"The emphasis on technical solutions only benefits them" 

This is blatantly question-begging, right? In that it is only true if looking for technical solutions doesn't lead to safe models, which is one of the main points in dispute between you versus people with a higher opinion of the work inside on safety strategy. Of course, it is true that if you don't have your own opinion already, you shouldn't trust people who work at leading labs (or want to) on the question of whether technical safety work will help, for the reasons you give. But "people have an incentive to say X" isn't actually evidence that X is false, it's just evidence you shouldn't trust them. If all people outside labs thought technical safety work was useless that would be one thing. But I don't think that is actually true, it seems people with relevant expertise are divided even outside the labs. Now of course, there are subtler ways in which even people outside the labs might be incentivized to play down the risks. (Though they might also have other reasons to play them up.) But even that won't get you to "therefore technical safety is definitely useless"; it's all meta, not object-level. 

There's also a subtler point that even if "do technical safety work on the inside" is unlikely to work, it might still be the better strategy if confrontational lobbying from the outside is unlikely to work too (something that I think is more true now Trump is in power, although Musk is a bit of a wildcard in that respect.) 

German has always had laws allowing this, for the extremely obvious reason that Germany once fairly elected a fascist government that ended democracy, created a totalitarian dictatorship, started the most destructive war in history*, and committed genocide. Understandably, the designers of (West) Germany's post-war constitution wanted to stop this happening again. These laws have been used to ban neo-Nazi parties at least 4 times since 1945, so even the idea of actually using them is not a new panic response to the AfD's popularity. If the laws make Germany a flawed democracy now, then arguably it always has been. Incidentally hardcore communist elements in Die Linke have also been surveilled by the German security services for suspected opposition to the democratic constitution,  so it's not true that only right-wing extremism is restricted in Germany. (Die Linke were cleared because it was decided the Stalinists were only a small % of the party with little influence.)

In fact of course, it is at the very least not clear the laws are bad even from a purely democracy-centric perspective and ignoring the substantive badness of Nazism. It is true I think that an election where you can vote for anti-democratic fascists is more democratic in itself. But it is of course also true that "fair elections except fascists are banned" is more democratic than "fascists dictatorship". If the risk of the later is high in a completely free election, them a mildly restricted election that bans the fascists can easily be the democracy-maximizing move in the medium term. I think it is fair to say that in early 50s West Germany, a country where a decently-sized % of voters had been enthusiastic Nazis, the risk of fascist takeover at the ballot box was more than theoretical. (Though admittedly the result would probably have been an American military takeover of Germany, not a revived Nazi dictatorship, but that would also have been a very bad outcome.)

Now, maybe what you think is outrageous isn't that banning parties is allowed (or isn't just that), but that the accusation that the AfD are anti-democratic extremists is obviously false and pretextual. Two points about that.

 Firstly, they haven't been banned yet! (And personally I suspect they won't be, and I'm fairly strongly inclined to think they shouldn't be, though I'd change my mind on that if Hocke or his faction captured the leadership.**) German law doesn't allow the government to just decide a party is extremist and ban them. They have to provide evidence in a court of law that they really do count as dangerously extreme by specific standards. Now maybe that process will in fact be a total farce with terrible standards of evidence, but since it hasn't happened yet, I don't see any strong reason to think it will be right now. Of course, it is possible that the legal definitions of anti-democratic extremism are badly drafted and could be used to ban a non-fascist party in a procedurally fair way. Maybe that is true, I am not an expert on the laws. (But frankly I have some doubt that you know whether this true either.)

Now you might say it is anti-democratic for the government to threatening the AfD with a ban if they are clearly not a fascist threat to democracy, even if there is little chance of the ban getting through court. And yeah, I agree with the conditional claim here: that would be a very bad violation of liberal and democratic norms. But I don't think it is clear that the antecedent is true. Bjorn Hocke the AfD's leader in Thuringia seems to have been a neo-Nazi in a very literal sense 10 or 15 years ago, and I've never seen any evidence that his views have changed. In particular, he was filmed chanting at a neo-Nazi rally in Dresden in 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/29/the-trial-of-bjorn-hocke-the-real-boss-of-germany-far-right I think this sufficient evidence to show that Hocke was very probably a real Nazi in 2010, and that Nazis generally want to abolish democracy. (If you doubt The Guardian's word that it really was a Nazi rally, note that Hocke's supporters don't themselves seem to deny this. The defence of him quoted in the article is that he only went to the rally "to observe", not that it wasn't a Nazi rally.) On the other hand, Hocke doesn't currently lead the AfD, Alice Weidel does, and I think she has tried to kick Hocke out before. I haven't seen any evidence that she is anything more than a very conservative but democratic politcian. So I think it might not currently be correct to class them as Nazis as a whole, and for that reason, I think a ban is probably wrong. But I think the presence of a significant Nazi faction downgrades suggesting they should be banned from outrageous to merely not correct.

