necrovore

All I have is my own history, which is only one data point. I was raised with Christianity, but ended up rejecting it. I went through seven or eight (philosophically) tumultuous years before discovering Objectivism, and I discovered Objectivism by accident. I never went through a phase where I thought the two were compatible. The lack of such a phase could have been in part because the flavor of Christianity I grew up with was fundamentalist; it guarded itself jealously against other flavors of Christianity; it rejected the other flavors as "people making up watered-down versions of Christianity in order to allow themselves to commit their favorite sins." So I could not entertain the idea of compromise. I had to be "in" or "out." I could not unsee the problems I saw, so I was out. I did try to hang on to the idea that God might exist, even if not the Christian conception of God -- until Objectivism showed me otherwise.

Technically, when a person dies, their remains continue fine, too! I think Galt is contrasting inanimate matter to life itself, not to animate matter. Living matter can die, but it is the life which goes out of existence, not the matter; the matter remains but is dead. Matter (or more precisely mass-energy) can change its forms but it cannot cease to exist. Matter can become part of a living organism or can become no-longer-part of a living organism. But a life can come into existence, e.g., when a person or animal is born, and it can go out of existence, when the person or animal dies.

There is such a thing as "agreeing to disagree" but this requires both sides to give up the use of force. Giving up force means that persuasion has to be used instead, which gives the long-term advantage to reality and reason. Some people don't want reality and reason to win. Others just don't want to wait; they think they have the advantage when it comes to force, so they seek to use it.

I'm not really talking about ignorance per se, I'm talking about the unknowable. In order for your free will to "go away," you'd have to know the unknowable. That's an entirely different thing from learning new facts of which you were previously ignorant.

As far as I know, the claim that determinism is "useless even if true," is my own argument. (I don't see it in the Objectivist literature either.) A useless determinism does not convert free will into an "illusion." Saying that it does is the same sort of argument that says that, because tables and walls are really made of atoms which are mostly empty space, the solid tables and walls that we see are "illusions." They are not. The solidity of tables and walls is a fact that arises out of the nature of the entities involved -- the atoms, the forces between them, and the fact that our bodies are also made out of molecules. Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.

Even setting aside the fact that one's own free-will is self-evident, I think the whole concept of "determinism" is flawed. It proposes that "if you know the entire state of a thing, you can predict exactly what it will do next." Although nature follows laws, these laws are averages, and there are always sources of noise. The gas laws for example arise from the random motions of innumerable particles. They are an average. There's no way any conscious could "know" the positions and velocities of all those particles. The amount of information is too big, even without accounting for "quantum weirdness." Some systems such as analog computers are capable of "unpredictable" behavior such as "strange attractors," where the system amplifies variations that started out being too small to measure, and thereby becomes unpredictable. This is also known as the "butterfly effect," wherein a (hypothetical) butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could eventually cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It is possible to use the thermal noise of a resistor to generate unpredictable random numbers. As for humans, there's no way you could know the state of someone else's brain -- in your own brain. Is your brain twice as big and only half-full, to have room for the other person's brain-state? How long will it take you to memorize it? But even that wouldn't be enough because you'd need additional brain-power to think about the state of their brain, to make your prediction. That doesn't even cover their sensory input, which is also a factor in what they do next. Also, they would carry out the action you are trying to predict faster than you could predict it. We can form and use abstractions. Abstractions throw information away. We can use them only when the information thrown away (or not known in the first place) is demonstrably unimportant. If you want an exact prediction, you can't throw anything away, because of the butterfly effect. So when they say, "in principle, if you knew the state of someone's brain," or "in principle, if you knew the state of every particle in the resistor that is being used to generate the random numbers," that's like saying "in principle, if two were equal to three..." because nobody could know the state of someone's brain or the state of all the particles relevant to the resistor noise. The "principle" of determinism is therefore useless. It only exists because of religion and the religious conception of "punishment," which assumes a God and His followers who should punish people for making wrong choices. Saying that something wasn't your choice is a legitimate excuse. Saying that nothing was your choice is the ultimate generalization of that excuse. Determinism also seems to require a God who could "know" all this stuff, because no real consciousness could know all of it. I think it's right to reject the notion of "punishment," but determinism, being useless, is not the right way to reject it. I do accept free will, and I also accept the notion of self-defense, which requires keeping murderers in prison (as a form of retaliatory force) because they're not safe to let loose. Self-defense also requires exercise of judgment: if you want to prosper, you have to protect yourself and the people and things you care about from crooks and incompetents, which means having to determine who they are and how to deal with them (if at all). But this does not require "punishment."

