I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. It's an absolutely brutal book that made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats, even in our current world. Even if they don't quite match the suffering of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine under the power of autocrats.
When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.
Thirded, it fundamentally changed the way I understand government. Would also recommended The Road to Unfreedom for some context around current geopolitics.
I'm not the person you asked, so I can only answer for myself. Previously, I had viewed Nazism as more of an aberration that overtook one society, and was the sole cause of the brutality of the Holocaust. Learning about the other forms of brutality that played out over the exact same geographic area, from a political direction that claims to be the arch-enemy of Nazism, points out that people's political representations are often quite distinct from the material effects they enact on people's lives. The Holodomor was not widely reported, and in fact covered up by the few Western journalists that witnessed it, and in the informational blackhole caused by Stalinism and the abduction, imprisonment, torture, and frequent death of anybody who stood out, much less spoke of the massive damage caused by Stalin, well, the full nature of what happened was not visible to the world until the fall of the USSR. The eyewitnesses to the starvation were often silent to their own natural death a decade after the fall of the USSR, due to the depth and depravity of the oppression of expression that happened in the USSR.
Basically the book points out the same lessons that Hannah Arendt and others have been pointing out for a long time, that such mass death of innocent people is quite possible even outside the strange ideologies of Nazis. The conditions for evil are quite endemic to the human condition, especially in those that abandon truth in pursuit of political strength.
Thanks for responding that makes a lot of sense. I think you're right about that, and if we view these movements as cults rather than political movements then it starts to make sense how different projects / ideologies can end up at the same conclusion of destruction.
> When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.
This same phenomenon has hit me like a ton of bricks over the last few years.
I spend half my time learning about humanity's past and the other half trying to keep up with the burgeoning AI explosion. It's a little disorienting tbh.
> I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it.
Ditto:
> In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis delineates the "bloodlands" as a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia; in this region, Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed beyond what each regime would have inflicted independently.[1]
[…]
> The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".[4][5]
Bloodlands is more of a history of what happens after unrestrained autocrats implement blood hungry murderous societies. The linked article is an excerpt from the same author's book on his thoughts of what to do to prevent authoritarians taking control and destroying all opposition, and I have not read it except this excerpt.
IMHO it's far easier to report on the history than to get counter factual reasoning correct enough to propose preventative measures. That said it's good to have a plan, but the plan must adapt to reality and our view of reality is never perfect.
This is why studying history is important. It makes clear the dividing line between systems that use violence as a legitimate political tool and those that don’t.
> violence is the fundamental polical tool of the ruling class
A Weberian state is defined by its monopoly on violence [1]. So yes, the state--and by extension, almost by definition, its rulers--will use violence to further their state's political aims. (Mandatory Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other means.)
That's very different from people within a state using violence to further political aims. Politics as a civic activity collapses when the population and its rulers fail to appreciate the difference between the two, which is why perhaps the singular question in designing governments throughout the ages has been how to enable rulers to deploy violence to further the state's collective aims while disabling them from doing so further their personal aims. (Althusser's simplification of the ruling class into a monolith is analytically enabling, but the political scientific equivalent of a spherical cow. You see a similar mistake made by foreigners describing others' political systems; no man rules alone, and no man rules unopposed.)
Also, when the political systems break down, i.e. personal political aims begin being openly pursued through violence, the order of impact starts with the poor. Even in the French Revolution, most of the rich escaped. In modern violent revolutions, the rulers have tended to leave with their wealth intact and egos bruised; the poor lose their lives and the middle class become the new poor.
I think you have misunderstood the term "ruling class". There is only one ruling class in a country, and the ruling class is not a monolithic entity. It is composed of different interest groups. But ultimately, these interest groups belong to the same class.
In a rough analogy, there're many companies, sometimes they unit, sometimes they fight against each other, but they all speak for the board, who rules the company, just an analogy
and, there're no "personal aims" in politics, personal aims can never play a decisive role in politics
Even in the most centralized empires, the emperor could only rely on a specific political group of the ruling class and could not achieve his political goals alone
I found many HN users thinking like this, "what if Xi want to ..." "Putin decided to do ...", in fact, before they do everything, they has to unite at least 100 others, and should be on behalf of majority of the ruling class
> a state using violence to further political aims
all states using violence to further political aims, otherwise there'll not be polices, prisons and army, even the state itself
> Also, when the political systems break down, i.e. personal political aims begin being openly pursued through violence, the order of impact starts with the poor.
personal rebellion is not revolution, because it's not organized, let alone class revolution, black panther movement is more like a class revolution
speak of "violent revolutions", althusser talked abt this:
> When the bourgeoisie is politically in a position to use violence, when it uses it, then the masses can only respond by revolutionary violence. But if, at the end of a long class struggle and heavy sacrifices, the balance of forces is found, in some particular place, to be both highly favourable to the proletariat and united workers, and highly unfavourable to world imperialism and the national bourgeoisie, then a peaceful and even democratic transition becomes possible and necessary.
