The arguments stemming from the rule of law always remind of this:

The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.

This is very clever and an interestingly adversarial (the unjust steal from the just) take on the quote that came to my mind: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

They complement each other beautifully.

I didn’t have a Hacker News thread where George Pataki is held up as some fenian and British sailors shelling a starving mob are misunderstood, well-intentioned chaps on my bingo card.

Yet here we are. Should you ever find yourself up against the wall during the revolution, take solace that the boys don’t take it personally at all.

It's not their fault. They think it's normal to turn every conversation into one about the homeless in California pooping on the streets.

If anything it's our fault for letting them turn every conversation into this one.

> I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve.

While I take your broader point about it being a system level issue - when you’re firing cannon at starving people so you can continue to export their food, you’re complicit, laws be damned.

Systems don’t emerge from the aether they are composed of by people. In this case the people were absolute bastards.

The guards at Auschwitz were perpetually drunk, because they couldn't stand what they were doing. Were they complicit in the holocaust? YES!

That is the point - after countless deaths we produced the principle of "carrying out a criminal order is a crime", yet we still see the people committing atrocities and going unpunished because they were just carrying out the orders. And that makes me think that we're still missing something important.

Well the folks giving the orders obviously have mixed feelings about the whole idea that their orders could be criminal.

> I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve.

Yeah they wanted them to explode.

Really? "Just following orders"? Did that work in Nuremberg?