The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct? The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith. The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality. These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith. If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings). Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians. -- There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct. Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too. Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons. But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?

The term "gaslight" comes from a play, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Light. The other one, may be defined here? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Run the Table I suspect the lack of blogs is because people had to shut down their blogs because of the crowd who believe in imposing "consequences" for speech. It can be dangerous to run a blog if one's views are unpopular with certain people (even more so if the blog can be tied to your real name). I used to have a blog (which I never linked to from this site) but deleted it for that reason.

There used to be a lot of bloggers aggregated here, but Gus seems to be the only one left.

I do seem to recall (from some older articles) that many jurisdictions had laws requiring that all real estate agents had to be Realtors, so much so that people began to forget that Realtor was trademarked and not a generic term like "lawyer." I do not know if such laws are even still on the books, but even if they were or are repealed, it is still likely that the National Association of Realtors would have a lasting advantage from their existence. If the market is open to competitors then prices should stabilize even if no competitors appear (the mere threat of competition is often enough to stabilize prices). This kind of arrangement is similar to laws requiring that cars be bought through a dealership, which Tesla has gotten in trouble with, or laws that grant city or county monopolies for cable television. Such things are of course products of the "mixed economy" and are violations of the separation of state and economics (a principle not recognized by law at present).

I do not advocate any of these things. I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do. Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.) I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them. I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement. Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it. Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large censorship moderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.) Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.

I should add something: this whole topic about what to allow on this forum is essentially philosophical and, more specifically, epistemological. If this is an Objectivist forum then it should practice the Objectivist epistemology. An essential feature of the Objectivist epistemology is the rejection of evasion. Objectivism requires the integration of all facts. It does not countenance the propping up of false abstractions through the suppression of counter-examples or counter-arguments. It rebuts false arguments, by identifying them as false (or in some cases arbitrary or irrelevant), but it does not evade or suppress them. Rebuttal should not be hard. OPAR shows that it's possible to use abstractions to group arguments and rebut them all in a single blow, e.g., by identifying an argument as "Primacy of Consciousness." Banning people from the forum because of their arguments is evasion of those arguments, pure and simple. (But it is proper to ban things which are not arguments, such as spam or harassment etc.) The people who run this forum are free to run it however they want, just like they are free to evade in their own minds if they want. But when they start burning heretics, they aren't acting like Objectivists anymore. (Further, such action incorrectly suggests that Objectivism is no different from any other philosophy or religion).

On the one hand I see your point because maybe 1% of new ideas are good. Maybe even less. People will disagree about which ones they are. That's to be expected. People can also disagree about whether an idea is really new. (People may say, "Hey, it was new to me...") On the other hand I think that good new ideas, rare though they are, are the whole point. There is nothing to be gained by recirculating and repeating the same old ideas; one might as well just read OPAR over and over. It's like panning for gold. There may be a little gold but there's a lot of mud. If you are afraid of mud, though, you don't get any gold. These are not mutually exclusive. It should be sufficient to identify the deficiency and stop there. The ban hammer should be reserved for use against spam, harassment, illegality, or attempts to render the forum useless. I think what the child learns is the word for the concept; the child must still form the actual concept on their own. I don't know if there's any requirement regarding whether the word or the concept comes first, but the concept is not complete without the word and vice-versa. A person can receive feedback, not just as a child but all their lives, about whether they have formed the same concept, based on how they use the word in their speech and writing. When I say that I don't want the forum to be rendered "useless" I am implying that there is some use for it. I think, discussion of Objectivism and its applications, its implications, where it fits in, and how to explain it to people. That should be pretty close to what is already there. -- Maybe there should be a part of everyone's profile page where you can see the posts that they have liked or thanked. Then if you don't like reading the whole board you can possibly find someone, or a few someones, who'll read it for you.

