Countries That Use Tor Most Are Either Highly Repressive or Highly Liberal 136
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: You might assume that people in the most oppressive regimes wouldn't use the Tor anonymity network because of severe restrictions on technology or communication. On the other hand, you might think that people in the most liberal settings would have no immediate need for Tor. A new paper shows that Tor usage is, in fact, highest at both these tips of the political spectrum, peaking in the most oppressed and the most-free countries around the world. "There is evidence to suggest that at extreme levels of repression, Tor does provide a useful tool to people in those circumstances to do things that they otherwise would not be able to do," Eric Jardine, research fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a Canadian think-tank, told Motherboard in a phone call.
And This is Significant (Score:1)
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And by "Liberal" is that the actual meaning of the word or is it the hijacked meaning of the word used in the US to designate the Democrats?
Re:And This is Significant (Score:4, Informative)
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"Sect", that's cute.
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You've confused Liberalism and Libertarianism.
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"I'm pro-choice because women own their own body."
"So if you own your own body you can chose to take drugs
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Speaking as a liberal, I don't really care about gun control, except that I get twitchy about the government infringing on a Constitutional right. I don't in general like laws that restrict people for their own good. Seat belts and helmets are a bit trickier, since we do put restrictions on the use of public roads to make the system work better, but unless you're taking a drug that makes you dangerous to others I don't care what you put into your body. I don't care who you're sexually attracted to (I mi
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I wish liberals, in general, believed in individual freedom. A few specifics become very important but the general principal is ignored.
The general principal comes from answering the following question: "Who / what has sovereignty over your body?" (Sovereignty is an 18thC - and older - term signifying r
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If you have ownership over your own body, you still can be restricted for public safety when dealing with others. I don't in general care what you do in your car if it doesn't affect others, but seat belts do help others. A driver wearing a seat belt is safer for other people. A passenger not wearing a seat belt can turn into a dangerous missile, and is likely to make an accident more serious than it would have been. Similarly, while I normally don't care what you put into your body, I get fussier if y
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use of TOR (Score:1)
Huh?? (Score:3)
People who live in oppressive regimes need anonymity. People who live in free countries know the value of their liberty and anonymity because they see the threats to it.
I'm afraid I don't see this as particularly shocking.
People who live in places like the UK where they've already said "you don't really get privacy or anonymity because we said so" have likely just accepted that as a fact, because they already don't have it.
People who have more freedom, and people who have less freedom, have a much more immediate sense of what they have, stand to lose, or don't have.
Especially since increasingly the governments of those "liberal" countries are trying to assert that, no, you don't get to have privacy and anonymity, because they'd really prefer if they had 100% access to your life.
If the national police forces of most Western countries had their way, we'd all give up these freedoms so that assholes could pretend they're protecting our freedoms.
Sorry, telling me I no longer have those freedoms isn't protecting them. It's the fucking opposite.
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I agree that this isn't surprising. I would add that the moderately oppressive societies are a special case of ignorance.
Basically, in the cases where the society has oppressed them a little bit, they have been taught by the culture that it's OK. They think "eh, this isn't so bad, I don't really need privacy, it's OK if the government takes it away, the government hasn't truly abused it's power."
But that only works for a while. Once the government expands the use of censorship and privacy invasions, peop
Re:Huh?? (Score:5, Interesting)
People who live in oppressive regimes need anonymity.
Yes, and the "regime" includes not only the government, but people and the condition of society as well. For example: by being found to having an unpopular view, then people around you such as family might shun you.
In the US, the Democrats and those that support them are oppressive of individual rights. Many people have had their lives turned upside down, or their careers ruined after frivolously being called a racist, or being falsely accused of a crime that became media-popularized.
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Oh, bullshit.
In the US most Republicans want to overturn the right of women to have abortions. In the US the Republicans want to entrench the right of Christians to discriminate, while wanting to ensure they can't be discriminated against.
Both sides of US politics want to control some aspects of individual rights. But don't fucking tell me that the Republicans do not also wish to do things which are oppressive of indiv
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I won't disagree with your rant against Republicans, because I generally agree with it. But at the same time I didn't see you argue that "the left" doesn't actually use "racism" as a stick to suppress arguments.
