The NO FAKES act has changed, and it's worse

Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of information and computation (and therefore control) becoming cheap. Liberal political systems can no longer survive in equilibrium. The 21st century will be a story either of ruling with an iron fist or being crushed beneath one :(

Information is as expensive as always it is just copying it that is cheap.

is it? it was always easier and faster to spew bullshit than to refute it, and now we can automate it.

Information, disinformation, what's the difference?

there is a huge difference between having strict laws and enforcing them and "ruling with the iron fist"

the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people

That is always same thing.

All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"

I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:

You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.

This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.

I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.

Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"

In most places, shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.

Your whole post falls apart right there.

Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.

Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.

And what does “enforcement” mean in your mind? The western censorship regime isn’t being implemented by asking nicely…

All countries exist as distinct entities because they can maintain what Max Weber called the monopoly on violence within their geographic bounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum

In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:

* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.

* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)

* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.

* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.

* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.

* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.

* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.

Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.

The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.

To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.

And how you make sure bailiffs/repo men succeed? For example I know a case in Brazil, that happened in the 70s, where repo men tried to take a Capoeira Master car, and he just grabbed his huge "Peixeira" knife and chased the repo men away. Justice then decided to just let him break the law, because the other choice was send heavily armed cops and hope they would survive the confrontation with the guy and his students.

Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.

> shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.

But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.

One's the kind that affirms existing worldviews, the other asks questions that makes TPTB uncomfortable, like Copernicus's questions about geocentrism.

Disinformation is not grounded in any observable evidence, and often has no basis in reality or is just wild speculation.

For example, anonym29, when did you stop beating up your partner?

> Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.

Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?

I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.

To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.

Murder by cop only applies to the individual.

Never in the history of our country, was a company that openly flaunted the law, and was murdered by cop or judge.

What's the saying? "I'll believe in the death penalty when they kill a corporation in Texas"

> Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.

if a iron fist rule you shoot them, but sooner or later you will end up with situations where their brother will shoot you, or there is a uprising and they lynch the police chef etc. no one wins

in country with strict rules but no iron fist rule the police person who tries to shoot someone who doesn't pose danger for other just because they try to avoid arrest by running away will lose their job

> involve killing people in the end

this is such a misleading dumb fatalistic argument, yes people will get killed, but there is a huge difference between the context.

> You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.

Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.

Sure there are edge cases where you threaten shooting at someone, and sometimes police will have to shoot. But only if there is risk to live. And most crimes don't go that far.

But is that a part of the design of the system, or parts of the system not behaving as intended?

>Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.

Well, it seems to be the same situation as everywhere: you either obey or be killed. As far as I know, in the EU there is no option to disobey and survive.

I do not believe that police are permitted to shoot a nonviolent criminal simply because they might escape (in most circumstances). They do have to actually physically apprehend them.

If a criminal uses violence to escape the law, then yes, violence is usually permitted against them (and they have now committed a violent crime).

Physical force is permitted against nonviolent criminals so they can be apprehended, but lethal force is usually not permitted unless the criminal has used or is about to use violence.

Yes, there are of course instances where nonviolent criminals have been killed, with that act of killing being legal under that framework. For example, if a criminal is escaping in a vehicle recklessly and putting the lives of others in danger. Or cases where enforcers are given overly broad latitude in determining what constitutes a threat of violence. Or tyrannical regimes that authorize lethal force for minor infractions.

But it is not the case that most legal systems say “a criminal can be killed if they refuse to submit to punishment, regardless of the severity of their crime”. That is a misconception. People don’t get killed for not paying fines, they get killed for trying to shoot the person that comes to take them to jail for not paying the fine.

The term 'disinformation' is also used by TPTB to discredit information that is grounded in observable evidence that goes against narratives that TPTB prefer to maintain.

Accordingly, every single declaration of "misinformation" must be critically evaluated according to available evidence, as the claim itself has been weaponized by bad-faith, self-serving interests of those in positions of power and authority.

The "experts" are frequently wrong, and are not inherently trustworthy. Not every word that slips past their tongue is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are humans, and like the rest of humans, they lie, they mislead, they are wrong, and some of them and can and do attempt to abuse social consensus mechanisms, including ostracization, to bend public discourse in their favor.

how do you have strict laws and enforce them without violence?

>a clear and present threat to life

Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.

Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."

>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine

It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.

There is no functional difference between behavior coerced by violence and behavior coerced by the threat of violence.

And neither is what I wrote. Threatening to destroy a dam or threatening to cut off a building's power is not threatening violence.

Is there a monopoly on coercion? An employer can for example coerce you into coming into the office with the threat of termination, or loss of access, but only the state can (legally) threaten you with violence to coerce you to do so.

Both the state or a private entity seem like they could do the dam example.

Depends what you consider coercion I guess. Perhaps if you view it that way there isn't a monopoly, I'm not sure. The way I'd look at it is that you could always quit your job, and you agreed to its terms beforehand anyway, so threatening to fire you is not exactly coercion... it's more like the contract stopping to be in effect. But I'm happy to see it as not-a-monopoly if that feels more sensible. The point I was disputing wasn't the existence of a monopoly on violence by the state, but the connection between that and "all laws are ultimately backed by violence" - I just don't believe every chain ultimately leads to violence, because states can (and do) coerce people in other ways.

First, would this distinction matter when lives are at stake?

Second, if parts of system does not work as intended, then we should think of how to prevent such situations in the first place.

Where lives are at stake we cannot take a stand "it works on my machine" or "you are not holding it the right way". We need to find solutions to fix or prevent it.

This is why the monopoly on violence is often formulated as "the monopoly on legitimate violence" or "legal use of force"

If you you don't pay your drug dealer, he can't take you to court, because his entire business is illegal. So instead he beats you up to get you to comply with his payment demands. If a policeman catches him doing that, the policeman can legally arrest him for the crime of assault, and can legally use force to stop him beating you up.

