Like a few commenters here, you're confusing the dark ages and the middle ages. You can quibble over semantics and say that the middle ages includes the dark ages, but that obscures the point of the original post.

The standard narrative of Western intellectual progress looks like this:

~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture

~400AD to ~1500AD: Europe under the dominion of the Church, science and reason suppressed

~1500AD: bam, Renaissance

~1700AD: bam, Enlightenment

~1700AD - present: humanity freed from the yoke of religion, knowledge flowers again.

The revisionist view is as follows:

~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture

~400AD to ~1000AD: Europe in the dark ages due to barbarian invasions, underpopulated and poor, classical tradition barely kept alive in monasteries

~1000AD to ~1400AD: Europe begins to get wealthier, knowledge flowers in Church-sponsored universities

~1600AD: bam, Protestant Reformation

~1600AD - present: science builds on knowledge and philosophy developed by Catholic church, but Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda creates the false narrative of Church suppression of knowledge.

I don't know why this perspective is hitting the zeitgeist now, but one reason might be that the internet enables niche communities to share such ideas.

One such group is Catholics - here's a Catholic blogger explaining exactly how the heliocentrism vs geocentrism debate played out: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Another group are environmentalists - here's an interesting blogger writing about how classical knowledge was preserved through the dark ages: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/merlins-ti...

And a final group are the reactionaries, a group who see the modern ideals of progress as a myth - here's a good starting point on the idea that modern 'progressive' ideas are largely derived from Protestantism: http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-...

Anyone who's interested and has the free time, please do dig around those blogs - you may realise, as I did, that the 21st century is quite an intellectually narrow and ignorant time.

If this sounds appealing to you, you are basically a Protestant, possibly a post-God Protestant aka "atheist"/"agnostic"/"secular". In Catholicism, as with most religions, God (or gods or spirit) is intertwined with every aspect of life. The idea that religion is purely about beliefs is a Protestant idea - for most people, their religion is about community, ritual, and accessing deep emotions or altered states of consciousness. Protestantism rejected most of this in favour of a purely 'rational' faith, from where it's baby steps towards giving up faith entirely in favour of pure reason. (Evidence: atheism flourished in the traditionally Protestant countries of Northern Europe and the Anglosphere).

"People are going to have to choose to believe that their religious beliefs are "just religious" and have no serious relevance to the material world (the exact notion their religion decries as the ultimate heresy) and join the modern world"

Has no relevance to the material world === "not real"; in other words, people are going to have to give up their religions.

"Those ideas are absolutely and totally required to support the idea of coexistence of peoples of different faiths."

I.e., for people of different faiths to co-exist they have to give up their faiths (in favour of 'secularism' or 'moderate-ism' aka Protestantism).

Much more on this idea here: http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-...

Related point: the West has 'Protestant-ised' several world faiths (in fact the concept of 'world religion' is arguably the creation of 19th century Protestant missionaries and scholars).

e.g. Buddhism: http://meaningness.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/protestant-buddh...

And Hinduism: http://mitrailleuse.net/2014/08/08/the-westernization-of-hin...

In my experience people of protestant denominations tend to be more irrational/faith focussed than catholics who tend to question more. An example is that in my country the people trying to prevent gay marriage are protestant and believe homosexuality an abomination (because of bible teachings) whereas the catholics (and some more rational protestants) want to legalise it (obviously not priests/bishops etc. but the politicians involved in the decision making).

I guess my point is that when it comes to religion every single person has slightly different beliefs or puts slightly more emphasis on some beliefs over others.

And this is an essay about capitalism and protestantism that can be paradoxal (how believing in predestination makes you fight against the odds). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Sp...

With the angle of protestant beliefs I can perhaps just convince them of their value, and let them figure out the rest on their own.

Here's a taste of his kind of take on things - http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/12/past-decade-world-...

I would strongly recommend his book Straw Dogs, though it is very polemic in style.

The only interesting source arguing for the effectiveness of torture was this: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Torture%2C_interrogation_and_intel...

