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drethelin comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong
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Most neo reactionaries I read believe in something called Exit whereby if you want you can get the hell out. Contrast this to the ussr or how America will continue to tax you for something like 10 years if you want to emigrate.
Exiting isn't cost-free, though. Most people won't even exit by moving to a different state in the US, just because of all the direct and indirect costs of moving.
this is true, and one reason why I'm not a neoreactionary. But I'd still rather be deported than gulagged.
I think you're confusing progressives with Stalinists.
I think you're confusing "responding to a point someone is trying to make" and "making fun of someone".
Maybe the average progressive has neither the power or the inclination to put me in a gulag but the side of things that they historically have lent their power and rhetoric to sure does. I don't feel it's particularly likely to happen in the near future but I also recognize that no one seemed to have predicted the outcome ahead of time the last time.
Or to put it another way: Stalinists are on a continuum with progressives. They are not a different kind of thing.
I would probably put it as "The more power progressives get, the more they tend to evolve towards stalinists". After all you've got to protect the people against the horrors of capitalism.
Fair point. My comment was unnecessarily snarky.
There have been sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to support Soviet communism. There have also been significant sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to vociferously oppose Soviet communism. Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus and George Orwell -- a few big names that come to mind immediately -- all had political views that would probably classify them as "progressive" in today's political climate. In addition, progressives have been at the forefront of most movements to expand civil liberties in the 20th century.
If you just focus on progressivism's criticisms of capitalism and conservatism, then yeah, it doesn't seem like a different kind of thing from Stalinism. But that ignores another prominent tendency in the history of the movement -- a strong strain of civil libertarianism (the ACLU, for instance, is regarded by many as a progressive institution) -- which is qualitatively distinct from Stalinism.
I'm not sure what you mean by "progressives", but it seems to me that "liberals" or "social-democrats" are actually closer to libertarians in terms of personal freedoms, while Soviet-style socialists are closer to fascists and theocrats on these issues.
The political spectrum has at least two dimensions: personal freedoms and economic freedoms.
I was under the impression that "Exit" was the means by which they were going to establish their own utopia, that is, by exiting whichever one they were living in currently, rather than a fundamental right for us unlucky proles.