> ultimately, these interest groups belong to the same class
This is the spherical cow. Different members of a ruling class have different motivations in respect of how the ruling class interfaces with the society it's in.
MLK Jr., JFK and Hoover each belonged to our elite in the 60s. They had vastly different interests, to the point that they were sometimes in open conflict with each other.
> there're no "personal aims" in politics, personal aims can never play a decisive role in politics
This is obvious nonsense. Individuals have pet policy aims. When they're particularly powerful, the system indulges these quirks.
Individual elites also have different levels of respect for constitutional order, drive, risk tolerance, et cetera. Most importantly, individuals typically (though not always) want to maximise their own power; the collecive, on the other hand, typically (though not always) wants to constrain them.
> When the bourgeoisie is politically in a position to use violence, when it uses it, then the masses can only respond by revolutionary violence
The prediction is when the bourgeoisie has the opportunity to stage violent rebellion, it always does? Or always should? Again, this is Althusser playing with sociological lego blocks in a vacuum when empirical reality paints a messier picture. Predicting civic strife isn't as simple as predicting whether it's possible. Humans aren't automotons; they also need to be motivated to engage the severe (and constantly changing) risk-reward calculus that is violent revolution. Particularly in the modern era, when it basically means the elite can leave unscathed while the revolutionaries must pick up the pieces.
> MLK Jr., JFK and Hoover each belonged to our elite in the 60s. They had vastly different interests, to the point that they were sometimes in open conflict with each other.
that why I said 'the ruling class is not a monolithic entity', class is not political factions, but all political factions belong to a certain social class
this is a classical misunderstanding abt marxism, although it was explained thousands times
"The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena."
and if you look into history - the topic we are discussing about - History is, in fact, surprisingly new.
"It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them – the so-called financial aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts."
"Owing to its financial straits, the July Monarchy was dependent from the beginning on the big bourgeoisie, and its dependence on the big bourgeoisie was the inexhaustible source of increasing financial straits. It was impossible to subordinate the administration of the state to the interests of national production without balancing the budget, without establishing a balance between state expenditures and revenues. And how was this balance to be established without limiting state expenditures – that is, without encroaching on interests which were so many props of the ruling system – and without redistributing taxes – that is, without shifting a considerable share of the burden of taxation onto the shoulders of the big bourgeoisie itself?"
"The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the first and last parliamentary ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal forms, accordingly, a decisive turning point. With it the party of Order lost, never to reconquer it, an indispensable position for the maintenance of the parliamentary regime, the lever of executive power. It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility, and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic — it is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials as far as possible, and, finally, let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power. But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents, and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple, the independent organs of the social movement, where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the vital conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise, of its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power hostile to it."
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. "
> Particularly in the modern era, when it basically means the elite can leave unscathed while the revolutionaries must pick up the pieces.
i'm not going to go further abt this, you can find part of the answer in 18th brumaire too
Italians called themselves fascist. Germans would not have identified as such.
Fascism is difficult to define, even when it does not mean "my current political enemies." I tend to favor Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism traits. Eco is a historian who grew up under Italy's fascism.
If you take a step back and squint a little, almost all of that could apply to the US, regardless of administration. I would hope that would serve as a dire warning and not as a weapon.
The reason you see these kind of takes from people in liberal democracies is that other countries generally do not permit critical analysis of their governments, even if the conclusion is ultimately that it's better than the alternatives.
When was Trump elected to Congress to change the law?
You may like the specific actions they are taking, but imagine someone you don't like doing the action. The Rule of Law is a core principle of the US secret sauce, and they are violating it.
No, he has an extremely small vote margin so any claim of mandate clearly isn't represented in the vote tally. He is usurping the rule of law, which was not on the ballot.
Mentality about having ideal solution is exactly what politics sell to us. Divide and conquer.
Thete is no ideal solution but we should talk about dependence on state, fiat money, increasing debt regardless of right/left politics, rising amount of bureaucracy, giving imaginary solutions by adding more regulations and vanishing freedom of individuals.
If you want more deep in problems connected with current politics and economy, I recommend authors such as Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Popper... They give quite interesting view and arguments.
Solutions could be decentralisation of power, such as subsidiarity.
>Solutions could be decentralisation of power, such as subsidiarity.
