It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Colonialism peaked in 19th century when countries doing it werent liberal democracies. Universal suffrage for men became thing only at the end of century. But widespread demands started in 1848. Before that voting was restricted to income/tax/property.
Not all european liberal democracies had colonies. But it is true that those countries that had them, didn’t decolonize after liberalization.
Oh, lying. Well, that makes the most sense, really.
No, liberalism (“liberal democracy” is a bit of a misnomer) did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth century just because you want to pretend it only counts as liberalism when it includes you. As I said in my original comment, liberalism has always used the rhetoric of freedom and equality while enforcing fundamentally unequal and oppressive systems of power. No, it doesn’t start being “real” liberalism when non-property owning men get the right go vote (which, source on thar weirdly specific and inaccurate 1848 date? Go look up Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and -30s, it was something widely demanded from the beginning of the United States). By this merit, there is no such thing as liberalism today, because it isn’t an idealized version of itself yet; literally a rationalizing narrative to construct the violence of liberalism not as an inevitability or necessity of this system, but an unfortunate failure of it to live up to the “real” liberal values.
I could tell this was some Euro pro-imperialism narrative before you got to that second section too. This is the kind of historical revisionism they typically deploy to make this brutal system seem coincidental with rather than emergent from the violence they inflicted on the world. No, liberalism does not only need to exist in states that we associate with colonialism (even if it did, it wouldn’t be accurate to act like borders stopped material interests in a system of colonialism). Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason, which is the same reason why the system of knowledge production on race, gender, ability, ethnicity, and humanity that we are forced to engage with happens to construct human life around the imperatives of that system. Could you explain how you’re conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?
To others who come across this, this user is the exact kind of liberal conservative I’m talking about, and go figure, they’re a Euro like I said they’d be.
Why rudeness?
I’m not spreading any pro-imperialism narrative, where did you get that from. Its a fact that european empires colonized world when those states were feudal. Before that during middle ages there were settlers from german lands towards the east. Probably inspired lebensraum ideas. And I bring up 1848 because during spring in that year many revolutions happened with liberal demands. And empires existed before that.
And the reason is? I don’t quite follow.
Maybe because I’m from central Europe?
One common idea of birth of liberalism is that it comes from industrialization. But this doesn’t hold because Russia and China are perfect counterexamples. I was more convinced that it comes from evolution of Western Christian philosophy. I read some french author for supportive arguments and an indian anti-colonialist one which also supports this argument but of course from the opposite.
So all in all I would rather examine philosophical currents in Europe when trying to understand liberalism.
As for colonialism. Being product of feudal logic makes great sense to me
The rudeness is on account of the arrogance and pro-Euro misinformation; well deserved. Please produce a single source. You’re talking like you have a working understanding of these things, but are saying things that are fundamentally incorrect historically and within discourses of political philosophy.