There can be options in concept formation; the Japanese color 青い covers blue and also blue-green and maybe green in some contexts, and there are probably other examples where concepts in different languages overlap but don't coincide. If this sort of overlap can happen between languages, it can also be possible between people who share the same language but perhaps aren't using a dictionary or aren't using the same dictionary. This doesn't mean that either one is non-objective, just as the difference in colors between English and Japanese doesn't indicate that either language is non-objective. The result of the difference is a lack of precision but not necessarily accuracy. Obviously, with differences in the units, the accuracy is slightly less, just like a translator might have to determine whether to translate 青い as "blue" or "green" in a particular context. It's easier to be precise and to agree with things like the "meter" which can be measured easily than with things like the exact line of demarcation where a forum becomes something more like a magazine. One could ask, what is the essential characteristic of a forum? I was thinking of "openness" as an essential characteristic, and the reason I think it's essential is that a "forum" that isn't open is useless, not just to me but to everyone else; that's what makes openness essential. This is not to say that "magazines" are invalid. There may be certain people whose opinions I care enough about that I might want them accurately represented. I might subscribe to their magazines. But it is telling that Leonard Peikoff, for example, hosted a Q&A, where he would answer questions, and he could pick and choose which questions he wanted to answer, and the answers were unambiguously his as opposed to what someone else thought he might say. It was a Q&A, not a "forum." He didn't host a "forum," invite people to post, and then ban opinions he disagreed with. Also, Peikoff had already built his reputation, so people were interested in what he, in particular, had to say. What if you come up with a new idea? Where do you put it? Assuming you are not famous. Nobody approves of your idea yet because nobody knows what it is. Do you want to take a chance that you will get banned because people disapprove of it? Is it fair that you should have to take that chance? And what if you want to find new ideas that might have been come up with by other people, who aren't themselves famous enough to create their own forums? Where do you go to look for them? How can you find someone who runs a forum that allows new ideas, given that the forum owner has to take the risk that the new ideas might be wrong and that he has therefore sponsored wrong ideas? If people have to censor ideas that they disagree with, people must have been grossly immoral for publishing Ayn Rand's books and ideas, since after all those people could not have agreed with the ideas already, since they were new. (Or else they were taking a chance on being immoral, sort of like shooting off a gun in random directions and being lucky enough not to have hit anyone. Which is also immoral. But anyway...) A personal attack is an ad hominem, it's a fallacy. But the reason for banning personal attacks is not because they're ad hominem: the fact that they're ad hominem is what allows us to get away with banning personal attacks, because we know we're not accidentally banning any legitimate ideas. The reason for the ban is because personal attacks tend to turn away the contributors who are attacked, and thus renders the whole forum useless to them, and less useful to others who might have wanted to read those contributions, or other contributions which might have never gotten made. I don't know if I want to try to run an open forum, because people might join and then demand that I suppress other people's views based on arbitrary criteria. Or if I didn't have time to moderate it myself, I'd have to trust someone else, and then they might start banning people for disagreeing with their views, and they might do a lot of damage before I stop them. I wouldn't want to run a forum where I banned people for disagreeing with me, either. What if I ban someone on an incorrect basis? It would ruin the forum for everyone and destroy its value. Wikipedia used to be great, until a cabal of editors formed who decided to take it upon themselves to rid Wikipedia of views they thought didn't have sufficient "notoriety" (because it was embarrassing to them that some articles about popular TV shows were longer than articles about important historical events -- so all they did was go around deleting articles because they lacked "notoriety"). This mostly happened on the English-speaking Wikipedia. Later, another cabal took over, this one consisting of leftists (or maybe it was the same cabal), with the idea of suppressing anything critical of leftism. As a result, Wikipedia has become less valuable and less useful, unless you are a leftist. (You can still use it if you are looking for an idea a leftist wouldn't disagree with.) That could happen here, too. The site might end up supporting, not Objectivism per se, but a particular flavor of it, and it could easily be the wrong flavor or a distortion, and no one would be able to say anything about it if it were. It would become an echo chamber. I suppose this is a problem of the culture at large, that people no longer tolerate views they disagree with, and that they wish to silence those views rather than engaging them in debate (and they can't accept the idea of just leaving their opponents alone, either; they have to silence them). The silencing of people is the main thing I am objecting to here; if there is some error in my definitions of "forum" and "magazine" then that error is not essential to my objection. Maybe this tendency to reject opposing views is a product of the current educational system (because I suspect that a lot of the people calling for this are younger than I am and it certainly aligns well with the leftists who are taking over the culture at large). Maybe it's also a problem that people don't want to see views they disagree with, so they hope some moderator will step in and ban those views before they have to see them. That sounds like the "safe spaces" that are being promoted in schools and universities, too, and it's the exact opposite of "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," which at least requires that you know what those facts and opinions are.

