Quote from: goofus on May 11, 2012, 06:16 amDear Hero Pine:I so enjoy your prose and agree with much of your worldview vis-a-vis the export of the terror done by the organization known as the DEA. Virtually all of the western world's military has been used to steal resources round the world or force our "forefather's" religious world view on non-christian societies. Its immoral and cannot be justified: just as any war cannot be justified as a moral undertaking.To be honest I think the idea the West's military incursions throughout the past two or three centuries, right up to the present day, have relatively little to do with resource extraction. It's not that this was not done, or that tying down resources was not an objective. I believe for example, much of the logic behind the operations in Afghanistan has little or nothing to do with manipulating the opium harvest, but gaining control over the world's supply of morphine. This is a highly critical resource that is extremely centralized, something like 90% of the world's poppy harvest comes from Afghanistan, and the best painkillers have always been derivatives of the poppy plant, I don't believe there is a chemical substitute that comes within a country mile of morphine. This is good evidence for this, because the developing world is currently experiencing chronic morphine starvation and has done so since the Taliban were deposed while the United States is hoarding it). That to me is a much more worrisome aspect of this 'War on Terror' than many other things that have got more press. It hints at an isolationist creed, and one directly targeted at preparations for a confrontation.But no, the main reason for colonization historically began with trade and over a long period ended with ideology. This, is not exclusively a bad thing. I do not view killing people as necessarily being immoral. What really matters in my view is the network effect. What is the sum total, the final result that your actions culminated in? I mean, I have difficult accepting for example, that the invasion of Europe by the United States was morally wrong, or that the British colonization of India was morally wrong. The reason is simply that I think there is excellent evidence to suggest that those events ultimately murdered far fewer people indirectly as a result. So, I guess to pine morality is purely a numbers game. In the case of the 'War on Terror', 'War on Drugs', the positive results of preventing a few terrorist attacks or preventing a couple of thousand people overdosing on impure street drugs are vastly outweighed by the people effected by those operations.I'm not arguing you necessarily require omniscience although clearly that would help, because there are plenty of situations in which it is a black/white decision which action or inaction will lead to more causalities and which will lead to less. i.e. the outcomes are well understood results of a causality relation by using even primitive inductive or deductive logic. Quote from: goofus on May 11, 2012, 06:16 amBut, I think you conflate these very bad parts of western governments with the idea that government structures such as the U.S. are irredeemable and basically anti-humanistic. I don't see how the very useful societal tools such as clean water and sewer systems, safe roads and transportation, a basic public secular education system and a generally accessible, fair judicial system could come about without the cooperative creation of government by the people and for the people. I think that more dis-ease and sadness would result if governments were destroyed rather than gradually changed to reflect a more egalitarian meritocracy. Pretty much all those societal tools you mentioned are extremely badly run and are highly inconsistent. You say that more unhappiness would result if the government evaporated. I agree. Unlike some here, I am not an anarchist. I think government is necessary for capitalism to work in the first place. Nor am I saying that if we merely had 'good people' in the right places with the right ideas, then that everything would run smoothly and more efficiency. That's a complete cop-out, a short term solution if there ever was one. In the short term highly motivated individuals can change the world, but in the long term the System changes the people.If I'm not saying "make it work better", then what am I saying? Well it's that the key thing to permanent change for the better, is the structure of the system itself. This is not a Revolution to get rid of The West. This is a Revolution within the West to alter itself. If you're a computer person, you might say I'm talking about updating the kernel.It's hilarious to me that people keep harping on about 'fixing capitalism'. Capitalism basically works, but needs to become ever more efficient. It is good at that. Capitalism evolves extremely fast in fact. So I am content that that part of the part, the engine room if you will, is essentially operational and adaptive. Karl Marx, incidentally, wouldn't necessarily disagree with that statement, as hard as that might be to believe. He actually said the same thing as I just did.My problem is democracy. That overly glorified method of alternating between left wing and right wing governments over time. Egalitarianism and Meritocracy are opposites. Socialism