Four fears for authoritarians
paulbernal.wordpress.com
paulbernal.wordpress.com
What will help is if everyone finally realises that it's NOT about pornography, that it's NOT about terrorism, that it's NOT about drugs, that it's NOT about whatever reason they name..
If anyone knows what to do please step up and lead I am happy to follow.
I understand HN isn't exactly the usual activist crowd, but it should be pretty easy to understand that activism is about acting against forces much larger, stronger, and better funded than you are.
Actions that bring change will be one-in-a-million, and they will always be the fruit of an individual (or a collective) that are persistent in their goals, and pursue them regardless of others joining them or not.
Also, if you're serious about doing something - don't just throw the usual "but who's gonna build the roads and help the poor". Think and find solutions that don't involve government. Don't just say it's impossible. Nothing is impossible and certainly not this.
Aside from that, you'd still need a way to convert bitcoins to cash, which involves the money running through a bank account. It would turn in to an elaborate fraud operation.
EDIT: To clarify for non-UK residents (I'm not sure how it works in other countries), everything in the UK is fundamentally tied to your bank account. Your wages go directly to your bank. Your bills come directly out of your bank account via payment agreements that are set up with your bank and the 3rd party (see Direct Debit). There's no real way you can be paid in cash and pay your bills in cash.
The essence of fraud is finding loopholes that allow you to move cash outside of the system. Those loopholes are intrinsically not common knowledge, otherwise they'd be closed.
Not so. Inflation is yet another tax you'll be paying if you keep your money in a bank. Inflation is a huge thing for governments. Without inflation, they'd be out of so many opportunities to finance various things and the fraudulent financial system governments run would be instantly exposed.
Then you would also have to remember that if you keep your savings in Bitcoin, you can pay for other products and services with them directly. And taxes would be paid only by a company that at some point decides to convert Bitcoins to fiat. That is, if you are A then your bitcoins may be in a chain of payments A -> B -> C. Obviously A (you) paid taxes, C would also have to pay taxes when he converts them to fiat. But because B decides to spend bitcoins earned from you directly by purchasing things from C, taxes are not paid from that deal.
Tax is payable on anything earned. This is an invitation to arrest and tax evasion charges.
BTC is also a fundamentally bad idea for an economy.
Then you could persuade your employer to pay this corporation for services rendered.
Of course, the heart of the company would still be with you and if you are resident in the UK, you are doing something illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism
Widely adopted, this is what kills the tyrants.
I don't see reduced tax income changing the ratio in which a government allocates their funds.
The bad part of the government is very small (but getting bigger). I think it needs to be eradicated politically, and I'm certain it will happen very soon (i.e. when the older generation that doesn't understand computers retires or dies).
Stop and ask yourself. If government is effectively gone tomorrow, would the demand for protection, fire safety, health insurance, education, infrastructure and safety net for the poor be gone too? Of course not! And if the demand is not gone, then wouldn't you simply have those things offered on the market?
It think you've actually hit the nail on the head here. What we need is some leaders. When you think about the civil rights movement and other successful movements, you can name names.
To some extent we have leaders, but they're more ideological leaders than meet-here-and-do-this leaders. We need people who can organize other people, so that we can cause 10,000 people to show up in one place at the same time. And then do it again, with the same people, in some other place at some other time when the need arises.
Where is the organization to do this? Why don't we have conferences on this? The closest thing I can think of is the gaggle of Libertarians-nee-anarchists who hold a bunch of sessions largely for the purpose of soliciting donations from their elderly followers. They don't seem to be accomplishing anything, unless you count funding the likes of Michelle Bachmann as accomplishing something.
It seems to me we need some kind of organizational structure for the rather not small number of 20- and 30-something people to fall into which is divorced from the fringes of the Tea Party. Because not wanting authoritarians to hold a majority in Congress or have SWAT teams kill your dog is an exceedingly moderate position.
Can you name one leader in the Arab Spring movements? Turkey protests? etc. Modern ways of communication take away the need of a leader we can inform ourselves and join an upcoming movement. What we need is a way to coordinate and get enough like minded people thats enough.
Not saying presence or absence of leadership is the cause, but don't assume because of no leadership it is the best way.
A decade or so back (forgetting the country at the moment) there was a high-profile spontaneous uprising which overthrew the government. A key moment during the 3-day rally/occupation involved a bulldozer (someone jog my memory). The whole thing seemed as you describe, modern communication having taken away the need of a leader with the participants informing themselves and coordinating spontaneously. Except...it wasn't. It was the result of an passionate 10-year plan by one person to choreograph the whole thing, right down to persuading a group of police to resist protestors for a given period then "spontaneously" change loyalties, along with timing of aforementioned bulldozer bashing down doors.
Leaders may not stand out at the front of their troops, guiding them into battle. Leaders may (especially today) hide in anonymous rooms, remotely directing agitators to persuade mob dynamics a la psychological warfare. That you can't name one leader therein doesn't mean there aren't any nor have plans been in the making for years.
