That's why you break the country up. When you have smaller regions where people are more alike, you get more agreement on issues, and the minority that disagrees is smaller. Right now, with one big giant country, you have 49% that disagrees with the majority 51% on issue X. When you break it up, region A will be 80/20 in favor of issue X, while region B will be 70/30 against that issue. Region A can have a law in favor of it, region B can have a law against it, and both sides will be much happier than the current state where there's near-deadlock.

The problem with a weak government is that it can't get that much done, and doesn't provide many necessary social services which help you to actually have a nice place to live (i.e., there's a reason that Sweden and Switzerland are much better places to live than Zimbabwe or Somalia; the former have strong social safety nets).

The problem we have is that our government is too corrupt, and there's too much diversity in the country so people can't unite and elect leaders who will get things done without being corrupt. The solution is simple: the country needs to be broken up into smaller units. What voters in Alabama want is totally different than what voters in Oregon want, and trying to balance all these differences of opinion is what's gotten us into this mess. Break the country up into 5 or so smaller nations and we won't have all this infighting, and with less power concentrated, corruption will be less of a problem. Voters in California can vote for greater social services, while voters in Mississippi can vote for contraception to be banned, and everyone can be happy.

It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately it's hard to see how it can be. The technology industry has a poor track record of deploying truly strong end to end privacy protections, partly because the physics of how computers work mean that outsourcing things to big powerful third parties that can be easily subverted is very common. E.g. my mobile phone can search gigabytes of email from the last decade in a split second and rank it by importance, despite having nowhere near enough computing capacity to really do that itself, only because it's relying on the Gmail servers to help it out.

That same phone can receive calls only because the mobile network knows where it is. How do you build a mobile phone that is invulnerable to government monitoring of its location? It doesn't seem technically possible. The only solution is to ensure that anonymous SIM cards are easily obtained and used, but many countries have made those illegal as part of the war on drugs.

This trend towards outsourcing, specialisation and sharing of data to obtain useful features is ideal for governments who can then go ahead and silently obtain access to people's information without those people knowing about it. I do not see it reversing any time soon. The best we're going to achieve in the near term future is encryption of links between devices and datacenters, but this doesn't help when politicians are simply voting themselves the power to go reach in to those datacenters.

Ultimately the only long term solutions here can be political, and I fear we will need a far longer and larger history of abuses to become visible before the majority will really shift on this. The problem is a large age skew. Older people skew heavily authoritarian, if you believe the opinion polls, and are much more likely to support this kind of spying. Perhaps they associate it with the cold war. Perhaps the old adage "a libertarian is a republican who wasn't mugged yet" has some truth to it. Whatever the cause, the 1960's baby boom means that demographically, older people can outvote younger people as a block, and for this reason there aren't really any fiscally conservative, economically trusted AND individual rights-respecting parties in the main English speaking countries. People get to pick between borrow-and-spend socialists with an authoritarian bent, and fiscal conservatives with an authoritarian bent, so surprise surprise we end up with people in power who are authoritarians.

>Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects - Conservatives know nuclear power is safe
Which would be responded to by conservatives with the old "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" argument.

I can't imagine why Fukushima would have anything to do with the argument over nuclear power is safe in the modern day. It should only be a poster child for why it's a bad idea to have an old nuclear plant located next to the ocean where it can be hit by a tsunami. That plant was just a disaster from an engineering standpoint: bad location, bad design, bad redundant systems, etc. There's plenty of reactors worldwide located in safe areas that don't have these problems. The French seem to do a pretty good job with their nuclear power industry; when was the last time they had some big disaster?

The moment you call 911 the GPS turns on. AND they track the cell tower.

There's a simple solution to this:
Don't call 911. When you've injured yourself with a power tool, just go ahead and bleed to death rather than calling 911, so that the Gubmint can't track you.

England these days is becoming much like America and turning to radical (read: fascist) conservatism. That's one reason Scotland was keen to become independent, because the Scots are more politically liberal than the English.

>'course, there have been times when they've left the recycling can sitting un-emptied because they saw a plastic bag in it (no, seriously... isn't that shit supposed to be recyclable)?

No, not by the same place. Municipal curbside recycling normally can't accept plastic bags; the machines they use to sort them will get jammed up by plastic bags, so you're supposed to just put loose recyclables in there.

You can recycle plastic bags, but only separately, and usually only at certain stores (like grocery stores) which have special receptacles for them. I imagine they have a totally different process for dealing with plastic bags than for anything else; they probably just melt them down.

"Kept in check" via the same bloodthirsty violence we're seeing now, just under different management. Brilliant.

The same? I'd like to see the numbers of people dying under Saddam's rule, compared to how many people have died under the new government which replaced him.

No doubt, Saddam was a tyrant, but he also provided regional stability. Some heads had to roll to maintain that stability, but was it as many as are dying now?

>In the long run, if you strike out at others without cause, it will likely happen to you.

George Bush seems to be living a very nice and comfortable life. Kim Jong * have all lead comfortable lives of great power, with the older two dying of old age.

>Causing pain to others is bad because the response I get is likely to cause me discomfort.

Politicians and CEOs and lawyers and cops do it all the time and it seems to work out quite well for them.

>Money requires relationships.

No, it just requires a job. It's not that hard to get a crappy-to-mediocre-paying job without any personal relationships. Or, you can be like corporate executives or lawyers and just be really good at lying to people, so you have relationships but they're not actually genuine.

>So you can name dozens of people who don't live by caring about others. There are what? almost 8 billion people on the planet?

The dozens of people I can name are actually running the planet. It doesn't look like this system of yours is working all that well.

You're not going to be around that long for the long-term good of society to matter much to you.