No, that's not true -- an unmoderated forum would allow spam and harassment and the like. What I propose is an open forum, where any ideas can be discussed. There's a similar difference between an anarchy and a free country. It should be sufficient to require that the ideas have something to do with Objectivism. I am not proposing to initiate force against anyone. But I am also not proposing to have people banned from the board because I disagree with them.

If you exercise editorial control, it ceases to be a "forum" at all, and becomes a "magazine" or a "journal." That's my point. If I write a book I can control everything in the book. But it's not literally a "forum." It's a book. (My biggest concern is that no one would read it, which is one reason why I like having access to open forums.) (Maybe this is more like a continuum than an either-or thing.) I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Rand said somewhere (perhaps in "What Can One Do?") that as long as free speech exists, the right ideas have a chance. I will agree with @Boydstun that there are a lot of choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. But the thing about a forum is precisely that it does not constitute an exercise of one's own speech -- it constitutes giving others an opportunity to speak, which is a different thing (and can be valuable too, including to the giver of the opportunity). Of course when you provide that opportunity it's pretty much true by definition that you give up control over what those others are going to say. You are signing up for surprises. Some of them may be pleasant, some not. The pleasant ones are what make it worthwhile. (But also, a person may run or participate in an open forum because he wants to test his own thinking and ideas by being exposed to those of others.) Peikoff writes that lies are "impotent" because the underlying reality is still there and will be discovered. This is why people who live by lies end up having to resort to force (because the lies alone are never enough). It's also why a free society can afford to have free speech. So in that sense there shouldn't be any harm in allowing people to speak their minds. (I'm excluding stuff like harassment that would render the forum useless). The truth will come out eventually. Even posting the truth here isn't necessarily going to end the discussion, though, because people have to see that truth for themselves, and they have to see it in reality, not just in the forum. Discussions end when there is nothing more to add. My concern is that the calls to exercise more editorial control are actually rooted in the idea that lies are not impotent, that lies have to be censored because they'll "mislead" people. This is rooted in the primacy of consciousness, but not in the usual way: most people familiar with Objectivism know better than to think that lies "create reality." We all know that I can lie and say I have a gold bar, but the lie doesn't create the gold bar. But there is a "second order" version of the "primacy of consciousness," if you want to call it that -- the notion that if false ideas spread around, people will believe them, and then act on them, and then this will give rise to oppressive governments and cultures. So well-meaning people then conclude that the spread of the false ideas has to be stopped. False ideas need to be refuted; that's the only way to really stop them. The possibility that people will believe bad ideas called "free will" and is metaphysically given, and there's nothing we can actually do about that. We can try to put the right ideas out there, and also try to explain why the wrong ideas are wrong. Trying to fight the metaphysically given is why it's a second-order version of the primacy of consciousness. We can't stop people from thinking bad thoughts. If refutation is not enough then the human species is doomed anyway. I think that setting up forum rules to ban the discussion of certain ideas only serves to create the impression that Objectivism cannot withstand those ideas, which is not true. Further, the ideas are not "gone," they just go to other forums. Merely hiding the arguments we disagree with doesn't help; it can even amount to self-deception. I will admit that sometimes people raise the same tired old objections to Objectivism over and over. In that case it should be sufficient to refer to them to places where the objections have already been answered. However, it is possible that the answer to the tired old objection was somehow incomplete and so another question may need to be answered. There are also people out there who would expect you to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4, and they won't accept anything you say, so that they are either trolling or their reasoning is irreparably defective. In that case, just stop. There is nothing you can do. (Why get all upset about it?) The correct thing to do, the only thing we really can do, about the evil in society, is try to patiently explain why having an oppressive culture is a bad idea, and how to make a better one -- which is sort of what Objectivism is about in the first place. -- There is a second concern, too. The forum owners may say that they don't want their resources to be used to promote bad ideas. The thing is, when the forum is open, and somebody posts a bad idea, it doesn't count as a "promotion" in the same way it would if it had been approved by editors. This is because people know that the forum is open and that just about anything can be posted. If everybody wins an award, the award is not very meaningful, and that's an instance of the same principle.