It seems like torture would work, not in a "ticking time-bomb: scenario, but in a situation where you had a long time to corroborate intelligence gathered from torture with other sources. Interrogate the captive on stuff you already know about, and if they lie, punish them with worse forms of torture. And if people are prone to losing their minds under torture - you can merely submit them to one session of brutal torture, then leave them for a few weeks or months before resuming normal interrogation - with the threat of more torture if they don't comply.

I agree that there are many interesting developments in political philosophy on the nature of democracy. The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it.

One of the best ideas I got from reading Marx (which also shows that people who read Moldbug tend to read widely, hey) is that political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. All that matters is the living breathing primates that inhabit our political systems, the stuff those primates have, and whether the primates are happy. Bad political systems are bad because they cause cruelty to animals.

"Freedom" is simply a matter of the monkeys being able to do what they want and not feeling like they are being bossed around by bigger monkeys. "Equality" is a matter of ensuring that the low status monkeys don't feel too low status.

As for "democracy" - well, it turns out that monkeys are generally happier living in industrial economies (with their abundant iPads, cappuccinos, etc), but that such economies require huge centralised bureaucracies to run effectively. The theatre of frequent elections is a convenient way to make every monkey feel like an alpha monkey whose opinion is important and not simply a well-pampered slave.

Both the first year college students with their "laughably simplistic definition of democracy" and "Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas" with their highly nuanced definition of democracy are in the same category as people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists. They have a fun intellectual pastime, and all power to them. But the latest mind-expanding discoveries in category theory have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. (The best they can hope for is that some enlightened and energetic project manager decides to let them rewrite part of the system in Rails.) Likewise, the latest advances in democratic theory have no impact on the people staffing the enormous bureaucracies which run advanced economies. At least the Haskell guys can write Tetris apps in 4 lines of code to show off. It'd be cool if Rawls would gather 100,000 followers to some private island to test-drive his own political system, but it's unlikely to happen. (On a side note, did you hear that seasteaders are evil fascist brogrammers and that charter cities are neoliberal colonialism?)

I'd actually be glad to hear you correct me and tell me that no, actually most Western democracies hand out books by the authors you cited to civil service employees, who hold regular workplace seminars on how to best implement such ideas and bring real democracy (tm) to the world.

EDIT: I realise that I never responding to the grandparent question about freedom and democracy. Well, there are many forms of "freedom" and democracy is certainly compatible with some of them. But I note that democratic states, lacking strong leaders with ability to make more than token cuts to government spending, tend to show a monotonic increase in the number of government departments that decide to regulate ever more and more aspects of life. The thing with regulation is that every individual item of regulation sounds sensible (how can we let people get away with poorly fitted child car seats? the humanity!) but over time people forget that a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone and b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.

An even bigger issue is the fact that if you are a paycheck employee (especially if you have a mortgage, debt and a family) you are in many ways a comfortably-off serf. An ever-growing government takes an ever-growing share of your salary, and since taxpayers are close to being an electoral minority in many countries (did you snark at Mitt Romney's 48% comments?) you are likely to spend ever more of your limited time on Earth working hard to fund TSA agents, drone strikes and the healthcare of aging pensioners. An anglo-saxon freeman had more personal autonomy. At least if you're reading this site you can make plans to build a bootstrapped passive income and move to Thailand.

In regards to paternalism (laws regulating personal safety, nutrition, private health, family relations, etc...) I also believe Singapore tends to fare worse, even if it's manifested in different ways (e.g., there may not be laws against trans fat, but there is compulsory military service, near impossibility of being allowed to live alone in an apartment, extreme difficulty of private car ownership -- which moots the discussion of car seats, etc...). As I a firearm owner, I find California (where I live) and New York gun laws to be idiotic -- but I'm pretty sure my "collection" (couple of rifles and a pistol) would mean death penalty in Singapore.

I think one place where you may have a point is the case of entitlements: it is indeed rare for democracies to have significantly cut some aspects welfare state, namely middle-class entitlement like medicare and social security (welfare programs for the truly poor do get cut frequently, but they are actually less fiscally burdensome than the middle class entitlement).

However, there have been cases of other regulations being significantly loosened, e.g., airline deregulation is something I am quite grateful for.

> people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists ... have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code.

