You definitely can't distinguish between Bitcoin and Altcoins (Cryptocurrency), there is no monkey jpegs in BTC even tho Bitcoin blockchain can be used to make NFT, but most of the time it was used for .btc domain. Bitcoin is very different with any democracy that exist today, most of the democracy nowadays are still very centralized all the policies executed and made by central entity, this means that all the policies need to secure the interest of the entity, while bitcoin is ture decentralized everything that is happened and is going to happened is because the market and community. What you are describing is centralized altcoin and we know most of the bitcoin enthusiast is against that centralization used of blockchain

What do they gain from raising the fees?

I think a simple explanation is that people are paying fees for ordinals and such because they either hope to make profitable trades, or because they are rich crypto investors who can afford to burn money on collectibles.

And I doubt that nfts can drive the fees up to $1,000 but they can certainly drive it to $5-40 for short periods of time, and that's already highly annoying. We talk so much about Bitcoin helping the economies of poor countries and banking the unbanked, well good luck convincing them that they have to pay their daily salary for a single transaction fee.

my view,
bitcoin 2009-2013 was western liberal democracy
but dev politics and business sponsorships got in the way after 2013 and bitcoin has changed

USER nodes dont get a vote no more.. thanks to "backward compatibility"
its now economic nodes(services and exchanges) and core devs that sway pools to do things

the github of bitcoin clients was more open to people making personal clients not branded "core".. but now they want to moderate and control the core github and call anything not core a cheap knock off/fraud

things have changed

That's on paper and what the advertisement says. But in reality and in actual definition democracy is all about brainwash. Those who invented it define democracy as "convincing masses that the dog shit they're eating tastes like candy".

If you look at the societies with "democracy", there is always an unchanging regime that nobody voted for (eg. they call it deep state in US to make it sound like a conspiracy theory) and has full control of everything behind the scene and pulls all the strings.
The most important part and parcel of democracy is the two sides that look like they are against each other (red and blue) and their purpose is to keep the the regime intact.
It works like this: one side wins the election (eg. democrats) and takes a shit on the country (on economy, health care, pensions, etc.) and the other side (republicans) attract the support of the angry people by redirecting all the blame on the first side (democrats) instead of the regime itself. Then in the next election they win instead and take control of the country to do the same exact shit as the first party and this time the first party (democrats) blames those in office and attracts support creating an endless cycle until people rise up and start a regime change!

In a democracy all types of freedom are also defined as whatever the regime likes. For example in "liberal economy" they tell you that you are free to do whatever you like with your capital but in reality it means you can do whatever the regime likes. Otherwise you can be Blackrock or MSCI and want to be free to take your capital to China and invest in their rapidly growing economy but since the regime doesn't like that they will prevents you and even takes you to court threatening to shut you down.

We do not have that in Bitcoin, the "constitution" which is the consensus rules don't change and people don't vote on who enforces those rules periodically (like 4 years) and the power is not in the hands of a centralized entity.
Although there are traces of the same brainwash seen in the community.

This is the proof of what I said about brainwash!

I don't know when and how a small portion of the community started referring to preventing exploit as censorship! What's worse is that we've been doing it for as long as Bitcoin existed. We've been preventing a lot of different ways people can easily spam the chain, there is a long list of the in standard rules, and yet this small number of people are excluding the most recent exploit Ordinals attack is using and refers to any effort at preventing it as "censorship"!!!

Censorship is defined as preventing anyone from using this peer-to-peer cash system to send money to anyone they like. It is NOT defined as preventing people from abusing the system and exploiting the protocol to turn Bitcoin into a cloud storage.

I disagree. I don't think this can ever happen (fees go up and remain up) because it would kill bitcoin and it will be replaced by something else that does not have the same problems (like being easy to be exploited by something like Ordinals and be attacked without the community lifting a finger to prevent it).

Fees can always be adjusted and instead of 1 sat/vb being minimum we could have 1 sat/100vb being the minimum rate.

CBDC will be centralized and be considered a shitcoin like Tether is in the decentralized community. Regardless of what it is backed by.

An interesting analogy that the OP mentioned is freedom, but I feel this way about freedom in the crypto space, where we think about our personal rights being unchecked but still not avoiding them being constrained by the legal corridor as Bitcoin increasingly develops. There will need to be separate regulations to link it with social life, or vice versa, society must take its course of action, and that will certainly cause conflicts.

We all want freedom, even Western countries talk a lot about this idea, but the reality is that perfection is not realistic when people themselves have their own conflicts. Incidentally, when I first listened to the podcast again, it was about the economic system as well as the control of a country, perhaps ideally this is very compelling to aim for, but the way it works is still subject to limitations on cognitive bias.

All the scenarios you put forward for Bitcoin scalability problem are far from the realistic scenario. It is true that Bitcoin transaction fees are currently high, but the blocks are almost full and confirmation times are instantaneous for large transactions. If you want to send $1,000 or more, Bitcoin fees are low (unless the number of inputs are Extremely large)
There are many suggestions for solutions to this problem and for small transactions, in which case you may not have to pay a lot of fees, such as the lightning network and side networks.

Yes, Bitcoin and democracy both live on freedom and little or no censorship, but lets not make things too easy. The large number of "monkey jpegs," which is a clever code word for small trades, is a problem, but it can be solved. Thats the same as saying democracy fails because of a few bad decisions about policy.

Bitcoin's resilience is its core strength. Even though network overflow or BlackRock-style plots are possible, the fact that it is decentralized makes it hard to manipulate. Its not perfect, no; its a work in progress. As for the $1000 transaction fee scenario, its speculative, but it underscores the importance of solutions like Lightning Network, despite its flaws.

And CBDCs backed by Bitcoin? Interesting, but lets face it: CBDCs are the exact opposite of what Bitcoin stands for: they are not controlled by a central authority. They're, frankly, trash. Bitcoin is the best at what it does because it is on the way to becoming the best answer.

I don't think we have any democracies that have zero censorship, surveillance, restrictions etc. Even strong Western democracies (and the USA isn't among them, it's usually classified as a flawed democracy) have their issues and restrictions (including quotas of immigrants they accept). If there's some censorship, it doesn't automatically mean that it's getting totalitarian. There's a very wide spectrum between a full democracy and a totalitarian regime.
I'd support some restrictions on Bitcoin which are meant to protect it from crazy fee spikes like the one we're currently experiencing, as long as it's actually doable. Let's not forget that transaction fees jumped from time to time in the past, well before Ordinals and stuff.

If everyone who bought Bitcoin are understand with the purpose of Bitcoin was created, we can combat against the centralization. Unfortunately most people who have Bitcoin are don't care with that, they don't mind to use CEX to buy and hold their coins.

As the government have a power and only the minority are against about the centralization, for sure we already lose before the war begin.