What happened?
What happened?
124 comments
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People love to talk about how 'the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.'
It's easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it's really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
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I do those things constantly and the fact that other people don’t infuriates me.
It’s like a group project and I’m doing my part but we still all fail because nobody else gives a damn.
I hate democracy and people now.
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On one hand I would love to kick the collective ass of all the people who sat the election out.
On the other, I know that I don't have the power to change things without them.
Back in WW2 a lot of people had to accept that the British, the Soviets, and the Americans were the only thing standing between them and the Axis. They had to give up control of their forces and hope for the best.
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The quote is that the tree is "refreshed" with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we'd be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won't take even the simplest of actions until they're forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it's desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who "aren't really into politics," by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn't enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
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Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.
Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”
America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.
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"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
We weren't vigilant. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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reminds me of this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Note, though, that the Panopticon is also referred to as a "prison design". So, quite the opposite of "freedom", depending on how you see it.
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if we want a breather we gotta upend the system.
not keep struggling with it.
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Let me count the ways that upending the system isn't going to happen anytime soon.
For the system to be upended in a meaningful way first means you've got an organized cadre in place. Savvy political operators who can make things happen.
The Left failed to get past the DNC twice with a popular candidate. The idea that the Left could get past the US Army is ridiculous.
Next, let's look at what 'upending the system' would actually look like. Look at the hyperinflation in Germany after WW1. Or the Depression. Or maybe just the riots of the 1960s. Life isn't a video game, and when the system fails the most vulnerable people are the ones who suffer the most.
Finally, do you really think that companies like Blackwater are just going to step aside and let themselves be swept away?
If the system goes down, it will be replaced by something much uglier.
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What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictatorMaybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn't already doing the bidding of governments against people.
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One could say the same about the Liberal Revolution of 1848. It failed, and yet it took many years before much of the liberal and progressive values became culturally ingrained.
"The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."- Martin Luther King Jr
Good or bad, that's why any ideas never die. That's why the powers-that-be love to censor.
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Excellent point
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Tunesia is the only one with a success story where the mass protests were successful in creating reform (new president and constitution). In the other countries, the mass protests for reform were violently suppressed, and still are in the present day.
The Arab Spring, which started out as an enormously hopeful movement for progressive change, has now largely been subjected to brutal repression and pushback from the forces of the status quo ante. It represents a poignant and tragic example of social struggle.
- Consequences of Capitalism - Chapter 6 - Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone
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It gave women significantly more rights than they had before, but we all know that shit doesn't matter apparently.
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Is this true?
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Democracy implies a system to translate people's will into action, and that implies both physical institutions for collecting information relating to the demands of the population, physical technology for processing that information, and physical institutions that can act on those demands.
The problem is that westerners treat political systems as if they're entirely built upon vibes. You can go to the poorest place in the world and as long as you have good vibes, as long as you get enough people to say the right "democracy" slogans and do the right "democracy" rituals, then you can introduce a true utopian democracy.
The problem is they ignore that we live in a physical world and not a vibes-based world, all societies are built upon a particular material foundations. The idea that you can go to a country that is so ridiculously impoverished that barely anyone can even read, like in Afghanistan, and then through good vibes convert it into a western-style democracy, is just completely ridiculous. The institutions just aren't there, it takes decades to build that.
Westerners then use their vibe-based politics as justification to destroy these countries. "If you don't agree that we should go to war with them, you're just a dictator lover! You have bad vibes!!" Even westerners took centuries to actually evolve to their pseudodemocracies they have now, but they refuse to let other countries go through this same process. They insist they must skip this development process and just become western-style democracies right now, or else they'll get bombed into the stone age, or the CIA will foster some sort of coup or color revolution to overthrow the government and plunge it into civil war or a military dictatorship.
But all this endless war does is make it harder to develop, so in reality western countries end up being the biggest barrier towards actually moving towards democracy. They keep destabilizing them, either through war, coups, or color revolution, which destroys the physical foundations of their society, destroys their institutions and infrastructure, and this makes it more difficult for them to actually progress as a society, and then westerners condemn them and paint them as genetically inferior for not having progressed as much.
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You still assume, that western countries would like to establish democracies as they would consider democracy in itself a value.
But you have plenty of cases where actual democracies were overthrown violently in order to install a compliant authoritarian regime. Iran, Chile, Egypt...
It is never about democracy and the "vibes" are just a farce. It is about installing compliant regimes that grant cheap access to their natural resources, labor, trade routes, markets...
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There's a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don't pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
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Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
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Yeah, how is that going in the Arab Springs countries though? Was that actually a glorious people's uprising, or just another despot using an angry mob to do his bidding?
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It was never not being weaponized, and never stopped being a place to organize.
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They found out how gullable religion has made Americans. They will literally believe anything and fall in line like sheep.
"A Republican would eat a steaming bowl of shit if it meant a liberal had to smell their breath after"
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Now I desparately want to see an Onion video of someone's review of the "Liberal Breath" attraction
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Or just cuz Bonespurs said to. "Thank you, Daddy, may I have some more?!"
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The oligarchs got scared, then they got even.
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that's part of why there's saudi money in twitter
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Monetization of human weaknesses. By this I mean our biased, emotional, prone-to-addiction brains being colonized for data and ad-revenue.
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It's almost like They realized something...
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amazing how at the drop of a hat the mainstream media will shill for de-anonymizing trolls when someone makes fun of a corrupt politician
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We let the normies into our spaces.
