The 'government' is responsible for a couple orders of magnitude more harm than 'criminals'. We're talking hundreds of millions deaths worldwide over the last century.
I'm much less concerned about the government knowing what the 'criminals' are talking about (there are plenty of other ways to track them) than I am with the government knowing what the citizens are planning on standing up for/against.
What are you comparing with (both for government and for criminals)? In case of criminals it's easier to imagine a similar world where just criminals don't do crime; however, that comparison fails to take into account indirect effects of crimes (which are both negative -- e.g. costs spent on protection against crime -- and positive -- more incentives to influence the society so that crime is less beneficial).
In the case of government, I find it hard to see what do you mean by "same world, but without government". If everyone behaved the same in absence of government, nothing would really change. If we take into account changes in people's behaviour due to lack of government, then how do we stipulate that no government forms in that world? Are we imagining a world where everyone knows that forming any government will end the world and thus no one does that? In that case I'm hard pressed to even guess the sign of the difference in magnitude of harm, let alone its order of magnitude.
In that case it's hard to say which deaths are "caused by government". If a government could have imposed a policy that prevented them, are they caused by government? Should we balance that against side effects of such a policy? What about side effects of a feasible way of arriving at such a policy?
If we want to discount such deaths as caused by the government, we will end up with lots of cases of "would not happen but for policy X, but policy Y would have prevented them". From some POV _every single death_ is somehow caused by some policy that's government-imposed. To have a reasonable way to define "caused by government" we need to have something to compare with.
There in general needs to be more accountability for people in power, instead we got reverse, the richer and more powerful someone is the less punishment they get for fuckups (unless they fuck up with wrong people's money I guess).
Hell, politician can lie their way to power, realize nothing of what they promise and still somehow not lose the "job"
Is there an organization you can think of other than a government that is capable of bringing about a Chinese Great Leap Forward, a Soviet Holodomor, or a German Holocaust?
Money laundering and drug trafficking are rounding errors.
I can't imagine how a society in a world where $DEITY would strike down anyone who tried to create a government would look like; I don't know what they'd use for coordination and whether it would be more or less vulnerable to e.g. creating correlations that defeat the disaster-prevention of the law of large numbers.
If we want to compare two situations, we should not only point out the differences in one direction. Otherwise we'd end up claiming that e.g. a society on a desert will have many fewer deaths on account of drowning being vastly less likely.
Facebook, Amazon, and friends certainly seem on track to give governments a run for their money. Facebook itself has directly led to genocide multiple times. Amazon wouldn't bat an eye at such atrocities if they were socially accepted and good for the bottom line.
Corporations might do it for a different reason — seeking capital above all else — but the end result is the same.
Any organization that gathers enough power would be capable of bringing about a Chinese Great Leap Forward, a Soviet Holodomor, or a German Holocaust.
Some of the worst abuses in history were made possible by the invention of the corporation. Ever hear of the East India Company? They are responsible for 100s of millions of deaths, many genocides, and the eradication of entire cultures.
The difference is that we now regulate corporations to hopefully prevent this level of power and abuse. We seem to be moving towards a new era of East India Companies though, so I'm not sure why you think only a "government" could commit atrocities.
Hell, the Irish famine was caused by the British adhering to free market principles. In that case corporations and the government teamed up together to kill 15% of the Irish population for no particularly good reason.
Governments do not have a monopoly on atrocity.
Edit: Nestlé probably has a bodycount approaching the governments you listed.
> Some of the worst abuses in history were made possible by the invention of the corporation. Ever hear of the East India Company? They are responsible for 100s of millions of deaths, many genocides, and the eradication of entire cultures.
“The corporation” in general is, and the British East India Company in particular was, a tool of government, not an opposing force.
He is right but I hate people talking about the government like it's some random entity. You are able to vote, you can decide who is the government AND here comes to the kicker you can even be IN the government. You just prefer to not be, you prefer to build artificial stuff to circumvent what your elected government does. It's so counterintuitive.
I don't really like this idea that voting will fix all problems and dangers in government. In fact, voting could be a cause of the danger. It is called tyranny of the majority.
And that's why governments are more complex than straight democracy. I love how people bring up the tyranny of the majority as some counter to modern democratic government, all the while providing no viable alternative.
What, do you want the tyranny of the minority? Are you proposing some sort of fascism?
The world seems to have a number of governments that don't respond kindly to criticism from their own citizens, so that leaves other governments the job of restraining them.
Not really, not in any meaningful way. We can vote for a handful of people every couple of years, but we get no say in the many thousands of people actually running the government from administration to administration, and with no oversight from the people.
I have the ability to participate in a handful of governments by voting. There are countless government officials around the world who might like access to my signal conversations. I don’t have any say for most of them. That’s why I’m glad I can use a service like Signal offers.
By that logic one shouldn't ever criticise let's say, Google (a separate entity), because in theory one could get a job there, work their way up to be CEO and then change how the company works. In fact, why ever criticise anything or express any opinion when instead you could be 'doing something about it'?
I think it's okay for people to express their opinion on the internet, and it's not a moral failing that they are doing that instead of, as you suggest elsewhere, running for office, getting elected, writing a bill and finding allies.
