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As I get older it becomes more obvious that the whole "moral arc of history" line is complete nonsense. Evil usually wins. Goodness is a strange outlier in all
by ramesh31 2mo ago
As I get older it becomes more obvious that the whole "moral arc of history" line is complete nonsense. Evil usually wins. Goodness is a strange outlier in all of history. It has to be fought for relentlessly, and is fleeting at best. The world as a whole now seems to be reverting to the mean.
- camillomiller 2mo agoSo, America good, China bad?
- ramesh31 2mo ago>"So, America good, China bad?" No. Democracy good, autocracy bad. America is speed-running toward the latter at this point.
- jackb4040 2mo agoA lot of American liberals just want to turn the clock back 20 years, when they were still doing military interventions everywhere in the world but at least the political class would get on TV and pretend to feel bad for it. In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire.
- rayiner 2mo ago> In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire. This is one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this app. Thank you.
- jackb4040 2mo agoLol I don't think I've ever been thanked for a post before. Don't thank me, join me and the handful of others here who don't just retroactively justify every decision our tech billionaire overlords make.
- ramesh31 2mo ago>but at least the political class would get on TV and pretend to feel bad for it. Yeah. Words matter. I do indeed wish we were back to a time where that was the case. America has always been flawed and contradictory, but our greatness came from a shared sense of some higher ideals that we strived for, regardless of the messy reality. That's been lost, and it's sad.
- boxed 2mo agoAmerica? It was the UK.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoWhat do you make of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain in Europe? In the last thirty years, lots of countries have gotten more democratic.
- ramesh31 2mo ago>What do you make of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain in Europe? As bad as the Soviet Union was, what came next for Russia was far far worse. The Soviets at least had party rule; Russia is now an absolute autocracy ruled with an iron grip of one man who is now liquidating 30,000 people a month in a pointless war. Orders of magnitude more people have died in the last four years of Ukraine than in every direct Soviet military action combined post-WW2. Remember that Afghanistan was their most infamous blunder, leading directly to the dissolution, and only killed half of what they are losing monthly now.