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In a word, commercialisation.
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That's when they noticed it could be used to topple governments and decided to use selfishly.
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Arab Autumn
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People put way too much weight on the "power of human ideas." They think if thee is a "free marketplace of ideas" then naturally the best ideas spread and take over. But that's not how the real world works at all. The ideas that are propagated are those that reflect what is "going around on the ground" to speak, not whether or not the ideas are actually good or bad.
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How has it been weaponized against democracy?
It’s still the best way to get info not filtered by MSM. There’s a reason politicians in both parties are calling for increased social media censorship.
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Its much more complicated than that, and yes contemporart information sources (i.e., the internet) have absolutely been weaponized by both state (Russia should come to mind) and non-state (say, ISIL, energy companies, etc) actors, as has been detailed in tens of thousands of pages of research and independent analysis focused on digital forensics. And its not just about the content (i.e., the ideological, cognitive apsects). It's also about control of the infrastructure - think media capture by oligarchs such as Musk or the reverse enginering of social media algorithms by countries like Russia to reach as many people as possible.
I would argue it's disingenuous to equate the activities of the two American parties in this field. If you were to take a comprehensive look at what they've been doing, there is a clear difference in their approach and intent. Where the Democratic Party wants to curtail the influence of foreign authoritarian states and local oligarchs by limiting their ability to spread disinformation, Republicans have been actively undermining these efforts, including by going after US agencies (such as the GEC) and independent researchers at NGOs. Why? Because these agencies and NGOs are exposing their lies and labeling their messages as misleading and dangerous. They are also exposing how aligned the Republics are with foreign authoritarian states.
Granted, I'm a bit biased. I'm one of those researchers. And dealing with SLAPPs and other measures by Republicans and their proxies has been undermining information integrity significantly in the last two years, within and without the US.
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You’re absolutely biased, and spreading disinformation of your own. People in the US are much more likely to be subjected to disinformation and propaganda from their own government online than any foreign actor. It’s not even close- we’re being flooded with state propaganda from the US astroturfing farms, compared to a trickle from outside sources.
And it’s false to claim the Democrats are attempting to censor for our well-being. Whenever their activities are revealed in leaks or fulfilled FOIA requests, the vast majority is revealed to be censorship of criticism or dissent, or censoring anyone countering the state narrative. Truth and public good are not on the Dem priority list anymore than it’s on the Republicans’.
And worth noting, these censorship efforts are illegal. This is a crime spree.
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Haven’t you heard? Unregulated communication is our biggest threat. It tricked people into voting for the wrong candidate, which proves my point.
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The ruling class, against whom the internet was a critical tool in the name of democracy, decided they were not going to let us have that tool anymore.
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Well, Kraut of all people should know how one can change their mind in the span of a decade.
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Context?
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Kraut (then Kraut & Te i think) was deep into Gamer Gate and Europe's far right, a large chunk of his video's were political commentary. I believe I first learnt of him through the "XY Einzelfall" video by Shaun. One day I read a comment saying Kraut response was pathetic, leading me to a Destiny stream where he defended the map, not believing that all the cases on the map just "magically vanish" under scrutiny. There apparently was a video he made in response too.
E: I just remembered, I actually watched the video itself. I can confidently say it included Kraut saying "Um actually, your definition of Arson only mostly correct" with the difference not mattering, and that the smoke in one of the cooking fires was not just a bit of smoke, but severe. Pathetic response indeed.
You can no longer find the stream or video, the only hint being this reddit post, with one comment mentioning Kraut was on the stream. Kraut rebranded himself and deleted his past videos in the process. This is just hearsay, but I heard he was attacked really hard by the far right after attacking their own for pedophillia. He left political commentary and made history videos instead, though there are still hints of Islamophobia and Racism in his videos, or common jokes just earn more criticism because of his past. I can't say, I don't watch them. However he definitely isn't nearly as much right as he used to be.
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Oh so you like the Internet eh?
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It's just a fad, it'll go away.
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I remember when people used to tell me that.
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...it has?
I thought countries like China, Iran, India, and Pakistan ban access to social media and the greater internet because of the threat it still poses to information being shared and utilized by common citizens.
I'm fairly certain the flow information still has a net positive despite attempts to crackdown and control online interaction both from corporations and governments.
Pakistan's PTI is still alive despite being stabbed by the military because they can effectively reach their voterbase via the internet. I don't think anyone has actually taken a picture or video of Imran Khan ever since he was thrown in jail, yet he is as popular as ever.
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Bless the color revolutions! Thanks Facebook and the CIA!
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Elon Musk happened. Twitter's staff banned Trump after 2020 elections, but (luke warm take) Musk bought Twitter to reinstate Trump
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Musk bought twitter to attack progressives in general. He then used it to empower whoever he wanted, and he saw Trump as a means to an end.
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Well the reality is that democracy is a shitty form of government to. So the internet helps fight shitty forms of government. The problem is that the internet doesn't seem to help provide good alternatives. It is essentially indiscriminate on what replaces the currenty shitty form of government, even if the replacement then restricts the internets ability to fight the new shitty form....
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Anonymity.
When you can set up thousands of bots and say whatever you want without consequence of course this would be the result.
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Or maybe mediums are inherently neutral?
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I disagree. Few things are truly neutral. What people usually consider neutral is just what's normal at the time. The structures within which we live and express ourselves are shaped by people and institutions.
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124 comments