[cmrdporcupine]

Arguably the majority supports the ideological foundations, aims, and methods of the institutions you are speaking of. In particular the military and intelligence institutions. If they didn't, they would have been removed by vote or force some time ago.

Frankly the broad majority of people in the US benefit materially in some way from their existence in ways that they might not even be fully aware of.

I am not arguing this is a good thing, but I think it's a reality. Military power abroad means wealth accumulation at home.

[p1esk]

Interesting. I have absolutely zero ethical concerns with Google building a drone which can more accurately target someone. I'm also perfectly fine with US government using those drones to kill bad guys.

Now if they use it to kill good guys, then it's a problem that needs to be solved.

[sametmax]

Yeah but your good guys and their good guys will not be the same for ever.

[p1esk]

If that ever happens, I will protest them killing good guys, rather than protest them having advanced weapons.

[soVeryTired]

How does one determine who's a good guy and who's a bad guy?

I would have thought most people are somewhere in between.

[p1esk]

So far, the people they kill are very much in line with my definition of "bad guys" (e.g. bin Laden).

[mmjaa]

Are you paying attention to how many "good guys" are being killed by 'your side' daily? Because thats more important than your other stat.

[soVeryTired]

I don't think you're really engaging with my point.

[p1esk]

Yes, most people are somewhere in between. What's your point?

[soVeryTired]

My point is that it's not at all easy to determine who's 'good' and who's 'bad'. In fact I think those are extremely simplistic labels to tag people with, expecially when discussing what could amount to summary execution.

Is an enemy combatant with a weapon a bad guy? How about an unarmed enemy combatant? How about an enemy combatant with just a knife, or a rudimentary club? How about an armed civilian who might be an enemy combatant?

Is a bank robber a bad guy? If so, do they deserve to die? How about a white-collar fraudster? How about someone running from the police? How about a mentally ill person running from the police?

This stuff is never clear cut. It's why we have courts and military tribunals. If you can't think beyond 'good guys' and 'bad guys', I don't respect your opinion.

[dorgo]

Is Snowden a good guy?

My government did enough stupid things for me to not want them to have sophisticated military toys.

[p1esk]

Is Snowden a good guy?

Debatable, but regardless - do you think the reason US government have not killed Snowden is the lack of "sophisticated military toys"?

Also, my government did enough stupid things (like killing innocent people in war zones by mistake) for me to want them to have more intelligent weapons.

[jerf]

It isn't hard to imagine a scenario in which the majority, or even the strong majority, of each nation disapproves of its own military or intelligence techniques, but nevertheless nothing can change because any nation that unilaterally drops some questionable technique (and don't just think "torture" here, but "excessive surveillance of the home population" and such) pays penalties vs. the other nations and experiences no benefit, making it very difficult for even one nation to climb the resulting gradient, let alone the entire world.

It's a hard problem, and most glib solutions are, well, just that, glib. Centralized agreements become increasingly difficult as the number of entities increase, for instance, even before we account for scenarios like this where the reward for defection increases proportionally to the number of other participants in the disarmament.

This is also ignoring those cases where there isn't even disagreement; in the real world, for instance, while you can quibble about the exact lines it seems to be the case that the Chinese accept and approve of levels of "invasive government" (to use a Western spin on the idea; I don't know what they would call it exactly) that Magna Carta-descended countries would consider abhorrent, making coordination even harder. (Meanwhile, they consider our lack of coordination or whathaveyou, if not "abhorrent", at the very least "sub-optimal", and possible dangerously socially negligent. As I'm using English here and, like I said, I don't know what they'd call it exactly, I can't help a bit of a Western spin here, but I acknowledge the flip side.)

[sametmax]

> Frankly the broad majority of people in the US benefit materially in some way from their existence in ways that they might not even be fully aware of.

No argument here, having a strong bully in the room is good for you when he is on your side.