Nick Szabo  🔑

My wife is an immigrant originally from China. Her grandfather sometimes wakes up screaming from nightmares remembering the Mao era. Before I met her, I had only read about the horrors of communism.

tens of thousands of Chinese came to the west coast as refugees after having their land stolen and families murdered by communists. Americans don't know this, because chinese ppl don't feel a constant need to remind others of their victimhood.

Also Cambodia. Silent sufferers

The Dead Kennedys is how I learned about what happened in Cambodia. Shows you the quality of US public education.

I understand why it would trigger you. But consider that people will always twist the meaning of words. I think it is better to focus on pragmatics and achieving tangible results than on arguing over the meaning of words.

Indeed, communists were and are the champions of twisting the meanings of words, for example of "fascist."

Indeed, and all governments strive for the goal of communism. Some do so overtly while the USA pays lip service to the flag as a placeholder for freedom. No government wishes its citizens to be free because that negates its reason for existence.

One could argue that governments are just the emergent phenomenon resulting from the poor decisions of everyone and that the notion of a government as a cohesive entity is entirely an illusion.

That’s a very good point. People also tend to automatically identify the ostensible political leaders with the centre of power — while in fact no one has control over Leviathan. That’s true even of dictators. Reality is the opposite of a conspiracy theory: no one is in charge.

I would rather say that governments are the emergent result if the continued — and hopeless — effort of creating centralisation in a complex multi-agent world.

Same. CEE was whipsawed b/w communist “liberations” (‘39-40, & again post WWII) & fascist “liberations” (‘41-44). Interesting how later generations, be it diaspora like us, or CEE youth, understands this history. Similar stories no doubt from the Far East.

I’m optimistic. 100 million dead won’t ever happen again, precisely because these stories of authoritarianism are more understood and widely broadcasted, in a compounding fashion, than ever before. Yet work left to do...

I hope you're right but I have a feeling someone has had a similar thought before with a lesser number dead.

To be fair all forms of government has killed hundred of millions of people. How many people did the US kill?

A lot less than totalitarians

Not all states are equally bad. If you really felt that way you wldnt mind living in North Korea, Russia or Iran over the USA — but you wld

lol.. even if i wanted too i'd still be forced to pay taxes to the US government.

Point is there are varieties of bad.