How is this not fatalism? I interpret this as "if we have ideas were dividing ourselves, so it's best to give up". At best, this could be determined as "all rally around one singular power and charge". But there's no suggestion of who such a power could be. I don't think anyone is so massively popular as to amass thst either.
But it doesn't sound like that's your interpretation either:
>Centralised planning is more or less compromise of mixed ideas that at the end do not satisfy democratic majority. Look how many minorities scream about their rights.
---
>Thete is no ideal solution but we should talk
How far has talking gotten us as of late?
And it feels this goes against your later ideology of "solutions decentralized power". By that mentality, we would need to pick one solution and razor down on it so hard that no one can avoid it.
But we run into the same problems you propose. There's no one solution we can get behind, and in fact the powers that be all have an incentive to crush most of these.
---
Lastly,
>Decentralisation of power, like principle of subsidiary, looks like a way.
I don't think any of us have this power. The theory of checks and balances as well as elected representatives from each state should act as a decentralization. There's no one person who should be able to overpower a branch of government, at lest not without another branch interfering.
But as we see, fear and propoganda (as well as general disenchantmentto participate) tend to make people yearn for one big power to tell them what to do, as opposed to having separate powers corroborate on issues.
But as we see, fear and propoganda (as well as general disenchantmentto participate) tend to make people yearn for one big power to tell them what to do, as opposed to having separate powers corroborate on issues.
This is "Divide and conquer" principle, that I don't understand why majority is not aware of.
How far has talking gotten us as of late?
Deep and meaningful dialogues leads to progress and change in society naturally. I don't believe in revolutions or simple solutions.
We live in times that information was never easier to get. Back then, people believe that king was a god (Egypt), later that king is human but connected to god (medieval times). Today? Would you consider electorate as somehow morally wise and respectable personalities somehow connected to greater good?
government does not influence society as much as society influences government. if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too, and the only way to change the government is to change the society too. simply abolishing government doesn't solve the problem.
"if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too"
Politics attracts sociopaths, narcissists and egoistic individuals. Individuals that are focused on competency most likely not survive in this predatory environment thus not reflecting common society.
I'm not calling for abolishing government, just for change of thinking about governance and abandoning individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
ok, that sounds more reasonable. changing of how to think about governance is quite different from rejecting any form of governance. i agree that rethinking is necessary.
politics is different from governance. it currently looks the same because politics controls current governments. what i believe needs to happen is the removal of politics. to develop a system of governance that is neutral and free of politics.
please elaborate what you mean by individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
Idea of giving our responsibilities to politics by voting for them and let them later decide what we should/shouldn't do loks wrong to me. Centralised planning is more or less compromise of mixed ideas that at the end do not satisfy democratic majority. Look how many minorities scream about their rights. It just a consequence of writen above.
Decentralisation of power, like principle of subsidiary, looks like a way.
Also... Law do not educate society about consequences of our actions. You probably don't drive on red light due to threat of fines, fo you?
HN has always had a certain respect for people and articles that seem particularly prescient. I suspect that the 2017 in the title does a lot to boost the upvotes and reduce the flags.
Always remember the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" refers to Silicon Valley startups "hacking" capitalism and regulations, rather the anti-establishment hacker culture of the pre-web era. The resistance isn't here, and it's never going to be here.
That's quite wrong—pg, rtm, and tlb came out of the MIT/Cambridge hacker scene and used the word the same way everybody else there did.
(which is the original sense of the word and which, as everyone here hopefully knows, predates computers, and btw didn't originally have to do with breaking into closed systems)
It's from eight years ago almost exactly (a couple months off). Saying it references today's current events isn't prescient, it's "second verse, same as the first".
"Left" and "Right" are luxuries of democratic societies.
Pro-democracy and anti-democracy is another axis entirely.
Both are political comparisons, but they are not the same thing.
The implication of the article is that we will only discover whether the current government is authoritarian based on how it handles social resistance.
How could resisting a political system ever have not been political? I'm endlessly confused by how people use the term "political" these days. Is there some new definition I'm not familiar with?
I was a mod, and by the definition used to pillory content moderation, there is no free speech compatible moderation anywhere.
This is the same thing done by everyone from radio jockeys dealing with callers, to TV shows.
The fundamental tool is the ban, because the only real power for site owners is silence.
Any principled stand will be riddled with exceptions in under a few days of operation. I’ve seen this repeated in multiple free speech communities, like clockwork.
Id very much like to see a principled stand which isn’t reducible to “free speech = speech exceptions I can tolerate.”
