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I’m not aware of a single nation where the ratchet is loosening. It appears freedom is being eroded everywhere. The most disheartening thing is that nothing wor
by cedws 1y ago
I’m not aware of a single nation where the ratchet is loosening. It appears freedom is being eroded everywhere. The most disheartening thing is that nothing works to stop it. There are countries where millions of people have protested, but in time the protests always fizzle or are stamped out, and things continue on the same trajectory.
- tomrod 1y agoI fear that your observations speaks more to protest being an inefficient catalyst for regime change more than it speaks to the efforts and initiatives to preserve freedom. The jetset class doesn't really care about a single nation. For good (trade binds fractious governments) or ill (neofeudalism), they try to separate themselves from the proles.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoHilton is their passport.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoTo be fair the people who care about a single nation, to the detriment of all other nations, are freaks
- tomrod 1y agoAye, it sort of sucks. A global government that could also respect privacy would be a good thing, IMO, except for when it leans authoritarian.
- r3trohack3r 1y agoA maintainable altruistic ruling class is a myth. When you centralize power you’ve created a point of control/leverage with significant value. It will eventually be captured. > except for when it leans authoritarian Totalitarianism, Crony Capitalism, State Enforced Communism, Authoritarianism, etc. are all variations of the same root rot: centralization. When you centralize power you will always get centralized power. A global centralized power is terrifying.
- mothballed 1y agoProtests are rarely effectual, they serve more to gauge interest of others and provide connections. In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight. As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Protests are rarely effectual False “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1]. Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3]. [1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rule-how-small-minority-can-change-world https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh) [3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privileges-32d253883d107fcfe7f17752bc46b7d9#:~:text=Indonesia%27s%20president,six%20dead. https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...
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- komali2 1y agoWe recently had a record-sized protest in Taiwan and major political movements as a result. The recall movement was also unprecedented, though it ostensibly failed. However the KMT has failed in its coupe so there's still a positive outcome. It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.
- simgt 1y agoLucky you! Taiwan is such a great place, I hope it will thrive in spite of its bullies.
- lordhumphrey 1y ago> It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic. My curiosity is piqued by this. Do you mean to say you've moved there from somewhere place? And what do you mean, why is it the only country for which you're politically optimistic? I don't mean to pry, and have no ulterior motive or point in asking. It just seems like a strong statement, and I cannot guess what you mean, or if I'm missing some cultural insinuation here or something. Taiwan does sound like a very interesting place to me, generally, though.
- komali2 1y agoYes I moved to Taiwan, from the USA. I was exposed to the political activism of Taiwan when I happened to be there during the sunflower protests in ten years ago, and spend 7 years working to return. My beliefs were confirmed day by day as I participated in g0v and witnessed the bluebird protests. Political activity is high in Taiwan and there are many viewpoints represented. The government doesn't lash out mindlessly against protestors which is something I've never encountered having attended protests throughout the West - the USA, the UK, France, Australia, it seems governments are compelled to meet all protests with violence. Furthermore taiwanese activists are incredibly organized. At the bluebird protests it was estimated there was many tens of thousands of people, but within hours of the protests being announced there were tents, food lines, water, and bathrooms set up for people. Some anarchists even set up a sound system and had a little rave down the street. There were also anarchists peppered throughout the crowd with medical supplies, and inevitably communists selling newspapers lol. There were two massive PA systems on side roads with hundreds of chairs for people to sit on, and plenty of cover to block the rain - and all these people her despite the massive rain storm! I saw similar during the multiple pedestrian rights protests I've been to. The only bad protest I went to was a poorly organized bike protest. I also very much enjoy the shenanigans of the Taiwanese legislative yuan. Throwing sausages at each other, stealing bills and running to the MRT so they can't be signed, barricading each other, getting into fist fights. It shows proper respect for the life or death nature of the decisions they're making. Here's some photos from the bluebird protests https://photos.app.goo.gl/45L8FE6bVPDLVmdFA https://photos.app.goo.gl/45L8FE6bVPDLVmdFA I recently also went to a massive music festival that was highly politicized. Did you know there's a taiwanese politician that's also a singer in a metal band? Anyway his band did a lot of political speech during their show, which I found interesting. Furthermore there was a great deal of anti PRC messaging and art (which is often implied to be anti kmt as well). Another random memory of the music festival is that people will just leave their things lying around in the park, and the festival is ungated in the middle of the city, but nobody will take people's things because that just doesn't really happen in Taiwan. It's incredibly safe here. I rambled. My overall point, is that people here genuinely feel like they can make a difference individually, because they truly can, and therefore they do. In my pictures you can see people sitting around on laptops. That's an impromptu working group to organize some recall efforts or something along those lines. Other countries convince their populations that to make anything happen you need to convince 30 million people to agree with you first. In Taiwan you can go to a g0v hackathon and change the country in a small way in an afternoon.
