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Comment by joeclark77 | Hacker News Reader

But there are no "international legal means" without the ability to threaten consequences. "International legal means" more or less just means your ambassador asks the foreign country nicely to release you. That's why every version of a "world court" is a joke; nations voluntarily decide if they want to pay attention to its judgments. If your nation has no ability to threaten consequences, I guess the only thing you could do is offer bribes. You might be able to bribe some corrupt banana republics to give your members immunity to their laws, but are you really going to bribe the UK to allow your members to bear arms, or bribe Canada to allow your members the freedom of speech?

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I really don't see where bribes come into this.

I've said before in other comments that this wouldn't just take over from your geographical citizenship, but would be a sort-of competition to it. Competition benefits the consumers, because both sides try to create a better value proposition. Right now there is no competition to your governance other than potentially voting for someone else or moving. If we created a global body that isn't just some black-box bureaucratic system, but a 100% open, transparent, run by the citizens system, that could help put some real pressure on international politics.

Here's just a few Wikipedia links that connect to everything I've written in my comments so far. There's more than these, but I'm still working through them:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_citizenship

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_mundialization

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_globalization

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_citizens_movement

But how would you apply "pressure"? It keeps coming back to this. If it's not by using force, and not by throwing money around, then I can't see what it would be.

Maybe you could illustrate this idea with a few fictional scenarios. For example, let's say Citizens A and B are a law-abiding family in Germany, and the government there has just seized their children because they're Christian and they homeschool. Clear violation of the UN declaration of human rights. What does your online government do to help these citizens?

You're still not reading my comments, try reading the other ones in this post as well. If something like your example happened what would a regular government do? I've said before this isn't a replacement for your geographical/local government (at least not for a while).

I've revised the term to not mean "government", that's just what term I first used. Think more of like a world citizenship, or NGO, or union fighting for collective rights.

In real life, the "regular government" is Germany itself, so, there's no conflict. The victim has no recourse except to try to get his family out of the country and seek asylum. (This is really happening to Christians in Germany, by the way, I didn't make it up.) I'm just asking for what sort of thing you envision a digital citizenship/NGO/union would do. Hold a protest? Threaten a strike? And how do you enforce solidarity among the ranks if a lot of your German members share the government's attitude about Christians, for example?

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