Wow, way to slander the one organised group that actually saw this coming from a million miles away. These people have claimed very strongly and very consistently over many years that governments (any government, no matter what party is in charge) simply cannot be trusted with power, and have been met with very little but ridicule in return. They have not accomplished anything because the majority opinion (by a wide margin) is that government power is benign and for our own good.
Their problem is that they don't distinguish between government power and government services. You can't object to public roads and schools and expect to be taken seriously.
We need to organize a group of people who are willing to accept that the government should operate a fire department without accepting that the government should operate a police state.
Few liberty minded people who wish to reduce the reach and scope of government have any in principle disagreement with the goals of most of the service providing branches of government, they just believe they could be far better handled by market entities directly accountable to economic forces for their performance rather than the political alternatives which fail to escape market forces entirely at any rate and just end up dumping their negative externalities on more productive sectors of the economy in the form of taxation.
It's not that they don't want schools or fire departments, it's that they don't want people mugged on an epic scale to fund them. Accepting that it's OK to use violent force on people to go along with your plans takes the argument out of the territory of what means are acceptable and only to what ends are acceptable, and that is far murkier territory when there are almost seven billion largely divergent ideas on what those ends ought to be.
You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state. Some ends are only possible with the acceptability of certain means, and those ends are typically the ones people want to avoid like tyrannical police states. It's much easier to reach a consensus on means than ends, so do that and let the best ends win by competition amongst voluntary, enfranchised participants rather than slaves gradually falling into despair as they find that everything they believed in is a lie and there is no way out.
Any means has to be weighed against the alternatives to decide whether it can be accepted. You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs without providing any effective alternative. "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor.
> You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state.
You do need force to run a fire department or a school. You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. That isn't any less a use of force than imposing the same penalty on someone who doesn't pay their taxes.
The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes. But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. I never agreed that the gold in your vault or the land that you mined it from should belong to you and not me but you are still going to have to exclude me by force in order to exercise dominion over it.
You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. The only way to avoid that is to somehow create a world in which everyone who refuses to work for existing owners of capital in lieu of pursuing their own interests will still be able to procure the necessities of life. We aren't there yet, so we have to pay taxes.
Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects. But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer. The buyer pays no matter what, the provider doesn't have to take any notice of the level of satisfaction that the buyer has with the service. This is the root cause of government inefficiency, it is not "effective".
> without providing any effective alternative
If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so.
All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives.
> "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor.
In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. This is completely false, in the absence of state environmental regulations there will still remain an enormous demand for pristine environments. Why are the contaminant levels in your local theme park well below the regulatory levels allowed in all cases? Because they have a vested interest in keeping that space maintained to an even higher level than the machinery of the state coerces them to, and so it goes for all agencies in similar positions.
In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control. That you'd call state education a success story defies belief.
> You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver.
You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service? It's simply not good business to be a bad business, unless your customers don't have a choice on whether or not they pay your bills, like say state provided goods and services.
Think of it in terms of Nash equilibriums, what is the stable state of a business that does not make good on its deals and cannot force new customers to patronise it? To go out of business. What is the stable state of the most efficient business in any given sector where customers are free to choose amongst all of the entities in that sector? To drive the profit margin toward zero, lower costs and increase quality. What is the stable state of an agency that is held accountable only by politics and is immune to the direct pressure of market forces resulting from poor performance? The agency with the best politicians wins, the performance of that agency is largely irrelevant except insofar as it is necessary to bolster the political goals of the agency in question.
And that's what we end up with in all cases.
> The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes
Negative sir, that's a strawman. The argument I want to make is that taxes are an extremely inefficient way to actually fund the provision of goods and services, with all the concurrent effects you can assume from that. Providers that can only exist by extorting their customers should not exist, they should not be compelled to provide their sub par services for no return.
> But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world.
And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict.
Or you could just try to actually provide value for your fellow humans in return for the things that you want and need in life. What is the path of least resistance?
> You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous.
It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this.
As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival, and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them and would rather see them starve, freeze or die of disease. That is your sole remaining justification for the existence of the massively inefficient bureaucracy that forcibly confiscates many months of every year from the lives of the entire remaining productive populace.
You'll excuse me if I'm not sold.
You can't have peace without the threat of force. If I come to your house and start claiming all your stuff, either you or somebody else is going to have to stop me by force or you're soon not going to have any stuff.
>But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer.
Now you're conflating effectiveness with efficiency. The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list. The existing size of government is ridiculously out of control, especially the federal government, primarily because of blatant corruption. You still haven't provided an alternative effective means of educating millions of poor children whose parents can't afford to send them to private schools.
>If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. >All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives.
You're trying to claim the middle. I don't want the middle. Nobody is arguing that the government would be better at manufacturing microprocessors than Samsung or Intel. Nobody wants the government to manufacture and sell microprocessors. The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention.
Let's look at education. Educating the poor is socially beneficial because it converts would-be vagrants and criminals into productive members of society by allowing them to do skilled labor and earn higher wages, which in turn makes them less desperate and less likely to end up in prison or draining the resources of social welfare charities. So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children? Either you make the kids and their families pay for it (student loans), or you find somebody else to pay for it (charity).
