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I'm going to take issue with that taxation and states being the root of evil. They are an inevitable result of the way that we humans are. If anything is evil, it's human nature itself.

There are always going to be people who want to form organizations, leadership cabals, and have control over things. Even areas already under the control of a strong Government still have corporations, criminal gangs, and various types of civil organizations, all vying for a little bit of that control pie.

Essentially, there will always be some sort of government. It can be a single one that's powerful enough to be unquestionably dominant over anything it chooses to touch, or it can be dozens of little ones, all vying for control over various things in various places. That essentially looks like Somalia or Syria or Libya - total chaos, with constant risk of offending one warlord or another or some gang of bandits, and none of them will make the slightest pretense of listening to you. Avoiding that requires having one government with enough power to squash anybody like that. The best we can get is to have one dominant government, set up in such a way that it has some degree of obligation to listen to the population.

Sometime in the future there will be just one government for whole earth, and all the people will have equal vote in it. But until that having just one powerful government is very bad. It might have to listen to its own population, but it will completely disregard people of other countries who do not have a vote.

I hope and believe that there will never be a government for the whole planet until such time as there is some entity off of the planet that we need to negotiate with as a united planet.

One powerful government per country might not be perfect, but so far, it seems to be better than anything anyone else has some up with. The alternative is not some imaginary perfect government, but a lot of little competing governments/militias that probably pay even less attention to what anybody not a member of them wants.

I think one government, or rather something like eu, but for whole planet, will be useful, and it will be possible when live standards for people in different countries becomes the same, and old feuds are forgotten. However that's not something to happen in near future and i do hope that mars will be colonized and become off of the planet entity long before that:)

The problem with one powerful government per country is that different countries still have different powers and they like to meddle with weak ones, like US and Russia did in this case.

> The best we can get is to have one dominant government

You think that would resolve everything hey ? Don't you think one dominant government would actually have no incentive to listen to the population and could impose its right by might alone ?

Not really. Look at China, they have a hugely powerful government, yet even they find it easier to engage in popularism than domination. It's much easier to govern a country which supports you: logically any sustainable government should be interested in maintaining enough popularity that their position will not be undermined: but no more than that.

European history is an excellent case study in the fall of dominant rulers who failed to satisfy their subjects.

Wow, if you're looking at the Chinese government as a model for governance...

Uniting all world governments into a single state scares the hell out of me, and I think it could very well be the worst idea, but suggesting China as a pattern is the icing on the cake, quite frankly.

I'm not sure what you think you're saying here. You might have noticed that in something like 90% of the countries on the planet, that country's government is dominant over the entire country? Dominant only means that nobody is capable of challenging them currently for the title of being in control of the country, not that they have total control over everything that happens there.

Yeah, but you always have the possibility to flee your country (legally or illegally) and go in a "better place" (how much better that is depends on where you come from) - but once you have a single government controlling every place on Earth, that possibility is removed.

It honestly depends on how it's set up. If it's American-style, where "the population" amounts to a jabbering know-it-all teenager with no real control over anything, then it won't work, no.

>I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians.

Is this really disputed? There are people with agendas trying to spin it one way or the other, but given that the rebels initially claimed responsibility for it, and the fact the Russians probably wouldn't make this mistake (it's easy to check if something is a commercial aircraft), it looks almost certain it was the rebels mistaking the airliner for a military plane.

People thought TWA 800 was hit by a missile but after months of investigative work it was determined not to be the case. So let's keep an open mind. The Ukrainians are not infallible.

>After 9 Days, Ukraine Says Its Missile Hit A Russian Jet

Earlier today, Ukraine's military had taken responsibility after nine days of increasingly vaporous denials.

Seventy-eight people, most of them Russian émigrés to Israel, died when the Siberian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk exploded and plunged 35,000 feet into the sea off the Russian coast. Four minutes earlier, a Ukrainian air defense exercise fired two long-range antiaircraft missiles at a drone off the Black Sea's Crimean coast.

Russian investigators concluded on Friday that one of the missiles, an S-300, struck the drone, but that the second, an S-200, flew 150 more miles and unleashed a warhead of shrapnel balls at the airliner. /

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/world/after-9-days-ukraine...

My mind isn't closed on this one, but the case appears pretty clear-cut to me. While it could have exploded mid air, I seriously doubt it crashing in the war zone was a coincidence.

Surface-to-air missile encountering a large body moving at 900km/h which is fully loaded with fuel will cause the body to completely disintegrate mid air at 10000ft. In this case a ball of fire was clearly seen at the time of the impact and bodies were lying intact on the ground. I'm more and more convinced that it'ss an air-to-air missile, exactly like that Spanish air traffic controller in Kiev was telling that 2 Ukrainian military war planes were tailing that Boeing

> Surface-to-air missile encountering a large body moving at 900km/h which is fully loaded with fuel will cause the body to completely disintegrate mid air at 10000ft.

There are plenty of pilots who ejected after being hit by SAMs in the Gulf War, and they were flying planes much smaller than an airliner. I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the state of the wreckage just yet.

Too certain you are in things that you most certainly have no idea of.

Why the Yoda-speak? Are you saying I'm too certain about things I don't know about?

Also, I'm not certain, it's just none of the other possibilities are particularly credible.

You said it was most certainly rebels mistaking one plane for another. Why are you certain? Do you know how various anti-aircraft weapons work or have you just assumed there's a blinking "target acquired" message and a red Launch button? Unless you are an expert in this field, you have no reason to dispense "certain" opinions. That's the point.

