There's one thing you NEVER get to lecture me on, and that's what a dictator looks like. If your country never experienced any of the authoritarian nightmares that branched from Marxism, yes including fascism, you don't have a right to debate me.

@alyx@gameliberty.club I don't know what discussion you've been through, but I feel the sentiment. As someone who lived my first 20 years under a soviet-inspired national socialism dictatorship, where kids at school wore military uniforms, and secret police can make you and your family disappear at night if you say one wrong thing, I find the discourse in the US absolutely ridiculous. All sides are escalating endlessly out of /fear/; they attribute the maximum emotional response to the smallest acts of their opposition, and use that to justify even bigger responses from their side, in a vicious, ridiculous, cycle.

It keeps going no matter what side has the power, and no matter what "$current_crisis" is. It feels like the entire society collectively has a severe case of "calibration out of wack" to what evil really looks like, so they think every resistance they face in getting what they want is "real evil". The entire country is having a continuous panic attack, and no one at the leadership level has the incentive to stop it, because if they try to stop the panic first, their opponents would "win". Heck, even the good old trick, of having your entire people focus on an external dangerous unifying enemy monster, doesn't seem to work anymore in the US. Maybe it was used one too many times and people grew a tolerance.

I have my suspicion, and fear, that democracy, anywhere and everywhere, will eventually implode unless making people intentionally anxious and afraid, for views or votes or power of any kind, fraudulently, becomes an outdated strategy that doesn't work from a game theory perspective. How that can be achieved, I don't know. Fear after all is one of the oldest and most powerful motivators of humans, to act together, since time immemorial.

@rozenglass
Yeah. I fear that democracy is already starting to implode in EU. But my fear as an Eastern European still lies with what is happening with US, because throughout my whole life, I've seen Europeans here emulate whatever happens there, either intentionally or because we're subconsciously copying US like it's our big brother.
If US goes down the communist rabbit hole, we're sure to return to what you describe. If US recovers, relearns what free speech and freedom in general means, then we'll redress some of our issues too. US has been a lifeline for Europe for close to a century now.

I was lucky enough to not live myself under a dictatorship rule, but the ravages of that dictatorship, and the lessons from it, are still everywhere to be seen by those who can open their eyes to see and learn from it.
You mentioned school uniforms. Communism here theoretically ended when the 90s started. We still had the uniforms mandatory nationwide a few years into the 2000s. Some highschools still enforce it to this day.
Then there's the systemic corruption that became a thing because of the twisted mentality communism brings along with it. There are countless scars here that are no wear near close to healing, and some morons in the west are trying to experiment with the same madness again.

I find it hilarious how much fear mongering there is in America about Nazis, but those same people say nothing about the horror of Communism, especially as pretty much every major communist attempt devolves in the same thing: a slightly different form of national socialism dictatorship, that sometimes chooses a different class of people to politically persecute.

I see University aged Americans say "true communism has never been tried" or "we'll do it right this time" and it's just horrifying to me.

@alyx @rozenglass Bro, all government is dictatorship. "Democracy" is just plutocracy with a friendly coat of paint on it, but that paint is wearing real thin and we can start to see the truth of it.

@alyx@gameliberty.club @WhitestTemplar@poa.st well, true democracy has never been tried :) we call representative democracy, democracy, but who's going to represent the people? the most likely candidate is someone very well known, has connections, has resources, etc. the only job that person really has is to "convince" the people of his "platform" that he's one of them; the most "representative" of them.

so yes, it is mostly a class of nobility, what makes it slightly more tolerable, is that outsiders have a chance of becoming noblemen if they work hard enough, and noblemen have a chance of being kicked out of the club if they're outrageous enough. this limits how good the system can get, but also limits how bad the system can get. well, in theory... although our friends in the US seem to be collectively trying so hard to prove that there is no limit to how bad it can get :p

but at least, so far, it's still not /too/ bad.
here's hope for better days ahead, for all.

@rozenglass @WhitestTemplar
Personally, what I'm actually interested is liberty, human rights being protected, and a fairly stable society overall. I'm not necessarily married to democracy per se. If someone conceives a system that is better able to guarantee what I'm looking for, I'm open to hearing it. But I already know that nothing derived from marxism can do that. So seeing representative democracy has the better track record, I'm sticking with that for now.

As for US, I think they've been trying to tack on more and more on top of what used to be a bare-bone democracy. More specifically, some of them have been looking at promises that socialism makes on paper. And it destabilized things as this hybrid creation grew in size. Some Americans now want to take things back a little, to regain stability, and the others are going full gas out of panic. Which has basically caused everyone to panic.

@alyx @rozenglass If you want stability then look no further than tribalism, it's what everyone reverts to when everything else fails and the only question is scale. If you want liberty then go to any Afrikan country, they don't understand the NAP though and good luck teaching it to them. The best we as humans can do outside of a robot overlord is stick to our roots. We are tribal animals. It's how we have always behaved and it's how we always will outside of extreme genetic tampering. Work within the framework God gave us rather than outside of it.

@WhitestTemplar @rozenglass
Yeah, I was about to say earlier, we're ultimately not biologically set up for grand countries of hundred of millions of people under one government. And in a sense, we do form tribes in western nations. You have a tribe of work colleagues (or a tribe of schoolmates in University), you have a tribe of neighbors, maybe a tribe of a hobby you follow. That's realistically how we actually function from day to day.
But somehow, for better or worse, there are elements that unite these small tribes we have in a larger cultural framework, elements such as language, a shared religion for some, a common history, etc. So it became useful to have a central government that protects the borders surrounding this large cultural framework. But these governments now encompass things that really should remain at that small tribe level.

A common thing that has annoyed the hell out of me for the last decade... I keep having the expectation that as adults, we can talk through things. If two people get into a fight, they're the ones that should deal with it, make up, apologize, or whatever. If I insult you, and you don't like it, you explain to me how it bothered you, maybe I fell sorry and apologize, things that you learn as a fucking kid.
But instead, the world transformed in a way where two people upset with each other no longer talk it out like adults. Instead some grand authority, whether it's Twitter/Reddit mods, or your jobs HR team, intervenes and levies out punishments. They chastise you, tell you how evil you are. But you never get to talk it out, you don't even get to say your side of the story, so instead of understanding the person you hurt, how you hurt them, and growing as a person, you only really have reason to become resentful. So next time, you're likely to be a bigger asshole.
I give this example, because it feels like the most simple of human interactions are now subjected to this weird, ad-hoc, governmental system. Communication no longer feels like it's between two people. It's through the approval of self-appointed mini-governments, and tyrannical ones at that. I feel like we're unironically inching closer towards "oy, you have a loicense for that speech".

@alyx @rozenglass I blame feminism for the second bit. Actual men have no issue with settling things themselves, it's women who benefit most from the current system that you mentioned. Qui Bono almost always tells you everything you need to know about a situation.

@WhitestTemplar @alyx @rozenglass I hate to say this. But i am a prime example right now what happens when democracy has failed.

Im tired of it i dont want democracy. Democracy is what ruined the USA, we need national socialism handled by alt right extremist. Only way turn things around. This country has lost its way and pander to satanist rather than the righteous.

@demonofustio @rozenglass @WhitestTemplar
If you don't want democracy, I understand and have no desire to change your mind. But I promise you, whatever you might want out of a governmental system, you won't get from national socialism, or any other Marxist derived ideology. They're simply worst at creating prosperity long term than a basic democracy+capitalism combo.