Immigration is a great example -- I think there's lots of reasons to argue for less immigration, but if you do argue this point one of the first criticisms will be that it's not actually about immigration but racism against Latinos.
Even more interesting is the claim of racism when it comes to strict
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In the US most Republicans want to overturn the right of women to have abortions.
Abortions are not a right, never were: have been illegal for the past more than 100 years, and constitute an infringement of the rights of people who have not been born yet.....
Abortion is arguably worse than slavery in some sense, because at least slavery did not deprive the enslaved entirely of the possibility to live and have some happiness in life.
Just because the beneficiary of an injustice solely benefits, and the in
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Abortions are not a right, never were: have been illegal for the past more than 100 years, ...
I'm sure you have some lame pseudo-legal argument that you think proves that statement, but you're wrong. Whatever your argument is, it's not something people are actually prosecuted under. Some abortions are legal. If they weren't, all the abortion clinics would have been closed down. The people that want to use the legal system to stop abortions are finding other ways. They do things like passing the recent Texas law that required that abortions only be done in facilities that have more surgica
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Abortions are not a right, never were: have been illegal for the past more than 100 years, ...
I'm sure you have some lame pseudo-legal argument that you think proves that statement, but you're wrong.
I'm not certain, but I'd guess that the argument is that murder is illegal. It's not uncommon for people to think of abortions as murder and those who see it that way are unlikely to buy the argument that embryos/zygotes/fetuses aren't people. Murder was illegal in the days of American slavery, but law enforcement authorities didn't think of slaves as people, so many murders weren't prosecuted. (By "murder" I mean the traditional common language definition, not the legal definition which is somewhat more de
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I haven't really studied the subject, but I'm not aware of any time when abortion has been treated as murder. It's very often been illegal, but I don't know of times or jurisdictions when it's been punished in the same way as murder was. (If you have examples of such, I'd love to learn of them.)
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My view is pretty US centric, so while there may be examples, none leap to mind. However, this law [wikipedia.org] does give fetuses the same protection as a birthed baby. It's an interesting topic if you can keep politics and personal biases at bay.
Please note however, that I said "think of as" which means that it is an opinion held by people, not a position supported by legislative action.
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actually abortion has been a right recognized since 1973.
the unborn dont have rights, by virtue of not being a person.
scientifically speaking its still a part of the mother's own body, and not a separate entity.
the idea that none of the republican leadership propose further actions is bullshit.
since 2010 alone, when they swept nearly every state legislature in the country thanks to massive redistricting right after the census, there have been over 2300 different abortion regulations proposed or adopted at t
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The really interesting thing about abortion is that Republican leaders seem to be more interested in keeping it alive as a political issue than banning it.
Roe vs. Wade did not confer an unlimited legal right to abortion, but set limits on what states could do to ban it. There wasn't a surge of Republican-run states passing new laws to go up to the border of what Roe vs. Wade permitted. There have been a lot of laws passed that are effectively meaningless (late-term abortions are almost always for healt
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You do realize there are two sides to that coin, right?
That you are so blinded by rage toward "democrats" that any progressive attitudes are seen as an assault on your personal right to be a dickbag to people you don't like?
It is the most circular reasoning I've ever seen, and there are many like you. I have many friends who have essentially isolated themselves from everyone they used to know for the reasons you provide. Interestingly, they tend to goad the others into shunning them by accusing everyone o
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A friend of mine told me that he has all these intelligent friends with weird politics. I told him I had just the same issue. We've rarely changed each other's minds, but we have gotten a better understanding of where other political thinking comes from.
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In the US, the Democrats and those that support them are oppressive of individual rights.
Pure myopic ignorance.
AKA, bullshit.
It is not the democrats who oppose equal rights for minorities, women, LGBT, and others.
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and dont make me pull out the history lesson regarding the migration of conservatives and liberals from one party to other over racial issues by saying something stupid like "but democrats were the original racists". that would be foolish of you.
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If you're capitalizing those, you definitely don't know what they mean.
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Liberal vs. Repressive is an actual political spectrum, forget the abused meaning of Liberal in the US.
