Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1996 | Hacker News Reader

1996

> "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"

No.

You can and should ask as 1) it is at the basis of check and balances 2) it is not an connection that can not be severed if needed.

If you are not willing to look at the dynamic of the relationship, you may help a country commit tyranny: if your country is not willing to help you because of your race / religion / anything else, maybe you should do nothing in return except get the fuck out and grab a bag of popcorn while watching the country go sour.

I say that as I love China, but I understand and support my Gay friends who have decided to never return.

View on HN

This misses the point: that the country is what we - as the people thereof - make of it.

The American government - like, I suspect, the Chinese government - has a vested interest in trying to paint itself as "the country" and thus demand said country's people to serve that government unconditionally, but that couldn't be further from the truth; governments come and go (as they have here in what we now call the US, and as they have in China) but the the people - themselves being the country - remain.

That is: countries do not commit tyranny. Their governments do. And when those governments commit tyranny, or otherwise fail to serve the people, it is the right and duty of the country - i.e. the people - to bring that government to heel, or else establish a new government obedient to the will of the people (or, better yet, learn to govern themselves instead of insisting on some government to do so). Driving out the people of a country in order to appease the wishes of some government is arguably the worst-case scenario in terms of that country's identity; a country which allows a government to dictate that identity only weakens as a result - as we can see quite plainly in both the US and China.

So, when it comes to weather reporting or anything else, if the government can't or won't do it, then it's on us - the people - to do it, for the sake of all of the rest of us. If any community or demographic or what have you is marginalized in our country, then it is on us - we being the country - to correct that, and to extend a hand in friendship and mutual aid. This is how patriotism is supposed to work: a commitment to one's fellow human, not to some arbitrary state.

If you do indeed love China (and I'm assuming here that you're a resident of it), you might want to reflect on what you can do to improve it for all of your fellow countrymen - including those who currently feel excluded from it. If more people did the same in our respective countries, said countries - and given their global influence, the world - would be much better places than they are now.

> it is the ... duty of the country - i.e. the people

No, there is no such duty. If we look at the Soviet dissidents, plenty of them neither wanted to support the Soviet regime nor challenge it, so instead they retreated into their own private world, and that was a totally legitimate choice.

Also, you suggest that the people naturally want a free country ruled by the people. Yet support among Americans for the 18th-century Lockean ideals that informed the Founding Fathers (radically free speech, division of powers, decisionmaking by the popular will instead of some recognized experts, etc.) seems to be falling on both sides of the political spectrum. In many countries, those ideals were never there in the first place.

> plenty of them neither wanted to support the Soviet regime nor challenge it, so instead they retreated into their own private world, and that was a totally legitimate choice.

So two things:

1. You seem to be conflating the country with the government here. The Soviet regime was not the country. It was one government asserting control over a country (and also some other countries, on that note). That country existed before the Soviet regime, and continues to exist after it.

2. "retreat[ing] into their own private world" is itself a means of challenging the power of a government. It demonstrates one way - indeed, the simplest way - in which the people of a country can abolish a government: by ignoring it entirely.

> Also, you suggest that the people naturally want a free country ruled by the people.

No, I suggest that the people - and the country existing as an abstraction of them - are distinct from whatever rulership is currently in place. The power of that rulership is contingent on its recognition by the people. This is pretty inherent to whether a government is actually functional; if the people refuse to listen to the government, then what power does the government have?

The form of whatever government the people do fashion for themselves (if they fashion one for themselves at all) is an entirely separate question. Doesn't matter if it's a direct democracy or a dictator for life; if it has power, it is because the people of a country enable it to have power.

> It demonstrates one way - indeed, the simplest way - in which the people of a country can abolish a government: by ignoring it entirely.

No, not entirely. The USSR and Eastern European dissidents' approach was often to publicly acquiesce to the demands of the regime, perform the rituals expected of them, while in private revealing to one another their true opinions and tastes in art, music, literature, etc.

You stated above that people have a duty to "bring the government to heel, or else establish a new government obedient to the will of the people", but clearly people have often not been willing to take action like that, and that is perfectly alright.

Fair. Still, it's those private actions that matter here; that perpetuation of ideas against the will of the ostensibly-in-power government is, too, a rejection of that government's power.

That is:

> You stated above that people have a duty to "bring the government to heel, or else establish a new government obedient to the will of the people"

Chopping off the parenthetical immediately following that quotation changes the meaning from what I wrote entirely. As noted in that parenthetical, a perfectly valid way of fulfilling that duty is to promote and exercise self-governance - which is exactly what those dissidents did in private.

And further, that promotion and exercise of self-governance is itself a way to bring an errant government to heel - namely, by introducing an alternative to it and prompting it to seek a more "diplomatic" outcome.

Ideas are not self governance. Governance is a relationship of power, ideas can only bring prompt changes to relationships of power.

In the Soviet Union, for example, change in systems of government by and large happened not because of ideas or dissidence but because a large part of the elite decided it would be in their interest to implement and oligarchy instead, against the overall wish of the population.

In the end, the ideas mattered a lot less than relationships of power.

Even in the American revolution the ideas of classical liberalism only struck because there was a class of rich landowners for which these ideas prompted the exercise of their power in a way that was conducive to their interest - increasing their power and reducing taxes, and enabling them to warmonger to their content.

That's not to say this necessarily only benefits and elite - many révolutions were prompted by ideas that allowed the common man to actualize their freedom and collective interest, but until now the inability to coordinate collectively always gave rise to an elite that seized effective power.

But never has any real political change been brought by anything but power and interest. Ideas serve to communicate the interests and possibilities and to coordinate groups to organize a society.

> Ideas are not self governance.

I never said they were. What I did say is that expressing and communicating those ideas is (one aspect - and a critical one, IMO) of self-governance, and that when there exists a government that forbids said expression and communication, engaging in said expression and communication anyway is a pretty unambiguous rejection of that government's power.

That is:

> Ideas serve to communicate the interests and possibilities and to coordinate groups to organize a society.

Exactly correct.

...but this all now drifting further and further from the original point of my original comment: that we Americans (like the people of any other country) have a collective interest in accurate, timely, and publicly accessible weather reporting, and that if the government ain't up to the task for whatever reason, then we arguably should be considering an alternative mechanism for said reporting - and that it's arguably our civic duty to help with that replacement, for the mutual benefit of ourselves, our communities, and our nation as a whole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com