is egalitarian and Capitalism is meritocratic. They do not mix. They are oil and water. The great success of Western civilization, is that it managed to more or less successfully alternate between these two forces for the past three centuries.Democracy is busted, the model is too simple to compete with the power of market forces. It's easy to show this because we have centralist governments in the West, and there are simultaneously left wing and right wing forces surging through the system. Those forces are untapped potential which are unintentionally damaging society.It cannot evolve no matter how large our populations get. You see, I believe that our political systems are functions of our population size, which in turn is dependent on market forces. Right now, the horsepower of the engine is shaking the rest of the machine to bits, and most people seem to believe the solution is to lower the engine power, which I clearly see as an unsound decision. It's not progressive to retard the power of capitalism, it's the same enlightened thinking that bought us the dark ages in Europe and the stagnation of the Middle Kingdom.I don't have a problem with the job that a Democracy is supposed to do. My problem is that it's not doing it properly. It's not a simple question of more or less democracy. It's a case of where, when and how much. We have to appreciate that markets are infinitely more complex than they were 300 years ago in terms of both scale and complexity. e.g. there were maybe 10 commodities in use, now they are uncountable. Yet democracy has barely evolved at all since then.We require a new method to alternate between channeling power equally or unequally over time and space. Again, I think democracy no longer has the precision necessary to make fundamentally sound judgement calls. It is way too blunt as an instrument.People with vague, uninformed notions of how the world works, in every sphere, are preemptively obstructing people who could improve it. In the market this doesn't matter because people who don't like certain things simply don't pay for them, but democracy is stifling scientific research, objective judicial rulings and much more besides. You could argue for example, that we spend more money on cat food than on cancer research is a market failure, but I would tell you that although that's a possible inefficiency, you couldn't turn around and tell me that we are blockading cancer research full stop. With democracy, whole swaths of intellectual life are permanently stifled without rhyme or reason.If people vote a certain way, and there is a fuck up. I want them to hurt. I want them to hurt in direct proportion to their error. But for that to occur, they actually have to be conscious that they voted on that thing in the first place. That is the idea I am struggling with, the idea of a democracy that is accountable for its actions, where voters are intimately aware and effected by the consequences for better or worse of their decision making. It can't be done manually, so I'm thinking of how it might be done automatically on the fly.Quote from: goofus on May 11, 2012, 06:16 amI can't tell if you really believe that a system that doesn't have mechanisms for collecting some form of taxes in a relatively safe and fair way to create expensive public welfare systems such as the ones I've mentioned could make for a happier world. The entrepreneurs you've described represent the type of people who can advance any society that they find themselves in. If they are in despotic, impoverished parts of the world or are being crushed under the superstitious, brutal theocracies then they have no choice but to try to survive and thrive by their wits and entrepreneurial spirit. That doesn't mean we should try to emulate the systems that create the individual's need to go debrouillard.The creation and use of TOR, SR, open-source software are beautiful and wonderful things. Working to go around the maniacal war on drugs, war on terror and virtually anything that uses the term "war on..." are honorable and morally defensible pursuits for all of us. I think you are a real hero for speaking up on these things and trying to encourage others to work to change whats wrong with the world.Ok. We *are* emulating the conditions that cause debrouillard individuals. Just look at where we're talking! The Silk Road! Boy, that bird has flown a long time ago. Nor do I agree those entrepreneurs exist in society by default, they are simply a reaction to failure. State failure. Not market failure. Not due to a lack of state, but too much of it. Incorrectly fluctuating state/market/society interactions would be a better description, but doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.Taxation and it's related problem: the size + expansion of the State isn't the core problem, I'm simply using it as metric and watching the trend line for some frame of reference. I mean it is a crude estimate, a State that uses up 40% of GDP could do more damage by deliberately manipulating the economy more than a State using 50% of GDP but using less manipulation, but the damage range has to be connected to the quantity of ownership. If the state controls 100% of production, then making 1 stupid decision means everybody is affected.tldr; We, seriously, need some new ideas.