Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.

I find this view to be lacking in nuance.

Laws are intended to exist with the consent of the governed. Substantially the whole of society agrees that murder should be illegal, so if someone commits murder we're willing to commit significant resources to investigating and prosecuting the perpetrator. It doesn't have to be efficient or have perfect enforcement because its purpose is to act as a deterrent. Everyone is willing to spend the resources to enforce those laws because everyone agrees that their enforcement is important. Enforcement efficiency is not required when there is popular consent.

Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. When there is a law against being of a particular ethnicity or religion or political ideology, you want to enable people to be criminals. Preventing laws like that from ever being effective is worth sustaining a significant amount of inefficiency in the enforcement of other laws.

And this is not a binary distinction with "laws against murder" on one side and "laws against being Jewish" on the other. The latter is only the viscerally powerful extreme that once made us say never again.

The spectrum spans the full scale, where the middle is filled with police corruption and political retaliation against the opposition and petty busybodies inducing poverty and homelessness through the incompetent micromanagement of society.

Should governments have the ability to freeze the bank accounts of protesters? It doesn't matter what they're protesting or what crimes some minority of the protesters are alleged to have committed when the account freezes are instituted as collective punishment, the answer is no. The government should not have the ability to do that, because in that case they are the criminals, and structural defenses against government abuses are important.

>Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime.

This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken.

> This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken.

That's kind of the problem, right? Suppose you have a system that actually allows perfect enforcement and then the government passes a law against some religious practice. Espousing atheism is banned, or Islam, or Christianity, depending on who controls the government this time; take your pick. If anybody who does it is instantly brought up on charges with severe penalties then nobody does it. But that's bad. That's the problem. You need to sustain enough friction to prevent things like that from being possible because enforcing laws like that is worse than anything that could come out of making ordinary law enforcement require more resources.

>If anybody who does it is instantly brought up on charges with severe penalties then nobody does it. But that's bad.

I don't think it's bad. Similar to closed and open source software there is room for closed and open societies. They are different approaches that have different pros and cons.

similar to closed and open source software there is room for societies that arbitrarily imprison and kill members of their society based on decisions of often insane ruling classes, and societies that try to prevent that kind of thing from happening.

Right, I mean, wrong.

before you go trying to do the HN thing of explaining why your open/closed source analogy was super brilliant, and my response was reductive and clueless, please consider that societies are composed of living people and software is composed of 1s and 0s.

>that arbitrarily

If they had access to better data they wouldn't have to do it arbitrarily and could more accurately target problematic people. I believe there isn't room for doing it arbitrarily as from my perspective it is a suboptimal strategy towards accomplishing one's goals.

>please consider that societies are composed of living people and software is composed of 1s and 0s.

I am not interested in making an emotional argument. I would be willing to hold my belief regardless of what a system is made up of.

> isn't room for doing it arbitrarily as from my perspective it is a suboptimal strategy towards accomplishing one's goals.

One’s goals? And if my goal were to enslave a nation of people to enrich myself and maintain power for as long as possible?

> I am not interested in making an emotional argument. I would be willing to hold my belief regardless of what a system is made up of.

You cannot discuss governance and civilization design without emotional arguments - i mean i guess you can you can if you lean psychopathic. I don’t mean to name call so please correct my assumptions here what you mean.

Closed societies are tolerable in theory - but in theory people should be able to opt-in or opt-out. If they aren’t free to opt-out such as with a national closed society it’s not civilization, it’s slavery.

Okay, let's go with your approach. Then the closed society is China or Iran and the open society is the US and other western countries, right? In which case we shouldn't have any such thing in the open countries.

>China or Iran and the open society is the US and other western countries, right?

Sure, but of course it isn't black and white.

>In which case we shouldn't have any such thing in the open countries.

I still think being able to effectively apply the will of We the People would be good to do. Being afraid that the people will be able to want for something you don't like to happen is disrespectful to the will of the people.

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