You don't, because most voters do want FBI and CIA and NSA and ATF to do their jobs and want the government to assign sufficient resources to stay the same or get more powerful. Politicians explicitly argue for such policies, and gain votes because of them, not despite them; this direction isn't one of those where politicians verbally support one thing and act otherwise, they put this stuff in their speeches and ads.
You should convince other voters to agree with your policy first, and if you can't, then you should concede that FBI/CIA/NSA/ATF shouldn't get voted out even if you want them to.
>because most voters do want FBI and CIA and NSA and ATF to do their jobs
The primary means through which said voters learn about these institutions are controlled by said institutions.
The FBI/ATF murdered hundreds of people at Waco, the CIA murdered the elected president of the United States.
These are not passive institutions that serve the people, they are hostile mafias hell bent on our subjugation, and inherently incompatible with the concept of democracy.
This is a classic problem. You have political and institutional elements in every system. (In the old days, the institutional elements were the clerics of various religions.)
A solution is to indoctrinate bureaucratic elements of government to follow political leadership, but this trick only works in authoritarian systems, like USSR, and requires periodic show trials and executions, or in the military (thus: bootcamp).
This is one of the areas where machine intelligence could end up saving the day for humanity. Bureaucracies can potentially be replaced in toto by informational systems at some point. I think only then will we get to try actual democracy democracy.
Voting does fuck all and everybody knows it. The only beneficiaries of the ability to vote are the tyrants who get to blame the result of their depravity on the people they oppress: the "voters."
How? If I live in a town/city/state/whatever where 70% support party X unquestionably what good is voting in the elections going to be if I support the Y candidate? I’ll always be outvoted unless the local majority absolutely fails to show up.
I met a guy running for congress a couple years back and had some discussion. We didn’t align politically but he seemed like a genuine guy who cared about helping people in his district more than reciting the party line and joining in on culture wars, and ultimately that screwed him out of the election.
The only time I can’t understand voting is in swing places where a small margin can make a difference, but even then I wouldn’t vote given some of the people on both sides running.
Local politics is a sham. My local AT&T fiber node is not being tapped by my local government. Traitorous elements within the NSA conspired to defraud the United States by violating our constitutional rights and tap my local fiber grid.
If you make $150k/year half your paycheck goes towards funding traitors to the United States of America, funding people actively seek to undermine the constitution.
My neighborhood council is not the one doing mass wiretapping. That’s the federal government (and, presumably, the central governments of other countries too).
we have a working solution to the problem of the cia snooping on political dissidents and for some reason you want us to abandon it and switch to a solution that won't work
>It's slow, but it's a dedicated political campaign that overturned roe v wade.
A President elected by a minority of voters under a system designed to disenfranchise the majority, who selected a panel of Supreme Court judges for life terms, themselves selected by a right-wing think tank specifically for their willingness to overturn Roe V. Wade, which had the support of the majority of the population and was settled law for nearly half a century.
That demonstrates the solution of government is only effective for a specific demographic... ironically the demographic that's been claiming everything is rigged against them for the last decade. For everyone else participating in the system seems like a fool's errand. One side was willing to risk sedition to get what it wanted, and suffered no real consequences, while the other side seems incapable of opposing the status quo, almost as if it's just there to provide the illusion of a choice between two sides.
I can see why people want to opt out. I vote, and I'm still going to vote on principle, just because I want to go down fighting, but I'm under no illusions that my vote is anything but a farce.
I don't think that poster is saying to ban Signal. A minority of people want to ban Signal. As it is Signal is legal and that's good. Democracy is also good. And yes people should participate in democracy rather than simply posting angry internet comments. Participating in democracy is also good.
a critical press free of official censorship and intimidation which can protect its sources with free software and strong encryption (verified by free academic inquiry into its security) and funded anonymously by strongly anonymous cryptocurrency
Simplistic "but hard" proposals beget sarcastic replies. I could enumerate some reasons why what you said is overly simplistic and ignores some harsh realities but I expect the response to be another variant of "no one said it would be easy". I guess no one is allowed to have an opinion on a topic without being prepared to martyr themselves for it?
But I am, we fought a lot of battles and won over the last years with the previous German government, got the new one to adopt most of our (CCC) proposals and are now fighting again because of some proposals are again overreaching.
We aren’t talking about Germany, we are talking about the US (the article that sparked the discussion was in the New York Times). The US has an entirely different (and much less fair or representative) political system to Germany.
Your self-righteous indignation is really no better, posting to others that their solution is obviously a task so grand that most who endeavor to attempt it fail (aka every candidate who doesn't get elected.) It reads like a very shallow attempt at pragmatism.
Why would I want to be in the government unless I wanted to impose my will on someone else? People like that are the people I least want to be governed by.
Ah...yes, the everyone on the internet is American approach. If you live in a country that's fucked up in your own views without doing the bare minimum (ie. vote) against it the one who is fucked up is, YOU.
I'm much less concerned about the government knowing what the 'criminals' are talking about (there are plenty of other ways to track them) than I am with the government knowing what the citizens are planning on standing up for/against.