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Comment by Too | Hacker News Reader

Like rock paper scissors, there are multiple dimensions to power and the state doesn’t always possess all of them. Media being the most obvious one (fourth estate). Federal bank another. As the split of government and parliament.

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The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state - fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of violence. Other actors may possess other types of power and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or are constrained by the state power of violence.

The democratic state is less violent than the individuals as a whole (including the police), so the distinction comes from actual vs potential violence.

I'm assuming you don't count holding people in cages against their will under pain of extreme violence as violence?

One could make an argument that the state does not hold a monopoly on violence. It holds a monopoly on the legitimization of violence. You're allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself from death or serious bodily harm in the majority of jurisdictions, provided it is not disproportionate. What matters is that the state declines to prosecute this, but does prosecute the person who hypothetically shoots someone on Fifth Avenue for no reason.

That's just semantics, for all intents and purposes the monopoly on violence is exactly that: the monopoly on the legitimisation of violence, only the state allows violence, you can only perform a violent act under the provisions the state allows, hence it's de facto and de jure holding the monopoly on violence.

Stating this because I'm not sure what differentiation you are trying to achieve with the semantics game, the meaning is the same for any interpretation.

I am specifically not arguing the state has a monopoly on violence - as with the GP, people are imputing arguments I’m not making. It’s the fact that the state cannot have a monopoly on violence that forces the state to be powerful enough that its threat of violence outweighs others (and, bluntly, defines what the state IS, for all practical purposes: it is the entity whose threats of violence supersede all others.)

The media has died though, ‘no one’ watches the MSM under 30, everyone is online in their safe space.

> The media has died though, ‘no one’ watches the MSM

Media != MSM

online is the media.

YouTube has gone mainstream.

As youtubers are getting more and more attention than the old medias, that may be an area where small groups are striving against large ones (so going against Terence's theory).

What small groups though? YouTube is owned and moderated by a trillion dollar company which heavily editorialize the user feed.

And more an more YouTube channels are owned by PE funds.

The small groups of influencers. YouTube is the new spectrum and public square. That’s why it was so harmful when Biden censored tens of thousands on it.

> That’s why it was so harmful when Biden censored tens of thousands on it.

Come on.

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