Most people can’t and don’t want to live in 4chan (8chan ?)
maybe if a certain government wasn't implementing Nazi-like loyalty purges (and making Nazi-like salutes) no one would be drawing comparisons with Nazi-like behavior, would they?
If you're constantly comparing people to some group, you can't talk about that group without being suspected of dogwhistles. Which forecloses discussions that otherwise could have been interesting.
It's also the insidiousness of Nazis. People always look at the holocaust and wonder how it could ever happen, and the answer as far as I can tell is Nazis weaponize the benefit of the doubt.
When you look back at how the world received Hitler before he became the Hitler we know, you see publications like the NYT musing that Hitler really doesn't mean anything he's saying about the Jews, and when he comes to power he will temper himself [1]:
So violent are Hitler’s fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew’s night.
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
Same thing is happening today. Trump is telling us he is going to genocide Gaza, he's going to create a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, annex Canada, invade Greenland, invade Mexico, cut out Congress, defy the Judiciary, serve past his constitutional term limit, and be dictator "for a day"... maybe let's just take him at his word instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt?
Sometimes the other group is neo nazis and are the dominant power.
Sometimes they are close enough but different that the similarities strike normal people. Except when they bring it up, the defense is “no actually the Nazis we’re specifically doing XYZ. This isn’t the same.
Which shuts down conversation about both - the actions being similar or identical.
Don't forget that laws are (hu)man-made. Laws reflect the kind of people that make the law. Certain kind of people can make certain kind of laws. At that point, rule of law would appear indistinguishable from lack thereof.
Rule of law in the United States refers to the separation of powers, and the courts are not to be ignored. For a broader definition:
> The rule of law is a political and legal ideal that all people and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers, government officials, and judges. It is sometimes stated simply as "no one is above the law" or "all are equal before the law". According to Encyclopædia Britannica, it is defined as "the mechanism, process, institution, practice, or norm that supports the equality of all citizens before the law, secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power."[0]
Regardless what the laws enacted are, ensuring no one is above them (a president or an entire branch of the US Federal government, say) is a cornerstone of US civil life.
"As all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action, so also all the needs of civil society — no matter which class happens to be the ruling one — must pass through the will of the state in order to secure general validity in the form of laws. " - Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
E.g. One could civilly request the local Republican City attorney to affirm some law, and immediately, in a protest fashion, compare that powerful directive to laws and orders being broken in Washington DC by those in power in the Federal government, defying recent federal judge orders to desist with the data theft/funding impounding.
Protestors and activists have to be very careful to manage public reactions.
Alienating the people who don’t care is always a risk.
It’s one reason I don’t go to protests, and generally avoid activism, even though I care greatly about many issues and take discreet action when I can.
My representatives know my views very well, as do many government rule-making bodies that must consider public input.
My neighbors know nothing about this. Even though I’m well known to the press, they have no idea what my politics are.
Activists very much have to be activists. There is often very little space for polite activism without the impolite creation of awareness in the first place.
And the progress of a position also depends on the ability to get work done politely when impoliteness is not needed.
Well, if they are going against the legitimating power of the people, isn't it bloodless and unworkable to insist on "rules" against people who can break them at will (and have the loyalty of the army and police)?
You have to insist on a more fundamental source of legitimacy, economic power, and wield a threat that cannot be easily defeated.
Remember: these presidents are elected by about a quarter of the country if that, and the most recent election had a fall in turnout. Even if you base your entire theory of legitimacy in election results, the legitimacy of U.S. elections is looking worse and worse every season. The opposition didn't even have a primary lol
Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine, you rightfully pointed out my linguistic imprecision :). Mea culpa. Another attempt, likely no better than before:outside of calling on the militia, prosecuting alleged fascists, or never voting them into power in the first place by enshrining education, media transparency, and banning dark money, it's a great option.
From a certain perspective Allied warfare was simply a extremely vociferous insistence on the rule of law.
That aside, an argument could be made that if the rule of law had been more forcefully adhered to in their early days, Hitler and the Nazi Party could have been stopped before the gears of war had started to turn.
There are procedural issues that make that difficult currently. For example, undocumented immigrants can claim asylum and then legally can’t be deported until their claim has been processed and rejected. And this takes a very long time due to a shortage of immigration judges. There actually was a bill introduced under biden that would have limited the circumstances in which asylum can be claimed, and added funding for more immigration judges. But Trump called republican congresspeople to encourage them to vote against the bill because he didn’t want anyone else to get the credit for improving border security.
> Like preventing illegal entry and crossing of borders and deporting illegal aliens? Or is that not rule of law?
And in the process of enforcing this law ripping children from their parents and losing track of them so that reconnecting them with families was not possible?
