Yeah, the whole system in America is fucked. Like, the punishment should be that you get removed from society. You lose your freedom. But we live in such a hellscape that somehow we’ve normalized treating people worse than we would treat any animal.

My friend and I were talking the other day about people saying “don’t drop the soap”. Your friend is going to prison you tell him “don’t drop the soap”. A son goes to prison and dad says “don’t drop the soap”. The person saying that is essentially saying “I hope you don’t get raped”, and somehow that’s normal.

Americans have got to rethink our punishment system.

It wouldn’t be difficult. Our hurdle is us.

This is exactly my point. Do American citizens have the capacity to overthrow / coerce their government by force?

Your answer is effectively: no. Thank you.

This is why we really need to rethink the value of having any state at all. States need those tools and information to best serve its constituents, yet when it gets it, sociopaths immediately take it over and use it for evil ends.

Our problem isn't really a governmental one, it's an evolutionary one, but because of it it's impossible to have any kind of a functional government.

Maybe we ought to have a general AI run everything.

I would agree, the lack of humanitarian and scientific education consistently bites our societies in the ass, though I've also heard plenty of pragmatic individuals throw up their hands and advocate for authoritarians before.

The big problem is that an authoritarian being voted in is always a looming threat, so it's best to avoid even the chance of such information getting into their hands.

And you do that by not gathering data on your users and making the data you do store encrypted such that not even you can decrypt it. No back doors.