If you exercise editorial control, it ceases to be a "forum" at all, and becomes a "magazine" or a "journal." That's my point. If I write a book I can control everything in the book. But it's not a "forum." It's a book.

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A true power-luster wouldn't be satisfied with catching murderers and thieves. A lot of is is that Congress doesn't really write laws that say "such and such behavior shall be illegal" anymore; instead nowadays they write laws to create an agency which will have such-and-such purpose and have such-and-such budget. The head of such an agency will end up with a great deal of discretionary power because they can write pretty much whatever regulations they want as long as they can plausibly claim that the regulations are intended to have the goals Congress has decided for that agency. With legislation like that, how could a Deep State not form? The "Chevron deference" is part of the problem, but the real problem is that a law that merely lists the purposes of the agency and doesn't itself clearly list what behaviors are allowed to the citizenry and what are prohibited, should be held as unconstitutionally vague. In some ways Congress is delegating its power to the agency, and that is also a problem because it violates the separation of powers (because the same agency is part of the executive branch, and therefore writes the regulations and enforces them, and some agencies even have their own special courts, too). This is how you get an unlimited, unaccountable government. Some government agencies have been around for decades. They have become "permanent" in the sense that they are difficult to get rid of. They exercise government power, they have very little oversight, and what oversight they do have is very slow and not always effective. They have identities as institutions (and an identity and culture as a group of institutions) even if the individuals in them change roles every now and then.

