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You would justify one true tyranny (ubiquitous surveillance) in order to prevent another, hypothetical, theoretical, unsubstantiated "tyranny" based on a few ex

You would justify one true tyranny (ubiquitous surveillance) in order to prevent another, hypothetical, theoretical, unsubstantiated "tyranny" based on a few examples from the dustbin of history (and just so you don't mistake me, I intend that metaphor as "history is a useless dustbin with no predictive value")? raymer sez: "The only thing worse than a bad government is no government." Counterexample: North Korea. The various governments of the French Revolution. There are plenty more. The nation-state is a relatively new concept in social history. National governments are neither necessary nor a proven good thing.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> The nation-state is a relatively new concept in social history The nation-state is relatively new as the dominant high-level model of government, and as a named concept, sure; but government isn't new, and the issue wasn't nation-states but government (and, heck, many modern governments only conform very loosely to the idea of a nation-state.) > National governments are neither necessary nor a proven good thing. Prior to the dominance nation-state, governments, with many of the same institutional forms found in nation states, had existed for quite some time. The only unique thing about national governments or nation-states is the alignment of the boundaries of the government's jurisdiction (the domain of the state) with scope of a shared national identity (the domain of the nation).