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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I have a few since I’m a historian:

    The revolutions of 1848 Europe, particularly Berlin or Paris. The atmosphere in that year was confusing, conflicting, and explosive. People wanted generally better lives, and put their own on the line to see it happen in numbers that shock us today.

    The fall of the T’ang dynasty and the early Song dynasty. I’d love to see if the Naito Hypothesis holds up as a viewer of that time and space.

    The Atlantic Revolutions between 1770s to 1800. So American, Haitian, French, etc. The birth of nationhood (in Europe), a new consciousness found its footing, and what it meant to have liberty, to be human, and to be unfree were changing.

    And Japan in the 1930’s. How fascism developed in the country. It’s a question that’s big in Japanese history, and not so clear today.




  • Almost every comment I’ve seen sees the future as hopeless and I’m going to largely chalk that up to the postmodernism/realism consciousness in our society at this time period.

    I think the future will be a utopia, and there isn’t a long term (I mean centuries or millenia long developments) reason to think otherwise. The idea of utopia has pushed civilization to confront power structures and create new ones, to rethink what was impossible, too difficult to accomplish, etc. The many rights, freedoms, and ideas that many around the world take for granted today began as people envisioning a utopia and trying to make it happen. These ideas can’t be done away with as Alexis De Tocqueville saw.

    Right now there are problems for sure, and I personally think liberty and egality are only a parody of utopia at this point, but that’ll change over a long time.

    Human civilization is only 6000 years old! We’re still working with the brain of primitive humans, and we aren’t even toddlers yet in the grand lifespan of Earth. I think people tend to forget that sometimes.

    We’ll get to a better place, and our consciousness is always changing to confront the problems we face today (biosphere collapse, resource hoarding, infighting, etc).

    Democracy took centuries to develop coherently, and even then it failed MANY times at first. But look at it now.



  • I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say, are the democrats not friendly with ANY big businesses? Is the extreme right wing of US conservatives not motivated by money (Donald Trump is often thought of as a successful venture capitalist, the amount of money funneled out during his presidency, etc…)?

    Russia is one of the most inequal countries in the world in terms of wealth distribution, and for decades now oligarchs in Russia have gone hand in hand with the state in eroding any form of democracy and exploiting what freedom those citizens do have.

    So, can you really say democracy can exist with money?