Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

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I am not to optimistic about privacy law in the US when you have a significant part of the political landscape in the US trying to pave the road to the Christian equivalent of Sharia law.

There are political ideas of fundamental religious, socialist or fascist nature¹ which rely a lot on subjects snitching and telling on their neighbors, kids telling on their parents and so on. They don't want stricter privacy law for all. Maybe for the political leadership, but not for commoners and people whom they disagree with.

Thinking about privacy makes no sense, if you have a considerable amount of the voting population that would be fine with abolishing the democratic process. How would one expect those people to respect your privacy (law or not) if they can't even be bothered to respect the democratic vote of the people they have been taught to hate?

¹: As someone living in Germany which has seen this twice (under the Nazis and under the GDR) I can't help but noticing the US slipping into a similar direction: There have been politicians toying with the idea that a dictator is needed in the US, others have "joked" about hunting their opposition with dogs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

> I am not to optimistic about privacy law in the US when you have a significant part of the political landscape in the US trying to pave the road to the Christian equivalent of Sharia law.

Congress is significantly older and more religious than most of the population. As younger people continue to take office like AOC, the attempt to do this will slowly be pushed back.

> There have been politicians toying with the idea that a dictator is needed in the US

Honestly, I favor a benevolent dictator with checks and balances, so not a dictator in the usual sense, but rather someone with enough authority to actually do things without opposition, but also an easy means of removal and a jury type deal to overrule certain things (as opposed to legislation having to go through two houses first).

Democracy only works when you have an educated population, otherwise you get what's happening in the US. That aside, democracy shouldn't allow people to vote on everything...the same way not everyone is qualified to be a manager and make decisions.

Vote on how local money should be spent, for a pool or a park? Sure. Vote on best steps to combat climate change? No. Not when half the population is in denial that it even exists.

> Honestly, I favor a benevolent dictator with checks and balances,

Note how people often evoke the specifically benevolent dictator when comparing forms of governance, stacking the deck from the start; democracy and other forms of governance don’t get such a privilege, as they are supposed to be evaluated on its empirical merits.

So you don’t have to worry about an evil and selfish dictator by definition. How nice!

> Democracy only works when you have an educated population, otherwise you get what's happening in the US.

First of all, democracy working cannot be judged on whether people make “educated” decisions: it works if people have the power to choose. Similarily freedom does not work if only people do good things; it works if they have the power to be free.

I cannot walk into a grown person’s home and judge whether they should be free to make choices based on the choices they make unless I am so arrogant as to consider myself an adult and them a child (relatively speaking). Yet this “democracy only works” line of thinking reeks of this attitude.

But this is an old-as-the-hills false goal, popular among the educated for painfully obvious reasons; the relatively educated can use their elite-adjacent power to systematically de facto disenfranchise regular people by depriving them of whatever their goalpost for “educated” is, over the span of decades. That then becomes a self-reinforcing and (in their eyes) virtuous cycle; more and more disenfranchisement leads to a more and more apolitical and “stupid” people, which in turn “proves” the point! And in the end the educated and the elites get what they want: more power for themselves, less interference from the general populace.

Politics is almost always about self- and group-interest. This is not an exception; the “educated” will wax poetic about the virtues of an “informed public”, but most of them just want more power for themselves.

We got democracy from Britain, Rome, and Greece. All of these places had what were essentially dictators from time to time, often to overcome crises.

Yes some of them were bad, but the illusion of consent democratic governments can create is IMO even worse when they go bad.

Do you think I am making an argument for the sham-democracies that we have in the world today? Did you even read what I wrote?

I think making that distinction is the same mistake you were pointing out.

I think you misunderstand whas democracy is. You probably think it is about being able to vote something you like, and because there are people with differing opinions you won't get a good outcome — or something among those lines.

This is not what democracy is. Democracy is mainly about one thing: Being able to remove people from office you dislike.