Well the 'rebels' posted boasting about shooting down a plane at the time MH17 was shot down and even posted a video though they seem to have thought it was a military plane. That seems like fairly clear evidence to me. A more interesting and uncertain question is whether they are actually rebels. The main guy organising it is a colonel from Moscow (Igor Strelkov) who officially retired last year but quite likely is reporting to Moscow still rather than rebelling. Here's an article in the Daily Mail - sorry about the quality of the paper. Still facts are facts.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2696389/That-blast-l...

I did say that, and I stand by that. I would imagine the Ukrainians and Russians would be smart enough to use the usual channels to check what the plane was before trying to shoot it down. The Ukrainians, in particular, would be aware that commercial flight paths covered the area, given that the Ukrainian government coördinates the country's airspace.

Are you an expert? In another comment you made the extraordinary claim, substantiated by absolutely no one and no organization of any authority at all (just the standard conspiracy noise and rhetoric that is simply deplorable. It is the domain of the worst, and appears immediately after any event), that the plane was shot down by Ukranian fighter jets. Which...wow.

Your credibility among most intellectual people sits somewhere around "none".

The general notion is that these were people operating a weapon system they had limited knowledge of, and motivated by their success the day earlier were a little trigger happy. And FWIW, most weapon systems do not tell you what kind of aircraft you're pointing at (this isn't the movies). Recall the USS Vincennes, with the most advanced fire control system in the world at the time (certainly far more advanced than this unit), shooting down an Iranian jetliner that was ascending and squawking civilian airliner transponder codes.

I would find a study of the brains of conspiracy fanatics fascinating. There is something fundamentally broken there.

For one I didn't say it was shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets, don't put words in my mouth. For two, nowhere did I say it was certain or obvious. I did not claim it either. Watch your arguments, bud. And personal attacks? Please.

> I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians.

I disagree. There's a very promising international investigation being planned, and they have an excellent track record of success.

I am going to have to disagree with you and point you to certain facts that are coming out of the crash site.

People are looting personal items and 'evidence' [1]

The rebels are blocking access to the investigation [2]

The rebel commander has fired warning shots at investigators [2]

Now I ask you again, do you really think they will be successful this time?

[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/heartless-looters-raid...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/mh17-crash-pro-...

I agree and disagree.

Tabloids are having a field day with claims of looting and corpses left to rot as a "final insult to the dead". Yet there has been no video of looters stuffing Euros into their pockets, despite the presence of 24/7 camera crews. Meanwhile others reporters are confirming that bodies are being recovered and sent to the morgue. So who is right?

Another contradiction are claims that "We have compelling evidence that THEY did it" yet at the same time there are headlines saying "THEY'RE destroying the evidence". So which is it? You either have the evidence or you don't, right?

What is reported as "fact" is so often just conjecture, opinion or simply made up, either to support a political narrative or boost ratings. Media reporting should have no bearing on an official investigation, but of course, they will have a huge influence in the court of public opinion.

The media are so desperate to get their ratings up, they'll literally let anybody have their say. Look how MSNBC got punked on the day of the crash:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEDH2Z2_6Zw

Military intelligence, in particular that of the US, will already know exactly where that missile was launched from. They have infrared satellites and ground-based monitoring for missile launches in that region already. They're not going to reveal their imagery in public unless no other evidence turns up - but they won't sit on it either.

One could argue that if any side had firm evidence of the other side's culpability they would produce it.

The political damage to the opponent would be of far more real-world value than any possible impact from revealing one's technical ability, which the other side had probably already guessed or been made aware of.

Yes. It's not as if every shred of evidence from every previous crash site was necessary to form conclusions.

We already know the plane was shot down, and determining who shot it down doesn't hang in the balance of getting access to the crash site.

I doubt you'd be here using the internet at all if humans didn't cooperate and form governments together. For all the atrocities caused by nations, saying we should all live as anarcho-savages isn't a solution.

The advantage of states is they abstract anarchy. Without states, it is man on man. With states, it is state on state. It's at least slightly better.

[damn, i up voted before I got to the end. I'll never do that again.]

Taxation also does a lot of positive things. Your logic is filled with false conclusions. What do you propose instead of taxation and states?

There is no my or someone else's logic. There's logic. If you say it's ok that taxation not only sponsored the development of weapons that killed all those people, but they also provided some good things, then it's exactly equal to saying "my husband beats me sometimes, but he's also a provider for my family, so it's okay and we're working on the beating thing". No. Just no.

The alternative is free market and free enterprise, of course. I don't propose it though. I know people are very stubborn with the old ways. My only hope is that we are going to see no-state and free market in some places on earth and when people are going to see it's good, they're gonna copy that.

I agree. The point of a state should only be about who has responsibility for building the roads and such in that area. Why anyone would kill people to have more roads to pave alludes me (actually, I do know why, but their reasons are not resonating with me).

I wasn't gonna go into a discussion here, but I'm tempted to say that not everyone believes states should have any responsibilities, including building roads. The problem is, you cannot have one without the other. If you have states and taxation, they're gonna trick you into paying for things you don't want or need or even object.

I know that hacker news has more-or-less descended into self parody already, but do we have to have yet another subthread on how gub'mints are the root of all evil? It's especially ironic given that this has happened partly as a result of a lack of stable government in the region.