The problem with student loans (in addition to the indentured servitude problem we already see at the college level) is that it fails to capture the externalities. Part of the benefit of someone becoming a doctor instead of a thief goes to the hospital, to its patients, to the would-be thief's victims who no longer have their property stolen, to whoever it is we have funding the prisons who no longer have to pay to incarcerate this person, etc. Those benefits aren't entirely captured by the higher wages earned by the person to be educated, which means they can't be paid in interest to the bank providing the student loan, which means the bank will often be unwilling to make the loan at an interest rate the borrower would be able to pay even though educating that person would nevertheless result in a net benefit to society.
So we're left with charity, which means we're in trouble. Because all those individuals who benefit from the externalities of educating the poor? They're not organized. They don't individually have time to do a cost/benefit analysis on charitable donations, and doing so is hugely inefficient in any event because it requires a massive duplication of effort by millions of individual contributors. Which means contributions don't go to the right place, and there is the same sort of lack of accountability as there is with government because millions of individual contributors have trouble holding a charity accountable in much the same way as millions of voters do a government. You mix these two together and you get a fact of modern charities: The charities spend an enormous amount of donated money soliciting for more donations, because spending two million dollars on advertising which brings you three million dollars in additional donations nets you a million dollars of cash money. So much for private sector efficiency.
On top of that, charities have a free rider problem that taxation solves. You benefit from the work of charities whether you know it or not and whether you contribute or not, and you don't have to contribute. Perhaps you're socially minded and you do anyway, but some people aren't, and they won't. So in order to collect the same amount of money, the charity will have to solicit more from each contributor. Not all contributors will be willing to pay more, which once again increases the amount the charity needs from those remaining, and increases the amount of money the charity has to waste soliciting donations to net the same amount of funding. A few rounds of this and you quickly end up with large inefficiencies and a significant shortfall from the socially optimal level of education funding.
>In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants.
See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously. The market is going to provide specific locations which are free of environmental contaminants and the rest of the world is fair game for toxic waste and unbreathable air? Seriously?
On top of that, how are you expecting to maintain these pristine environments against unregulated neighbors? What is your hypothetical theme park supposed to do when its closest neighbor starts burning used tires in an open pit? Pick up and move? Buy all the surrounding property for a hundred miles?
>In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control.
Good teachers teaching small class sizes are expensive. The internet hasn't changed that.
> You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service?
That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations and create a significant advantage for larger and more established companies, resulting in market consolidation, monopolies and the consequent massive inefficiency.
>And that's what we end up with in all cases.
This is really the whole flaw in your argument. What we end up with in most cases is not what we end up with in all cases. There are important cases where the market fails and the government can do better.
>And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict.
Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy? The citizens of this country earned the right to govern it by taking independence from the crown. We now collectively own the country. If you want to live here you follow the rules we collectively set through the process of democratic elections. If you want to live in a state of anarchy then feel free to win your own war of independence or colonize Mars and establish your own government or lack thereof.
>It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this.
It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary:
>As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival
The ability to get a job or have a choice between several jobs doesn't imply that taking any such job is voluntary when refusal to choose your master results in homelessness and starvation. That's the point. You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration, you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation. I don't see that the one is particularly morally superior to the other.
>and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them
How can this be foreign to you? The whole "children starving in Africa" thing is actual reality. Actual human children with no food, no medicine and no education. That's what the complete lack of government looks like.
No, You or someone else would only come to my house and start claiming all my stuff if you believed it was in your best interests to do so. It might get you killed is indeed one reason that it might not be in your best interests to do so, but firstly there are many ways to implement the "it might get you killed" condition, and none of them necessarily rely upon a westphalian nation state as supporting infrastructure. In addition, if you believed it was not in your best interests for other reasons than "it might get you killed" it wouldn't matter, the end result would be the same.
People act in accordance with their best interests, it doesn't all have to be stick, it can be carrot, too. If you do not respect the property rights of others, it is only logical to assume that in turn, they will not respect your property rights. This makes it not in your best interests to do that.
Also, this response was directed at something that has nothing to do with the compulsion against the appropriation of private property by random people, it was a statement that it is wrong to extort people to finance your personal pet projects. If I set up a protection racket in my neighbourhood and enforce it with violence, it doesn't make it alright as long as I donate a portion of that to charity.
> The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list.
So whilst acknowledging that the current system is completely broken, you still can't see the value in exploring alternative avenues for the cases where currently government acts as the sole service provider? Even in a case like education where they do a terrible job of it to boot? You really don't see a problem with that perspective?
It strikes me as someone living in a feudal system arguing for the necessity of landed nobility to protect them from roaming bandits despite the fact that they spend the majority of their time scraping together a subsistence existence to feed a parasite class. Or someone that has convinced themselves that an embedded baroque thrown together regex parser for html processing is better than an open source alternative because they're not familiar with it and it wasn't invented here.