Interesting observation, and yeah, it definitely smells like Marx. But I'd say it's too early to reach a conclusion like that. It's not unusual for mainstream philosophical ideas of X'th century to have little impact on the real world until well into X+1'th century or even later, and that's under favorable socioeconomic circumstances.

Similarly, programming language theory debated on the Haskell lists tends to "trickle down", after a while, into various other languages and frameworks. 10 or 20 or 30 years later, someone writes a PHP framework that is indirectly inspired by some of them. It takes time, that's all.

I'd be very surprised if political ideas developed in the 1990s, for example, came to fruition anytime before 2090 or so. And the same applies to the neoreactionary ideas of the 2000s. Even if they're as promising as their advocates say they are, it's going to take no less time to port them to the real world. So I don't think your impatience is justified.

> a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone

Ah, the usual baseless romanticism about the past. This is what I find the most disagreeable about neoreactionaries. If you want to build a better future, leave your unrealistic notions of history at the door.

> b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.

Did you actually go back in time and ask them whether they really enjoyed it? Or are you just trying to force everyone else to be "free" (hello, Rousseau) regardless of whether they want to be?

I don't have any problem with a bunch of consenting adults who want to build their own country in the middle of an ocean. It's their money and their own lives to spend as they see fit. But I don't think anybody has the right to drag a single non-consenting person into a copy of Plato's ideal city.

Most people are just fine being comfortable serfs in an industrial society, whether you like it or not. And that's what really prevents the speedy implementation of any political philosophy, whether yours or mine. As I see it, you're not really trying to fix this issue, but merely rewrite history to make it look like a non-issue. It's a fascinating intellectual exercise, but good luck getting your rewritten history merged into Upstream Reality.

This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.

Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.

Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".

Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.

For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.

I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).

People (with a few exceptions, usually the result of excellent breeding, education or culture) are much weaker and worse than that.

It's important not to forget that all people have limited potential, though some are much more limited than others.

Do you know Plato had a name for the man who was ruled by passion? Every man has to place some principle on the throne of his heart. The true aristocratic man, the philosopher-king, is ruled by wisdom. The timocrat, leader of a warrior state, is ruled by honour.

Going further done the list, the oligarch is ruled by desire for wealth - which at least gives him the motivation to work hard, if nothing else. The democratic man is ruled by freedom, and his life therefore involves being blown around his own whims.

But the lowest of all is the man ruled by passion - the tryant. People here should read The Republic (or knowing HN readers, skim the Wikipedia article describing the 5 different types of polis): he describes modern culture (including Occupy Wall St) pretty well, which just shows that human nature hasn't changed.

Here's something interesting: various Chinese think tanks wonder publicly about if, and when their country will transition to democracy. (Yes, they can get away with this - the unwritten rule is that they can't say "China should become a democracy in the next 5 years" but discussions of longer time periods are not considered a threat).

A lot of the left-leaning think tanks believe China should gradually become more democratic, building from the village elections they have now to city, province and ultimately national elections.

Some of the right-leaning think tanks have a more original idea - China remains a one-party state, but with increasingly sophisticated methods of soliciting public opinion. Basically technocracy.

I think the EU is converging on the same system of government from a different direction.

I'm not saying technocracy is a wonderful system of government either, but it won't be hard to do a better job than democracy.

Pretty much everything bad people have predicted about democracy has come to pass:

- many people will vote on ethnic/tribal lines (true even in the US)

- people's voting patterns will be mainly determined by the media, making the media and whoever controls it extraordinarily powerful (if you're Chomsky, this is the corporations, if you're UKIP, this is the "metropolitan liberal elite" - actually, they're both right).

- the idea of having rotating politicians managing a permanent civil service is insanely impractical, is not implemented by any non-governmental organisation, and has had the entirely predictable result that the civil service pretty much does what it wants regardless of who is in power.

- eventually the population realise they can vote themselves largesse out of the treasury. This is the equivalent of injecting smack for polities; it's insanely addictive, it's incredibly painful for them to quit, and it will probably eventually kill them.

- it doesn't even really give a voice to voters. Seriously, all your opinions and preferences are reduced to 1 bit of information every election cycle? And in practice its less than that, because you probably live in a non-swing region, or your preferences are highly predictable (eg, in information theoretic terms, an urban highly-educated media professional who votes left-wing probably only gives you about 0.2 bits of information, because you knew they were gonna vote left-wing anyway).

