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"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am. With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.

ahtihn 5y ago
I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos. "All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others." This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
  - toiletfuneral 5y ago
    How small does a government get before it stops farm subsidies?
- pbourke 5y ago
  > Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. That doesn’t ring true to me. Both liberals and conservatives want to change and preserve rules according to their viewpoints.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Conservatives want to change rules to get back to their view of what was good about the past. Liberals want to change the rules according to their view of what should be good about the future.
    - beebmam 5y ago
      "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-travesty-of-liberalism.html https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        That is not the definition or description of "conservativism". That is a strawman.
      - pjkundert 5y ago
        This seems like a bizarre definition. As someone who would accept a label of "conservative", and growing up and living in a world of mostly "conservative" people, I struggle to think of a single such person who wouldn't be appalled to find out they they were living under a single such law, let alone many such laws. Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?
        handrous 5y ago
- DanHulton 5y ago
  The rules on abortion have been around for decades. Conservatives seemed pretty dead-set on changing them. Pretty sure it goes deeper than that.
zapataband1 5y ago
I studied physics and the agreement I think we need is that we are literally a super-organism about to ensure its own destruction. I hate to use the term mass consciousness or whatever but it's really irresponsible to me how people are still arguing between flavors of ideologies that push us towards being more individualistic.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Reminds me of this: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
  - zapataband1 5y ago
    Woah cool! Thanks for sharing, this actually reminds me of this quote: The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx
potatolicious 5y ago
> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus. At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees. This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees. I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy. In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  In order to prevent a nuclear war, you need consensus. Anything less than 100% buy-in is insufficient. Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Where do you get this definition? Wiktionary just talks about widespread agreement, not unanimous agreement: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all. From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making: > The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    There are differing definitions but maybe the wiggle room is in the use of "agreement" vs "acceptance". As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is: majority agree minority disagree... but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.
vorpalhex 5y ago
> I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond? You have three basic options: 1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no) 2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink) 3. Force people to say yes The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  I agree. I dont think all systems require consensus and its likely most things do not. When it comes to things that optimizes for survival, it is likely we will need consensus to be productive. Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    I don't think technology has to bring us closer together. I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want. I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules. Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.
- mistermann 5y ago
  4. "How about we have a conversation, perhaps if we think about it we can find a compromise that works out for both of us?" Note also that such conversations can even be had that don't involve the disagreeable party (if they're that difficult), but if they are of high enough quality and visibility (such that they can get public momentum) they can change the person's mind based on them seeing which way the wind is blowing. 5. Something neither of us have thought of.
rkalla 5y ago
I love your last sentence here - so well stated.
generalizations 5y ago
> Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical. > One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
- guntars 5y ago
  > Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish. That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
  - generalizations 5y ago
    > Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)? That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
padobson 5y ago
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy. One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  "That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy." My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction. "it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. " Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.
pjkundert 5y ago
I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true: I don't know how we can be productive without breaking consensus. All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
You're conflating Western leftism with liberalism. Wikipedia defines liberalism as "a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law." [1]. Liberals are interested in individual rights and often are opposed to collectivist ideas such as those espoused by state socialists. Your position on global consensus is a more collectivist perspective, not necessarily a liberal perspective. > We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions. What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
LordDragonfang 5y ago
Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces. Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this: > Capitalism has become a "success disaster." It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from. The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.
- beckman466 5y ago
  what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    > What's wrong with socialism? Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.
    - beckman466 5y ago
      true, there are subtler ways!

ahtihn 5y ago

I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.

nouveaux 5y ago
This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos. "All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others." This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
  How small does a government get before it stops farm subsidies?
pbourke 5y ago
> Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. That doesn’t ring true to me. Both liberals and conservatives want to change and preserve rules according to their viewpoints.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Conservatives want to change rules to get back to their view of what was good about the past. Liberals want to change the rules according to their view of what should be good about the future.
  - beebmam 5y ago
    "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-travesty-of-liberalism.html https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      That is not the definition or description of "conservativism". That is a strawman.
    - pjkundert 5y ago
      This seems like a bizarre definition. As someone who would accept a label of "conservative", and growing up and living in a world of mostly "conservative" people, I struggle to think of a single such person who wouldn't be appalled to find out they they were living under a single such law, let alone many such laws. Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?
      - handrous 5y ago
DanHulton 5y ago
The rules on abortion have been around for decades. Conservatives seemed pretty dead-set on changing them. Pretty sure it goes deeper than that.

zapataband1 5y ago

I studied physics and the agreement I think we need is that we are literally a super-organism about to ensure its own destruction. I hate to use the term mass consciousness or whatever but it's really irresponsible to me how people are still arguing between flavors of ideologies that push us towards being more individualistic.

ModernMech 5y ago
Reminds me of this: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
- zapataband1 5y ago
  Woah cool! Thanks for sharing, this actually reminds me of this quote: The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx

potatolicious 5y ago

> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus. At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees. This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees. I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy. In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.

nouveaux 5y ago
In order to prevent a nuclear war, you need consensus. Anything less than 100% buy-in is insufficient. Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.
pcthrowaway 5y ago
Where do you get this definition? Wiktionary just talks about widespread agreement, not unanimous agreement: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all. From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making: > The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  There are differing definitions but maybe the wiggle room is in the use of "agreement" vs "acceptance". As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is: majority agree minority disagree... but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.

vorpalhex 5y ago

> I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond? You have three basic options: 1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no) 2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink) 3. Force people to say yes The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.

nouveaux 5y ago
I agree. I dont think all systems require consensus and its likely most things do not. When it comes to things that optimizes for survival, it is likely we will need consensus to be productive. Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I don't think technology has to bring us closer together. I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want. I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules. Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.
mistermann 5y ago
4. "How about we have a conversation, perhaps if we think about it we can find a compromise that works out for both of us?" Note also that such conversations can even be had that don't involve the disagreeable party (if they're that difficult), but if they are of high enough quality and visibility (such that they can get public momentum) they can change the person's mind based on them seeing which way the wind is blowing. 5. Something neither of us have thought of.

rkalla 5y ago

I love your last sentence here - so well stated.

generalizations 5y ago

> Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical. > One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.

guntars 5y ago
> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish. That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
- generalizations 5y ago
  > Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)? That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.
  - CRConrad 5y ago

padobson 5y ago

Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy. One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.

nouveaux 5y ago
"That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy." My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction. "it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. " Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.

pjkundert 5y ago

I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true: I don't know how we can be productive without breaking consensus. All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

You're conflating Western leftism with liberalism. Wikipedia defines liberalism as "a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law." [1]. Liberals are interested in individual rights and often are opposed to collectivist ideas such as those espoused by state socialists. Your position on global consensus is a more collectivist perspective, not necessarily a liberal perspective. > We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions. What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

LordDragonfang 5y ago

Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces. Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this: > Capitalism has become a "success disaster." It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from. The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.

beckman466 5y ago
what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  > What's wrong with socialism? Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    true, there are subtler ways!