>>argsnd+m2
this is called "controlled opposition"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda

>>osmsuc+P3
We share the blame as we spent 80 years relying on the crutch of US military support and now we struggle to see how we can stand up on our own without the crutch. The next decade will test the resolve of other liberal democracies to survive this challenge.

Republics fall, progress isn't linear. Even c. 2000 years ago people were writing about how democracy falls to tyranny. The world is a lot more global now, but the Roman Republic would also have seemed rather "global" too, yet was replaced by the Roman Empire not long after Cicero was writing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory

>>jampek+J4
My concern about PG isn't that he's "falling in line" so much as ripping the mask off and embracing right-wing authoritarianism:

  So what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat. Obviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do that? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came back worse than ever.

  In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of political correctness, but the next thing like it?

  The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we're up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

https://paulgraham.com/woke.html (this entire essay is pathetically ignorant even by PG's standards, but the latent fascism is still very scary)

>>ffsm8+Z6
Companies that try to turn themselves into the infrastructure of the internet and then control it can fuck right off, private or not. Here's an example of where the Supreme Court agrees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

>>mardif+p31
I can't reply to the sibling comment but yes, yes it is:

>In France, a new law dubbed "CREN" has already made its way through the upper house. It allows the French government to force DNS blocking of sites it deem to be non-compliant of the new law.

>In Spain, websites belonging to the Catalonian independence movement were all DNS blocked, back in 2017.

>Denmark has censored a wide-swath of content since at least 2011, including file sharing, mp3 converters and illegal gambling sites.

>As reported back in 2021, The EU itself is actively developing its own DNS, with the project named "DNS4EU". Its goal is to wrest control away from US based companies, and to gain greater control over access to online content.

https://vocal.media/01/norway-introduces-dns-blocking-of-ill...

>>rofo1+h5
For starters, the Sieg Heil salute that Elon did was exactly the same as Hitler did it [1] and modern-day white nationalists do it [2].

Secondly, anyone who refers to Nazism as the "the National-Socialist party of the German working class" is clearly attempting to make an utterly specious claim that Nazism is really about Socialism and not about Fascism.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6v521/for_those_not...