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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

Since diversity is a strength, it would seem that the ideal situation globally is to have a diversity of economic, political and legal systems. If instead, these systems around the globe tend towards similarity and strong coupling, the result is likely to be fragility and instability. By having weakly coupled diverse systems with well defined interfaces, the overall global system becomes more robust and disturbances in one part are less likely to propagate to the rest of the globe. Current tensions seem to be due to too tight coupling and poorly defined protocols and interfaces.

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+1, well said! Diversity, having individual countries do their own thing and embrace their own ethnicity, and where it makes sense support free trade.

Sometimes in conversation I hear people talk about how we have to save the world, interfere with other countries, etc. I think this should never be done unilaterally. If something really bad and evil is going on in the world then many countries should agree and cooperate to try to fix things.

The trouble with unilateral intervention is that it can so easily devolve into just serving the needs of special interests.

There are no well-defined interfaces in human interactions. Human interactions are messy. The closest we get to well-defined interfaces is the law and even that needs regular human intervention in the courts.

You think totalitarian regimes like China and North Korea are OK, because "diversity"?

North Korea is totalitarian, and it will hopefully change to something acceptable.

I think of the current regime in China as more an authoritarian single party regime. We have tolerated or been allied with authoritarian single party regimes in earlier decades such as Taiwan under the KMT, Japan under the early LDP, and South Korea under Rhee.

China places a higher priority on enforcing social harmony than the US, but China has a history where there have been multiple periods of severe social disturbance causing 10s of millions of deaths, such as the Taiping Rebellion. In actual practice most people have quite a lot of freedom on most subjects most of the time since, "Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away."

The Chinese Communist Party places a high priority on social harmony because that’s what benefits them. Having freedom as long as no one notices you isn’t freedom.

In the US there is a faction that is extremely strong on "privacy rights". This seem motivated by the idea that you are free to do as you please so long as you can prevent others from knowing about it, rather than depending on having strong rights to do as you please whether others know or not.

Strong privacy is the "security by obscurity" solution to being free.

So you're arguing China has strong privacy rights? How do "privacy rights" matter if you don't have the freedom to have privacy?

Freedom is subjective to one's past experiences.

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