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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

bartered rights with governments are ONLY a shaky peace deal. The only thing that holds that deal together is the willingness of an aggrieved party damage the other party. It's anarchy behind a thin veil. The only thing that prevents the government organ from taking away all our hard negotiated rights over hundreds of years is the fact they're afraid they'll get strung up on fence posts with their intestines hanging out while children pelt them with vegetables and vultures consume their rotting flesh.

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> The only thing that prevents the government organ from taking away all our hard negotiated rights over hundreds of years is the fact they're afraid they'll get strung up on fence posts with their intestines hanging out while children pelt them with vegetables and vultures consume their rotting flesh.

This is why Democracy exists - voters express their displeasure by voting people out of office. Save a lot of beheadings a la the French Revolution.

In Europe, a similar dynamic exists for armed conflicts between nations and Eurovision.

We only got to "Democracy" by constantly the constant bloody deposition of kings and queens and their soldiers, allies and other forces, yes.

Not really, in fact, the French revolution and the "democracy" (included was a period called the "reign of terror") that followed was closely followed by a empire, and the French people were happy with that newfound stability.

I think that what motivated the transition to democracy the prosperity made possible by the industrial revolution. No longer we need a population of dumb muscle since machines do better. Instead we need a healthy, well educated population, capable of innovation, so that we can build and operate better machines. And that's not the kind of population a coercitive regime creates.

much further back, like the magna carta is even more obvious this is indeed the case. It's two sides agreeing to certain privileges enjoyed by the other (or else...)

The giant western security state is not amenable to democratic change. The media keeps us apathetic and helpless, and candidates that would meaningfully change anything aren't allowed to run. People who try to get around this "soft power" are jailed, killed or exiled.

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