"In my world there's always a place for you; you can disagree with me; you can even insult me; I will not fire back because that is your freedom of expression, however
In your world there's no place for me; you want to eliminate me and even my family from the world just because I disagree with your government or your ideology; this is puzzling isn't it?"
What's your point? That doesn't exclude US Americans from offering criticism. We are not all one entity, there's ~300M of us. Many of us had nothing to do with Vietnam and I can damn near guarantee wouldn't repeat that decision today.
While flawed in practice, I think the so-called "domino theory" had some valid roots in the so-called Paradox of Tolerance.
It's hard to dispute one historical aspect of communism in particular, namely that it cannot tolerate competing ideologies. The only way to implement communism is through the use of force; it's not something free people will adopt voluntarily. I may think of myself as a tolerant person, but if you have to stick a gun in my back to make me practice your ideology -- which you do -- why should I be required to tolerate that?
It can be argued that it's a moral responsibility to stop the spread of such a pathological system of thought by any means necessary, just as if we were fighting an infectious disease. I won't go that far personally, but others in America did, and the wars in Korea and Viet Nam were the result. Not so much an apology as an (admittedly oversimplified) explanation.
Of course you have just hoisted yourself on your own petard: it’s hard to dispute that American capitalism cannot tolerate competing ideologies, evidenced by (e.g.) The Vietnam War and Korean War. But now I am just repeating my original comment.
You also have another glaring problem to address: it is very easy and simple to tolerate the kind of socialism/communism where an independent nation state wants to use it’s own national resources instead of opening it up to foreign private interests. No one is harmed by that.[1] I guess the CIA just had a very eccentric interpretation of Popper.
[1] Unless you want to get real Red Scare and concoct some crazy theory about how those small nation states are really puppets of the Soviet Union who will use those resources to eventually nuke the Free World… and therefore War is Peace, Paradox of Tolerance and all that.
Comparisons to capitalism as an abstract ideology notwithstanding, you do have to use violence to keep people from voluntarily buying from and selling to each other.
There is a reason why the Communist Party of the USA is a thing and the Capitalist Party of the PRC is not. They are willing to use violence within their own borders to suppress competing ideologies in the absence of tangible criminal offenses, while we generally are not.
And then there's the simple question of whether more people die trying to sneak into your country or out of it. Moral relativists run into serious trouble with that one.
You have to use violence in order to stop people from nationalising their own resources instead of opening themselves up to foreign corporate penetration. The US federal state had to use violence to suppress the socialist Black Panthers.
I could go on like this all day. You have no legs to stand on when your claim is that capitalism is just voluntarism.
I don’t think that I am. My flagged reply was to a comment about the difference between the “liberal” and the “authoritarian” mindset. Some university has not invaded any country. In fact it hasn’t even done anything wrong—it has just condemned political persecution, which is just admirable if anything.
Could a reply to some statement like “the X mindset” be about ideologies in general and not directly about what we just read in the linked article? Several replies from the top of the thread? No. Surely not.
well, at least it seems like you understand why people flagged your comment in the first place. Maybe in the future don't bring up unnecessary generalizations that muddy the discussion?
It's pretty clear that in the context of the comment the usage of small-l liberal was referring to the classical ideal, not the homonym label misused in contemporary American politics.
It comes down to a simple formula: are people learning and appreciating freedom faster than it's being diluted by people who are ignorant or disdainful of freedom?
There's no fundamental reason one rate must remain above the other. Education, immigration trends, business, and culture all play a part.
But once the anti-freedom are greater in number than the pro-freedom, then freedom democratically self-destructs.
Non-free governments don't have this problem, because they aren't democracies.
In other words, losing freedom can be peaceful and even consistent with the principles of freedom (you're free to give up your freedom). But getting freedom requires some non-free (or at least non-democratic) things to happen.
Jefferson said "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". Which is probably one reason why we now have efforts to read him out of the discussion.
The drive to power and control seems to be part of human nature, and it is always finding new ways to organize and express itself. And because freedom is a matter of human choices, yeah, there is always the danger that people will choose to become unfree.