As soon as you get a dictator, benevolent or not, you cease the power to remove them, their heirs or sucessors from office without civil war and/or revolution.

This is why dictatorships will always have a sense of insecurity, because on top of not being able to rely on a fair system of law, you are not even able to rely on the character of the dictatorship. Even a single dictator might change their style drastically throughout their career etc.

So if you wish for that, you probably didn't read a lot of history.

> This is not what democracy is. Democracy is mainly about one thing: Being able to remove people from office you dislike.

This is absurd and wrong on its face if you take the word “democracy” even a little literally, which you should even if only for the theoretical exercise. Democracy roughly means that the people govern. But now you’ve said that it is “mainly” about removing someone else from governance. Huh? Something doesn’t seem right here.

This is of course “representative democracy”, or roughly “elite(-driven) democracy”; a sort of governance where the elites jocky for power (as per usual), present to the rest of the population who they may vote for (every two years or so), and then the general population goes back to their private (non-political) affairs.

And this according to some people is something that we are supposed to be grateful for. What a sham.

> So you don’t have to worry about an evil and selfish dictator by definition. How nice!

Exactly. 'dictator' is a word loaded with negativity, so it's an attempt to balance that. Someone who still has a comparable amount of authority while being limited from becoming a tyrant.

> First of all, democracy working cannot be judged on whether people make “educated” decisions: it works if people have the power to choose.

I disagree. It can be judged by the results it garners, and looking at how bad the US is doing at the moment, I would say it is not working. Simple because things could be substantially better than they are, but the current democratic system is preventing that.

> Yet this “democracy only works” line of thinking reeks of this attitude.

You call it arrogance, I call it confidence and common sense. When half the population are voting based on belief and out of spite instead of science, fact and empathy, then they may as well be spiteful children.

> Politics is almost always about self- and group-interest. This is not an exception; the “educated” will wax poetic about the virtues of an “informed public”, but most of them just want more power for themselves.

This is a bug, and something that can be solved by patching the code (legislation).

> Exactly. 'dictator' is a word loaded with negativity, so it's an attempt to balance that.

Nope. Being “loaded with negativity” is besides the point (you seem to love the idea); this form of governance is just particularly prone to failing due to the character of the tyrant. But you seem to acknowledge that anyway.

> I disagree. It can be judged by the results it garners, and looking at how bad the US is doing at the moment, I would say it is not working.

Weird. I haven’t read any serious research on this subject that says that America (or perhaps any liberal democracy, but I’ve only read research on America) is a democracy-in-practice. According to the mainstream elite democratic theory, elites govern with limited input from the general population.

So maybe you should blame the elites if things are falling apart. But I bet you don’t want to do that, though.

> This is a bug, and something that can be solved by patching the code (legislation).

The smart-but-naive often think that you can tune politics like a machine.

> Nope. Being “loaded with negativity” is besides the point (you seem to love the idea)

It's not beside the point in the context of your statement I was replying to, which is why I added the word benevolent to it.

> this form of governance is just particularly prone to failing due to the character of the tyrant. But you seem to acknowledge that anyway.

I acknowledged it while I refuted it. You can have someone with a similar amount of power and have checks and balances on some of that power. A carefully crafted system allowing for that hasn't really been created in modern day.

> Weird. I haven’t read any serious research on this subject that says that America (or perhaps any liberal democracy, but I’ve only read research on America) is a democracy-in-practice.

Huh, then I guess you haven't even read the basic stuff, since a representative democracy is a type of democracy.

> According to the mainstream elite democratic theory, elites govern with limited input from the general population.

You're confused. You're talking about conspiracy theory

> So maybe you should blame the elites if things are falling apart. But I bet you don’t want to do that, though.

The elites have power because the sheeple let them have it. Again, democracy at work.

> The smart-but-naive often think that you can tune politics like a machine.

It's not naive to recognize our current system is flawed and we can do better.

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