Hehe, yeah.... It's totally gone nuts here, lol.

Personally, I think the supposed liberal/conservative divide is a false one. I think that, as you mention, the real battle of ideology is between egalitarianism and authoritarianism. Suffice to say, I am a complete anti-authoritarian, which I assume you've gathered from my previous rantings, lol. I mean, I don't think anarchism could ever actually work in reality (and would probably just lead to authoritarianism without rules in place to curtail such authoritarianism), but I think the original concept of how the US federal and state governments were supposed to work (not what it has turned into in the present day) is the closest we've ever come to that.

What usually gets me in trouble is when I say that I believe that preserving egalitarianism (at least in the US) has become a conservative position.

I can't speak for the Nordic countries, but I get the feeling that the problems are subtly different between Finland and the US. I get the feeling that the culture in Finland is fairly homogenous, and I think that helps everyone get along. I mean, you don't seem to have as much of different cultures proclaiming that THEY are the best, and everyone else should change to suit them, or be purged or whatever. I feel like the big problem with the US right now is that the country is so big, but the culture is fundamentally and radically different in different regions of the country. That wouldn't be a problem if most of the political power still lay with the individual State governments. But for the past 150 years or so (post civil-war, and the "new-deal" era in particular), the central federal government has gradually gathered more and more of the power into itself, and the power of the individual state governments has waned. As a result, whichever culture manages to get enough votes to control the federal government can tell everyone else how to live. If you look at the election map from last year, you can see the small progressive (I don't like the term 'liberal'; it has lost its meaning completely; in our western culture, we are all technically liberals, since we believe in human rights and the democratic process and all that) areas on the west coast and north-east (which is where most of the population is concentrated), and then the mass of middle-America that is predominantly conservative and/or libertarian. This wouldn't be a problem the way our government was originally conceived, where the only valid function of the federal government was to prevent the states from violating citizens' human rights (it wasn't even allowed to collect taxes to begin with), and everything else was left up to the individual states (incidentally, this would also prevent the US president from engaging in foreign wars without the approval of congress, which I think would be great to get back to as well; I don't think the US has any business whatsoever trying to act like the world's police force or whatever). But now with the vast power concentrated in the federal government, it is a one-size-fits all government for everyone, and we have no choice to endlessly fight about it, instead of just leaving each other alone to live how we want in our various regions.

But one positive thing that has come out of all of this, though is.... Traditionally in the US, it is the left that has been in favor of a strong and powerful centralized federal government, but now with Trump in office they are suddenly rediscovering state's rights again, lol. So I am hopeful that if nothing else, when it is all over and done, we will have at least taken some power back from the federal government and returned it to the states. Regardless of whether or not I agree with what the federal government is currently doing, I still think that the one-size-fits-all huge central government across the huge geographical area and diverse cultures of the US is wrong and unsustainable.

That's not what my original thought was though, lol. I was instead going to talk about how I think egalitarianism and individualism are very closely linked with each other, as are collectivism and authoritarianism. Or at least in the way that they play out over time. But I think I need to just wait on that until the public discourse has calmed down a bit, lol.

So let's completely change the subject! XD As an indie game developer, how do you keep yourself on-task and motivated? I seem to noodle in a million different things, but never finish anything. My game development interests lie in trying to recreate the feel of 1980s-era tabletop OSR dungeon crawls on the computer, as well as in interactive fiction (though that branch of the hobby seems to have been taken over by hostile pseudo-intellectual academics who take themselves waaaay too seriously, nowadays, so I can't handle it anymore, lol). Some of my garbage is collected on http://www.dizzydragon.net/