It seems like some of the most controversial threads of late have been on point; the main question is always how to discover what the facts are. This can get into questions of what sources you trust, and under what conditions you trust them. Objectivism obviously reaches different conclusions depending on what facts you put into it; if Objectivism were impervious to facts, it would be arbitrary! It's proper to reject claims of fact when they clash with lots and lots of well-founded abstractions, though, the way perpetual-motion machines clash with the known laws of physics. It's also proper to identify situations where a fact really doesn't make any difference, like whether Abraham Lincoln ever dyed his hair. It should be possible to integrate everything without contradiction. So I think part of having an active mind is to read a lot and see if you can integrate what you are reading with what you know. (This includes identification of claims as falsehoods or as arbitrary, where appropriate). Writing some of your conclusions and seeing how people answer can be valuable and thought-provoking as well. My inclination was to think it would not have done any harm. For myself, I figured I had said my piece, and had nothing further to say. So as far as I was concerned the thread was already dead and it was time for me to move on to some other topic. I suppose there could be "vampire" threads that could refuse to die and suck the lifeblood out of the rest of the forum... such a thread would need a stake through its heart... but was this thread really one of them? (Probably the worst thing is unneeded repetition. I don't like reading the same thing over and over, and I don't like saying the same thing over and over, either...) Often people leave not because of the forum itself but because they have a "life event" such as a new job, a marriage, birth of a child, or a funeral. Life events are why I left and came back, and not because of anything wrong with the board itself. Right now I have time to participate but other times I have just been too busy. If the administrator of a board has such a life event, the board itself may come to an end. This sort of thing is not the fault of the content. People can also leave because they are no longer interested in the topic, or because they find the forum "unfriendly." Moderation can help with keeping things on-topic and civilized. That sounds a lot like "guilt by association." Lots of, e.g., Metallica fans, don't necessarily like each other. A forum is not like a magazine where the content can be completely controlled (for quality or anything else). It is proper to remove spam, and stuff that is off-topic could probably also be removed. But you'd know it was off-topic because nobody who is interested in this board in particular would be interested in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget $6.4 trillion dollars for the US. The runner up is China at $3.9 trillion dollars (based on currency exchange rate). And I think US spending is higher than ever, even higher than during World War Two, even adjusting for inflation. So put those two facts together. In theory but not necessarily in practice. Who is in charge of enforcing these laws? Who watches the watchers? Agreed. (This is why I think calls for "term limits" are missing the point.) That's not what "permanent government" really means. Individual bureaucrats shift around from job to job, and also sometimes they rotate between working for the government and working in the private sector (like helping companies with "compliance"), but that doesn't change anything much. They all have roughly the same opinions about The Way Things Should Be Done (which naturally includes the present and increasing scope of government), and they get into positions to enforce those opinions. These are largely people whose careers keep them in the government or pretty close to it, and in positions of power and influence, at all times.

The US now has the largest government ever in world history. The White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court together make up less than 1% of it. Although there are millions of low-level "grunts," the people at the cabinet-level and just below that probably each have more power than any single Senator or Representative, even under normal circumstances, and right now they probably have much more power. Unchecked, unaccountable power. And some of these people each have annual budgets larger than any one billionaire could accumulate over his lifetime. If you want some particular evidence you can see where Mayorkas told a House panel that they weren't showing him the proper respect. I'm sure that's how all the cabinet-level people feel. (The House has decided to impeach Mayorkas but I don't think the Senate will go along with it.) We don't really have a President right now, he's too busy drooling or eating ice cream or shaking hands with people who aren't there, so of course the cabinet-level people are running things, and the President probably does whatever they want him to, which is just the kind of President they prefer to have.

