171–180 of 273 posts
I keep telling people about this and their unconcerned reactions really worry me.
People are only getting concerned by the "hype thing of the day". (today it is the 1500 immigrant children lost, yesterday it was some battle in Syria) They don't care about things until a mob of similar people care about it. It is group thinking and virtue signaling at its peak
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> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse while Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. It is a bubble boy vs Sewer Rat thing. The bubble boy looks extremely clean and insulated from bad things until one day it just dies of common cold. The f…
> At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse w hile Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. FYI the American Civil War ended in 1865 while the first Soviet was in 1905. And the first ~10 years after the ‘17 revolution were absolutely terrible in the Soviet Union. So your statement just isn’t correct.
In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. We've seen so many examples of fallen tyrannical states. But many ideas fail the first few times they're tried. China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work." It's hard to think of any more dangerous invention. Even nuclear weapons aren't as dangerous as a sustainable model for modern tyrannical government. This is an in…
Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce. Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power wi…
The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.
As a European I hope we find the courage and the strength to allow ourselves to be militarized as we where at the beginning of the 20th century. I think to a certain degree a military conflict with China would not be a bad thing. Here we have achived quite a few things of which each of his own would be worth dying for. Typical western values are seriously underrated and are not taken seriously.
What, like nuclear bombs?
Because that's what most likely will kill you in a large scale conflict between superpowers.
There ought to be a law that you can't advocate for war unless you've actually been to war...
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I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost. What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict[0] not unlike what took place in white Rhodesia/Namibia, Northern Ireland during the troubles, etc. There is a economic reason why these conflicts could not last indefinitely, no matter what ideologies drive…
Technology is making the price plummet of policing a large population. Natural language recognition, face recognition, location tracking, pattern-matching, deep packet inspection, graph traversal, and of course AI can all run unattended pointing out dissidents to the authorities who just have to go round them up and reeducate them. Oh and guess what China is making a big investment in lately?
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Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce. Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power wi…
Within a few decades of the French revolution half of the European governments were overthrown and replaced with constitutional Monarchies. The other half that resisted were forced into increasing totalitarianism and in a few more decades themselves overthrown in year zero revolutions. The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no const…
Er, Britain had been a constitutional monarchy for a long time before the French Revolution, and many of the others made reforms rather than being overthrown, and in many cases, like Britain, well before the French Revolution.
Your version of history is badly distorted.
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Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.
> Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government. The 2nd Amendment specifies that a well regulated militia is necessary for a free state, and that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be abridged by the Federal government. Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government. That's…
You have to take into account the context. It was written and ratified by people who'd just staged a revolution against what they described as a "tyrannical" regime, often using their own personal weapons.
To note that the Constitution doesn't mention "totalitarianism" is to note that it doesn't contain an anachronism. It's a modern coinage that's not to far in meaning from "tyranny."
As a European I hope we find the courage and the strength to allow ourselves to be militarized as we where at the beginning of the 20th century. I think to a certain degree a military conflict with China would not be a bad thing. Here we have achived quite a few things of which each of his own would be worth dying for. Typical western values are seriously underrated and are not taken seriously.
Instead of military spending, we should get our education and politics act together. We should be at least ready to pivot to self sufficiency. We depend on Putin's mercy for energy, because a lot of us skipped game theory in kindergarden apparently. Someone mentioned cell phones. Yes that'd be good, to have a full end to end electronics pipeline around here. And so on.
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> That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China? The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets. > China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else. That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to…
If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.
They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...
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Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce. Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power wi…
Within a few decades of the French revolution half of the European governments were overthrown and replaced with constitutional Monarchies. The other half that resisted were forced into increasing totalitarianism and in a few more decades themselves overthrown in year zero revolutions. The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no const…