Thanks! (Although, the policing by consent thing sounds like propaganda. Everyone and their dog claims the will of the people)

Ah. It wasn’t clear your “nobody” excluded them.

I think there are people out there who are privileged enough, that they fully don’t realise the police aren’t just on TV or theoretical. All states must actively maintain a monopoly on violence.

<3

It’s not clear what goalpost you mean, exactly. Any consequentialism being bad, or pure consequentialism?

I was pretty careful not to set a goalpost of any kind on pure consequentialism, if you go back and double check, exactly because it has well-known problems.

Go bootlick a billionaire if you want to but don’t come here try to convince anyone that they are in any way good people

Don’t flatter them with the evil genius shit either. That’s how they want to be seen.

The fact I know what deontology means should suggest that I’ve heard of the trolley problem.

Also, leg[al] isn’t moral!

Correct. But, you’d have to figure out an alternative system of rules that he broke. And it may very well capture people you like as well. Most people would have no problem killing a technical standard for a very large sum of money.

I can’t say it’s impossible to do reasonably, but I can’t say it is possible either. Most people just acknowledge that sometimes the ends justify the means.

People also say he’s putting microchips in the COVID vaccines, so pardon me if I’m skeptical about all that. It appears to be a philanthropic project. Maybe not the best possible one, but one nonetheless.

good should be done for the improvement of humanity and bad people should be held accountable for their crimes.

Wouldn’t the “holding accountable” itself involve some bad actions?

Hey, it’s a pretty popular ethical philosophy. Generally, people like to leave caveats, but fully rejecting all consequentialism is similarly uncommon.

If you’re going to be a pure deontologist, you have to pick out single actions he’s done that went against your chosen rules. One hurdle there is that most of his activities were legal in their time or place. Another is that seeking personal profit is almost universal and often commended.

Dictatorship had a pretty clean run of several thousand years there. Sure, dynasties changed, but never the actual system.

Also, consider the attractiveness of dictatorship. I think that everybody would like to be a dictator. Who wants to share power? Not me. I want to be in control, of my forum, my project, my game.

So, my second paragraph kind of addresses that. It’s never actually about one person having the power, as a government system.

One-person control over something, backed by externally imposed laws, is a completely different thing. You don’t have to worry about your forum members poisoning you and physically taking control of your server.

Almost certainly, he’s saved far more lives than he’s taken at this point.

He scalped Western technophobes pretty hard and tried to hobble a lot of early FOSS efforts (although we came through in the end). Few of the idiots buying Windows XP licences needed that money more then the recipients of the Gates fund, though, so if that’s his lifetime transaction it’s based.

so what’s your threshold for being a scumbag piece of shit?

It’s not clear good people exist at all.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”

In a way that’s refreshing. The levels of anti-government sentiment globally has been insane and was always going to consume itself one way or the other. Power vacuums don’t last.

Experience shows democracies work better in just about every way. Mainly, there’s questions about how stable they can be over the long term.

I’ve known people who liked the idea of a dictatorship, but they’ve all had funny ideas about how they internally work. Palace intrigue and corruption are inevitable and huge, it’s never just one potentially-wise individual calling the shots.

I don’t know, but the way they’re answered often ends up being very interesting.

Uninventing guns is not actually one of the options. The police are definitely going to have them, because if they didn’t they’d be under threat from upstarts with a 3D printer or just a lathe, and they know it.

I really hope a tax hike is the direction he goes with this. The “we’ll save billions with AI” thing from the election was bullshit, at the very least. Potentially, conventional digitisation could save quite a bit, but it will probably take a while, and more debt is also imprudent.

Society doesn’t want you to have any negative emotions. I need to know how to not express negative emotions at all whatsoever unless I’m alone.

What about your friends or family? Particularly in some countries, it’s true that public displays of unhappiness are taboo. Less-than-totally-public displays are kind of a huge part of people’s social lives everywhere.

Europeans are still most concerned by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Pew Research Center survey shows.

We understand America better. They’ll come around - especially if Russia starts having serious internal problems.

Half of Canada was fully on the Trump bus the day before the tariffs hit.

I’d say that’s a high estimate. Maybe 20%, with another 60% that just wasn’t worried about it very much.

This isn’t new, unfortunately. Fascism was trendy and influential in polite circles all through the 1920’s and early 30’s. Then they actually got to put their ideas in practice. Humans can be pretty shit like that.

I’m probably one of the people OP is thinking of. Before my time he was apparently a massive bastard, and he even admits to it. These days, as far as I can tell, he rescues Africans and doesn’t do much else. Every other famous billionaire is higher on my shit list.

Yes, this hasn’t closed the door forever (as far as I can tell), and Carney doesn’t seem like an idiot, so I hold out hope this is some kind of maneuvering, and he’s still as “elbows up” as he was on the campaign trail.

Hmm, what are the historical reasons?

I wasn’t actually sure what the breakdown is across the continent, so I left it vague. I’m guessing French police are always armed.