> The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention.
I see no evidence for this claim, the provision of any product or service allocated to government invariably ends up rated by political rather than performance metrics, it is necessarily inferior to alternatives where the performance can be directly rewarded or punished by the customer.
> So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children?
Or you radically overhaul the entire educational process to drastically reduce the investment necessary for attaining a superior quality education, the process as to how this is done is best decided by market forces, which as previously established drive costs as low as possible and quality as high as possible. Reducing costs results in the risk for loans going down and the ease of paying them back going up, as well as the coverage of scholarship / charitably funds for education going up.
Taking the entire sub performing public education infrastructure which has been sucking at the extortionate government teat for the majority of modern history and instead simply hooking it up to a directly user pays system will simply result in the vast majority of people refusing to patronise it due to its ineffectiveness and the cost relative to that ineffectiveness.
If "Let the market figure it out" with regards to educational means is too hand-wavy for you, consider Khan Academy or the vast crop of humans who have managed to self educate from the growing amount of information freely available on the internet for anyone with a desire to do so. There is enormous room in the machinery of education for improvement, and like everything else in history, there is no evidence that this is best managed by central planning and bureaucratic committees.
And it's still no justification for sticking a gun in the face of everyone in the world to finance the system, even if it actually wasn't as poorly performing as it is.
> See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously.
Actually, it implies that the owners of any given location are responsible for the contaminants in that location. It implies that there is a market for the responsible disposal of hazardous environmental waste, and when people are held to account by their neighbours for the negative externalities of their own environments who are incentivised to do so they will be eager to make sure that they are not contaminating their surrounding environments. For the full details, see;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter22.htm...
Alternatively, your system is what led to CFC Ozone depletion, Chernobyl and all other associated nuclear incidents, Water board contamination from fracking, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, the Bhopal disaster, the epidemic of rising lead levels in the air and all the knock on negative externalities from that even though at the time of the creation of leaded fuel lead poisoning was extremely well understood and there were alternatives, Ethyl corp actually used the blunt force of the government to stop its competitors from even questioning their practices in this area.
And who is the biggest polluter in the world? I'll give you a hint, it's not a private enterprise. So you'll excuse me if I actually think it's more reasonable to have a problem taking your approach seriously.
> That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations
Because no new entrants in the bespoke software development ever start up and gain traction from clients when there is no local framework to hold them to the delivery of their promised goods and services like say outsourced arrangements with businesses from other countries where the direct application of the legal machinery of the local state is off the table, right? Alright, maybe that happens sometimes, but it's at least extremely uncommon right?
Markets are extremely well tested methods for the dispersion and management of risk, and that's all this particular issue is.
> Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy?
I certainly would be if your assumption about the nature of my existence as a normal every day citizen moored to a typical nation state and all the infrastructure thereof were true. However, it is not. Also, we were discussing the results of behaving in a way counter to the rules set by an alternate society that at this point in time does not exist, and in that context I was pointing out that it would be easy to predict the results of your proposed behaviour.
> It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary
It is voluntary, in the system under discussion you are free to choose not to engage in transactions with your fellow human beings. Yes, this might mean you starve or freeze to death, but that is the consequence of your voluntary inaction that nobody is forcing upon you. If you want to bring a case for that one, you'll have to take it up with entropy and nature itself I'm afraid.
> You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration
You pay your taxes under threat of death, which will be actively imposed on you by a thinking entity which believes that it has the right to do so.
> you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation.
You engage in a free market because you want to gain the things that it has to offer you, like food and shelter, if you do not want these things you are not forced to engage in that market. No thinking entity will actively hunt you down for your refusal to participate in the system in question. In fact it is more likely that a thinking entity will offer you charity in sympathy for your position to protect you from the natural consequences of your own inaction.
That is why the two could not be more different, one is parasitism and slavery, the other one is symbiotism and trade.
> How can this be foreign to you?
Actually Africa has no shortage of government and the one area in which it does have a shortage of the form of government with which most of the modern world is familiar is actually outperforming all of its similar peers.
African governments are typically extremely corrupt and inefficient even by the standards of other world governments, which are as previously discussed corrupt and inefficient by nature. The charitable donations that are funnelled here are often parasitically controlled by the governments in question and doled out to the parties whom it is politically useful to do so, that you would use this as justification for the necessity of the state once again defies belief.
As for what "complete lack of government looks like" there is no place on the face of the planet that does not have some self important blowhard or committee thereof who believes that they have the right to parasitically impose their personal brand of law upon a static geographical area. Even Somalia which is the oft cited go to example for "without government" is simply a patchwork coalition of warring factions who claim sovereignty over a given territory. So citing examples is not really possible, people of the earth are still too addicted to the drug of the state for now.
With the growing discontent with that status quo all over the world though coupled with advances in technology that make it practical to choose to adopt systems like anarcho capitalism I have hopes that this might not always be the case. Back to the original question, I see this as one of the more promising ways to throw off that yoke.
If we have the educators, we need to advertise them to extreme limit, ensuring that everyone gets their message at least five times in some format.
