It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof.
Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"
The rest of your comment is, unfortunately, spot on.
I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.
It doesn't look like a duck, it doesn't quack like a duck, yet you insist that this goose-shaped creature is a duck.
Some special amendment procedure is not the only or even defining feature of constitutional law. There is non-constitutional law that has this property and there is constitutional law that does not.
The oddities of this "duck" go far beyond its lack of entrenchment. It also lacks form and definition in the way that a puff of smoke lacks form and definition. It includes such nebulous elements as common law, unwritten convention, and even legal commentary of various law scholars. It's also said to be in constant flux as it evolves over time.
It may be a useful abstraction within the context of UK law to refer to this amorphous blob as the "constitution," but for anyone unfamiliar with the UK's system of government, to say the UK has a constitution is grossly misleading in as much as all of the conclusions the listener will draw from that assertion will be false. It's like characterizing a chicken eating grain out of your hand as being "attacked by a dinosaur." The chicken may belong to the clade "Dinosauria" and may have inadvertently pecked your palm in its feeding frenzy, but in as much as it communicates information contrary to fact, it is a confabulation. At best, it's a lawyer's lie, to coin a phrase.
That's got to be the understatement of (many) centuries. AFAIK the UK constitution isn't even even codified into millions of documents, let alone a "single" one. Saying it's not in a "single" document is like saying my trillions of dollars aren't in a "single" bank account. The number of partitions really isn't the problem with that statement here.
Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution", let alone an arbitrary citizen who needs to be able to become aware of them to be able to follow them? (Note I'm not asking for interpretation, but literally just listing the sentences.) Could they even do this with infinite time? Is it even possible to have an oracle that, given an arbitrary sentence, could indisputably tell you if it is in the constitution?
Maybe that's asking too much. Forget enumerating the laws. Per your own link: "...this enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched."
If this doesn't itself sound silly, hopefully you can at least forgive people for getting irritated at the proposition that there totally exists a "constitution"... that nobody can point to... and that doesn't actually do the one thing many people want from a constitution: being more entrenched than statutes.
> Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
Not sure what countries you're referring to, but at least in the US, this is not the case. There is a single document that is the constitution, and (thankfully, so far) nobody is disputing what words are in fact written on that document. And that document absolutely is supreme to statutes.
Interpretation of the words is obviously left to courts in the US, and courts can interpret it differently changing the effective law, but "constitution" is not a synonym for "effective law", and nobody argues over what the words to be interpreted are. And even those interpretations are still written down!
You can't just brush it aside as some quibble about definitions. It's a fundamentally substantive difference in the two structures: one of these has an indisputable source of truth (a foundation everyone can witness) that everything else is built on top of -- however shakily! -- and the other does not. Regardless of whether you include the upper parts of this metaphorical building in your definitions or not, the foundations are not the same.
Yes, it is a substantive difference but it does not follow that this difference provides the 'constitution' property.
> one of these has an indisputable source of truth... the foundations are not the same
They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.
What stops a President from simply choosing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling and what prevents the King from returning to personal rule?
The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both and relies on something that emerged rather than something imposed from without by written words.
Legally? The fact that everybody under the president -- including those in the military -- understand they are swearing their oath to the constitution -- not the King, not the Crown, not God, not the Supreme Court, not anything else. And that the Supreme Court says what the constitution means. And that if there is a clear and direct contradiction between the Supreme Court and the president, the former trumps (no pun intended) the latter.
Physically? "Nothing", yeah. Same goes for non-presidents. If you can get enough people to follow you (or maybe at least enough of the people with guns) everything else becomes irrelevant, including whether your title was president or King or God or Constitution or whatever.
> The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both
It is emphatically not. There are lots of countries with constitutions that nevertheless have arbitrary rule. As there are countries without constitutions or arbitrary rule.
> They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.
No, that's exactly what those are not. Unwritten stories, traditions, and rituals are very much disputable. That's kind of the entire point of writing things down, and the point of the game we call Telephone. The indisputable bits are physical artifacts everyone can see with their own eyes.
No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
> No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
Do you never write down or sign contracts? Are verbal promises adequate for you in all transactions?
If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN.
But what I can tell is that most people who care about the legitimacy of government believe it is fundamental to fairness that there be a single source of truth that can tell them the laws under which they would be rewarded or punished, before those happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#Un...
Note the second one applies to the US - a country with a mostly but not completely codified constitution.
I don't think this is helping much in the US right now. The orangefuhrer has shown he is willing to ignore clauses that are inconvenient.
It's a shame you can't really explain it. It's ineffable, isn't it.
"I do too, but the way Trump is behaving, pretty soon it will be illegal to ..."
You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.