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From the article: >I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewal
by palmfacehn 1y ago
From the article:
>I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewalled by the government and externally shooed because of the sanctions, so I am probably missing some of these heart-warming messages:
>>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.
> I actually do not blame the people who do this. I think there is a fundamental misconception that people think because "Islamic Republic" has the word "Republic" in it, it must be a government of people in charge.
Total war and total information war are the side effects of the Democracy meme. Everyone from a taxi driver to a professor is assumed to be a political actor. The rationale runs something like this, "because you have a vote, you are defacto responsible for the actions of your state and political classes. Vote harder next time."
Meanwhile the individuals involved never explicitly consented to be governed. Even if there were a meaningful democratic process, it doesn't follow that the individual could withdraw consent. Ironically one of the suggested avenues for withdrawing consent in a democracy is to refuse to vote.
- adastra22 1y agoCountries with "Democratic" and "Republic" in their name rarely are.
- vasco 1y agoThe majority (like over 100) of world countries have Republic in their name.
- tgma 1y agoOr rather if you start aiming for democracy (the actual definition, not the 200 co-opted bastardized definitions,) that's where you always end up, as people from Plato to American founding fathers clearly understood.
- vasco 1y agoOnly way to widthraw consent in a democracy is moving to pay your taxes somewhere else.
- thayne 1y agoWhich is very difficult to do. Even if you ignore that doing so often means leaving behind your home, friends, family, culture, job, etc. to go to somewhere unfamiliar. Most countries, especially the countries that you would want to move to, don't just let you in because you want to. You probably need to have a job lined up, there may be a lottery, it will almost certainly be expensive, etc. And if you are in certain authoritative regimes, you don't just have to worry about another country letting you in, your home country might not let you out.
- palmfacehn 1y agohttps://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expatriation-tax https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...
- constantcrying 1y agoYour government might just build an antifaschistischen Schutzwall to keep that from happening.
- randomNumber7 1y agoThe only real way to withdraw consent would be political violence. The key upside of democracy imo is then that most people do not see a reason to use violence; They can vote and never need to withdraw consent that extremely.
- Draiken 1y agoAnd we rarely see meaningful change anywhere because electing politicians is barely connected to the actual outcomes people want. Now we have a pacified populace that allows corruption to run freely and keeps repeating "violence is never the answer" while forgetting meaningful change almost always requires it. Never forget we wouldn't even have weekends if people hadn't died for it. I wish we never needed violence but it seems to be wishful thinking rather than reality. Will people oppose the next Hitler by ranting on Twitter and peaceful protests? Something tells me that won't work.
- olelele 1y agoThis. The fact that people in Europe and the US had to fight tooth and nail for workers rights and were opposed by a conglomerate of government force, corporate powers and organized crime gets all to easily forgotten.
- randomNumber7 1y agoI deliberately said "most of the time" as Europe goes in a dangerous direction imo.
- marcosdumay 1y ago> keeps repeating "violence is never the answer" while forgetting meaningful change almost always requires it. It's a bit paradoxical, but almost all real change is done by the threat of violence, and almost none of it is achieved by applying violence. But you are right that as people more radically reject violence, democracy dies and changes stop. Even though violence almost never achieves anything.