[pling]

I think a non-violent approach is unrealistic. History tells us that tables only turn when soldiers refuse to shoot citizens on order of the government and turn the guns back against them.

The best interim approach is to destroy all means of facilitating the dictatorship. In this case that means destroying the tools by which we work, destroying the banks, the commerce regimes and the communication and logistic platforms muck like the Russians did when they pulled out of the Eastern Bloc. No one has to be hurt to do that but people will go hungry, jobless and penniless. This will however open their eyes to the situation.

I'm not advocating this as a solution nor would act upon it but I'm without a better option in my mind.

Edit: to the down voters. This is not reddit. Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

[asgard1024]

It has been shown (for example in Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism) that violence increases authoritarian tendencies among population, while violent attacks against nonviolence decrease those tendencies.

This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand. Once that happens, the powerful people have to give up, because they themselves can only rely on other people to stay in power.

[john_b]

> "This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand."

This is a cute theory, but history provides countless examples of soldiers not refusing orders and shooting unarmed citizens. It's been happening in the Middle East for the past few years. It happened prior to the American Revolution (events such as the Boston Massacre likely contributed to the 2nd Amendment). And it will happen again over and over again.

Soldiers have several things to weigh when contemplating orders to fire on fellow citizens. The "moral upper hand" is one of them, but history has shown it's often not the strongest motivator. The 2nd Amendment is an amendment firmly grounded in reality and written by people who had seen government at its worst. Americans have lived in a relatively peaceful country for a long time and have largely learned to love Big Brother by now, so they are more worried about the 1/1e12 chance of a terrorist attack than the chance of their own government oppressing and spying on them. The 2nd Amendment establishes a firm deterrent that, in the limit, discourages how far and how fast the government can exercise its various forms of abuse.

[dublinben]

>This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong

They got it right in 1776-1783 when they put their lives on the line, and fought for their independence. Britain never would have "given up" their North American colonies peacefully.

[krapp]

The United States was certain the Muslim world would "open its eyes" to Western style democracy if only we overthrew their governments and destroyed their infrastructure and just kept killing whoever disagreed with us until we were welcomed as liberators with flowers in the streets. It didn't work, though maybe we just need to keep killing until it does?

I think it's irrational, albeit probably a common bias in revolutionary thinkers, to assume that the likely result of such violence will be the people viewing you as their liberator rather than their oppressor. Which is of course why such revolutions typically require purges and secret police, and spawn violent counter-revolutions of their own. I don't see how one form of oppression is better than the other.

[TeMPOraL]

> Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.

Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.

[tokenadult]

downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement

The site founder has said otherwise on more than one occasion. About 2341 days ago he wrote,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."

Downvotes are, of course, especially appropriate when a comment is BOTH uninformative in the context of the discussion and uncivil besides. I'm happy to upvote comments I disagree with (as a factual matter) if those comments prompt me to think about an issue I haven't thought about before, or if the comment contributes to the discussion being more nuanced in other ways. But there appears STILL to be no general rule in the Hacker News Guidelines[1] prohibiting downvoting to express disagreement. Submissions of course cannot be downvoted by anyone (they can be flagged) and no submitter or commenter can downvote child comments to what they have just posted. It's the overall sense of onlookers that determines net karma of a comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[happyscrappy]

> people will go hungry, jobless and penniless.

This is why you are being downvoted. It seems unlikely you have kids, but you must have parents and grandparents. Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?

[pling]

I have three children so your assertion is incorrect.

If it means that the world is a better place afterwards for them, some hardship for us all is not a bad thing. That includes me and my family. It's not an anarchist pipe dream. It happens when the government sends your country to war as well don't forget.

I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe and they'd do it again to be free from opression.

[ripb]

>Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?

What complete and utter nonsense. Someone willing to pay a price now for a better future tomorrow is the same as corrupted governments prying into the private lives of their citizens. What a brilliant comparison you've drawn.

It's this fear of change and desire to protect the status quo that has our societies in the rotting state that they're in, by the way, so while you may take comfort in knowing your parents and grandparents are ok now, and that your pockets are moderately protected, that it's your choices in protecting this status quo that is making the future look very bleak for our children.