21 sats \ 2 replies \ @cozy OP 27 Feb 2022 \ parent \ on: What to do with Putin and the ignorant bitcoin
I'm a poltical layman, but I'll try to reply to the best my ability.
NATO is an institution that was designed to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union itself was an institutional extension of Marxist ideas.
One of the most important Marxist ideas is that humans aren't individually rational, so the collective good (often, then, defined by a few elites) is the "greater good." Here, suffering becomes a way to virtue signal, and when that happens we have a much bigger problem.
While the Soviet Union has ended, those Marxist epistemological ideas about the inferiority of individuals persist through Putinism.
Let's take this current meme for example:
'Put sunflower seeds in your pockets so they grow on Ukraine soil when you die.'
If one reads the full transcript, what spoke to me was not the woke woman predicting flowers growing from her and the solider's own corpses, but the solider's fallible statement:
That's not true, it is possible that their conversation lead to the end of the war—to a fair election of a new leader in Russia. In another universe, it did.
But I digress, What does this have to do with NATO? NATO is unfortunately becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if Putin thought more of himself as an individual, he would have had the knowledge realize that he was about to pull a Catch-22. But he didn't. And now it's everyone's job to prevent this ignorance from exacerbating indefinitely.
One thing worth taking seriously is that money is a form of communication. All forms of communication are imperfect in that there is no way to communicate so as to not be misinterpreted. So, because of its imperfect claims about value, people tend to think of money as one of the worst forms of communication. Even economists refer to their own field as "The Dismal Science".
However, silencing (censoring transactions) in any medium is akin to those same Marxist ideas about the inferiority of people--we must be able to silence because people can only speak "for the greater good" that a few elites can define. Insert any Yoda-like quote about fear here. But, part of the reason the study of money is considered 'The Dismal Science' must certainly be related to this fear.
This becomes the same self-fulfilling prophecy. But we now have a new voluntary institution without those restrictions--Bitcoin. That means Russians can use Bitcoin to avoid monetary censorship (but likely not value, on account of I, for example, don't want those Oligarch's Bitcoin), and that's a good thing, particularly on a micro-scale. Bitcoin seems like it could be one good contributor long-term for shrinking the need for NATO/military. But, Bitcoin is only as strong as our communications infrastructure. I'd worry about attacks on Starlink satellites, for example.
One of the most important Marxist ideas is that humans aren't individually rational, so the collective good (often, then, defined by a few elites) is the "greater good."
This approach appears to be adopted by the west based on how we approached COVID and more recently in Canada with the freedom convoy. The Canadian government has put property rights to the side and frozen people's Bank accounts. I can't see this limited to Canada. Western countries will implement this in due course.
As a result, it's two pigs arguing over the trough and the only choice us plebs have is which lipstick do we prefer?
Thank God for bitcoin. The more of us that withdraw our labour from the fiat system, the more power the individual will have over the collective, be it a nation state or an alliance
reply
Indeed, totally agree with you. Hence the intense pushback from citizens all over the world. And yeah, thanks for Bitcoin.
Regarding hog cosmetics: The difference between the US/Canada/EU and Russia is that in the West we celebrate criticism, we have a Tradition of Criticism--which goes all the way back to people like Galileo, Copernicus, Martin Luther and, hell, Mark Twain. There's no method of criticism in Russia (or China, or North Korea) that isn't intermediated. If a solider asks questions, they get killed, if they defect, their family gets killed (or silenced in some way). Bitcoin, again, is a digital extension of that Tradition of Criticism where all Western progress derives from.
I agree with the negative points about centralized governance, but I also see more reasons to be optimistic than ever.
reply