*Technically you could argue the Japanese actually started it when they invaded China, I suppose.

**If you care about track records, I am a Good Judgement superforecaster, and I gave Trump a higher chance if winning the popular vote than most of the other supers did.

https://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/28/nordic-socialism-is-realer-than-you-think/

At least 8 years ago though, Finland and Norway had elatively high levels of state ownership of enterprises, much higher than the US. If that's not a much higher level of real socialism, it's hard to say what is. That suggests to me that whatever the Economic Freedom Index measures it's not how little socialism there is in a country. Nonetheless, it could be the freedom not the socialism that's responsible for Finland and Norway doing well, of course.

Norway is a petro state so arguably it doesn't really count, but Finland isn't. 

"anticapitalists often think that we should have very heavy taxation or outright wealth confiscation from rich people, even if this would come at the expense of aggregate utilitarian welfare"

What's the evidence for this? I think even if it is true, it is probably misleading, in that most leftists also just reject the claims mainstream economists make about when taxing the rich will reduce aggregate welfare (not that there is one single mainstream economist view on that anyway in all likelihood.) This sounds to me more like an American centre-right caricature of how socialists think, than something socialists themselves would recognize. 

I'm not sure I subscribe to any form of utilitarianism, and I'm not sure what my view in population ethics is. But I am confident that the mere fact that a life would be below average well-being does not make adding it to the world a bad thing. 

Thanks.

A partly underlying issue here is that it's not clear that the consequentialist/non-consequentialist division is actually all that deep or meaningful if you really think about it. The facts about "utility" in a consequentialist theory, are plausibly ultimately just a kind of short-hand for facts about preferability between  outcomes that could be stated without any mention of numbers/utility/maximizing (at least if we allow infinitely long statements).  But for non-consequentialist theories, you can also derive a preferability relation on outcomes (where what you do is part of the outcome, not just the results of your action), based on what the theory says you should do in a forced choice. For at least some such theories that look "deontic", in the sense of having rights that you shouldn't violate, even if it leads to higher net well-being, the resulting preferability ranking might happen to obey the 4 axioms and be VNM-rational. For such a deontic theory you could then express the theory as maximizing a relevant notion of utility if you really wanted to (at least if you can cardinalize the resulting ordering of actions by prefertability, via looking at preferences between chance-y prospects I don't know enough to know if meeting the axioms guarantees you can do this.) So any consequentialist theory is sort of really a number/utility-free theory about preferability in disguise, and at least some very deontic feeling theories are in some sense equivalent to consequentialist theories phrased in terms of utility. 

Or so it seems to me anyway, I'm certainly not a real expert on this stuff. 

People don't like angry political comments here, they prefer a dispassionate tone. They also generally don't like stuff that sounds like "left-wing activist", even though most people here don't identify as "right-wing" but as left/centre-left/centre/libertarian. Not to mention that whilst most people here are not pro-Trump, probably a small minority are, and they can strong downvote if they want to, and if you get no upvotes, that means low Karma even if most people aren't bothered by what you said. Also, I think the Musk Nazi salute thing reads as "silly media bullshit" even to a lot of people who don't like Trump, because they don't think Musk is a "real fascist"*. Musk probably tends to get (too much of) the benefit of the doubt round here, because he shares a lot of preoccupations with the futurist, existential risk wing of EA, and because he is idolized in Silicon Valley as a great man (something that predates his public turn to the far-right.) 

*(I think Musk is a real fascist, but I still kind of feel like that, because I don't think he was actually signaling that he secretly loves Hitler, he was just trying to offend for shits and giggles. Very obnoxious, but not necessarily a sign that he is secretly working towards some sort of Nazi-style regime behind the scenes.)  

FTX was late in 2022, but nonetheless 2022 already shows most of the drop in new donors. 

Is there any pattern of behaviour that couldn't be interpreted as maximizing utility for some utility function? If not, even if vNM is self-evident it's not actually much of a constraint. 
 

Maximize average welfare is a bad policy goal: https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/#:~:text=The%20average%20view%2C%20variable%20value,lives%20with%20positive%20well%2Dbeing.