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Comment by thwest | Hacker News Reader

I disagree simply because I feel the obligation for a completely transparent government outweighs the need to wage war. How selfish must one be to insist we wage these conflicts where the deaths of many are a certainty.

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The problem with pacifism is that it gives you no defense against those who aren't pacifists.

No one is invading France.

Nor is France especially pacifistic. I suspect these two facts are somehow related.

Therefore, we should preemptively invade Mali/Iraq/etc? Do we have to strike first, and violently manage other countries just to maintain our defenses?

I am not arguing for pacifism. I put the 'need to wage war' into the original moral calculus as a valid consideration, not to dismiss it.

Deliberately making yourself ineffective at waging war because you don't want to wage war is equivalent to pacifism. There's no value to going out of your way to start wars, but you need the ability to end them decisively.

The problem with transparency is that there are those who would exploit it. We could all have our passwords publicly available (that would be an interesting experiment), but I'll guess that you wouldn't be willing to post yours here. So I could understand the french gov't not willing to divulge this information at the moment either.

If history has been any lesson, conflict will come, regardless of whether you want it or not.

History also teaches that secrecy is a tool of the powerful state forces to oppress and kill the weak civilians.

History also teaches that secrecy is a tool of those who would like to rebel against powerful state forces that wish to find and kill them.

>>We could all have our passwords publicly available (that would be an interesting experiment), but I'll guess that you wouldn't be willing to post yours here.

Come off it. Hyperbole much? Why don't you take it even a bit further and in the name of transparency have everybody walk around nude so that you know, we can see that you are not carrying any weapons.

You know the comment you replied to did not talk about transparency to this extreme.

It did talk of "obligation for a completely transparent government" (emphasis mine).

Maximally might have been a better word choice, or just dropping the adjective. Absolutism never survives scrutiny⸮

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