As I am not left wing, simply not Republican, I've never understood why Fox News and political provocatours needed to lie about the magnitude of the problems on the border during Biden's presidency, except and unless they wanted to create fear via propaganda. The economy was a much better angle. I value intellectual honesty.
Edit: and to add, one thing that Fascists in Germany did was to turn their political rivals into boogeyman. Simultaneously weak and strong. Lacking morality.
I guarantee you folks on the left have strong morals and standards. As do folks on the right. Assuming they don't or concluding they don't because they don't align to your preferences means that you, not them, are polarized. I use 'you' here in the royal sense, I don't know you from Peter or Paul. I only know what you said in your comment.
Having lived in places where I was a stranger, I've found people generally want similar things, usually found on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
>Assuming they don't or concluding they don't because they don't align to your preferences means that you, not them, are polarized.
Many people here including parent commenter argue for rule of law, which includes controlling and protecting the border and deporting illegal aliens as written in the law. However, those same people (not necessarily parent commenter, but probably the case also) argue for an uncontrolled anarchistic border and presence of foreign nationals in the same breath.
This is why I am of the mind that the only standard the Left has is the lack of standards. Rule of law, except not those laws.
> argue for an uncontrolled anarchistic border and presence of foreign nationals in the same breath.
Can you cite any of these arguments? Because I struggle to take seriously your assertion when compared against data like these [1][2].
These data show laws were being followed and enforced. Maybe you want to argue about the level of enforcement, but you can't look at these data and conclude the border was "uncontrolled and anarchistic". Looks like Biden deported more people at the border in 2024 than Trump ever did in a single year. That's not anarchy.
The real issue with interior deportations is the drastic rise in pending asylum cases after 2020 - roughly 3x more cases in 2024 than in 2020, and the number is just going up. Dealing with this would be easy if you just deny everyone political asylum, but that would be lawless.
Google and Apple just updated the name of an international body of water based on the demand of a single person throwing his weight around. No one asked for this change. It has no backing by locals. It wasn’t even a thing. This wasn’t a culture war issue, it’s a flexing of power by an old delusional man. AP has been the only corporate organization to stand up to this nonsense that I’ve seen.
Not to mention the cdc scrubbing and such that judges are now overturning and demanding information returned to the public.
A great example of the many system abuses over the past several weeks.
People did not vote for the Dark Enlightenment nor the Butterfly Revolution. Want to gut USAID? Work with Congress and pass a law. Want to strip Social Security? Samesies.
That is the rule of law. If you are a representative of the people, you follow the law.
Of all the wrong things Trump/Musk are doing , renaming the Gulf was arguably the most benign. But it does send a powerful signal of “I can do whatever the f I want”
are you sure about that? it makes it so that he can approve drilling in the gulf because it's not named the same. or at least that's his idea to subvert biden's drilling ban... we'll see if it is the case.
interesting; hadn't thought of that angle. but he could just do an EO to reverse the drilling ban, as he did with Alaska. I don't think he needs to rename the gulf of Mexico to accomplish that.
I mean, I guess it's possible they've been really busy with other stuff and are just now looking at the internet after some kind of six-month death march at work. (but probably not likely)
Please state explicitly for the record why it's timely, in order that anyone who cares can compare that reason against the posting guidelines to decide how seriously to take it.
.
A bit wordier, but hopefully harder to denounce on the pretext that it's playing dumb.
The conclusion I draw from these analyses of Milgram is that fewer people obeyed to the degree originally stated. But the fact that even one of them was willing to obey at all speaks volumes.
Also consider that these were studies in which the the participants volunteered, and had nothing to lose by refusing orders or simply walking away. In the real world, these people would be agents of the state, or employees of a company, whose jobs, physical safety, and even lives (not to mention that of their family members) would be dependent on following orders. It's reasonable to assume in those situations, there would be a much higher rate of obedience than in the relatively safe environment of an experiment.
Conclusion: people are easily manipulable by authority.
Rather, the study shows that people are easily manipulated by a belief in Science with a capital S.
To quote one of the articles,
"he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent…
...Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order."
I don't recall in the study whether the shockers knew the shockeys or volunteers but I bet they thought they were and thus they thought they were trying to help advance science. Since so many people dropped out after hearing pain in the shockees, I'm guessing that if we were to try to replicate the study scientifically and without looking for confirmation bias, we would find entirely different results.
What blows me away is that some people can't see the signs of authoritarianism when it's staring them in the face pretty much every day for the past weeks.
Somehow we have managed to make words themselves political. If a word is used by "the other side", it's convenient to assume that what is happening are "aggressive measures" to make US more free.