The topic is really hard, because one needs to crush various myths: - that we can be safe, no matter what, - that the people in government are good and honest, - that it can happen to them and not only to others...
... while you keep their engagement level and focus up.
My personal goal is to create apps for that WiFi, sounds fun optimizing a website for 802.11G 54Mb/s.
I think we need to make a distinction here. See Egypt, for example.
A secular military government was in power for decades long (with support from the west). Their "Internet generation" got together and managed to overthrow Mubarak, and call for elections. They had elections, and the most organized party (Islamic) was able to elect their candidate (Morsi). But because of the religious inclinations, the laicist sector of the society asked the military to overthrow the president again. Now the military is in power and killing islamics who protest against the coup d'etate (again, with support from the west). It's back to zero.
So, Egypt attempt to adopt democracy and a more equalitarian state didn't exactly played out well. In fact, there, the government is a major chunk of the society (military control 30% of the economy). As it seems, democracy isn't the ultimate solution for every country.
I agree that just because you get to democracy doesn't mean everything becomes peachy.
But what other systems are better 'ultimate solutions' for given countries?
Ie, maybe there's a country for which right now the most practical government is a Kingdom. King Ud helps the wagons run on time. What makes that government the most practical for that country right now? Are those factors changing over time? What will the 'ultimate' solution look like then?
Honestly, I've heard this a lot -- even in amazing books like "Through Our Enemies' Eyes" -- and I'm never sure what the author intends to say.
For instance, it might be possible that Egypt successfully adopted democracy, even when a leader supported only by a sector of the society got elected. The very nature of democracy is forcing you to deal with different viewpoints on the political arena.
But since that goes against the west agenda and the US finances their military, you end up with a dysfunctional democracy, and suddenly it's acceptable to overthrow a democratically elected leader.
Today's world is interconnected so much that the very notion of sovereign countries is arguable.
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
In other words, government is, at its bare naked minimum, the monopoly of force. It must be contained, mistrusted, and treated as a necessary evil.
Despite the USA being screwed up in so many ways, I still thank my lucky stars for the anti-federalists, who gave us the bill of rights. Without them, we would be much worse off today than we are.
The current administration and the previous administrations don't care about the Bill of Rights.
A large body of decisions in trial and appellate courts at both the state and federal level, up to and including the SCOTUS provide plenty of evidence that this is not the case.
That Washington 'quote' cannot be found before 1902. I agree with the sentiment, but false attribution does nothing to help our credibility.
I see what's happening in the UK, where people are prosecuted for speech and there is no limit to parliament's power (other than watered-down EU treaties and such) and I'm glad we have the first amendment, which prevents prior restraints and criminalizing unpopular speech.
Then why is it that the US ranks lower than the UK on the Press Freedom Index? How exactly has allowing the most vile and offensive hate speech protected you or improved your nation?
Long story short: if you stifle the speech of anyone - say, if they're objecting to an overzealous monarch who demands taxation without representation, OR objecting to puritanical standards that don't allow for interracial marriage - progress will not happen.
Amusingly, in checking this out myself, I found this:
"If they have real grievances redress them, if possible; or acknowledge the justice of them, and your inability to do it at the moment. If they have not, employ the force of government against them at once."
[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZD1.html (control-F "Tenth Amendment")
[2] The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
What blew me away was that he genuinely did not think that the NSA would interpret the term "relevant" as broadly as humanly possible. Anyone who's taken 10 minutes of a law class knows that you write laws defensively, presuming the most evil motherfucker imaginable will have the reins some day. And this retard is one of the few running the country.
Out of curiosity, what was the name of this class that you took and expect that most others have taken?
What makes you think he genuinely thought that? My (admittedly limited) experience with state and national politicians is that most say in public exactly what benefits them the most at the moment.
I heard the same thing. His position is that there is a common sense definition of "relevant" that they did not define in the law, and that the NSA would be cool and only look at what they needed.
EDIT: A quote.
>What Congress intended and what I intended is that the target had to be a foreign national and not a U.S. person. He would be targeted, and then they would find out who that person was calling, both in the United States and elsewhere, rather than grabbing all of the phone information and working backwards to the target. The relevant standard was intended to limit what NSA could do. They took the position that it expanded it. And that tips the commonsense definition of relevance on its head.
My reading of it is that passing through a UK port means I enter a legal limbo. If stopped by an inquisitor, I'm likely to assert my right to silence. This may mean I'm detained and intimidated for 9 hours. At the end of this I can be arrested and charged with 'non-cooperation', this may involve further detention and/or fines all for simply remaining silent.
Leaving the UK is worse, as I'll likely miss my flight, and have the expense of re-booking.
This is just if the border agents are acting within 'the law'.
Virtually every UK citizen passes through a port at sometime during the year - the inquistors can simply wait there for anyone they are interested in. It effectively means the right to silence is dead.
Foreign visitors should be aware they can be legally forced to give up their Gmail/Facebook passwords. Hope Big Ben is worth it.
