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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

We just need to start with better self governance, exploration, review & moderation & justice. I imagine most of our best futures starting as voluntary, non-binding, additive/annotative atop existing channels & forums. Systems of peers & juries.

More than just momentary summary judgements & things which help us reflect & ascertain how others are seeing us.

Real democraccy, when done well & with regard, is about an promotion of freedom, expanding liberty. This article focuses like so much of the day does on regulation, on accepting as given the confined & prisons that happen to be about, corproate run, & projects development of additional new constraints to guide things a certain way. Im not opposed to exploring ways forward here, but my hope for where democracy happens is elsewhere, lies in thise wanting to understand & share the world & themselves better, more openly, & working forwards newer mediums.

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Can an idealistic libertarian view survive in a larger and larger world? Bad actors can abuse such a system more easily with more anonymity, and with a larger population, you're going to have more bad apples.

When you claim something like "real democracy" leads to better freedoms and the expansion of liberty, how can someone come along and claim "real socialism" leads to better freedoms and the expansion of liberty, and one is immediately rejected while the other is expected to just be accepted as true?

Is it me or are democracy and socialism not opposites? They are two different philosophies that can and usually do co-exist. Socialism is based around means of production, while a democracy is a system of government which dictates how that government is run.

They’re somewhat orthogonal to each other, but they aren’t opposites.

In practice, relatively few socialist/communist regimes had what could be charitably described as democracy (with the exception of the Nordic countries), but when the political philosophy really gained steam in the early 20th century, many of the branches of socialist philosophy were rooted in democratic control, of all society. Even during the Russian revolution, socialist takeover mean democracy within the government, the factories, and the military. It was only later once the Bolsheviks consolidated power that reality shifted away from that, under the shadow power structure of the party.

Can you think of any example in history where a socialist revolution didn't get taken over by a Bolshevik like group creating a large state apparatus and authoritarianism instead of democracy? I can't and I don't think it's right to ascribe democratic leanings to a philosophy that has never had any except for perhaps very fleeting and unstable amounts of time (conceding it is a philosophy for the point of discussion even though it is really more of a religion).

Most revolutions end in authoritarian states, frankly. When a group is biased towards a will to power, that tends to give them a leg up when there’s a power vacuum.

As I alluded to previously, though, the Nordic countries were largely governed by socialist parties for much of the 20th century. They didn’t devolve into dictatorships.

They didn't start with a revolution either, and they moved away from much of that socialism stuff towards a strong market economy with lots of social services within a few decades of moving towards socialist ideas.

Socialism is democratic, generally. People vote under any type of socialism I've heard of, maybe too much.

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