Democracy is about screaming. Organizing. Protesting. Operating through civil society organizations. It's not merely about voting.
I'm not criticizing strategic autonomy. I think it would be an amazing thing for the EU to be able to defend itself. I'm criticizing the kissing Xi's ass thing.
Mad props to Microsoft for handing all this over to CitizenLab!
Yeah. I agree the EU is deeply in need of serious structural reform. But I think political disintegration in the form of more Brexit-like secessions is a likely scenario if that doesn’t happen. Which is how it *should* work.
I think this is where people get quite confused. People point to the illiberal and undemocratic things in liberal democracies as proof of the problems with liberal democracy. But the point is, we have a standard by which we can measure against, that our societies are supposed to live up to. We can point out an example of government censorship, and recognize that's illiberal. The philosophical ideal isn't the problem. The problem is we're not living up to it.
The good news, is we have a bunch of people jumping up and down demanding we do live up to those ideals. And the push back does work, when the voices get loud enough.
So far, those of us who push back and yell, are not being disappeared and sent to re-education camps. Which is a pretty important thing to think about, when idiot libertarians claim we're supposedly living in a totalitarian states now.
This is a fine argument. Personally, my criticism would be a little further up the stack. Discriminating against types of electricity usage, rather than just using the market pricing mechanism would seem to me, to just be batshit insane on its face, when you think about if for more than five seconds. You don't even really need to get into the merits of bitcoin mining, before realizing it's a terrible idea.
I do think quite highly of the philosophies of liberalism and democracy, so I'd probably take issue with the fact that these ideas can be grouped in apples-to-apples with totalitarian communism. But I recognize that's a frustratingly popular view around these corners of the internet.
I'd struggle to call any of them "aberrant", considering we have a sample size of exactly one human species and human civilization to use as a yard stick. Any such notion suggests an objective standard that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in nature.
And an unlikely future, given human nature, unfortunately.
We may not have invented it. There's quite a bit of evidence that language might be intrinsic to the human brain. Outside of his politics, the study of this is one of the things that Noam Chomsky is well-known for in the field of linguistics.
This intrinsic nature is also believed to be why babies are able to pick up language so fast through osmosis.
I'm not sure. My completely limited sense is that it could be pretty difficult to make drastic changes to entrenched language, given that cognition and language is very linked, and as Chomsky and others have argued, our brains have an intrinsic linguistic grammar that is common to all known human language. That said, I have only very recently started reading a little bit about linguistics and neurolonguistics, so I a barley know what I'm talking about here.
I think language has evolved and become more optimized over time, actually.
Remove written language from the equation, and reduce us just to oral language, and our entire technological civilization basically just vanishes.
We take written language for granted. But it's actually the most important human invention, when you really think about it. Nothing else comes close.
That's not what's going to happen. What's going to happen is they're going to have a rude awakening.
Eastern European countries seem to be pretty outraged. There has also been some pretty fierce criticism within the French press, such as in La Monde, at how morally bereft his statements were.