- canadiantim 1y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> US has definitely loosened some of the free speech restrictions Press, academic and political speech freedoms are at a generational low point in America. The President has never before had the power to directly police academic speech and the media’s coverage of him. MAGA voters have no idea the power they’ve given the Presidency, which could be used in the future by a Democrat President to literally just cut funding and pull licenses for people who say stuff the left doesn’t like. (On the other hand, we can put the J6’ers in a foreign prison for a few months, mothball the antivax movement and maybe dismantle the coal plants.)
- patanegra 1y agoIt's because they have been actors in cancel culture and progressive left propaganda machine. They have been exactly those who were harming free expression, in collusion with social networks. Now, they reap what they sow.
- x187463 1y agoNot even close. Sure, the cancel-culture of the left twitter-verse has weakened, but that was not a government enforced restriction. Meanwhile, the current administration is literally removing signage and museum exhibits which offend their sensibilities. They are removing funding from institutions, kicking people out of the country, and manufacturing 'investigations' into anybody who opposes them. They took over the damn Kennedy Center for honoring people they don't like. You've lost all manner of sense thinking this is improving free-speech. Listen to the tech bros and any other official sitting at the white house glazing the president to his face and tell me that's due to increased free-speech.
- padjo 1y agoPlease provide an example?
- jeffgreco 1y ago
- pjmlp 1y agoAs first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, our country now having a right majority with a Nazi party in the mix, makes me really sad. How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears. Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
- simgt 1y agoA bit of brainwashing through some media owned by billionaires and there we go for another round. My parents' generation is voting en masse for a party that was literally funded by a former Waffen-SS leader after WW2, while thinking "the left" is antisemitic.
- secondcoming 1y ago> fall into death hears Maybe I'm missing a pun somewhere, but the phrase is 'fall onto deaf ears'!
- lordhumphrey 1y agoI think you may be being downvoted for the exclamation mark, which I also found a tad over the top, although I didn't downvote you. Particularly when the mistake you're correcting was so reasonable and charming. It's an excellent example of an "eggcorn". If you haven't heard of eggcorns, fear not: the word "eggcorn" is itself an autology, i.e., a word that is an example of the phenomenon it describes. So if you remember the word, "eggcorn", you should be able to remember the concept. An eggcorn is a type of malapropism, but one that could plausibly fit the context of the misheard original word or phrase. So, for example, "eggcorn" could plausibly have been the word for the object which we actually call an "acorn". Similarly, when I read "into death hears", I immediately knew what the writer meant, and had a little chuckle to myself thinking about how it actually made total sense. So perhaps we could point out to them nicely the lovely eggcorn they were using, rather than text-shouting.
- martin-t 1y agoYou can't make people care. Not by telling them they should care. They have to experience. Unfortunately, with dictatorship, once you are experiencing it, it's already too late. --- The reasons democracies slide towards less freedom is that in theory decisions should be made by people who care and are informed. But in reality, a single vote every few years is too imprecise to express any kind of informed opinion. You pick and issue, do research and vote according to what's best for you and/or society. Except you can't vote on the issue. You vote for a party or candidate which also has stances towards dozens other issues. So even if you provide signal in one dimension, you provide only noise in others. Voting for parties/candidates is like expressing your entire opinion, a multidimensional vector, by picking one point from a small number of predefined choices.
- screye 1y agoI've found it to be the other war around. Protests succeed, and they crown (usually conservative) authoritarians as the new king. Arab spring & Bangladesh are the 2 recent examples.
- isk517 1y agoGeorge Washington's single greatest feat was not making the office of the president just another way of saying 'king'.
- achenet 1y agoyes, and he set a great example by doing so. Honestly, would be nice for modern day leaders to have that kind of commitment to collaborative institutions. I feel like some of them are just trying to openly accumulate power for personal gain.
- lossolo 1y agoTrue! In fact, Augustus was the first to master that trick in Rome, he concentrated king like power in himself while carefully avoiding the title of "king" calling himself "princeps" instead.
- angelgonzales 1y agoIt might not be on the national level, but we’re fighting over here in California to maintain/take back our gun rights. A court recently ruled that the state cannot require a background check for ammunition, we also got rid of the one gun a month rule recently as well. This progress gives me hope we still have so much more work to do re. privacy, property rights and freedom of speech!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dennis_jeeves2 1y ago> The most disheartening thing is that nothing works to stop it. Armed citizenry? I do not see any other way. Power always corrupts.