Story Title Repetitive (Score:1)
Since "Highly Liberal" is a subset of "Highly Repressive", the story title is somewhat repetitive.
The thing is, there is a tendency to think that a government that forces everyone to do things the way you think it should be done is not repressive. As long as one can do what one wants, one may be surprised and offended to discover others believe they are being oppressed.
Over and over again a movement starts to deal with real problems and then overshoots into creating other problems whether or not their metho
In other news (Score:2)
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I didn't think it was obvious. I would have expected a more or less linear correlation of Tor use with degree of repression.
Without having RTFA, I suspect it really is linear, and the measure of freedom (liberalism) they're using isn't an adequate measure of digital freedom. Hard to imagine the Five Eyes countries would be considered particularly free unless you weight surveillance slow and censorship high.
I thought Tor was anonymous. (Score:2)
To get at the research paper itself would cost me a minimum of $36.
It's not clear to me how you build meaningful global stats for a service that is usually promoted here as anonymous. It is also not clear to me how these states relate to the population as a whole.
The ultimate test of a "secret messaging" system is whether people generally feel safe and comfortable using it. The old-time spy hated the gadget or the code book that his handlers claimed could be easily hidden or disguised or disposed of in a pi
social repression (Score:2)
Political repression isn't such a good measure by itself. Many countries that seem politically non-repressive are socially very repressive; that is, legally, little is going to happen to you if you state an unpopular opinion, but you may greatly hurt your job or career chances. Many European nations fall into that category, and the US is increasingly moving in that direction as well. Just look at the current Title IX witch hunts and the wild accusations of racism against anybody who doesn't toe the progress
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Alternately, look at Christians claiming they're being discriminated against or that there's a war against Christmas. I'm getting tired of people thinking that all the unreasonable assholes disagree with them. There's plenty of unreasonable assholes who more or less agree with my politics, and plenty that disagree strongly.
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That's comparing apples and oranges. Christians claiming that they are being discriminated against doesn't hurt anybody. Title IX prosecutions and $100000 fines for refusing to bake a cake wreck lives. People legally not getting hired because they are being accused of being racists and homophobic merely for disagreeing with progressive politics, that wrecks lives.
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Title IX prosecutions wreck lives? How do they do that, criminal prosecutions? How's that different from what happens if you're busted and convicted of marijuana possession? I'd call the War on Drugs to be the biggest unnecessary life-wrecker, and that's something your typical liberal or progressive would like to see go away.
Large fines for refusing to bake a cake? You need to read up on that. The bakers got a small fine for violating the law. However, they started a harassment campaign against the
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People get kicked out of college and have the reasons marked in their transcript.
The Oregon bakers were fined $135000 by the Oregon Labor Commissioner, as Snopes itself explains [snopes.com]. Are you illiterate or are you a liar?
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The Snopes article mentions the damages, which are explicitly not fines, but doesn't go into the harassment that resulted from the bakery's going public. You can find that in the linked court document. It doesn't say what would have happened if the bakers hadn't put the dispute on Facebook. There was no multi-thousand-dollar fine.
I believe that a business that serves the public should serve the public, and that discrimination against disliked minorities should be illegal. Such discrimination can cont
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As Snopes says, the $135000 were imposed by BOLI for the act of discrimination alone, contradicting your claims that the high fines were for subsequent abusive conduct.
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I'm going to correct just one paragraph here, because the rest is no more rational.
The $135K was not a fine. It was damages. Snopes doesn't do their usual good job here, but they do link to the court findings, and the Findings of Fact show a lot of up-front emotional distress, followed by the considerably worse stuff that went on after
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You said:
That statement is wrong. The issue isn't whether you call it a "fine" or "damages", the issue is that th
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The point is that, if the bakery had just said "Go away" and left it at that, they would not have been in serious financial trouble. You are being disingenuous in calling this a freedom of speech affair. The bakers were indeed justified in publicizing what happened on First Amendment grounds, but the First doesn't say there aren't consequences for speech. As they named the would-be customers in question, it became effectively harassment rather than a simple protest.