I think freedom has the enormous advantages of being more effective and more motivating. The free are better able to innovate, and to correct their mistakes. They have a better moral basis, which motivates stronger action over longer periods of time. The free can rely on the power of the individual, which mounts en masse to an enormous force, while the unfree are ultimately always awaiting direction.
The greatest risks to a free society are internal, the forces which erode freedom of speech and thought. Liberal democracies have a very strong track record against totalitarian societies. For the US, I think the decline in free speech and the growth of ideological thinking is a serious problem, and we may hit a point of lock-in where people cannot criticize the regime. Many corners of the country are already at this point, and have been for a while, and those zones are spreading. It doesn't help that resistance to this has coalesced under a cult of a crazed personality.
I think freedom will win out, but it won't be easy, and we'll have to work at it. Probably always.
Yes, it is. We all like to believe in ideals like turn the other cheek, take the high road, welcome opposing views no matter how extreme etc. Looking back through human history though, the only way to combat intolerance has been to be intolerant yourself. Freedoms need to be defended, sometimes with blood. Look at WW2 for example. Appeasement didn't go very far, direct action did.
Freedom is never absolute. You can respect other people's freedom to disagree with you, but not their freedom to kill you. You can choose to only stop them from the latter, but not the former.
Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.
> Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over.
Am I the only one to see an interesting parallel to "copyleft" (e.g, [L]GPL) licenses (and a refutation of the "It's evil, viral, anti-free!" objections to them) here?
But should you respect someone's freedom to vote? What if they vote against freedom? And then what if that leads to the same result as them killing you?
You have no choice but to respect that freedom. The only alternative is to establish a tyranny of your own -- that's the only way you can tell people how to vote.
Democracies can suicide. The Weimar Republic did (though notice that Hitler never actually won a popular majority vote).
This problem was exactly what the American Founders had in mind as they shaped their Constitution. They wanted to identify the ways a government could be turned against its own people, and create barriers against those attacks. The US doesn't trust majoritarian government, which is why it isn't exactly a democracy. Items like the Bill of Rights, and features like the separation of powers, are intended both to secure liberties and hamstring oppression.
(The Federalist Papers are a fascinating discussion of all this.)
But at the end of the day, constitutional features can only slow down an oppressive majority. If a majority wants to dominate a minority, eventually they are going to find a way. The only real security for freedom, over long term, is to raise up a people that think and feel and act in those ways that are consistent with freedom.
I believe the answer is 'yes' and it's also true for most 'noble' causes.
Analogous to this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ."
This reminds me of a bit of trivia from Italian politics.
A few years after WWII, a senator from the main post-Fascist party greeted a fellow senator from the Socialist party (who had fought for the Resistance), saying: "We fought gallantly on opposite sides, now we can shake hands". The other replied: "Yeah, then we won so you could become a senator. If you had won, I'd still be a prisoner".
Feels the same to me, makes me wonder who'd ever disagree with it. Does the person this was written in response to really feel like it is false and that people should not be allowed to exist if they think certain things?
I'm confused by the last paragraph, out of my own naïveté, do HKers 'identify' as 'Chinese' then, just not 'from China'?
I suppose it's not surprising when someone's when someone adopts their parents' culture etc. despite being born abroad (e.g. self-describing as Indian without being a citizen/born there) - so makes sense, I just hadn't realised.
> do HKers 'identify' as 'Chinese' then, just not 'from China'?
If they were born in HK and raised there, they would call themselves a HKer (香港人) from Hong Kong. It's highly unlikely they would say they are from 'China' because in their eyes China is Mainland China (大陆/中国) and there is negativity associated with it.
Confusingly, my friends whose parents are from Hong Kong and were born in the UK identify themselves as 'British Born Chinese' rather than 'British Born HKer'.
I use Cantonese or English when in Hong Kong. Speaking Mandarin there, when you look East Asian, is just asking for trouble if you are in wrong part of town.
The English word "Chinese" describes three different things:
- a state (the PRC)
- an ethnic group (Han)
- a culture
The government of the PRC will gladly conflate those things serves their interests.
Most people in Hongkong would definitely identify as culturally and ethnically Chinese. That third item is ... a point of contention. I expect the situation in Taiwan is similar.
On the other side, it is possible to be nationally Chinese but neither culturally nor ethnically so -- see the Tibetans or Uighur for examples.