There's a good reason for having states and "competing jurisdictions," too, though: suppose you have Big City with 90% of the population and Little City with 10%. It might be better if each one gets one vote in the Senate rather than having it done proportionally by population, primarily because for example there could be a vote on whether Big City gets to dump its garbage in Little City, and it passes, 90% to 10%, and a vote on whether Big City gets to collect a special tax from residents of Little City, and it passes, 90% to 10%... this sort of thing is also why we have an electoral college. Locally-sourced juries aren't always biased. You could imagine that Little City, being somewhat rural, is frequently visited by bears who may attack people, and so maybe 5% of people carry Bear Guns to scare or incapacitate the bears to prevent this from happening. In Big City, though, there are no bear attacks, so somebody carrying a Bear Gun would likely be carrying it for some other reason. A prosecutor, playing to a Big City jury, can make it sound very suspicious that the alleged perpetrator was carrying a Bear Gun, but a Little City juror would understand that the Bear Gun proves nothing. Especially if the alleged crime occurred in Little City in the first place. However, there's a difference between such a jury's "bias" and the bias in Washington, DC, and it's similar to the difference between a statement of fact (like what kinds of precautions are necessary on ships or in cold weather) and a statement of opinion (which is broader, more ideological, in nature). It would be good to move a trial if the residents of Little City are all of the same religion and there are religious overtones in the case that may overshadow the legal issues (and cause conviction of an innocent person or acquittal of a guilty one without proper reasoning). It would not be a good reason to move the case if Little City has a lot of harbors and the residents know a lot about the fishing industry and about what kinds of precautions ship captains should ordinarily take. I am concerned that corrupt people in power could make that into a sort of political or religious "purity test" which would make the jury system less fair. A better solution would be to pursue a separation of state and education, so that jurors might have a better chance of being better educated. Without access to government money and power, educational institutions would have to earn credibility by being right in reality. The notion of looking down one's nose at the "ignorant masses" sounds very much like Plato, and it should be borne in mind that Plato's philosophy did not lead to a free country. Ultimately, by means of Christianity, it led to the Dark Ages.

The idea is for the jury to be representative of the country (or at least the voters), not the defendant, and such "representativeness" implies that if the country is 50% Democrat then juries should be 50% Democrat (on average), that sort of thing. If Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided about political issues, and they can still agree to convict or acquit a defendant, then that greatly reduces doubts in other people's minds about that conviction or acquittal. The same thing applies to Establishment vs. anti-Establishment and so forth. So the jury wasn't really representative but was chosen from all one side of the racism issue. There can be simpler instances of the same thing where for example all the jurors watch the same TV news, and the TV news has taken one side and not presented the other side, so jurors might be prejudiced because of that. Usually this sort of thing is why there is a jury selection process, and why a court can and should consider "change of venue" motions to have the trial moved to a place where a local population bias would not apply. The reason "consent of the governed" exists is that it's another way to hold the government accountable for its actions. This, in turn, is necessary because, "benevolent universe" aside, reality itself won't necessarily do anything: if the government decides to kill everyone on Earth, reality per se isn't going to stop them. This is why people need to be able to. I am aware, of course, that individual rights should not be subject to vote. Reality isn't subject to vote, either (and existence exists even if you don't consent to it). I think that if 95% of the population opposed individual rights (either certain ones or all of them), a government trying to preserve them by dispensing with jury trials would technically be engaged in an "occupation," and the days of those individual rights would be numbered anyway unless the population could be persuaded to change their minds. Reality is an advantage for the government in this sort of situation: individual rights would end up being good for the country, and the population might learn that it can do just fine without opposing them. So the opposition would wither away in a few generations, especially if it doesn't have access to coercion, because there is no such thing as an honest revolt against reason. The same thing applies in reverse if the population supports individual rights (either certain ones or all of them) and the government opposes them. The government could dispense with jury trials in order to maintain the control that it thinks is necessary, but if it has to resort to that, it is engaged in a sort of "occupation." However, if reason is not on its side, it will not be able to persuade the population, and will have to resort to more and more force (or fraud). Meanwhile, the bad consequences of their policies will cause conditions to deteriorate regardless of how successful the force and fraud are.

I'd say it's a bad idea to get rid of juries, because of something about government having to be based upon the "consent of the governed." However, in order for a jury system to fulfill its function of ensuring "consent of the governed," juries would have to be representative of "the governed," and it seems that the juries in Washington DC are not. They have a clear pro-establishment bias, probably because government bureaus and contractors are the biggest employers in Washington DC. Clearly it would not be fair if a government agency (such as the SEC, FDA, etc.) accused you of something, and at trial all the jurors just happened to work for that same government agency. But all the government agencies agree on a lot of things (including the necessity of their own existence and the general way they do things). The things they agree about are part of a framework, and that's the same framework they will use to determine your innocence or guilt.