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That is what the bakery did. Then, the lesbian couple filed a complaint with BOLI, that complaint got sent to the bakery. And then the bakery published the complaint letter they received with names. (We don't know what would have happened if they hadn't published the letter with names. You presume that the fine would have been small. I don't believe that based on the judgment a
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The bakery said "go away". The couple was feeling emotionally hurt at being illegally discriminated against, so they filed a report. I assume you are in favor of people being able to report illegal actions. I don't know what fine is assessed for such discrimination, but I'd expect it to be small. I don't even know if the bakery was fined.
Publishing the letter was fine. Leaving the names on came at a risk, since the couple did nothing wrong, and it was reasonable to expect some sort of harassment fro
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Look, this discussion started with your assertion "Large fines for refusing to bake a cake? You need to read up on that. The bakers got a small fine for violating the law. However, they started a harassment campaign against the couple who wanted a cake and filed the complaint, and the resulting lawsuit was what cost them big." You needed to "read up on that", and we have esta
Is it just me or did those links lack data? (Score:2)
All I found was a chart and an abstract. At no time did I see the actual countries listed.
Also how liberal a nation is can be up for debate.
For example some nations in the EU have hate speech laws but almost no restriction on sexual content.
In the US you will often see age restriction on sexual content but no restriction on political speech. Which is more free or liberal?
I would like to to have seen a list of the nations and how they ranked them before I draw any conclusion.
Re:Should be 'and' not 'or' (Score:5, Insightful)
It always amuses me that people think they can win arguments by freely redefining words.
Multiple meanings (Score:3)
"Liberal" is indeed a word that has several meanings.
In this case, the use of the word in the headline is clarified in the text: it is used as the opposite of "repressive", in its meaning of "most free."
(Definition 3: "of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties." [dictionary.com])
(The phrase used in the actual article is "liberal democracies." This does not mean "democracies that elect governments from the Lib
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Contrariwise, a "progressive" (i.e. a leftist or what Americans call "liberal") arrogantly assumes that what has worked very well to transform a colony into the superpower
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Except for the fact that applying "liberal" principles is largely how we got there. You seem to be ignoring the formation of unions and building codes lead to a much more productive workforce that was able to keep up with increased manufacturing demand.
You seem to forget the "liberal" principle of social security leading to abolishment of asylums where a great many people were tortured instead of becoming useful citizens.
You also forget about the "liberal" EPA cleaned up a great many lakes and rivers whic
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Here's a question:
1) A Gay couple goes to a bakery to buy a wedding cake
2) Bakery owner refuses to sell them a cake on his religious grounds
3) Gay couple complains to government
Would a Liberal government recognize the couple's right to buy a cake, or the baker's right to his religion?
I think GP's point was that "liberals" would want to force the baker to sell the cake
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A classic liberal understands that your rights cannot include compelling others to work on your behalf (though they often include preventing others from doing something to you, that's not the same category).
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So you'd be just fine with the old "no blacks" policies? Allowing public businesses to discriminate against certain groups disadvantages the individuals in those groups considerably. If you're willing to provide a service to random people with no connection to you, you're basically allowing yourself to be compelled to work for others anyway.
Re:Should be 'and' not 'or' (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you actually know the definition of those words except as they pertain to US politics and how you think they work?
In many places, "conservatism" is the authoritarian central regime. ISIS and the Taliban are "conservative".
And if you think American conservatives around about centralized power, look at it from the perspective of not being a Christian. "Conservative" in the US means "entrenching Christianity as being the highest authority with the ability to control the lives of others according to that".
Sorry, but you are so clueless it isn't funny. And the fact that you think "conservatism" in the US means any of that shit says you have no real understanding of it, just the fiction "conservatives" in the US like to tell themselves.
The people who want to overturn the right of women to have abortions, or entrench the right of religious people to be assholes ... they only are interested in protecting the rights of a specific group of people, but they actually wish to control the rights of others.
Most highly liberal governments are also highly oppressive? You haven't got a fucking clue what that word means.
The US Constitution is the most liberal document you can imagine.
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"Conservative" in the US means "entrenching Christianity as being the highest authority with the ability to control the lives of others according to that".
So why do people call Milton Friedman "conservative"?
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Right-wing and conservative are synonymous to many people.
