481–490 of 494 posts
The fundamental instinctive understanding that everyone has socially as to why gossip is bad is why privacy is important.
I'm tired of these cutesy backronyms that they try to come up with to influence the public's perception of a law. "EARN IT"? What the fuck? It should be outright illegal to pass laws whose acronyms spell words. But, of course, that'll never happen, because who would willingly give up such a juicy tool for gaming the system?
OK, monkey paw wish granted. Laws may now only be passed and officially discussed using their globally unique identifier like SB-47226 When politicians advocate for or against these laws in the public sphere they will still make up catchy names to make them stick in peoples heads. Now you still get misleading names but its twice as hard to understand what bill is what.
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> I suspect that's because the Democrats, in recent times, haven't pursued "party purity" to the same extent as the Republicans. It's a more fractured electorate without the few "big ticket" issues that the GOP weaponizes (guns, god, and gays). The Republican Party of today is changing right before our eyes. Many hard-line issues are becoming soft - famously recently with Trump and his complete lack of religiousness.…
> Republican party will continue to "liberalize" is that why they are pushing so many anti-gay/trans bills, banning books, and banning abortion seeming to no end?
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Modern governance is the problem. However, if there is no country that's, say 50% free (to put an arbitrary number on it), and even when we presume that America is 49% free and "everyone else" is less, that doesn't mean there is actual freedom. American freedom seems to largely be centered around the ability to make money, the way things are going nowadays. We were more free in the 70s and 80s. Nowadays people in som…
> American freedom seems to largely be centered around the ability to make money, the way things are going nowadays. There's also the freedom of speech, which thankfully is damn near absolute in the US. In fact it has only increased since the 70s.
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It depends what you value most. If you don't mind corruption, then in a lot of developing countries like SE Asia, you can have a huge amount of personal freedom by paying the (relatively cheap) occasional bribe. If you're morally opposed to that, I'd recommend Singapore for its financial freedoms. After working there for a year, I was initially opposed to such an authoritarian government, but they're one of the rare…
> then in a lot of developing countries like SE Asia Also South America, and even the Caribbean islands
I don't know how I'd fair in SE Asia, South Africa, or South America, but my hunch is that it wouldn't be great unless they had similar free speech absolutism.
A reminder that "you have nothing to hide" argument is a fallacy because people abuse their power: Some first hits as reminders of places where their powers are abused [1]: "NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog... [2]: https://reason.com/2022/07/26/police-can-access-your-ring-ca... [3]: https://reason.com/2021/04/26/warrantless-border-s…
And as you mentioned, power will be abused. Unchecked power will be abused unchecked. This is ethically, morally and humanely wrong.
There's so much wrong with this bill and the thought behind it. It should never see the day of light.
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Monopoly on violence is fine, but in return the government should be 100% transparent, in order not to abuse this monopoly.
_should_ is the main problem I have with this argument. A Monopoly on violence is _never_ fine because there is never a time where we can trust a person or an organization to be completely transparent.
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While the above is overly simplistic, the basic concept has historical precedent under the general umbrella Social Cycle Theory which is likely why it persists. The same basic idea is described in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah as "Asabiyyah", for example. There is also the Greek kyklos, or the more recent Cyclical Theory[1], Strauss-Howe generational theory or Secular cycles theory,[2] which roughly maps on to the meme's…
The meme is a bad interpretation of "Asabiyyah" which covers something else, entirely. It's also not clear whether it's still valid today with the globalized world-order created by the US and its allies.
Asabiyyah is strongest in the nomadic phase, and decreases as the civilization advances as the ruling class begins to focus more on maintaining their wealth/power individually at the expense of the group, which covers the Strong Men and Good Times phase. As decadence increases group solidarity decreases Weak men and bad times occurs, which readies the cycle to start anew with additional strong men, which matches with Khaldun's period of 3 generations per cycle.
It's a pretty bare bones social cycle theory by modern standards but the core idea common to both seems to be that history is a cycle of barbarians conquering decadent civilizations, only to eventually become fragmented, self serving and vulnerable themselves at some point. The applicability to the modern world seems to depend on whether the underlying causes have been eliminated, in a "The End of History and the Last Man" sort of sense.