"signs of authoritarianism" is a smear. Either you have evidence of it, or not. A good example of authoritarianism is restricting freedom of speech, such as when Biden's administration worked with the social media companies to censor, as revealed in the Twitter Files, and then which they continued to do with USAID in collaboration with other countries where our tech companies operate. Another example is requiring DEI statements to obtain favors from the government, such as grants, since DEI statements are declarations of fealty to an ideology, rather than anything based on evidence (e.g., you failed the test if you said that you would follow evidence-based approaches to improving inclusion).
if you can't see that the loyalty purge sweeping the government right now isn't a sign of authoritarianism, then I can't help you.
> requiring DEI statements to obtain favors from the government, such as grants
I've been working on government science research grants for the past 10 years and this is complete bullshit
> such as when Biden's administration worked with the social media companies to censor
that was arguably a bad move by the Biden admin; on the other hand, when you're going through national epidemic with millions dying of a communicable disease, out-of-the-ordinary action is sometimes need
> continued to do with USAID in collaboration with other countries where our tech companies operate
this is as vague as Elon's claim that "the government is full of fraud!" I don't doubt that fraud exists in the government, like any other, and there are no doubt USAID projects that I disagree with or think are wasteful (I actually disagree with a lot of US foreign policy moves). But what you do is investigate and take action on the individuals; shuttering whole agencies like the USAID and CFPB is purely ideological (and in the latter, conveniently self-serving for Elon).
Anyway, you've clearly drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid so no need to waste our time arguing further. Just be careful what you wish for. I've lived in authoritarian countries, and have seen these signs before.
This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
If that surprises you, I recommend reading the hacker howto.
"Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers."
There is a difference between a hacker and a cracker, which might these days be called "tech-bro". Even if it might not be obvious to everyone.
>This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
Some of the people on this site maintain a strong anti-authoritarian, instinctive and philosophical hacker instinct, sure..
Many others however are just about as fully establishment, self-serving techno-elitists as you could want. One this site there's no shortage of such authoritarian types who happily defend all kinds of social control notions by default, while embracing a supposed need to monitor and herd "average" people for their own good.
The "Hacker" in Hacker News is more a cute marketing phrase than a real description of any such dominant ethos here.
Edit: And the post for this thread just got flagged. Amusing indeed.
> This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
disagree. While hackers traditionally do lean anti-authoritarian, I am consistently disappointed by how many folks here generally side with CEOs and tech leadership that do, in fact, display authoritarian tendencies.
It is no coincidence that the "tech bros" are sinking democracy full steam ahead, given how Thiel and fiends find democracy incompatible with their vision for the world.
So, no, I wouldn't say that HN tends to lean anti-authoritarian. From my experience on this site, I would say the opposite.
Unfortunately, the hacker culture of today is different than 20 years ago. It has become much more mainstream and inclined to hack inside the rules (social or legal)
They still exist, both young and old, but is a minority. The flagging of this article is a proof of that.
I understand keeping flamewars out of HN is important, but this discussion has been surprisingly calm. I hoped that it was enough to pass the filter
100%. Hacking is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, and starting your own business and becoming an entrepreneur instead of a wage slave is also fundamentally anti-authoritarian.
However, I wouldn't go so far to disparage messing with the political system as "cracking". Hackers often try to break systems that are stagnant, and get those systems changed so that they come out stronger on the other side. And there's nothing more stagnant than modern politics. Ultimately it's a question of whether the people "hacking" the political system are "black hat" or "white hat".
I know what color hat Musk has chosen to represent himself, though.
When people bandied about "hacking the planet" I have to wonder what they were picturing if not subverting bureaucracies to accelerate technocratic progress
HN, IMO, tends to lean libertarian which if strictly followed is anti-authoritarian. Fascism and authoritarianism are things that anyone who believes in "freedom" should oppose right or left of the political spectrum.
I may not have the power to change things directly, I'm definitely watching what politicians and companies are lining up to lick boots. The boot lickers have not just been Republicans unfortunately.
Libertarianism leads to lack of checks and balances regarding Popper's paradox. It is a key component for authoritarianism to breed, via accelerationism.
Most that I'm aware of take a dim view on government police forces but don't really take a dim view on enforcement apparatuses against the government. An authoritarian regime needs a strong police force to properly function.
For example, I don't think I've ever seen a Libertarian complain about the inspectors general (except maybe for strict anarchists).
that was true of "hackers" (who in "old times" might be more likely to associate with anarchism), but not true of "tech bros" (who seem much more concerned with how much money they have than how much they're hacking), and I think HN reflects more of the latter than the former, though of course a wide spectrum with lots of people that fit neither category
Yeah, money was a great second love.