Right-wing is a meaningless term - it simply means not left. That's why Patrick Buchanan, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand are all lumped together.
Conservative may mean something but it does not cross national boundaries. A conservative is Russia is not a conservative in Saudi Arabia and is not a conservative in the US. However a socialist means roughly the same in all places.
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Right wing is the same as conservative in the USA as the Republican Party has been a collation of values that were mostly similar. However. In the last 7 years in the USA that collation has been fracturing. The extremists (tea party) are pushing one direction while the religious are pulling and the fiscally moderates have to vote democrat as the other two side scare them.
Trump is just the latest group of tea party. He is the end result of a political group that was voted in to do nothing to stop Obama at
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that's like the media saying Todd Akin was a tea party candidate. He was not. He was a social conservative darling.
Interestingly enough the Todd Akin candidacy is one of the reasons many tea party
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Interestingly enough the Todd Akin candidacy is one of the reasons many tea party people want to take out the republican establishment. The republican establishment funded a candidate with no chance for winning simply to split the vote and allow Akin to win. They preferred to lose the Senate seat rather than have a tea party candidate win.
And this is why the current party system needs to be disbanded. Both parties.
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The sort of election system we have leads to a two-party system, which has been the norm for the history of the US (not always the same two parties, and parties have changed values without changing names). The Republican party currently is really struggling to hold together some diverse constituencies, and missing out on some (Muslims tend to be religious conservatives, and would be much more Republican if the Republicans accepted them freely - as it is, the first Muslim elected to Congress is a very libe
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None of that will stop people from getting sample ballots from party organizations. The city elections where I live have been nominally non-partisan, but everybody interested knows who's affiliated with Democrats and who with Republicans. In other elections, the order is randomized, which means I can't just fill in ovals across the sheet in a line anyway.
Ranked-choice voting (or some similar system) would make it safer to vote third-party since one could also effectively vote against the Democrat or Re
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I think the proper term for the US is "social conservative" to describe a desire to use the law to stick to traditional moral codes.
Traditional moral codes? So, polygyny is back on the table? Including to under-aged girls who are given no choice in the matter?
"Traditional" does not mean what most people think. Most people only want to use the last hundred years or so as "traditional" and ignore that fact that if we use a larger time frame then we end up with a lot of things that modern people don't like.
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Traditional moral codes? So, polygyny is back on the table? Including to under-aged girls who are given no choice in the matter?
"Traditional" does not mean what most people think. Most people only want to use the last hundred years or so as "traditional" and ignore that fact that if we use a larger time frame then we end up with a lot of things that modern people don't like.
Jerry Lee Lewis.
Not even the last 100 years, in the US, with well-known people.
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Conservative may mean something but it does not cross national boundaries. A conservative is Russia is not a conservative in Saudi Arabia and is not a conservative in the US.
'Conservative' simply means 'resistant to (social) change' so it is the same in different countries, even though the social arrangements they want to preserve may be very different.
However a socialist means roughly the same in all places.
Yeah, it means 'a scumbag who wants to change things'. In fact if you look up 'socialism' on wikipedia it names at least a dozen different kinds, and 'socialist economic system' has seven kinds.
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There are variations on a theme - but socialism has the means of production under government control and promotes (to various degrees) a collectivist social order in which individual freedom is subordinated to state needs.
Stalinist centrally planned command economy is only one of the seven systems listed by wikipedia, which also notes that many socialists regard it as state capitalism and not a form of socialism at all.
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The end goal of socialism and communism, at least according to the marxist idea which I adhere to, is the complete withering of the state, as it will no longer be needed.
So decrying socialists as "statists" and the like, as often done by libertarians and anarcho capitalists is highly misinformed.
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Nice strawman. Marxism says nothing about thought control.
RE: the withering away of the state and the abolishment of central planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Of course it is a utopic ideal, similar to the mythical free market.
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Shouting down opponents is an attempt at thought-control.
In addition we all know how caring the Stalin, Mao, and Che were to individual rights.
I belong to food coops and when I say that I don't like any of
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Lots of conservatives seem to have little regard for individual rights. In particular, many of them want to force my beliefs and actions to conform with whatever religion they like, and another large group want to subordinate my rights to corporate rights.
