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Short of having a revolution like the people who started this country, what's your suggestion for defeating authoritarians? It's difficult (more like impossible

Short of having a revolution like the people who started this country, what's your suggestion for defeating authoritarians? It's difficult (more like impossible) to do on a legal basis when all branches of government are corrupted.

skrtskrt 6y ago
America is full of bootlickers. The following quote is framed around the debate around social democracy in the US which you may or may not agree with, but the main point is how Americans happily accept a super-strong centralized state that does virtually nothing for them. """Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?"""
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  That's just ranting on a theme. Americans value personal liberty (e.g. taxes, property, travel) while other value security (medical and financial). So what? Which is 'freer'? That quote has made its socialist leanings obvious - government should care for us all. And 'no substantial civic benefits'? Where does that come from? Water, power, highways, the mightiest cities on earth. Sure there are problems. But its nowhere justified in bashing American freedoms as 'not really free'. That's just 'No True Scotsman' at work?
  - skrtskrt 6y ago
    You frame it as a preference that the average person has agency over - we Americans have chosen the ability maybe one day own property over medical and financial security because that's what we value! We have massive physical land space, resources, and control our own currency. We spend over $800 billion a year on our military alone. We can demand more, but we have been trained not to. Water, power, highways - all built when the government had the appetite for massive civic projects, and the top income tax rate was >70%. Now in varying states of disrepair, and cost more than ever to maintain as everything is contracted out to private entities. There is no chance we would get the interstate highway system or the Tennessee Valley Authority if we needed to build it today. But we would not ask for it today, we would just supply endless excuses why it would be too much to ask.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    government should care for us all Maybe it's too idealistic, but supposedly the power of the government originates from the people, so it's not asking too much that the government should serve the people.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      Sure, but how? That's been the question for 250 years.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    > So what? It all hinges on whether you're willing to bet that the ranter is wrong about American's lack of knowledge about their history, the history of other nations/movements, etc. If ranter is correct, then any mental snapshot you have of a "freer" America is extremely fragile and probably transient. Unless of course you want to be the contrarian who argues that awareness of history is somehow not part of "eternal vigilance." If you want to argue that Americans' lack of historical knowledge is largely a myth and have some references about that, let's have the links. Hell, I'd certainly enjoy a December pick-me-up! :)

skrtskrt 6y ago

America is full of bootlickers. The following quote is framed around the debate around social democracy in the US which you may or may not agree with, but the main point is how Americans happily accept a super-strong centralized state that does virtually nothing for them. """Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?"""

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
That's just ranting on a theme. Americans value personal liberty (e.g. taxes, property, travel) while other value security (medical and financial). So what? Which is 'freer'? That quote has made its socialist leanings obvious - government should care for us all. And 'no substantial civic benefits'? Where does that come from? Water, power, highways, the mightiest cities on earth. Sure there are problems. But its nowhere justified in bashing American freedoms as 'not really free'. That's just 'No True Scotsman' at work?
- skrtskrt 6y ago
  You frame it as a preference that the average person has agency over - we Americans have chosen the ability maybe one day own property over medical and financial security because that's what we value! We have massive physical land space, resources, and control our own currency. We spend over $800 billion a year on our military alone. We can demand more, but we have been trained not to. Water, power, highways - all built when the government had the appetite for massive civic projects, and the top income tax rate was >70%. Now in varying states of disrepair, and cost more than ever to maintain as everything is contracted out to private entities. There is no chance we would get the interstate highway system or the Tennessee Valley Authority if we needed to build it today. But we would not ask for it today, we would just supply endless excuses why it would be too much to ask.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  government should care for us all Maybe it's too idealistic, but supposedly the power of the government originates from the people, so it's not asking too much that the government should serve the people.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Sure, but how? That's been the question for 250 years.
- jancsika 6y ago
  > So what? It all hinges on whether you're willing to bet that the ranter is wrong about American's lack of knowledge about their history, the history of other nations/movements, etc. If ranter is correct, then any mental snapshot you have of a "freer" America is extremely fragile and probably transient. Unless of course you want to be the contrarian who argues that awareness of history is somehow not part of "eternal vigilance." If you want to argue that Americans' lack of historical knowledge is largely a myth and have some references about that, let's have the links. Hell, I'd certainly enjoy a December pick-me-up! :)