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Comment by stpdnerdism | Hacker News Reader

The article is not completely wrong in its premises, but phrased incorrectly.

This is not about technologies (after all, an authoritarian government will use many existing technologies, from the car to the computer), but about powers granted to a government, that could be used differently by the next party/majority in power.

The answer to that is to not grant government too much power in the first place.

Of course, this is often a contentious point for leftists, since they do want to grant government a lot of power in the first place; they're just concerned that the exact same powers will then be used by a different political side in a way that bothers a different category of people.

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You will get downvoted to oblivion for even suggesting it here but it's so obviously a take that maps on cleanly to reality. Massive power centralization in government makes everything dual use in the service of a police state. The easiest thing to do is resist massive centralization of power in a government.

you get downvoted because to most people we don't care if its tyranny.gov or tyranny.com. "don't give powers to the government" just means they buy them from corporations. see: cellphone location data.

the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.

>the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.

This is nonsensical. The power always exists, it's just your fellow human beings doing things, to you, around you, with you, without you.

You cannot do anything to not have that power. It doesn't matter if your neighbors are lynching you because the evil dictatorial police state said to, or because the rough consensus of a mob of lunatics want your food.

You as a human lack power. Humans working together have far more power. Sometimes, you can use the combined power of some humans working together to empower other humans. That's what laws are. That's what a State can do.

That's why corporations can have power even though they are not part of government. Being able to direct 1000 humans to do something is what power is.

You cannot eliminate that power. It's a fundamental part of reality. It's the entire reason animals evolved to be social at all, to take advantage of that power.

Its like you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them" (corporations/governments/groups of lobbyists) from working together.

I'll point to the gun rules, where gun owners prevented the state from building gun registries, forced gun sale records to be kept on gun store premises, and then largely purchased from small independent gun stores. They ensured the background check was on the person and not the gun. All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.

You can avoid giving any single person or group too much power. It does take effort.

Your thesis that the solution is to "not to have the power exist at all, anywhere" and your insistence here that "you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them"" are at odds. "We" did not build those laws nor do "we" enforce them. The government wrote those laws and the government enforces them with its monopoly on violence. You cannot have a set of laws which anyone respects or enforces without a source of power capable of doing so, and in the US that source of power is not "we the people," regardless of what your civics classes might have taught you.

>All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.

And so it became impossible to do anything effective to prevent gun violence and mass shootings and "that someone somewhere" proceeded to centralize power anyway because the gun owners don't actually care as long as no one touches their guns.

Meanwhile the rest of the Western world has democratic governments which actually function and don't have mass shootings.

Good work I guess.

Many of the same people that want to attempt to reduce mass shootings by directly undermining the obvious literal intent of the second amendment almost without exception want to expand the government for their own ends. It wasn't "someone somewhere" - it was very specific political movements that had often had heavy endorsement from the government itself. You can't honestly say gun owners haven't cared as long as no one touches their guns - that's just dishonest and plainly historically illiterate.

do you really not understand the monopoly on violence that governments have that corporations in large part completely lack? are you being purposefully obtuse?

wana see private security for a pharmaceutical beat a guy on a bike for taking a shortcut through their parking lot? oh right, no bodycams there.

cops protect property. rich people got a sweet deal right now as our taxes pay for them. but rest assured if we did manage to defund the police, you'd see private security replace them. then maybe you'd understand who has power without the obfuscation of "libertarian" bs.

You are just making the case for a leviathan which is clearly cited in much of the "libertarian bs" you disparage - but I assume it's an area of political science you don't actually read. The government IS this leviathan and that is its justified role. You need to have something above corporations that has the ability to actually enforce contracts. That doesn't mean it needs to be the worlds largest employer - or generally distort every market signal critical to its citizens lives. Government that can fulfill it's justified role(s), and a totalitarian government are different things.

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