I wonder what the plans are for Julian Assange when he eventually leaves the UK - almost certain to be detained under Schedule 7.
I'm not going to worry about it too much, myself. The statute is quite clear that you can only be questioned to establish whether you appear to be a terrorist. The law has been broken in the case of David Miranda. I hope he will sue -- as he has threatened -- so that Special Branch know that they can't get away with breaking the law in this way.
Chapter and verse:
Schedule 7, 2 (1) An examining officer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b).
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/7
...
40 Terrorist: interpretation.
(1) In this Part “terrorist” means a person who— (a) has committed an offence under any of sections 11, 12, 15 to 18, 54 and 56 to 63, or (b) is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/40
If you're worried about this, perhaps you should also be worried about entering the US -- including in transit -- in case you are declared to be an unperson and sent to Gitmo with no trial or legal recourse. It's a bit worse than a maximum of nine hours of pointless tedium and handing over your Gmail/Facebook passwords which -- let's face it -- the spooks will have if they want them anyway.
As for Assange, if they get their hands on him, they will ship him to Sweden. He's spent the last year holed up in one room: I doubt another nine hours would bother him too much.
Quite.
>It's a bit worse than a maximum of nine hours of pointless tedium and handing over your Gmail/Facebook passwords which -- let's face it -- the spooks will have if they want them anyway.
I think you missed my point. Asserting your right to silence is a crime in this situation. You can be further detained, charged, prosecuted, jailed and/or fined for asserting a basic right.
It's worse than this - since border zones are considered legal no-mans-land, you actually don't have the right to silence in those areas (i.e. it's an imprisonable offence not to co-operate). This is one of the significant points in the Miranda case, the fact that normal protections afforded to journalists don't apply in these areas.
With other words, stop being afraid and take the risk to be attacked by security forces.
That is the only way.
You cannot do this as a large number of independant individuals. You need an organisation, or several; and yes, that means politics and compromise and all the other things about working with people.
Other than that, I suppose we could cross our fingers and hope for the best, like we did in the days before we had a constitutional monarchy, we would cross our fingers and hope we wouldn't get a shitty king. Well we don't need protection from our monarchs (as far as I can tell), we now are in dire need of protection from our government (and other "friendly" governments by extension).
Our customs and traditions have done well for us, its amazing to me we got this far, but maybe its time to get a bit more serious about our protections of rights and have them baked into common law.
I suppose there is a bit of irony that the protections we now seek from those who govern us are actually baked into the EU, but our country seems to be half in and half out (I'm a little angered I have to have cookie warnings on my web properties because of EU directives and yet my basic little right to privacy my grandparents generation helped put into the UN is not even taken seriously, never mind the EU equivalents).
If they wrote a constitution now, it would suck (they did, it's the EU constitution, and it sucks).
In my opinion, all constitutions suck. They are, after all, the proverbial horse designed by committee. But its better than nothing right?
South Africa probably has the most liberal constitution in the world, that makes sense, it was drafted in modern times so takes into account modern problems like fairness and equality of homosexuals or transgender people. But in practise, I would personally doubt the same constitution is enforced to the same standards as say, Iceland (also a country with a modern constitution).
The US, must have the gold standard of constitutions and there are arguments over if the right to bare arms meant semi-automatic weapons or just muskets. Does the 4th amendment just apply to physical property and letters or digital communications too?
There is no perfect constitution, it is impossible. I don't agree with everything in the EU standards of law, but that's the sad thing, it is better than what we have now. The Germans have more protections than I do, for standards of rights our country authored and pushed on the world (with the US of course) in response to things like WW2. Its unacceptable, I would personally rather have dog shit protections than none at all.
I'm yet to find a good way to incite change without having to dedicate your life to a cause. Like the OP, I'm open to suggestions.
An organization like EFF is too broad. We need groups that each focus on one issue only.
1) an authoritarian regime with pervasive surveillance, direct governmental control of all mass media organizations, secret police who tortured and killed peaceful dissidents--even dissidents based in other countries, and a ruling party organized essentially as a terrorist organization
to
2) a government constrained by rule of law with broad protection of individual civil liberties, a free press, judicial and legislative oversight of the police, and multiple political parties based on voluntary participation.
I have tried to tell the story before here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720
of what life was like under the dictatorial regime, and I have repeatedly recommended experience-tested tips for freedom-fighters
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html
about how people around the world can, and do, organize to overcome authoritarian repression.
It's up to everyone here on Hacker News to decide whether or not to pay the price to organize to secure liberty. I know what the cost is, and I know what the reward is, of a successful freedom-fighting movement. I don't know whether or not Hacker News participants will mostly set aside their desires for comfort and entertainment to struggle successfully for freedom, but I will watching meanwhile, and I am always willing to help when dare to take a consistent stand for freedom.
This and every law on the books. A law is like ground being broken on a particular location (realm of life), something will be built upon it down the line. Much fuss might be made over the specific law but it is all slight of hand.
Maybe this is control for stability.
