[ClumsyPilot]

This duscussion is cute, but but situation in belarus is deteriorating and people are being beaten and tortured in jail. Open this with google translate yo get an idea: https://news.tut.by/society/696375.html

I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus. It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.

Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.

[AbrahamParangi]

No offense but I think this is wrong. We’re trained by society and upbringing to think that only “appeals to management” can effect change- and that “doing it yourself” is amateurish.

There is some truth to this- but the world is entirely run by people who believe they can personally effect change through their actions, everyone else be damned.

[blimey74]

Would you not agree that government ministers who can impose economic sanctions on the Lukashenko regime have more power than regular voters since they sit at the top of the power hierarchy?

[tinco]

They might, or they might not at all. Who knows what government can truly influence that man. Examples plenty of countries being sanctioned that simply ignore the sanctions and do their business elsewhere, or not at all, even if that means their people suffer the consequences.

I definitely support asking our governments to pressure their government. But I wouldn't ignore the fact that people in Belarus are be the ones that might be able to affect real change in Belarus.

[huac]

Economic sanctions will severely hurt individual Belarusians, who are the ultimate consumers of those trade products. It is hard to imagine sanctions improving the quality of life and ability of protestors to communicate with the outside world.

Separately, I would expect American sanctions to push the country towards increased trade with Russia and China -- who are both allies of Lukashenko.

[ClumsyPilot]

You are right, but then you should suggest what you believe we should be doing.

on individual level the best actuon I can think of is donating to help folks that lost and eye or were beaten withing an inch of their life.

Otherwise i am not sure what you could do, perhaps we could send equipment like radios, first aid and body protection / armor? Depending on your views you coupd even post crossbows. Would they arrive through customs, assuming you know who to post them to?

Lastly, you could travel there to join the protests, but realisticaly are you going to do that?

[z3t4]

As a single person your options are to join with others, or buy an army. Not everyone can afford the latter.

[373637822726]

It's funny because I thought your reply was cute.

>I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus.

Bahahaha. The US already has its hands full, there's no way on earth this gains traction when there's actual strategic priorities at the moment for them. Let the EU do something useful for once, they love talking about how much they help the world.

>Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.

Again, bahahaha. This is going to end up like when everyone and their brother was a "Syrian Refugee" because they knew it'd get them into Europe. You may as well send some of the money to the prince of Nigeria while you're at it.

[Klaster_1]

>Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.

What about this one? https://www.facebook.com/donate/1123543824684874/ https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8rjj4ZxCNs

[GoblinSlayer]

>It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.

You just said how to evade the pressure.

[ClumsyPilot]

I cant make sence of your post. Could you elaborate?

[moksly]

> It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.

Don’t they mostly depend on Putin money? Here in Europe we’ve had sanctions and been working for change for quite a while.

Doesn’t matter much when their dictator is backed by Russia.

[jmnicolas]

> the free world

Ah the famous free world where our social media posts are heavily censored, where lock-down was / is mandatory for a lot of us, and where protesting can cost you an eye (at least 20 people lost an eye last year in France's Gillets Jaunes protests).

Yes we still have it better than the Belorussians but free our world is certainly not.

[komali2]

Why do you conflate corporate enforced moral positioning with people protecting themselves from a pandemic as well as police brutality? None of those 3 things seem at all related to me.

[jmnicolas]

We are not free to post certain things on social media. We are not free to move wherever we want to go. We are not free to protest without being harmed.

Those 3 things are proofs that there is no free world.

[bobthechef]

Well, there's freedom and there's liberty. We often use the former to include the latter, but they're completely different. We only have the freedom to do the right thing. We are not free to do evil things. We may have the liberty to do them, of course. Now in a liberal society like the US, we are at liberty to do many things we ought not which is partly motivated by either skepticism on the one hand and a wish to maintain the peace on the other because enforcing certain behaviors would actually result in an even worse status quo (there's a hint: make it uneconomical to suppress certain freedoms). So no perfect liberality exists nor could it. The question of which liberties ought to be tolerated is answered by our constitutions, but even those are bounded in practice. You have blasphemy laws and you have hate speech laws, both of which constrain speech. Now, I don't think which are in force is arbitrary or that it's all the same or relative--tyranny has an objective standard and not suppression of what I happen to want to do--but the fact that we always have had them is proof that freedom (liberty) of speech is always limited.

