Vitalik Buterin on Farcaster

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Vitalik Buterin

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 pfp

Same on my timeline, feels like some Western people forgot the fundaments of their culture

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Vitalik Buterin

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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tldr (tim reilly)

Interesting - can you link to something indicating what you’re meaning by “daoism” here? I wasnt aware of its political teaching/implications.

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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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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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Eastern communities have more discussion and talk about the situation. For example in the middle east a lot commented on the situation and followed uo what you and others commented on. Usually eastern are more interested in western news, because they are usually affected with it. Telegram was a substitute for many countries here when there Govs suspended other media platform. I think also the need affects the reaction to the situation

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I think the reason for Westerners allowing this to happen stems from this or something very similar: https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/

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Aaron Blaisdell / ittybit 533

@aaronblaisdell

And frontiers tend to be more liberal as well. The US was born as a small collection of independent colonies banding together on the frontier to protect Enlightenment ideals of individuals and collectivism via democracy. e pluribus unim.

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Europe has always imposed the responsibility of a digital service on the operator. That‘s literally why all the Americans are mocking us over at /europoooooor and that‘s why Europe has no tech companies. I‘m sounding like an annoying European Western apologist but haven’t these rules always been here? I think they suck, but I also don‘t know how to change this. Would everyone be happy if there was a section 230 law in the EU?

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