The government creates models of the future and with more and more data about climate change pointing to disaster in the next few decades, those models must be focusing more and more at that point. So instead of government "holding its people back from a bright future", they are pragmatically laying the foundations for the control structures that will be necessary in the unavoidably dark future.
How can stability be maintained when society is radically altered by climate change?
Answer: Control
The thing is, the extremes of keeping things hidden we see in the government are just a tip of a long tail of many, many people trying to keep things hidden in other, more mundane, institutions. For existential fears, people who could point out these problems stay silent. We accept this as a necessary acts, because of "competition". But aren't wars and such just another result of this thinking, really? (For an interesting take on morality of speaking truth, see also Sam Harris' book Lying.)
Here's a couple of ideas:
1. Can democratic state do without any secret service at all? I don't mean not to have "operational" security. You need to keep secret where you have troops, keys etc. But; maybe it should just release all the secrets after 5 years, about operations they did. Likewise, their operations should be made public, just like courts are. In other words, the default position should be to release, not keep secret. I am on a fence regarding technology plans - would really world be a better place if Russians couldn't make the bomb? The point is, we take position "secret service is needed" for granted; I don't think it is.
2. There should be no blank exceptions to free speech, just like in the above case. It should be right applied to everybody, not just US (or other state) citizens. Private sector shouldn't be an exception - you should have right to publicly criticize your employer. There should be no contracts preventing you from disclosing information about what you don't like, or about what happened to you.
3. I envision a platform that would allow anonymous publishing of unreliable information, which then could be collectively analyzed and the reliability of sources assessed, without revealing them. Kind of inversion of classical journalism, where you have a limited number of people (editors) accessing unreliable information and only publishing if you can reasonably prove it to be true; here you would publish indiscriminately things, that are not true, and only later, via some algorithm that would connect the sources somehow yet retain their anonymity, the correctness of the information would be proved. It should allow to connect very small leaks from many people. This would require a cultural change in how we understand media, but it could be done in incremental way.
I am not completely advocating all of what I just mentioned; I would just like to see some discussion about that. Maybe everything about institutional behavior in the past, older than 5 years, let's say, should just be fair game to publish. This rule would nicely exclude all the technical and operational plans.
Maybe. But probably they won't stay democratic for long. Some people are only there to make a mess.
"There should be no blank exceptions to free speech"
Remember that this works for the WBC. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's a consequence.
"you should have right to publicly criticize your employer"
But this is like it is. Free speech does not mean speech without consequences, but it means you have the right to speak your mind (as opposed to a "preventive silence")
The word "probably" is precisely my point. To my knowledge, nobody ever tested this. We have police to deal with mess, which is under public scrutiny. Why SS should be exempt is not clear at all.
"Remember that this works for the WBC."
Not being American, I don't know what you refer to, sorry.
"Free speech does not mean speech without consequences"
I don't follow. I don't understand why speaking about what happened to you in the past should have any consequence to you. It may have consequence for the other people involved, that some may learn they are not so squeaky clean, and they will lose their authority, but that's precisely what the article was about.
I'm not talking about only internal threats, but external threats as well. I'm not sure that "nobody has tested this" but history has lots of cases of coups, invasions, etc (and probably other cases where things went differently)
The WBC is the Westboro Baptist Church, read about them and how they use freedom of speech laws.
"I don't understand why speaking about what happened to you in the past should have any consequence to you."
Because of something called Defamation. There's also the possibility of having admitted to a crime.
But yes, in the US freedom of speech is very strong, even there, it's not 100% free of consequences (which may be a good thing). In some other countries defamation laws stifle free speech.
I believe that the positive effect of not censoring stuff outweighs the negative effect of spreading misinformation, always. In other words, you cannot at the same time claim that people cannot distinguish misinformation and that they process it differently from truth (and therefore attempts to ban it will do more good than harm). And the idea of "free speech" in itself is a proof of that, so far.
I'm not american either, but I'm pretty sure he was referring to the westboro baptist church.
In fact, the protection of the freedom of speech is another prominent example that if you just leave the market forces to sort things out, you will eventually end up with a situation that is in opposition to the ideal of a functioning democratic society.
Not in the first world.
The secrecy there is in place today is all "operational", there are no other kinds. The problem is defining what constitutes as being within the scope of a legitimate operation, and especially the asymmetrical nature of defining it (only the people know a secret can reason about it, and they are rarely the best people to make the decision).
> There should be no blank exceptions to free speech
You're confusing "free speech" in the constitutional sense with something else, which seems to amount to outlawing private agreements to not divulge certain information. Your definition of free speech would cover my right to post the root password to my employers servers on 4chan and my employer having no recurse against me.
Constitutional free speech exclusively concerns the governments right to decide what you can say. A newspaper or website deciding you can't "speak" on their property is not a free speech issue in the constitutional sense.
> I envision a platform
Your envisioned platform is essentially wikipedia. You have a somewhat naive notion of "truth" - the truth in any half-way juicy issue have a very high number of facets and nuances that frequently allows honest and well meaning people to disagree on fundamental issues, which means compromises will have to be struck where those disagreements can't reasonably co-exist. This is a feature, not a bug, in a pluralistic society.