Something like Singapore is one good example of what a well-managed non-democratic state can look like. (INB4 caning: OK, corporal punishment isn't very nice, but neither are most criminals, and since Singapore has a low crime rate its "draconian" law enforcement leads to less overall suffering than, say, the American policy of placing two million people in rape-infested concentration camps. Free speech? You noticed how Jezebel and similar outlets have started threatening the employment of people who say things they don't like? I used to be a lot more libertarian, but I'm seriously coming around to the idea that people have more practical freedom in an orderly state than a libertine one).

People here interested in this stuff should seriously read Moldbug if they haven't already: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.co.uk (start with "The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pill" and then maybe move to the "Open Letter" series).

(Moldbug argued that America is transitioning into a one party state, since most government workers and "respectable" media outlets are allied with the Democrats).

Both had long periods of same-party rule, but both have had changes in party administration in recent years, back and forth. Taiwan started having changes in party administration not long after press freedom was achieved.

My objection to that statement is that designing political systems is not about doing a better job (on average). It's about not doing a worse job (ever). Rawls calls this "maximin": you choose the option that maximizes the minimum possible value. The maximum possible value is irrelevant, and the average doesn't matter, either. When lives are at stake, you always choose the safest option, the one with the lowest chance of descending into tyranny.

I'm sure technocracy has the potential to soar higher than populist democracy under many circumstances, but unfortunately it also has the potential to crash just as hard as, if not harder than, most democracies can ever dream of. Without giving others the power to overrule technocrats, it's only a matter of time before technocrats become autocrats. Anyone in a position of power who can't be fired is a Stalin in the making. I don't see how that's "not worse" than any democracy. A populist democracy has a reliable way to throw a political leader out of his job or at least get him to change his mind: throw up a shit storm like we did with SOPA. It's dirty, it ain't easy, but once you manage to do it, it works like a charm. And in the end, keeping little Stalins at bay is all that matters.

Power tends to corrupt. Any political system that depends on trusting a group of people to do things right will invariably fail because of corruption, and technocracy is no exception. The only solution is to design a political system that harnesses the power of distrust. When all alternatives are necessary evils, you choose the most controllable option because a controllable evil is almost always less bad than an uncontrollable evil. Of course, evils aren't easy to control even under the best circumstances, but do your best to find one that you can at least put on a leash.

So the best government isn't one that is not subject to control by any political interest, because objectivity and neutrality in politics are never going to be anything more than daydream. Rather, I think the best government is one that is open to control by so many conflicting interests in so many different ways that the vectors eventually balance one another out. Politics is meant to be dull, boring, and utterly predictable. Because when politics gets exciting, people die! It's OK if you want to give up your own life for a cause, but don't put others' lives and human rights in peril.

tl;dr for technical readers: the performance benefits of putting a bunch of spinning platters in RAID 0 ain't worth the inevitable data loss. Especially if your data == human lives.

"Power tends to corrupt." If this is true, then democracy may well be the maximin solution. But is it true? The word "autocrat" makes people think of Hitler and Stalin. They don't think of Frederick the Great or Deng Xiaoping.

Power often corrupts, but not always.

1. When power is insecure, it is dangerous, like a cornered wild animal: totalitarian spying against potential conspirators, suppression of dissent, brutal retaliation against political opponents. Secure power has less need for such behaviour. As Bismark said of the press "they can say what they want, and I will do what I want".

2. When power is a "family business", the leader's time preferences change and they want to ensure they pass a prosperous country onto their children. That's why old-school monarchs, for all their faults, were less rapacious than third-world dictators - the dictators knew their time in power was limited, so they made out like bandits while they could.

3. Many people are actually quite nice and will use their power to help their fellow men (or at the very list, fellow countrymen).

Consider that Communist China has transitioned from Maoist schizo-state to pragmatic autocratism and now to some kind of quasi-democracy, all without major revolutions. I see the real danger of technocracy being Brezhnevism, not Stalinism, but the same thing has happened with modern day democracy. (The current "democratic" system is designed to prevent charismatic populist politicians (ie, potential Hitlers and Stalins) from making much significant difference - how much personal impact over government policy did Bush have, for example? Or, for that matter, Obama? - and instead most power rests with hundreds of unelected but government-funded agencies.)

