Quote from: d5000 on April 19, 2025, 09:13:47 PM

Quote from: Smartprofit on April 19, 2025, 07:24:35 PM

The ideal of any government is to record all violations (of which there should be many) and immediately punish people for these violations. The ideal of any government is to turn people into trained dogs, because controlling dogs is easy and pleasant.

This is a bit too simplistic, I think. There are two tendencies which must be separated:

1) the tendency of governments to continuously justify and reinforce their importance, which can lead into surveillance dystopias.
2) the desire to please a certain electorate who think "security" is the highest of all values, higher than other human rights, which is not a small group (I'd estimate 20-30% of voters). The tendency of even more people to think the way "if I do nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide" is the biggest problem there, because it leads to passivity and even to active calls for a "police state" type surveillance.

I think the biggest problem in democracies is the second one. And yes, I think there are graduations of authoritarism. There are a lot of grey areas, there are governments of democracies commiting atrocities, but there definitely are countries which are more close to a dictatorship and others which work fairly well when it comes to democratic participation.

Quote from: Synchronice on April 19, 2025, 08:48:59 PM

Isn't that what they do? If you have Bitcoins on your address, you can do whatever you want with them but if you try to convert it into fiat, then you'll have a problem if you have a suspicious activity.

It's not only converting to fiat. Even if you use the BTC to buy things, often the merchant will rely on a payment processor, with similar problems.

Quote from: Synchronice on April 19, 2025, 08:48:59 PM

The big fish is either the government or big fishes work with the government. Do not make a mistake and do not think that big gangs import coke in the USA out of thin air. It's an agreement between criminals and the governments but it's done behind the scenes.

Yes, corruption is a big problem, which can't be solved entirely by "well-meaning" government members (who would listen to call-to-actions like my OP for example). The situation is however a bit more complex than you describe, see also my answer to Smartprofit.

Yes, I agree with you. However, when we say that a state is democratic, we thereby assign it a certain positive status, give it the highest rating and (what may be the most dangerous) grant it more rights than other (non-democratic) states.

For example, is the opposition useful? Yes, from the point of view of democracy it is useful. Is the financing of the opposition useful in authoritarian countries? Yes, it is useful! And is the financing of the opposition in democratic countries (by authoritarian countries) useful? If the answer is "no", then why? Is the opposition a good thing for the purposes of democracy? Or does it all depend on who exactly finances the opposition?

But isn't this a situation of double standards? If authoritarianism is evil, then its manifestations cannot be forgiven either in democratic or in authoritarian countries.

For example, CBDC (central bank digital currencies) are a typical manifestation of authoritarianism (or even totalitarianism). Such a financial system in itself is capable of turning any democratic state into an authoritarian one.

Violation of natural human rights (in particular, the right to privacy) is unforgivable (and it does not matter where exactly it occurs).