Software developer since the 1990s dot-com boom. Spent a decade in academia as a PhD and professor of information systems. My first computer was an Apple IIe
But how would you apply "pressure"? It keeps coming back to this. If it's not by using force, and not by throwing money around, then I can't see what it would be.
Maybe you could illustrate this idea with a few fictional scenarios. For example, let's say Citizens A and B are a law-abiding family in Germany, and the government there has just seized their children because they're Christian and they homeschool. Clear violation of the UN declaration of human rights. What does your online government do to help these citizens?
But there are no "international legal means" without the ability to threaten consequences. "International legal means" more or less just means your ambassador asks the foreign country nicely to release you. That's why every version of a "world court" is a joke; nations voluntarily decide if they want to pay attention to its judgments. If your nation has no ability to threaten consequences, I guess the only thing you could do is offer bribes. You might be able to bribe some corrupt banana republics to give your members immunity to their laws, but are you really going to bribe the UK to allow your members to bear arms, or bribe Canada to allow your members the freedom of speech?
Sure, but you obviously can't "protect your rights and freedoms" without armed forces, police, and prisons. A "legal system" with no power to enforce its laws and judgments is useless.
All you are left with is an organization that collects money from its citizens and then spends it for them.
You ought to know that it's pretty radical to think of "government" as an entity that spends your money for you. Before the 1900s it was hardly imagined, and I think the jury is still out on whether it's an effective model.
What has always been understood is what's written in the Declaration of Independence: that the purpose of government is to protect the fundamental rights of the citizens. You're proposing to discard that old purpose entirely, and just focus on providing services for money. I don't think I'd call it "government", myself. Not to discourage you, just want to point out that you've got a lot of work to do to convince people that the thing you're describing is actually capable of being what you think it is.
When you talk about services offered for a fee, okay, but how would you offer "protections"? What if one of your citizens is physically located in Europe, for example, and the local warlord tries to interfere with his right to free speech, or his right to bear arms? Will you draft an army and bust him out of prison?
What if he missed his "subscription" payment the previous month? Does he lose his fundamental human rights until he's paid up?
Most of those would be classified as "social sciences", not humanities. It has to do with the methods and philosophies they use. Grievance studies is my nickname for "_____ studies" where the "_____" is the name of some census checkbox.
He was wronged in that students lied about feeling "afraid" and "terrorized" and "unsafe" instead of simply saying that they were offended. They made these claims because they know that these words put into motion an array of employment-related and/or pseudo-legal threats like Title IX suits. They lied about how they felt, to a third party such as the university administration, instead of responding truthfully to the person they disagreed with. The first problem is that there are structures in place that reward this behavior, and the second is that the current breed of leftists feel absolutely no shame in using them.
I think the example in the first paragraphs of the article (the Klan effigy with candid camera) is not the strongest one; it was a weird device for data collection, not really speech. The problem is better illustrated by some of the other articles: leftist students attacking things they disagree with, not by responding to them, but by going to the authorities and claiming to feel "unsafe". They have in many cases abused Title IX, claiming that this book or that lecture creates a "hostile environment" (i.e., lying without shame), because they know it's a way to trap an opponent in a lengthy, biased pseudo-judicial process. In these kinds of attacks, it's not about getting a conviction, because the leftists know their charges are false. Instead, "the process is the punishment". They want to make examples and terrorize others into self-censorship. These attacks are happening all over the country and they are not just good people taking it too far -- they are malicious and intentional.
I'm referring to "soft sciences" like social work, psychology, sociology, [grievance] studies, poli sci, etc, as opposed to the humanities: history, mathematics, philosophy, classics, fine arts, etc.
Just what I meant. The problem for public schools is that there are a million grads with degrees in social work, poli sci, pyschology, sociology, grievance studies (womens studies, etc), and other fake sciences, many of them ready and willing to be teachers. People with degrees in history or the classics, by contrast, are almost as hard to find as math and science majors willing to work for public school salaries. (Unions being what they are, you can't offer math and science teachers twice what you offer the "social studies" teachers, despite the fact that they're worth it.)
If by "soft/social sciences" you mean real substantive disciplines like history, philosophy, civics, and the arts, I agree with you.
Currently "social studies" in school is a bit of a trash bucket into which gets thrown every personal ideology and pet project that some teacher got her feminism or social work or grievance-studies BA in. It's the worst subject in most curricula, even worse than English. The problem is there's plenty of those nonsense degree holders and far too few college graduates who have studied the humanities.
I do this, but be aware, it's mainly for going from my office computer to my home computer. I don't know if it would suffice if I were using two computers at nearly the same time. Dropbox takes at least several seconds to sync files, longer for big ones, so if you're literally going back and forth between two keyboards you may need to wait for Dropbox to catch up.
Ok, but why is your service so necessary that your bishop should pay you to do this instead of serving in a parish? There are a million social networks and online communities where mothers can go looking for other mothers. Frankly, you could do this with a Facebook group and YouTube, in your free time between more important duties.
As a professor who teaches tech classes, I can tell you we're constantly courted by companies that want us to use their software in our classes. Some make it easier than others. I've never been offered "sponsorship" although to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily turn it down as long as I was making my own choices about who to take it from. Certainly vendors have been known to provide free equipment and licenses to academic institutions. I think where it becomes problematic is if someone else is taking money and, in exchange, constraining my decisions as an educator. So the real question for me about "native ads in education" is, who's buying and who's selling? Are teachers and students going to suffer the consequences of decisions they're not involved in, for someone else's profit?
If you have twice as much as I do, and both of us see our real wealth doubled, we would undeniably both be richer and happier. However, the entirely abstract, purely-on-paper metric "economic inequality" would also double. That, in a nutshell, is why the premise is dubious. If you would argue for sacrificing real-life prosperity in order to prioritize a purely abstract "KPI", you have to prove it.
That's assuming the thing you want to prove. (I'm sure there's a Latin term for that, but I don't remember it.) It's a logical error that Margaret Thatcher blew apart beautifully probably before you were even born. (Bing the video.)
Nothing in the article explains why "economic inequality" is a bad thing. Which seems to be a logical pre-requisite to declaring it to be "worse than you think".
I would guess that the smartest way is the way you would invest in California gold in 1849: by not investing in the too-good-to-be true dream of easy free money, but investing instead in the businesses that profit on the greed of the dreamers. Which ones those are, I don't know.
You're sort of proving my point. "We aren't using the force of law to silence you... yet" is not the same sentiment as "We defend to the death your right to express your opinion." Meanwhile, on the real free-speech issues of the day, liberals are furious about Citizens United and are jubilant about Net Neutrality.
You used to hear American liberals saying things like "I disagree with your position, but I would defend to the death your right to express it." It was part of the creed that they thought defined them as "progressive". Funny, you don't hear that much any more.
I bet they've got their finger right on a set of great solutions: (1) more money for the UN, (2) more sovereign power handed over to the UN, (3) more money from the UN to fund more studies on why more money should be given to the UN, (4) more posh conferences for UN and UN-related bigshots in exotic locales, (5) annihilate Israel, (6) new Nobel prizes to be handed out to UN-grant-funded researchers promoting increased funding of the UN at UN-sponsored conferences...