enabled treaty is coequal with US federal law, not with the Constitution.

>>tptace+5k
Extradition clauses allow foreign countries to reach out and pluck Americans from the comfort of their Constitutional freedoms, and the technicality of such extradition provisions, should they be enacted, would allow foreign countries to enforce their laws on U.S. citizens in the U.S.

If you don't think that sort of thing could happen, you should recall that the Trans-Pacific treaty being pushed in the U.S. by the Obama administration included provisions allowing U.N bodies to inspect compliance and sue local governments for things like climate violations (wealth transfer) or even firearms possession and compliance (end-run around the 2nd amendment). That is, these treaties were seen as a way to sneak in enforcement from extra-national entities for rules explicitly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.

That particular treaty was dropped, in part, due to public outcry against it.

Liberty requires maintenance and defense. You cannot simply assume that once we enjoy some particular freedom there is no way to retreat or regress from it such that we lose it. Bureaucrats that cannot be fired by the head of the Executive branch are another example of this erosion by technicality.

So I don't find your conclusion obvious at all. I wish it were so simple.

This kind of rule-making follows the trick of getting the public to trade safety for liberty. The problem is that the same governments have created the lack of safety, provoking the unrest they know seek additional power to quash. We should say no.

>>slowmo+6m
That is not at all how extradition treaties work.

>>enligh+oa
Jefferson suggested that we just have another revolution every 200 years.

>>slowmo+fi
It does seem like we are approaching a critical point where a new baseline of rational knowledge is created, but not quite there. I think it is because there still not enough pain at a population level. There’s a section of people which has realized but can’t do much other than being mere spectators. Beyond that point, when it happens, we would probably have a new normal and perhaps a new experiment like USA, better than the previous one and humanity beyond a nation’s boundary can benefit. Now I’m confused if I’m a pessimist or an optimist.