U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that he has revoked security protection for Anthony Fauci, his former COVID advisor who has received death threats over his handling of the pandemic.

  • SwingingTheLamp
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    3 days ago

    Who’s going to hold him accountable? These things are true:

    1. If an individual or small group tries, they’ll be arrested or killed by authorities.

    2. A large enough group of people acting together could do it, but it has to be large enough, or see #1.

    3. To build a large enough group requires getting the word out, and getting the word out means that the authorities will hear about it. See #1.

    4. If the word goes out by anonymous, untraceable communication channels, then each person has to trust people they haven’t met and don’t know to act in concert with the plan. If the others fail to act, see #1.

    I just realized that I’ve re-created the need for resistance networks (a web of trust in which each person only knows and trusts a small number of others each) from first principles. But even those require people willing to risk getting arrested or killed, because sometimes the authorities bust resistance cells. Basically, this is how all dictators hold on to power against overwhelming discontent in the populace: Nobody can get together in large enough numbers to do anything about it, and individually, going along with the regime is slightly (or a lot) better than not.

    Dictators fall when enough of the population decides that the status quo is worse than defying the dictator. The United States is nowhere near that stage yet.