But being reminded of the OG is part of everyone’s personal journey. What people remember and choose is theirs in the end.
>Ironically ESR seems to be siding with the authoritarians, though that was never really going to be a surprise for a lot of people.
yeaaaah, i can vaguely recall off the top of my head some quote from ESR about young black men being a mortal threat to everybody around then, and another incident where ESR was advocating the nuclear genocide of the entire islamic world as retribution for 9/11. The only reason I might be surprised to find out he's a trumpster is that Trump seems too moderate for him.
>ESR is not a hacker, just a run-of-the-mill libertarian.
c'mon man don't do the libertarians like that, they have some dumb ideas i disagree with about voluntary non-association but that's not because they're racist, it's just that they don't like the principal of the government forcing them to do things that they would probably be willing to do anyways.
> Timothy David Snyder (born 1969)[2] is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[3][4]
> He has written several books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), The Road to Unfreedom (2018), and Our Malady (2020). Several of them have been described as best-sellers.[5][6]
Interesting, this post now appears to be shadow banned? For me it shows up mid-way through the front page, but for logged-out it doesn't show up at all.
This sounds good an all but you're incredibly unlikely to be asked to murder someone.
Instead, suppose you're the government bureaucrat who must decide whether this vaccine hesitant individual gets medical care or keeps their job which is their family's sole income. Are you really going to oppose the state or is this an acceptable level of authoritarianism for the greater good?
What if the state requires you to report any known illegal immigrant or face jail time and steep fines. You know some illegal immigrants, are you going to refuse to obey in advance?
What if the state requires you to put pronouns in your linkedin and HN profile, are you going to refuse in advance?
Where do you draw the line on rule of law vs. authoritarianism?
At that point, if there is a credible threat of those decrees being enforced, it's already over. The point is that obedience in advance empowers authoritarians to start ratcheting up the abuse.
edit: also but sorry, complying with vaccine mandates isn't the best start for the slope you're trying to slick up.
First they came for people without pronouns their email signature, and I did not speak out because I was not a person without pronouns their email signature.
Why do you think Covid, a public health emergency, was fascism, an inchoate merger of corporate interests that overthrow the rule of law?
Edit: cobbzilla, your comment disappeared on me, but to respond:
> Got it. Would-be authoritarians should definitely go to the public health playbook.
Covid responses were certain targeted towards incentives that they could be to push for responses believed to be the best for society, especially in domains were personal action may strongly deviate from social good.
We should never accept these actions as a normal operating procedure. In times of real emergency, such as Covid, natural disasters, and if the alleged events on the border were happening as claimed by right-wing propaganda news sources, the use of force is the purview of the government. We select them for this job during non-emergency times. For example, vaccine approval by the FDA is horrible slow. The time to change those standards isn't during an active disaster, but rather before or, less good, after.
Emergencies by definition need to be immediately addressed above all other priorities. A state of emergency is not indefinite. If someone claims it is, that is an exercise in authoritarianism all the same.
I’m curious your understanding of what the essence of fascism is. To me an essential part is mega corporations colluding with the government to force the people to do something they want.
Public health concerns, valid as they may be, ought to be accomplished without this kind of coercion, yet I sensed a very strong “obey in advance” mentality permeating from mainstream media.
apparently, it’s anathema to even talk about this.
> mega corporations colluding with the government to force the people to do something they want
correct; that's why the Trump+Elon tryst, and all the billionnaires lining up to kiss the ring at the inauguration is so troubling
> apparently, it’s anathema to even talk about this.
you gotta be kidding - the government's response to Covid has been debated for years now, with some people vehemently against the lockdown measures, others vehemently for them. Also, those were State policies (since public health is the purvue of the states not the federal gov -- the Fed gov could only mandate its own employees).
Per your request for a definition, I find my definition aligns to Wikipedia's definition.
> Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[2][3] Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism,[4][5] fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[6][5][7]
Your corporo-fascism is certainly one form. Remember in this context that "corporate interests" aren't specifically multinational businesses, but any group that, as a body, seek to take over a government at the exclusion of all other competing parties. Hence why fascism can be oligarchical authoritarism, religious based (like Dominionism), tehnocratic, you name it.
I don’t think that’s a particularly easy refusal? It’s hard to articulate any principle for rejecting the name change other than “cmon it’s really obnoxious”, and there’s far too many place name changes for the Google Maps team to review them all for obnoxiousness.
Every other nation on Earth calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it some other nonsense name (it's not even majority in US territorial waters) does users a disservice.
