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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
One meta-note on the situation, is that in my timeline I have seen exactly zero non-western people defending Durov's arrest, but quite a few western people. Definitely don't want to say that they don't exist (after all, my timeline is biased just like anyone's), just this is what my sample is so far. IMO this is another example of the decoupling of liberalism and westernism that https://x.com/MacaesBruno often talks about.
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Mac Budkowski ᵏ
@macbudkowski
Same on my timeline, feels like some Western people forgot the fundaments of their culture
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Western culture produced JS Mill and Milton Friedman, it also produced colonialism and Hitler (and, to give a third category, FDR). All civilizations' cultures have many strands, I expect the default path is that the strand that gets emphasized at any given time is the strand that fits the interests of that time period, and perhaps reacts against bad things in the previous time period. WW2/Nazism as negative example ("secular replacement for Satan") is weakening as people with direct memory of it pass away. If you analyze the situation looking at raw interests, the first-order conclusion is that smaller countries will be the more liberal ones, because they have more to gain by connecting and less to gain by dominating (and more to lose by being dominated). So while more authoritarian-flavored westernism is a risk, on the flip side we may get to enjoy more diversity in different types of liberalism (so maybe this is a daoism bullpost?)
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Mac Budkowski ᵏ
@macbudkowski
Fair point, the Western culture produced many bad people and ideas. But I think it's a bug and a feature - if you let people think and speak more openly, you will get more ideas. Good and bad ones, often with a higher variance (anarchocapitalism vs. communism, nazism vs. wokeism, technooptimism vs. degrowth etc.). The main European takeaway after WWII was to limit nazism because it led to enormous destruction. But it did not limit communism, it even cooperated with it to some degree until we got into the Cold War. So I agree with this culture strands theory :) I'd add that it's not only smaller countries that are more liberal, but also the countries that experienced the slippery slope of authoritarianism in the last decades - e.g., Eastern Europe.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
> I'd add that it's not only smaller countries that are more liberal, but also the countries that experienced the slippery slope of authoritarianism in the last decades - e.g., Eastern Europe. Yeah I agree with this; my own experience and the data bear this out.
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Snibb123.eth
@snibb123
I’d argue that Poland and Hungary are a good counterpoint to the idea that countries familiar with authoritarianism (Eastern Bloc) remain more liberal.
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Nick T
@nt
It did not limit communism only in order to limit nazism better.
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