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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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Sophia Indrajaal
@sophia-indrajaal
Free exchange of ideas is not the same as creating a hive mind nor is it necessarily a self reinforcing mechanism. If you look at old newspaper letters and editorials, illiberalism has always been in the mix. US founder debates show this as well. Of course, the "West" (silly term, West of what?) sort of collapsed 100 years ago with the death of Aristotelian logic, Kantian epistemology and Smithian economics via quantum mechanics, Einstein's eclipse and the great depression respectively. You may be on to something with smaller countries being more ripe for liberal experimentation tho
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