> But that's a terrible baseline.

Fair but it’s such a massive difference there’s steps up the ladder which are still worse.

I’d still be careful when suggesting anything but success is theft, because as you say internal transitions are risky. Migration however has improved the living standards of billions throughout history.

Meanwhile just about anywhere today is still better for the average person than living in say medieval Europe or antiquity etc. Falling birth rates provide a significant opportunity for improvement. China isn’t a great place to live, but it’s also now the 2nd most populous country.

I feel like you’re defending terrible governments for no particular reason. Of course it might be better to live in modern china than medieval europe, but this doesn’t defeat the notion that modern china could be made much better for its people if the structure of its government were altered.

The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve. Implicit in the argument is a belief in a social contract being voided by one party, wherein the government makes lacking effort to provide “the best possible governance” and the people respond with disobedience. I’d personally disagree with the notion of a social contract, and argue only from the idea that an alteration to the government could produce better outcomes, but that argument would produce the same sentiment as the one they’re expressing, so in what way would you disagree with their sentiment?

Why did you say "Modern China" instead of "Modern USA" or some other country?

Read the end of what i responded to

I’m defending social order not terrible government. Governments can be a pure net negative, but that’s really rare.

I disagree with the idea that ‘poor performance’ rather than ‘negative performance’ from the standpoint of an individual gives someone extra authority. I have no issues suggesting someone can void the social contract by leaving but disobedience is something else.

Anyone can disagree with how a government functions, but individuals who dislike something don’t inherently know how to build a better system. Even non violent means like protests and voter suppression have real downsides. When people act with the assumption of authority they often result in serious negative consequences and only very rarely cause actual improvement.

Taken to the extreme the idea even supports wars of conquest. If your government is even mildly better than another why not ‘improve’ the situation.

PS: Which isn’t to say operating within a given system is useless. Convincing others, be that voters or a dictator, can also enact change with less risk. But again well supported arguments are safer than simply persuasive ones.

I’d argue that the solution isn’t for people to avoid protest or disobedience though. The civil rights movement in the US was composed of a lot of different groups, plenty of which were unsatisfied with anything less than radical change. The tactic was then to unite these people under a leader smart enough to negotiate the meeting point of their interests and the pressures of practical political change in the US. The endless civil disobedience and threat of radical violence was then a powerful piece of leverage, really the sole source of leverage, in mlk’s negotiation with lbj.

Given that brain enhancement is a while away, it’s gonna be a while before most people are able to weigh the nuanced ripple effects of their actions in order to optimally resist bad leadership, or be able to see the impracticality of otherwise good ideas; these are difficult mental feats that require a lot of self reflection. I wouldn’t then suggest that these people do nothing. I’d suggest that they represent, in essence, a productive force to be taken up and wielded against the subject of their discontent by similarly motivated, but intelligent, leadership.

Its the same concept with environmentalism. You can’t expect Joe Environment to be smart enough and critical enough to reason his way around the panic-inducing coverage of nuclear scares, but maybe you can harness his frustration with environmental as a source of political power.

I don’t think we’re going to agree though; I think we’re motivated differently. I don’t really find myself enticed by social order in the same way, and I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.

I’d argue for many Americans in 1960 the existing system was an actual net negative, and for others it was close. There was ~100,000 young men risking prison for homosexual relationships, about to be sent to Vietnam, treated like dirt for being black, and under significant threat of nuclear war all at the same time. That’s being rather uniquely shat on by a system setup to benefit others.

I don’t expect random environmentalist to have a well reasoned stance, but holding activist groups to a higher standard feels reasonable to me. I get just as pissed when nuclear advocates conflate the cost of uranium ore as fuel cost when reactors are using vastly more expensive enriched uranium fuel rods. (Possibly because the fuel bit works.)

> I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.

I used to feel that way, but the more I learned about how the world works the more I understood just how delicate these systems are. Gerrymandering isn’t just a free way to political power, it erodes people’s trust in democracy. Elections dependent on swing states and us vs them ideology fed by Ecco chambers isn’t heading to a healthy place. At the other end, the amount of havoc just a single person damaging fuel pipelines and electrical transmission infrastructure could cause is shocking.

Now imagine a few thousand motivated people intelligently trying to damage the US.

Bad governments have a consistent internal logic, and operate at a local maxima. In some sense, they are "doing the best they can", and practically, most forms of resistance damage the social order without improvement.

But surely this wouldn’t argue against resistance itself. If you argue no resistance should take place because it’s too damaging, then you’ll lose the small portion of radicals with beneficial ideas.

You’re also assuming that change only happens in small steps, which would trap you in a local maxima, but what about a revolution? That’s more like a giant leap, potentially in the wrong direction, but it might be worth the risk if the local maxima sucks enough.

> The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve.

People deserve: sugar, fat, an uninterruptible TV programm, constant surveillance (it it for your safety, for your children), apps or streaming apps so their brain never stops to think. /s