In addition we all know how caring Hitler and the militarist Japanese government were to individual rights.
Fundamentally, lots of people are authoritarian conformists who want to impose their values on everything, and this is not limited to any polit
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Patrick Buchanan was a conservative who was greatly opposed to free markets.
Ayn Rand is considered a "right-wing conservative" and she was an atheist.
Milton Friedman is also considered a right-wing conservative and he was for free markets
The term "right-wing" or conservative does not make sense if it encompasses the above three individuals. And the term makes even less sense if it includes Hitler.
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"Right-wing" makes as much sense as "left-wing", considering that that includes Che Guevara, Bernie Sanders, Karl Marx, and me. Politics is a lot more complicated than that.
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1. individuals cannot produce or trade items without government consent.
(The means of production are owned entirely by the government. No individual can hire another in a private endeavor.) The more progressive you are the less you believe that private entity has legitamcy; the more you feel that profit is theft; and the more justified you feel that proponents of such an endeavor are evil and lackies of the "rich."
2. That wealth is bad. That we
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Who thinks that people should have government consent to make things? That wasn't true in the Soviet Union, and people could make their livings by making things. They couldn't have employees, because that would be exploitation.
There are a lot of leftists, including me, who don't think wealth is bad. It appears to me that "wealth is bad" is the province of a few crackpots that many in the upper classes like to showcase to cover up the fact that they're winning the class war.
Marxism talked about the w
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Yeah. I miss the sort of conservatives we had when I was a kid. I rarely agreed with them, but I could learn from them and respect them.
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The fetus magically becomes a human by coming through a vagina.
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Time for you to realize that what is designated in the US as Liberal is a "truespeak" word for Socialist.
Conservatism doesn't have anything to do with decentralized either, there are a lot of governments around the world that are conservative and centralized.
Libertarians are most like the definition of a true Liberal, but still far from. A true liberal is like an Unicorn.
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I doubt you understand what "socialist" means, either
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I currently live under a semi-socialist government. "Everyone shall be equal" but some are more equal than others...
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'Liberal' means 'free' or 'generous'. Check a dictionary.
The opposite of 'liberal' is 'authoritarian' aka 'social conservative' in the US.
One can be liberal and conservative (eg. Libertarian) or liberal and radical (eg. democratic socialist, green, anarchist).
Historically, Liberals favoured mercantilism or capitalism over the more socially rigid feudalism.
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I hate to disappoint you, but I haven't seen significant numbers of people who call themselves liberals and match your definition, or who call themselves conservatives and match your definition of that. The self-described conservatives seem to be as happy to centralize power as the self-described liberals, although they typically want to use the power in different ways.
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A horrible example of countries that are both liberal and, I suppose, repressive. Of course you can make your point without using offensive terms in most of those places and probably just get ejected from whatever venue you were haunting so my heart does not personally bleed for thee, but the point exists that one can be both liberal and authoritarian, witness Hillary Clinton.
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You mean the hijacked meaning of Liberal, not a true Liberal.
The political meaning of Liberal in the US designates the left wing in politics because Socialist is contaminated. In Europe Liberal can apply to the right wing instead and the socialists despise them.
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A horrible example of countries that are both liberal and, I suppose, repressive. Of course you can make your point without using offensive terms in most of those places and probably just get ejected from whatever venue you were haunting so my heart does not personally bleed for thee, but the point exists that one can be both liberal and authoritarian, witness Hillary Clinton.
One can be liberal and authoritarian? Nope, if you're authoritarian it is fundamentally impossible to be a liberal. We're talking hard civics lessons and real definitions here, not the made up nonsense on TV, or from uneducated idiots in society and surely not your pundits. Leaving this here:
liberal
[lib-er-uh l, lib-ruh l]
Synonyms
Examples
Word Origin
See more synonyms on Thesaurus.com
adjective
1. favorable to progress or
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Some countries do have free speech and don't ban hate speech. This doesn't mean you're immune to social consequences, or even that what you say can't be taken into account in sentencing for crimes. However, in the US, as long as you stay on the right side of the law in other ways, hate speech is completely legal.
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