"So the best government isn't one that is not subject to control by any political interest, because objectivity and neutrality in politics are never going to be anything more than daydream. Rather, I think the best government is one that is open to control by so many conflicting interests in so many different ways that the vectors eventually balance one another out. Politics is meant to be dull, boring, and utterly predictable. Because when politics gets exciting, people die! It's OK when it's your own life, but don't put others' lives and human rights in peril."

I definitely agree with your last 3 sentences. The thing is any kind of true democracy is going to be full of exciting politics. Your ideal of a system where the vectors balance out is savvy (were you a British colonial administrator in a previous life?) and is also quite close to the current system. Designing a government that is ineffective by design is a good way to prevent tyranny. Unfortunately, it also makes it unable to make difficult-but-necessary decisions. Example: who in the USG actually has the power to reduce the deficit? Will this situation change in the next 20 years?

I also wonder if the possibility of getting another King Sejong is important enough to risk getting another Vlad the Impaler, even if the chances were as good as 50/50. Even if power only corrupts 50% of the time, or even 10% of the time, maximin still says that you should choose the safer option.

I'm not saying that the current form of American democracy is the safest option. Every day it seems to move further away from the maximin solution. But if so, that's only a reason to find and implement the maximin solution, not a reason to move even further away from it. If all the power actually rests in the hands of 10000 unaccountable bureaucrats, the solution is not to give more powers to Obama and thereby end up with 10001 unaccountable people. The solution is to make those 10000 bureaucrats fully accountable, in addition to Obama, so that we have 10001 fully accountable people.

> The thing is any kind of true democracy is going to be full of exciting politics.

As long as my life, limbs, and human rights are not at the mercy of some megalomaniac (or any particular interest group), I'm sure I'll get used to whatever excitement "true democracy" brings. I'm assuming, of course, that this "true democracy" includes strong constitutional protections of my rights so that nothing that happens in ordinary politics can violate them. Democracy doesn't mean everything gets decided democratically, there are certain things that even a majority shouldn't be able to do.

> Your ideal of a system where the vectors balance out is ... quite close to the current system.

There are too few vectors in the current system. We need way more vectors to cancel out supersized incumbents like the military-industrial complex, the oil industry, Monsanto, the MAFIAA, etc. Putting together a short list of interested parties and deciding all matters among them is just corporatism. We need something more open and flexible, where EFF (for example) has a realistic chance of outcompeting Sony in the marketplace of ideas.

> it also makes it unable to make difficult-but-necessary decisions.

Big decisions usually shouldn't be made in a hurry. So as long as it's not 100% impossible for the government to make decisions, I think it's OK for there to be lots of checks and balances in the way. (This would be a different situation from what we currently have, where unaccountable bureaucracies are responsible for a lot of inertia.)

I also don't think it's right to move in the direction of facilitating the production of massive decisions on a national scale. In my picture of "true democracy", decision-making responsibilities would be decentralized unless the federal government absolutely needs to get involved, and most local decisions would follow an agile and rapid-iteration model. Take health care reform for example. Did we really need such a protracted, ideologically charged, misinformation-filled, national debate about it? Vermont actually wanted to implement their own single-payer system, and a few other states had similar but slightly different ideas. Why couldn't we let those states implement their own health care systems first, compare results after a couple of years, make changes along the way, and get other states on board over the next decade or two with plenty of opportunities for A/B testing between them? Answer: Ego. Obama and Hillary wanted to finish the job themselves, get it exactly right the first time, and take credit for it.

A very large proportion of the stalemates that make Washington ineffective could be eliminated if people refrained from saying "But there's this teeny tiny provision here that I don't completely agree with..." and just agreed to reiterate every year. Can't agree on the debt ceiling right now? Release the current version now and release the .1 version by the end of the year. You ask how the government can make massive decisions. I ask why such massive decisions are needed in the first place. Of course this won't work all the time (wars, for example, can't be easily canceled once begun), but the thing about necessary evils is that you don't want to make them appear any more necessary than they strictly are.

