Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's you. This kind of lazy pessimism strikes me as a peculiar privilege of people who've grown up accustomed to living under a government that, while unavoidably imperfect, does in fact give consideration to the rights and desires of ordinary citizens. They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things. On the other h…
They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things. If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty. There's a spectrum of government effectiveness that goes from "actively oppressing the peop…
Re: China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
#51I think the flaw in your argument is that you don't take the Overton window into account. Nobody is arguing about the existence of the scale of government effectiveness, but you're way more pessimistic than average in how you label the scale.