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Comment by kikokikokiko | Hacker News Reader

"Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services" I understand where you're coming from, "the ultimate goal of a company is to profit and so we can not trust it to protect their users/consumers interests instead of their own" but... you know that it is always the government that will put you in prison, or send you to war right? That it is a blob of power, controlled by people right? This goverment = good that you see people believing these days is such a childish view of reality.

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> This government = good that you see people believing these days is such > a childish view of reality.

There are plenty of immature ideas about running human affairs going around. History has shown that a social contract obtained by popular assent is the only viable choice, unless you relish war, insurrection, terrorism, and social collapse [0].

Government is good almost by definition because we grant its existence on that basis of benevolence. Indeed one should be ready to defend good government and lay down ones life to make it good, including overthrowing existing bad government.

This was well established 80 years ago and we seem to have forgotten.

I know there are some around here agitating for tyranny and dictatorship. That in my opinion is the "childish view", a result of too much screen-time and a lack of life experience.

Would you be willing to fight for good government? [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/soe/

you know that it is always the government that will put you in prison, or send you to war

You're merely playing word games here. A person keeping another human being against their will is called slavery or abduction instead of prison. Similarly, it's only called war when it's a government doing it, otherwise it's called activism, terrorism, or gang warfare (note the overload of the term).

The main difference between a corporation and a real democratic government is that a government is accountable to all its citizens, instead of its shareholders. I understand that this is a difficult concept to grasp for US citizens, but the rest of us living in actual European democracies don't deserve your childish derision. No system is perfect, but don't make the mistake of thinking that the US government is the best (or even a good) example of democracy out there.

Why do you presupose I am a US citizen?

Because you're repeating the typical US defeatist trope that government is other people. That attitude is how democracy dies. FSM help us all.

I'm brazilian. My complete and utter disdain for any trust whatsoever put on goverment (i.e. government officials, i.e. people) comes from hard earned experience. I would rather leave my life in the hands of an "evil" corporation than any bureaucrat.

It seems you have already accepted your subjugation. So it shall be, then.

So much this! The internet does not have to be a monolith controlled by the mega-corp/govt flavor-of-the-month. It originally was (and still can be) a network of smaller federated ecosystems controlled by individuals or smaller groups.

Government and charity can be corrupted (and usually are, to at least a small degree). Private industry is corrupt bt default: to the extent possible, it will intentionally serve owners at the expense of other stakeholders.

This is not a knock against private industry in general. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it harnesses corruption toward productive ends through private industry.

Nonetheless, it's unsurprising that people would take a chance at less-corrupt versions of key infrastructure. My preference would be to do this through charity, which worked pretty well for e.g. Mozilla for a while - but I wouldn't call other directions naive.

There are a lot of pragmatic pro-government people here, holding tightly to the "51% > 49%" core principle of democracy, which sadly turns into a mess at the scale of humanity, just like any other model we've invented so far. There isn't a real alternative for us collectively now but to submit to power – so any even slightly anarchistic views are not welcome here most of the time...

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