You are missing one key option:
You hit on one of my pet issues: What you aptly term the quasi-state. I myself have used that exact term, and similar terms (not on this forum).
Give the freedom of the authoritarians to impose restrictions on others, while not applying said regulations for themselves.
The above is reflective of what many leftists are trying to achieve, both here and in various other institutions, such as the education system and colleges.
The forum administration appears to be very libertarian. This is generally in line with my worldview. My experience on this forum has shaped my view that libertarianism is good, but the 'state' needs to wield a modest amount of power. If the 'state' is too weak, a quasi-state will form that will impose restrictions and regulations on citizens without any kind of real accountability.
Leftists (and to be fair: most people) never pause to consider the origin and meaning of the State in the first instance.
In the abstract, a state is an organized group of people who have the power to enforce their will over others. It may have other characteristics; but objectively, that is its only
essential characteristic.
The only characteristic that distinguishes “the State” from an armed criminal gang is some notion of “legitimacy”. However, this is purely subjective: It is an expression of the collective
nomos of a society. If the society is an inner-city neighbourhood, then in the eyes of the members of that society, what you and I call “gang leaders” may well have greater “legitimacy” than the official “government”.
A quasi-state that lacks the capacity for direct physical violence, but has
de facto power to control people’s communications and even their economic activity, must be judged by its essential nature, and not by mere labels. What is “public”? —Is a “state” which is
de facto owned by “private” corporate interests a “public” entity? —What is “private”? Is a quasi-state as you describe truly a “private” entity? —What if the technocratic quasi-state is a “private” legal person created by the laws of a “public” entity which, in turn, is
de facto owned by corporate interests? What horrific ouroboros hath been wrought by unthinking modern apes who confuse their concepts?
The foregoing is perforce terse. Information-dense—a quick notation, not an essay. The subject matter is not suitable for discussion in the format of an Internet forum.
For my part,
I reject all notions of “legitimacy” derived from the dead weight of numbers. A democratic “state” is in my eyes absolutely no different in kind from the above example of an inner-city neighbourhood gang; it differs only in degree, insofar as it is the
largest, most organized, most well-armed gang. And the “private” corporate creatures which both are
created by the “state” according to its “laws”,
* and are the real owners in interest of the “state”, are only other hydra-heads of the same gang.
A good example of this would be the major tech social media companies. Social media companies today hold an outsized amount of influence on public discourse, in some cases, the owners want to remain neutral, but in all cases, the employees have their own non-business agenda, and are powerful enough such that they are not held accountable for their decisions. A modest amount of state regulations on social media companies would largely solve this issue.
I do not think that the owners want to remain neutral. Furthermore, with control having been divorced from responsibility in the modern corporation, you are confusing the owners with the managers.
* I do not
only refer to corporate law in itself: The entities hereby in question are typically
“public” companies whose ownership is controlled via highly regulated stock exchanges.
You know, I'm actually kind of surprised that I haven't seen more of the SJW ideology being espoused on the forum, since it seems to have permeated even the tiniest cracks of the interwebz. So I don't think bitcointalk is in imminent danger of crazy far-left liberal infiltration--and yeah, should I see any of that nonsense I'll hit the ignore button so hard and fast I'll need a new mouse afterward.
We must be inhabiting different fora.
I was
partly alluding to the plain fact that, with some odd twists, much of the DT warring runs along left/right political lines. In particular, I have observed that certain parties are personally hated and distrusted for their opinions, by the types of persons who are oftentimes even
overt in the generality of their biases.
(Partly, I was referring to the objections by sirazimuth and some others to my usage of “he” as a generic singular personal pronoun for a person of unknown sex.)
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