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Comment by logicchains

7 months ago

What happened in Nepal earlier this month proves that a brighter future is possible, if people get fed up enough.

Since this is EU level legistlation and blocking minority is already ignored (e.g. going in to the streets does not matter in there), it is much more difficult.

Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.

  • If an equivalent % of the population got in their cars, drove to Brussels and started setting EU government buildings on fire like in Nepal, things would change pretty quickly. The EU can only do soft totalitarianism because it doesn't have the kind of police force that a full-blown totalitarian state has.

    • Don't worry, they're working on that. Give it a few decades and generations to get personal locomotion automated and legislated out of the commoner's reach and they'll start ruling from highly secured ivory towers partitioned off from the public transit grid. Then resistance won't even be practicable in the numbers sufficient enough to cause disruption to the edifi of power.

Does it? Some parts of the world have revolutions every other week and are still jot as good as anything we have in the west despite our massive flaws

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution

  • Revolution simply rolls the dice again. In states which used to have functional institutions and the organizational memory is still present, they can lead to good outcomes. In states which never had them, they cannot be created out of thin air.

    A historian called Sarah Paine explained this nicely with examples of how the occupation of Afghanistan failed to create democracy but the occupation of post-WW2 Germany succeeded because Germany used to have a democracy whereas Afghanistan never did.

  • In this particular context, the recent Nepalese revolution succeeded in overturning attempts to limit citizens' communications, i.e the Nepalese equivalent of "Chat Control".

and what if a system of mediation can pick up the encrypted messages sent by dissidents and formulate a plan to crush the resistance? To government-for-hire companies, it's a service problem, not a systemic one.