To your point, the proper way to characterize the current status quo is that a certain kind of leftist orthodoxy or ethos has come to dominate institutions, organizations, and corporations that otherwise pretend to some kind of "neutrality" in ways that don't actually obtain. So what you have is a religious war of sorts and this leftist religion currently has the upper hand. As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms. What irks me most is the mendacity. At least confessional states give you the courtesy of telling you they're confessional. You can work with that even if the confession is wrong and at least everyone's clear about the circumstances you're in instead of living in a fog of lies. But lying about ideological orientation, also while knowing fully well others disagree with it, is dishonest. But people are noticing. (As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services. Of course, that doesn't quite extend as nicely to laws. We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.)

[komali2]

I think it's very interesting that you delineate a line between freedom (you can say nazi stuff in the usa without going to jail) from liberty (that doesn't mean you won't get kicked out of walmart for saying nazi stuff inside the store), but then you turn around and say

> As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms.

I have no idea what "traditional lines" could mean here. Cause I could take it, for example, the traditional values of women and black people being less-than and thus their liberty to vote being illegal, has been "eliminated." Is that what you mean? What "traditional constraints" are being eliminated, and why do I get the sense from your post that this is bad? Furthermore, what new laws are being passed that "constrain liberties" along "leftist norms?" For focus, maybe we can stay on-topic in the USA, where I can only think of the removal of restrictive laws across the board: gay people can get married, more states have laws explicitly allowing open-carry, for a brief period women's bodily autonomy was being restored (though this is being restricted again) (I'm talking about abortion here), etc.

> As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services.

Do you mean services like Voat? I mean... I guess if that's the ideological standard you want to align yourself with, go for it lol.

[jmnicolas]

It's a long time since I've met someone lucid about what's going on, thank you !

> We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.

Do you think we already have lost ?

Frankly I don't want to live in this Communist 2.0 world, I know I won't be able to shut my mouth and go with the flow : I already lost all hope of career evolution at work because of my sharp tongue and that was for things much less polarizing than politics.

I guess I'll probably be in the firsts to try the new gulags.

Or should I expatriate while it's time ? But where to go ? It seems I can either choose between a "traditional" 3rd world dictatorship or the new Communism 2.0

[komali2]

Interesting - let's take a look:

Absence of social class structure. Absence of currency. Public ownership of the means of production. Absence of state.

Which of those values are compatible with what you appear to fear? We know that the traditional conservative Monsters such as China and the Soviet Union weren't Communist - they had social classes, currency, and a state, after all, so that's obvious. Are you operating on the Bad Faith interpretation? In that case, let's be lucid: You fear Authoritarianism and Fascism, not Communism. It doesn't make sense to use the wrong words to describe things.

> I already lost all hope of career evolution at work because of my sharp tongue

This brings us back to liberty. Right now the USA is capitalist. Therefore companies have rights and liberties, just like people. If you have a relationship with a person, and they call you a subhuman, do you believe it's ethical to use law to enforce that the insulted person must remain in that relationship? No? Then clearly there's no issue with companies firing people for, say, dropping n-word bombs and the like. There's some differences, in that we at least don't legally allow companies to be racist or sexist in their policy anymore.

To be frank, whenever I get in conversations with people that bemoan their loss of freedom of speech, talk about having a "sharp tongue" and losing hopes about career progression because of it, I find myself talking to a person that wants to be allowed to demean and bully at work. I find myself talking to a Linus Torvalds type at best, and at worst a sexist, racist, or homophobe (or all 3 combined! :D). So it's very, very hard to engage in good faith, because I can't imagine what you could be saying at a US company that's preventing your career progression, that isn't despicable and causing you to get exactly what you deserve.

[ClumsyPilot]

Would you be content with calling it 'somewhat democratic world'?

[jmnicolas]

Depends what you mean by democratic. If you mean people can vote, then yes. But if it means ruled by the people then I only see elites at the top.

I'm disillusioned with the western narrative about freedom. We can and should do much better than the oligarchies we actually live in.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the rest of the world has it better than us, but we're certainly not the paradise we pretend to be.

[blaser-waffle]

I'll take a mostly democratic world over an openly despotic one a la the CCP.

[jmnicolas]

Me too. But the fact that our prison is shinier than the neighbors isn't enough to make me proud living in it.