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...especially if 9.9 million of those votes are being cast by people on the basis of questions completely unrelated to TLD governance, and who may not even be a

• palata 3y ago
  In a functioning democracy, the government does indeed represent the people. Not every country is lucky enough to have a functioning democracy of course, and the people only gets to vote once every few years for a president that by design does not represent them. I trust the ccTLD of my country more than the gTLDs that are private entities.
  • Gormo 3y ago
    >In a functioning democracy, the government does indeed represent the people. I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people", because that concept represents an aggregation of many distinct individuals and communities, and all controversies and conflicts of interests that are addressed via politics emerge from within that aggregation. Politics is a tool for mitigating disputes arising from divergences of values or conflicts of interests within "the people", so the idea of treating it as something that expresses a singular set of values or interests applicable to the whole is incorrect. > I trust the ccTLD of my country more than the gTLDs that are private entities. The point is that everything is a private entity, even the government-run ones. All institutions are groups of specific people inhabiting a bounded context, and there's no mechanism for effectively making any particular institution accountable to a speculative aggregation of millions, so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless.
    • palata 3y ago
      We seem to be living in pretty different countries :-). > so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people. There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless. > I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people" Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand. The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country. So you, individually, are not represented by the government, but most of the citizen are. That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible. But if you believe that, you need to learn how to compromise, for your own sake.
      • Gormo 3y ago
        > In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people. All formalities. The government is just a specific institution within society, and all of the symbolic rituals by which it appears to be acting on behalf of "the people" are illusions. > There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless. There is no obvious difference. It takes a heavy stack of conditioned assumptions to make the distinction in the first place, where a hypothetical space alien observing our planet would just see groups of humans acting in bounded contexts. > Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand. "Left" and "right" are just about as arbitrary as distinctions as "public" and "private" are. There's no way to make any specific office-holder, let alone all of them, accountable to a vast aggregation of disparate individuals, each in equal measure, when the divergences in values and conflicts of interest among that set of individuals is where all of the controversies that those offices exist to mitigate come from in the first place. > The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country. I don't always disagree with everything that the government does at the object level. It's just that I recognize that the cost of the government doing the things that I do like is (a) doing lots of stuff I don't like in parallel, (b) doing things that are harmful to others for my benefit, both of which I dislike. That's why I prefer to have a plurality of solutions maintained by the wide range of communities and institutions that aren't the government, catering to all values and interests in parallel, without usually having to make the compromises inherent in centralization. > That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible. I think that most people should be going about their affairs in most matters without any direction from the government in the first place, so there should be little for them to agree or disagree with at all. For the few issues that do involve the whole of society, cannot be meaningfully disaggregated, and for which only a single approach is possible, then your comments regarding compromise are applicable.