Many thinkers throughout history have noted that states and criminal gangs are effectively the same. They are both inherently violent organisations. Criminal gangs are tiny states; states are large, settled criminal gangs.

The Yakuza in Japan or the Cray family (when they ruled half of London) are examples of intermediate forms: criminal gangs that have taken on some of the role of the state. Rather than arbitrarily robbing people, they instead ask for protection money. This is more than just a polite form of robbery: they legitimately protect you from other criminal gangs. Though I doubt anyone here has had to make the decision, I think everyone would prefer to deal with one predictable criminal gang than many competing unpredictable gangs.

Eventually the gang leaders realise that it's in their own interest to build a stable, prosperous society: its better to be a Caesar than a barbarian warlord. If nothing else, the wine is nicer. Passing laws and promising that even the leaders will abide by them makes the citizens comfortable dealing with one another and makes everyone richer. Once everyone is comfortable with the idea of the law being supreme, the mob might realise they can do away with kings and bring in constitutions and parliaments and so on. Democracy works (and only works) because the mob agrees that these are the set of rules they will live by, and that therefore it's not wise to ignore them.

Still, rights and laws remain contingent on power. Human rights only extend as far as the military reach of states that support human rights. Until we build a world government, the only universal law over humanity is the same as it was in 10000 BC: raw power, physical force, violence. The world as a whole is essentially a lawless realm consisting of about 200 gangs; the only thing that stops everything turning into bloods vs crips is a shaky system of alliances, treaties and, ultimately, mutually assured destruction.

One obvious counterpoint is that France no longer needs to fear Germany because the Germans and French are suddenly BFFs and neither will vote to go to war with the other. The "international community" is slowly coming to resemble a federated state, with one set of laws. But this community is not truly international. Russia and China can violate your right to privacy all they want. Ultimately, this is because they have H-bombs. Likewise, we can violate Sharia Law as much as we like and Iran can't stop us.

My point is this: most of these complaints would make sense if America truly was a world government, achieving legitimacy via just consent of the 7 billion governed. But it's not, and it can limit its citizenship however it pleases. The fact that America was historically built on immigration doesn't give me, a foreigner, the "right" to live there. The very concept is nonsensical - the USG has more guns than me, and so they can decide who's in and who's out. The idea that people should be able to live wherever they want is a beautiful dream but is entirely counter to the way the world is going, and is also horrendously impractical.

I've travelled to China a few times over the last few years and each time the visa requirements have gotten stricter. They've decided they don't need any more foreigners, and I can't contest the morality of this with the CPC because again, they have more guns than me. As the world gets more crowded, other middle income countries will follow suit. The walls are going up everywhere. As much as I, personally, would benefit from the US tearing down its borders and letting me live there without restriction, it doesn't make a lot of sense if they do so and other countries don't.

Americans can constrain their intelligence agencies and open their borders as much as they like. They can't force other countries to do the same, which means that these policy proposals are equivalent to "we should make our intelligence gathering less capable than that of China and Russia" and "we should import Latin Americans until our quality of life is equal to that of Honduras". If America wants to reenact the fall of Rome, that's their prerogative, but as a foreigner I wish other foreigners would not cheerlead them as they do so. No America means no "international community" (what can the EU do against China and Russia?), and good luck petitioning China to respect your human rights as a global citizen.

Although you might not believe it, I'm not actually a cynic about human nature or pessimistic about our future. We built stable, peaceful societies in a violent world. Go humanity! But we have to remember that this was not achieved by the divine intervention of the Great God Human Rights, but by working within the universal laws of power. Good can triumph over evil, but as even Jesus said, it needs the "cunning of snakes" to succeed.

I very much agree that the rest of the world is being a bit two-faced, on the one hand enjoying immensely the pax americana which we have wrought and on the other decrying the evils of American imperialism--despite doing damned little to act in a similarly noble fashion.

As much as we may, for example, decry the surveillance of foreigners by the .gov and bemoan the lack of open immigration policies, we cannot do so without also acknowledging that the US is still very much better in these regards than many of the other first-world nations.

The failure of the US is perhaps a sadness, but the failure of the American Dream--were it to come to pass--is far, far worse.

Your apologia is as old as the Roman Empire, and made as little sense then - as Tacitus points out using Calcagus above.

