So you know it’s bad but you don’t know what good looks like.
Please consider the possibility that this is because it’s not bad at all to have the state, rather than private citizens, hold the sole ability to use force, and that the problems you’ve observed may be unrelated to that principle. Not that they don’t exist, just that they are not caused by what you’re saying they are.
I leave you with that, in genuine good faith.
So what is a US where there is no monopoly on violence by the state in your view? Or rather, if it is a “bad thing”, what is a good thing? How do you see this working?
No, it’s not “another form of war”. Plenty of illiberal countries have a strong monopoly on violence and nobody conceptualizes that as them being at war with their population. That’s absurd.
Making grandiose declarations doesn’t make them make sense. I wish people took an extra breath to check what they are actually saying when they post.
Also, if you’re not saying you want to abolish the monopoly on violence by the state what are you saying? Because that’s the thing about monopolies, you either have it or you don’t. As I’ve said above, control and accountability don’t remove the monopoly on violence, and the US already has an unusually lax regulation on this issue. So what are you saying?
Because nobody wants the government to stop being the only one who is allowed to deploy violence. So the monopoly on violence is not in question.
The solution to the government abusing its monopoly on violence is accountability and regulation, not to remove the monopoly and allow people to just shoot each other freely.
I didn’t bring up legitimacy, by the way, you were the one to claim that the government doesn’t have enough support from the majority. That is an unrelated issue, as far as I’m concerned.
You’re talking about democratic legitimacy, not about the monopoly on violence. Non democratic countries also have a monopoly on violence for the state, it has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the state to represent the will of the People.
If your argument is that the current electoral or political system in the US lacks legitimacy because it’s not representative enough I can agree with that. But the monopoly on violence by the state is the same with or without that issue, and the lack of legitimacy doesn’t change the fact that you don’t want random people being allowed to resolve their grievances violently.
No, the notion that
Despite being less accountable than normal citizens for it, the state has monopolized violence to be acceptable for them to commit, but unacceptable for others
is no more true in the US than Finland or France. All modern countries legally prevent their citizens from taking violent action. This is normal. It’s intended, it’s a good thing.
The problem is with accountability for the agents of the state, which has nothing to do with the monopoly on violence, it has to do with the criminal system and how the use of that violence is controlled.
If you say the monopoly on violence is the issue with the US’s police violence issue what you’re saying isn’t that the police should be controlled better in their deployment of force, you’re saying that individuals should be able to shoot back at the police or, in fact, at anybody else they don’t like.
Which is clearly already way too frequent in the US. The interpretation of exceptions to enable private violence, be it the right to bear arms or the insane “stand your ground” rules and other expansive interpretations of legitimate defense are part of the problem. The state’s monopoly on violence in the US is too lax, not too strict. Which is mostly unrelated with the fact that the state deploys violence unjustly or without enough accountability or limitation.
Those are different things. I don’t think you mean what your statement is implying, I think you mean the other thing, but that’s what you’re saying and you can probably see how that’s a problem.
You’re changing the subject, though. The state having the monopoly on violence is a trait of civil societies in general. You can break a liberal democracy in many, many ways entirely unrelated to that issue, which is ultimately just that individual citizens aren’t allowed to enact their will through violent acts and instead must appeal to the state for restitution when they are wronged.
The US’s issues aren’t that the government doesn’t allow its private citizens to legally act violently (the exact opposite is a problem in the US, in fact), and having a monopoly on violence doesn’t bear one way or the other on whether a country’s international policy is compliant with international law.
Words mean things.
This is obvious and, honestly, the arguments against it are so weak and rely on such a niche, deliberate misunderstanding of how… you know, reality works, that it’s probably not worth engaging with them. Especially not now. It’s still shocking to see it written down, though, at least until one remembers that people can just write whatever they want on social media.
I’ll give them this, though: the notion that political violence like this is “unheard of” in the US is absurd. It is shockingly frequent.
Yes, this is by design and it’s a good thing. That’s what the state is for.
People are losing the plot around here.
Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs…
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I’ve been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn’t have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
Right? It’s pretty solid.
I think it’s a shame the show ended on a bit of a downer, but season 1 is underrated and 2-4 are actually very watchable. I think my power rankings are 4>2>3>1>5, but I could change that in a rewatch.
I thought it got closer over time. Season 1 tired maybe a bit too hard to feel “new and fresh”, but they reined it in a lot later on. I mean, obviously bringing the SNW Enterprise crew in for Season 2 was a bit of a mission statement, but the entire back half of the show is all about getting back to Trek status quo.
I don’t think, I know.
True. I was in a genuine rage halfway through Lower Decks season 1 and I’m now actively in “Save Lower Decks” team.
I do recommend going back in your situation, then, because it really becomes a whole different show. Especially if you did enjoy SNW, the vibe of Season 2 is different but the characters are consistent, so it’s a natural jump-in point.
Hm… had season 5 been better, maybe. Like Discovery it starts with a different tone and then it finds itself, but it unfortunately ends in a bit of a dud. I think seasons 2-4 are good to great, though, it’s just never quite as smart as TNG.
Season 1 is… underrated? It buckles under the pressure of expectations as a revival to kickstart a whole new era, but I think as a movie it would have worked pretty well, honestly. Better than most of the cheap fluff they put in theatres during the TNG movie era.
But I also think DS9 is overrated. besides the straight-up bad wheelspin-y early episodes, my last rewatch ended when they spent a whole show making O’Brian argue for doing a bit of murder, then doing a bunch of murder himself and then the show being so much in agreement with him that this is taken as a bit of a teachable moment.
It’s been decades and I was still pissed. At least Michael got court martialled.
Nah. There is a whole omnipotent being with a massive crush on him and Picard treats him like a nuisance he deals with at regular intervals. First thing he did when Q got briefly depowered was put him in the brig.
Picard knows the Koala is real but he has zero respect for cosmic marsupials in general.
I haven’t gotten past that, to be honest.
To this day I have a visceral reaction to all the online nerds complaining about NuTrek not being Starfleet enough but having memory holed that DS9 got that exact pushback at the time for honestly way more legitimate reasons.
I looked it up.
Horrifying. Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? NO!
Man was such an atheist I’m mildly surprised he isn’t more of a terminally online conservative. He’s too pro-choice, though, so I think we’re safe.
It is a hardware issue, in the way that those kitchen gadgets to peel eggs or neatly slice butter into perfect cubes are a hardware issue. The application is just not mainstream and the usability of it has built-in challenges that aren’t about improving the specs.
VR is cool and I hope it remains viable for enthusiasts, but it’s definitely not the next cell phone and it’s never going to be as long as it involves strapping a screen to your face.
I was once in the room while a Valve rep told a bunch of indie developers to spend their own money localizing for the Chinese market or risk not getting store placement.
Valve is a big, big corpo and their MO is to make other people work for them. The software they do make is amazing, but please stop thinking they’re a charity, they are extremely not.