We seem to be living in pretty different countries :-).
> so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless
In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people. There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.
> I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people"
Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.
The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country. So you, individually, are not represented by the government, but most of the citizen are.
That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible. But if you believe that, you need to learn how to compromise, for your own sake.
> In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people.
All formalities. The government is just a specific institution within society, and all of the symbolic rituals by which it appears to be acting on behalf of "the people" are illusions.
> There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.
There is no obvious difference. It takes a heavy stack of conditioned assumptions to make the distinction in the first place, where a hypothetical space alien observing our planet would just see groups of humans acting in bounded contexts.
> Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.
"Left" and "right" are just about as arbitrary as distinctions as "public" and "private" are.
There's no way to make any specific office-holder, let alone all of them, accountable to a vast aggregation of disparate individuals, each in equal measure, when the divergences in values and conflicts of interest among that set of individuals is where all of the controversies that those offices exist to mitigate come from in the first place.
> The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country.
I don't always disagree with everything that the government does at the object level. It's just that I recognize that the cost of the government doing the things that I do like is (a) doing lots of stuff I don't like in parallel, (b) doing things that are harmful to others for my benefit, both of which I dislike.
That's why I prefer to have a plurality of solutions maintained by the wide range of communities and institutions that aren't the government, catering to all values and interests in parallel, without usually having to make the compromises inherent in centralization.
> That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible.
I think that most people should be going about their affairs in most matters without any direction from the government in the first place, so there should be little for them to agree or disagree with at all. For the few issues that do involve the whole of society, cannot be meaningfully disaggregated, and for which only a single approach is possible, then your comments regarding compromise are applicable.
> where a hypothetical space alien observing our planet would just see groups of humans acting in bounded contexts.
Well, if you take it like that, then of course we are all animals, we don't need laws, and we will all die eventually so what's the point? But that's an easy and uninteresting take.
I get it, you're a libertarian, you don't want a government to "dictate" what you should or should not do. Now my answer to that would be that some people have different opinions and believe that having a government that defines what the people can and cannot do is the fair way. There are things that I definitely don't want you to be able to do even if it I don't even know that you are doing them.
And there are countries that have a functioning democratic process that most of the people is happy about. And in those countries, relying on the ccTLD makes sense.
> Well, if you take it like that, then of course we are all animals, we don't need laws, and we will all die eventually so what's the point? But that's an easy and uninteresting take.
It's not a question of needing laws -- it's that laws are either emergent from the incentives inherent in a given social context, or they aren't really laws at all.
The idea of law as a product of legislation, i.e. some specific organization formulating prescriptive rules in the abstract and then using the threat of force to coerce people into compliance, is almost a contradiction in terms, inasmuch as the strongest faction using force to make others comply with their demands is what you already have in a raw state of nature without having to formalize any concept of law to begin with.
> I get it, you're a libertarian, you don't want a government to "dictate" what you should or should not do.
No, it's a bit beyond that. It's that I don't really recognize the concept of "government" in the way you're using it as anything that really exists. Everything is just specific people acting on the motivations they already have within bounded contexts.
What you call "government" is really just a specific group of people, like any other, differentiated only by their use of symbolic woo-woo to override their own reservations about violating moral norms that everyone else generally adheres to.
> Now my answer to that would be that some people have different opinions and believe that having a government that defines what the people can and cannot do is the fair way
The problem is that government can't define what other people can and cannot do. They have no control over what inherent abilities or capacities others have. All they can do is threaten people with reprisals for ignoring their dictates, and many people routinely call their bluff and do what they want anyway.
And since the thing that restrains people from transgressing against each other is primarily the incentives inherent to human social relations, not the threat of reprisal from third parties who aren't present, it stands to reason that much of what "government" actively intervenes to enforce are rules that it is imposing onto society, but which society itself does not consent to.
> And there are countries that have a functioning democratic process that most of the people is happy about. And in those countries, relying on the ccTLD makes sense.
And, again, most of that "democratic process" is defined by people who have no idea what ccTLDs are and have no opinions on the matter, where the NIC is a de facto "private" organization in the first place.
> so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless
In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people. There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.
> I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people"
Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.
The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country. So you, individually, are not represented by the government, but most of the citizen are.
That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible. But if you believe that, you need to learn how to compromise, for your own sake.