Are you seriously saying that all of today's classified documents relate to ongoing operations? They still classify stuff from WWII. And huge amounts of material relating to technologies unrelated to any operations imaginable (like CRM systems) are classified. I urge you to read the Washington Post's series on government secrecy from a few years ago to learn about what kinds of things are classified in today's government: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
The definition certainly appears to be applied too broadly, but you're not going to achieve less secrecy by limiting secrecy to "operations".
Maybe you could elaborate on how exactly this is sensitive? (Then we can have discussion about whether or not it's worth to divulge it publicly.) I mean, how does it help criminals to know that your police force has X million policemen? They will have to deal with it anyway.
Unless you are in state of war, and have a single enemy, then such information is not of much help to anyone. However, it can show if the money are spent efficiently. We can look at cases resolved/worked on during the previous time period and compare it with spending.
I claim savings due to these records being public will outweigh an advantage of any enemy knowing things like these. Just like democracies with all the public information about government spending economically beat dictatorships keeping these things secret.
Of course, the final authority of interpretation should lie within the public. But it should be defined very narrowly. Basically, if public cannot reason about it, it shouldn't be a secret. Specific details can be a secret. In cryptography, this problem doesn't exist. There is a distinction between algorithm and key. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to accountability of government as well.
> which seems to amount to outlawing private agreements to not divulge certain information
Again, such private agreements should be very very narrow, and defined by what they can do, not by what they cannot do. In particular, they shouldn't prevent talking about events that happened to you.
> Constitutional free speech exclusively concerns the governments right to decide what you can say
Yes, and it shouldn't. Government is just another type of social institution. Just limiting government doesn't equate to freedom. Free speech, in my view, should cover all social institutions, including private companies and religious organizations.
> Your envisioned platform is essentially wikipedia
It isn't. First, I am talking about primary, not secondary sources of information. Second, Wikipedia isn't very anonymous. Third, there is no automated (or collective) assessment of trustworthiness of the sources.
The disagreement problem can maybe be resolved, but in a different way than on Wikipedia.
My thinking was that the system would have 2 types of information, sources (primary information) and edits (reviews of information drawn from sources). Sources would be optionally anonymous, while edits would be public. You would be able to "invest" your trust into an editor (producer of edits) in the system. Editing the information would be then redistribution of the trust. This would result in calculation of how much you should trust the primary sources, based on their reliability when reporting other things. This would allow you to get a "consistent" view of reality.
I am not completely sure how such a system should work, and how secure it would be possible to make it. But it's not at all like a Wikipedia.
The people who violate such principles (yours being not far from the USA Bill Of Rights) are the ones entrusted with enforcing them. They will and do impose creeping "reasonable exceptions" until just a shell remains.
Facebook CEO Admits To Calling Users 'Dumb Fucks'
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
Google and Facebook both said they didn’t know anything about the National Security Agency using a program called PRISM to access their users’ data.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mv06t60fV9YclwHzFmDOEk2w...
What irks me about the quote is how specific and self-assured he sounds:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
I am also saddened that pg time and again praises him for being an example of a good founder. The hacker community should continue giving him as much hell as possible (as most of it does, thankfully), refuse to promote its business (don't put 'Like' buttons on your stuff), don't use Facebook Connect, don't have a FB profile, do not disclose bugs to FB, etc. Don't reward individuals who lack basic conscience.
I'm assuming you've never met Mark Zuckerberg. All you have to go on are his portrayals in the media.
Have you ever said anything racist? Sexist? Discriminatory, widely insulting? Have you ever joked about things you would do to take advantage of other people?
How would you feel if any one of those things were held against you by everyone years later? I've personally said worse things, and I've later regretted them. I'd be mortifed to have them follow me for a decade. The man is turning 30 soon. It was literally a decade ago. Let it go.
The age argument is not good enough. You're still trivializing his willingness to release private information about thousands of students at his university without their permission.
Like Vote? or Like Make Porn?
How would you feel if any one of those things were held against you by everyone years later?
You're really missing the Irony here, eh?
He was careless. Most teenagers are. He was probably not even seriously thinking when he said it. He's almost 30 now. Let's judge the man on what he says today.
don't worry though, you can still cast the second stone :-P
Now back to today, how much of what you say do you mean?
Read and listen to his words on how he feels about privacy in the digital age. Especially with regard to "expectation" of privacy in a sharing site (silly concept, this privacy business there, isn't it?). If he's grown as much as you believe he has, and if how much Zuckerberg means of what he says is any way comparable to you today in terms of how much he means it, I'd still worry.
Does that still sound like someone you want guarding your basket while you put all your eggs in it?
I have judged him and Facebook by their words and actions: I've never had a Facebook account.
(And I don't think he's changed much since he wrote that.)
other people can be trusted to lead a corporation that globally has access to individuals most private data and relationships.
I really don't think it's unreasonable that I prefer those two sets to be distinct. unrealistic, maybe. unreasonable, no.