Those who do not vote have the right to complain. And those who do, also have the right because everyone is brainwashed. Government is not some magical entity, it is a group of armed bandits who claim to represent the whole society for the "common good" at each individual's expense. It's just religious excuse. People do not deserve to be threatened to surrender property, secrets and liberties that they arrange freely between each other for some "common good" invented by priests and presidents.

Saying "you deserve your government" is like saying "you deserve to be raped because you didn't try to avoid it hard enough".

I don't care about losing money because of taxes. But if government kills people and I cannot withdraw financial support for it, then it bothers me. Then, its real mafia face is exposed. "Go vote for change, but still pay for our activity."

> Saying "you deserve your government" is like saying "you deserve to be raped because you didn't try to avoid it hard enough".

I meant Americans as a group, not the individuals. Also, while I mostly agree with you, I certainly hope you do not get into politics. This kind of discourse is fine amongst people who are already like minded but will assuredly fail to convince anyone who does not already share your ideas. I hope you realize that and tone it down a little according to your audience even if you are right.

I'm not going into politics. People cannot be convinced. Only practical solutions can make certain moral claims irrelevant. E.g. internet makes it irrelevant to discuss "is it good for people to read these heretical books". People will read them anyway. With Bitcoin it will become irrelevant to discuss if money should or should not be inflated. It simply won't be. (If Bitcoin succeeds, of course.) If it's impossible to collect certain taxes, it would be irrelevant to discuss if it's good or bad. People will pay them voluntarily if they like, not under threat as of today.

Americans as a group do not exist. It's a conceptual label. Individuals exist. And if your analysis of what's good for a "group" leads to suffering of individuals, you have some problem. My view of the "group" can be different from yours. To me all people are people, without nations and colors determining "rights" and morality. Who's right?

"Those who do not vote have the right to complain."

Yup, I just won't listen to them.

So you won't listen to, say, people convicted of minor drug crimes, or who have otherwise been disenfranchised for any of a wide variety of reasons, some good and some not-so-good?

I think most people who make the "people who don't vote..." argument pretty clearly mean "people who choose not to vote", not "people who are denied the opportunity to vote".

But since it's already been convincingly argued that our "opportunity" to vote just gets us carbon copies of the same policies, isn't that very much like being denied the opportunity to vote in the first place?

At which point we've crossed into "Matter of opinion" territory.

As soon as you started using subjective terms like "very much" and "convincingly", yes, it was in matter of opinion territory. But if you ask a question with terms which inherently call for an opinion, you can't (justifiably, at least) complain that the response is in "matter of opinion" territory.

So in order for a piece of criticism to be valid, the critic must divulge their voting record and whether it has been affected by convictions?

You live in a Democratic country. Is it any surprise that the majority of educated people are committed true-believers in the Democratic process, despite all evidence that it may be broken?

>In a sense, Americans deserve what they got. They chose to re-elect...

So if I kidnap you and give you the choice of dying from a pistol and dying from a shotgun, I'm off the hook for murder?

> there is an alternative in the libertarian party

Spoiler effect. Also, given that the party currently in control of the executive branch campaigned on the promise of stopping these surveillance programs and then went on to extend them, I question your certainty that the libertarians would actually stick to their values once in office.

As I replied to someone else, I meant Americans as a group, not the individuals. Regarding the Libertarian party, I am not certain they would stick to their values but I'm certain it would be better than status quo.

> In a sense, Americans deserve what they got. They chose to re-elect the same party (Democratic/Republican party, is there a difference really?) over and over again

Sure, there's a pretty big difference both practically and in terms of ideological PR (those two differences don't, of course, align perfectly; the former is largely, but not entirely, a subset of the latter.)

So, no, they didn't choose to re-elect the same party over and over again.

> when there is an alternative in the libertarian party which by the way, would most certainly not authorize or encourage what the NSA has been up to.

I'm not at all certain of that. Sure, the Libertarian Party ideological PR isn't that, but we really have no idea what the LP in practice would be like, and we certainly know that parties' ideological PR and actual actions in office are rarely universally consistent (and we know that from far more examples than just the US Democrats and Republicans, as its true of virtually every political party in existence.)

Further, I think its not all that true that the American people freely choose any party; each individual American voter makes a decision of how to maximize value out of a fixed game that is tilted in their favor, and where they have much less power to address the fundamental problems in the electoral structure than they have to choose to minimize the harms within the structure.

And, frankly, too many of the people who try to sell alternatives to the major parties aren't interested at all in exerting effort to get people behind measures that would actually fix the electoral structure to increase the potential for alternative parties to be viable. In addition to the fact that this makes it virtually impossible for them to succeed, since they aren't willing to highlight and correct the primary barrier to their success, it also makes me suspicious of both their honesty of purpose and their competence to follow through on their purpose if elected, since they either lack the former or have far too weak a grasp on the structure of the government they seek to run to have much of the latter.

> Regardless of your political inclinations, I would strongly suggest you consider voting for them if only to shake up the establishment.

For people who understand that political activity isn't limited to voting, there are a lot more effective means of shaking up the establishment than voting for a third party that you might agree with on only a very narrow range of issues for that purpose. In fact, of all the successful movements that shook up the establishment and shifted the ground of American politics, I can think of exactly zero for whom that was a central part of how they succeeded.