The concept of a 'Pax Americana' is an absurdity given the wars instigated by the US just in the last few decades and manipulation of client states, and while other nation states are no different in many ways in being run for the benefit of those in power, I certainly wouldn't say the US is better in these regards than the majority of western states.

I'd condemn this sort of widespread surveillance no matter who the actor is (and in fact it seems the UK has been just as cavalier in their actions, to take one example). It's a very dangerous centralisation of power and will lead to the growth of a secret state, inimical to the values you appear to find admirable (though the American dream is a rather vague concept and could really mean anything).

Empires are not forces for good, on the contrary normally they civilise the world by subjugating it to their will. In our increasingly connected and mobile world, we should try to see past the concept of a nation state or empire building to universal values of human rights to basic needs, among which I'd place individual privacy fom state intrusion.

We've seen the people voluntarily subject themselves to cataloging and surveillance on an unprecedented scale--Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so forth.

So, honestly, to hell with "the people". You claim that this information gathering is an outrage, that this invasion of privacy is an affront to all things decent.

Fact is, amigo, that fully a sixth of the human race has voluntarily given up their privacy to Facebook and the like in exchange for a cute little garden to play in and communicate with. Sadly, we seem to have forfeited the right that we otherwise would've claimed.

The people have spoken.

I agree that frequent and public sharing of information via twitter etc will in future be considered dangerous, and some people are sharing far too much, much of it out in public. That has no bearing on my individual right to privacy though - just because lots of people engage in public sharing of trivia, news, and opinions doesn't mean they are abdicating the right to privacy on more substantial matters - not many would agree to sharing all their email publicly for example.

The more important point for me is that there is a big difference between me sharing some info publicly, some info semi-anonymously, and then separately private financial info with my bank, numbers called with my phone company, email with google etc, and intel agencies of my country demanding access to all this information in aggregate for everyone, in perpetuity, and sharing it with other agencies and countries, with no effective oversight or even permission.

I see no justifiable excuse for that, not the mirage of a Pax Americana, Islamist terrorists, or any future threat.

  | the US is still very much better in these
  | regards than many of the other first-world
  | nations.

Our weapons are no different than bacterial antibiotic resistances and all the other genetic mutations that have led to what life is today. It does not matter if all seven billion people consented, all it would take is one willing person with a weapon strong enough to subdue the rest of civilization to take power. That weapon doesn't even need to be technology, it could be as simple as blackmailing the people holding the power.

The struggle for life, let alone liberty and privacy, has always been an arms race and it always will be.

According to Elias, monopolization, and especially the monopolization of physical force and violence warranted more self-restraint from both the government and the individual. In "The civilizing Process" Elias talks about "a chain of mutual dependence" which makes people dependent upon each other in order to perform various tasks and achieve their goals. This, according to Elias, explains why societies required more stability, regularity and supervision. Transportation and the development of markets increased human interactions between people who found themselves dependent on each other even without direct contact. This according to Elias has led for the need to coordinate actions and establish the "rules of the game". Playing by the rules meant a growing demand for self restraint.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process

[2]: http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.fr/2012/04/norbert-elias-...

Good can triumph over evil, but as even Jesus said, it needs the "cunning of snakes" to succeed.

The whole quote is: "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."

You conveniently forgot the "innocent as doves" part, obviously because it doesn't fit in with the rest of your argument that America must act like a cirminal gang to secure peace. I feel unfortunate to live in a world filled with others who feel the same as you.

"I feel unfortunate to live in a world filled with others who feel the same as you."

Judging by the comments here, I think its filled more with people who feel the same as you. It's not since the 19th century that people like me have been common, though the ideas I'm riffing on were already old during the Roman Empire, who succesfully implemented the only known formula for world peace discovered to date (si vis pacem, para bellum). The 20th century was full of idealistic visionaries who tried flipping this ancient wisdom, with predictable results.

You should feel unfortunate in about two or three decades though: that's when I forecast the West's technological and economic boons peter out and its various infringements of natural law finally catch up with it, and the east Asian nations bring back the old order: national sovereignty over world policing, mercantilism over outsourcing, savings over debt, and good governance over democracy.