That... has nothing to do with what I said?

I was saying that the government can and does coerce people to do a lot of things without violence. For many laws, just cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance without ant violence whatsoever - even if you never comply with anything. Heck, even mere arrest and jail time isn't violent - they can occur pretty darn peacefully.

Of course if you become violent at any stage then that's what you get in response, and the government has a monopoly on doing that legally, but that's not a response to your noncompliance - it's a response to your own violence, which is separate and has nothing to do with the initial law you were actually breaking.

> cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance

That's still underpinned by violence. Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access? Perhaps they think you're a good guy and the state has the wrong idea. Let's say they refuse the state's demand.

The answer is the state in turn threatens these providers with whatever it needs to to force their compliance. And it threatens any fourth, fifth, sixth etc. parties it needs to. It threatens them with loss of legal status, loss of revenue, loss of property, loss of freedom. And it ultimately has to use violence to uphold these threats, should everyone it asks to carry out these actions refuse.

It all traces back to state violence, it's just convenient for both the state and subject if the state doesn't have to escalate that far. But it always can. If it cannot - if the subject can successfully defend themselves against a state-backed enforcement of its laws - that's a sign of a failed state.

It matters in terms of describing what the system is supposed to be.

If indeed violence is intended be used in context X, then that is something quite different from violence is intended never to be used in context X.

Sure, on the ground, "violence is not intended to be used here, but it is being used here" can be a life-or-death question. But if the answer is that the system is indeed intending to function that way, then the route to changing that is quite different than if some actors are not obeying the rules.

> Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access?

Because their licenses might be revoked and that would affect how others treat them, both domestically and internationally? Because they have respect for the rule of law and want to live in a country where laws are respected? Because they realize they're playing infinite games rather than one-shot games, and that it might actually be better business to comply? I could cite a million reasons, but seriously: not every single compliance is due to indirect threat of violence. We actually have laws with penalties that simply do not escalate that far, and the vast majority of people still comply with them simply because they're the law, and a lot of people have respect for that. Hell, even violence is not enough to prevent the entire population from turning against you, even in the world's most powerful countries. The idea that every single law is ultimately backed by violence or that that's somehow necessary is just silly. Humans are more complex than that.

What is this insanity? Obviously the police have instructions that letting someone get away with a crime is better than having a shootout in the street. There's 3 big reasons for that. 2 good, one really bad:

1) other people can and will get hurt if you do that. Plus other damage.

2) no criminal only breaks the law once, so the police will get another chance. And, frankly, if by some miracle the criminal really does only breaks the law just once, that by definition means they're rehabilitated. Job well done.

3) If you use violence you WILL get hurt. Perhaps that's very Jesus of me but it's true. Jesus did not see fit to build in an exception for the police. And states do not take good care of police that get hurt in the line of duty. So for individuals ... SWAT pays well but on the other hand there's demands. Demands you will never meet again if you get even a severe kick in the knee, and that represents years/decades of lost income that the state will not replace. So ...

This is something people forget, but even animals behave like that. And it makes sense: a tiger may be powerful, but he cannot survive long term eating just you. Plus the calories the tiger gains from eating you justify maybe a few scratches, nothing more. In other words: an attack will only happen if the tiger is either desperate or VERY sure there's no risk. Not even a small risk of getting knifed.

Yes, we're still human, and if you really make it clear your a dangerous lunatic, say kill a cop, or kids, or ... yes some police will risk their own safety to arrest/kill you. So there's exceptions. But mostly, no.

> at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail

This is just not true.

It's such a reductionist argument that it's nonsense. You either pay the fine or ... they find a way to get the money outside of direct payment and if they can't because you have no assets or income then most often the fine goes unpaid, sometimes for many years.

Jacob Blake and Charles Kinsey were Americans, right?

Your society has a violence problem and I don't think ought to be used as any sort of example. If the initial claim was "enforcing any law may cost lives in a broken society in which the police can murder with seeming impunity" that's a very different proposition.

I agree with your last line, but the rest not so much - Yes, the monopoly on violence exists, but the idea that one must always consider that the state will kill people on the introduction of a simple fine is just silly.

Looking at the monopoly on violence as the backing to the entire system of law? Sure, it's absolutely there. It's something to consider when discussing the merits of the existence of the state at all.

But within the context of the state already existing, looking at the introduction of an individual rule that may result in a fine through the lens of "is this worth someone's life" is nonsensical - it's just not going to cost anyone's life, it's not a reasonable thing to consider. Especially outside of countries where law enforcement are routinely armed and trigger-happy - there is no reasonable pathway to a fine costing lives. What we do see is fines just going unpaid if they can't be recovered by administrative means.

It is notable that in both your and the GPs timelines, the other party turns to violence first. Your line -

> What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.

really seems only to apply in places like the US where you have a bigger problem with police killings and a societal leaning towards firearms and escalation of violence. The UK (for example) will only send in armed police as a response to situations in which the other party is also armed and a credible threat to lives, they won't just start shooting.

tl;dr - considering the consequences of complete societal breakdown as part of your scenario when deciding to introduce a new type of parking fine is... well it's fricken hilarious really.

Disobey is not to escape. In most cases escape isn't possible. Disobey is to put up enough resistance to prevent your restriction of freedom. In Europe, they would absolutely one hundred percent kill you in such cases.

If you limit the definition of “disobey” to mean “use lethal force against law enforcers”, then yes. However, I think that is a narrow and inaccurate definition.

It's not me, it's European law enforcers who limit definition of "disobey" to "use lethal force against law enforcers". And when you disobey, they will kill you.