Quote (kusotarre1 @ Mar 18 2023 10:47pm)
Being able to be mostly safe in having an even vicious and doompilled critique of liberal society is one of the great advancements of liberalism. You can scream and bitch all you want about how bad things are here, that's not the issue.
What is very profane in liberal societies is pointing out something that's actually pretty obvious: Some non-liberal societies, China included, are not only not as bad as liberal societies, they are quantifiably better.
Say something like that, and immediately the defense mechanism of liberalism comes out: rights, rights, rights. But it's a mirage. Liberalism is hostile to rights to the degree that they can affect the material base of society. You can speechify, unless it's too popular. You can protest, unless it's too inconvenient. You can organize, unless it threatens property relations.
It's a sham system whose glory days were derived from the threat of a good example and imperial plunder. Forced to grapple with the former re-appearing and the latter disappearing, it produces the polls I cited above, and the nonsense responses you'll get from people like the vi***n Frenchman here.
communism/atheism has never brought anything good to the world
Atheist Governments of the 20th Century: The Death Toll of Godless Goodness
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2013/03/atheist-governments-of-the-20th-century-the-death-toll-of-godless-goodness/Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) 49-78,000,00 people murdered
Jozef Stalin (USSR 1932-39 only) 15,000,000 people murdered
Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) 1,700,000 people murdered
Kim II Sung (North Korea 1948-94) 1.6 million people murdered
Tito (Yugoslavia 1945-1987) 570,000 people murdered
Suharto (Communists 1967-66) 500,000 people murdered
Ante Pavelic (Croatia 1941-45) 359,000 people murdered
Ho Chi Min (Vietnam 1953-56) 200,000 people murdered
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (USSR, 1917-20) 30,000 people murdered
Adolf Hitler (Germany 1939-1945) 12,000,000 people murdered