"The review process is tedious" is a non-excuse. It's the largest geographic feature in this quadrant of the globe to receive a name "change" in my memory, and it's highly politicized.
Should Google refuse to show Korean users the "East Sea" because the rest of the world calls that body of water the Sea of Japan? Or tell the Arab countries that "Persian Gulf" is the only correct name? The fact that these kind of name changes are highly politicized is more reason, not less, to adopt whatever the user's government considers to be correct.
And all of the tech CEOs that paid the $1 million inauguration loyalty fee. Perfect example of obeying in advance - trying to bribe the president before he's even threatened your company with anything.
I will never work for any of the CEOs or companies that were that quick to bend the knee.
That's not obeying in advance. The change already happened, it's the official name according to the United States. GNIS has published the change, and Google is just reflecting that change.
Mount Evans was local to the US, and was not a contested international name. This is the first time the US has been on Google's "Sensitive Country" list.
The US does not control the majority of the Gulf of Mexico. It cannot "change the name" of it any more than it can change the name of the Moon.
The executive branch has decided to call it something different than its internationally accepted name as a political stunt. Google could just ignore this, but instead they chose to obey in advance.
I mean I agree that it’s stupid, but my point was that there are protocols in place to handle this already.
If the US government says it’s the name of something, then it’s any map company’s job to display the valid name of the thing to the users in that country. They still show “Gulf of Mexico” to users in other countries.
Well for one thing it's stupid to change the name. Per your example, I still call it Mount Evans and so does everyone else. This sort of thing is just a pissing contest where the government figures they can up and change the name, but that doesn't mean anyone is obligated to go along with it.
As @mmastrac points out in a related comment, Google has chosen, at the behest of no law, to place the US on its "sensitive countries" list, which is the mechanism it uses to show users from certain countries incorrect names which it is legally obliged to.
But, Google is not legally obliged to in this case. Google is obeying in advance.
>Google has chosen, at the behest of no law, to place the US on its "sensitive countries" list, which is the mechanism it uses to show users from certain countries incorrect names which it is legally obliged to.
That is not what happened, you got fooled by fake news. From Google directly: "This report is misleading. “Sensitive” is simply used in our internal systems for countries that see different official names in Maps (like a different name for a body of water) — that’s all there is to it. This is common & includes dozens of countries. Adding the U.S. & Mexico to that list means nothing more than that."[0]
"Gulf of America" is not an incorrect name, that is the current offical name of that body of water according to the GNIS, which is the authoritative source in the US.
>But, Google is not legally obliged to in this case. Google is obeying in advance.
Google is just following the protocol they've always followed, one that predates Trump. They're not doing anything in advance. This is by definition not "obeying in advance."
Excuses. No-one else in the world uses that name, and the U.S. doesn't control the majority of those waters.
Google is kotowing to authoritarian nonsense. There's no reason they need to follow the executive branch's naming scheme. We're not a fascist state (yet). They can use whatever name they want, they can use the name that's internationally agreed upon.
That's not an excuse, it's exactly what happened according to Google: "We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources."[0]
>No-one else in the world uses that name
Immaterial.
>and the U.S. doesn't control the majority of those waters.
Neither does Mexico. Mexico and the US are both in the Americas. Similarly immaterial though.
>Google is kotowing to authoritarian nonsense.
Google is doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming by instead not changing their procedure as the politics administration changes.
>There's no reason they need to follow the executive branch's naming scheme.
Sure there is: consistency of following authoritative resources.
>We're not a fascist state (yet). They can use whatever name they want, they can use the name that's internationally agreed upon.
I think you're being a bit histrionic here. I suggest spending a day away from the screen.
Complete nonsense. American media and Israeli media both credited Trump with the ceasefire deal, with the WSJ complaining that "Trump forced Netanyahu to make a deal with the devil" and AIPAC complaining that Trump isn't being blamed more for the action.
WSJ is Diet Fox News, in print form. Murdoch owned. It's completely Trump aligned and untrustworthy on politics.
I've heard conflicting accounts of the ceasefire - but many accounts credit Biden while saying Trump's team was mostly merely in the room. This seems much more plausible to me than the reverse.
Yikes—can you please stop breaking the site guidelines in comments here? You've been doing it repeatedly and very badly, and we've already had to ask you more than once.
I don't want to ban you, because some of your comments have been quite good and knowledgeable, although they have been few and far between as of late. Unfortunately you repeatedly cross into personal attack, name-calling, and so on, and we simply can't have that here. It destroys the site for its intended purpose, and that won't do anybody any good. Scorched earth is not interesting.
The "flag" link, if enabled (not available for accounts with <500 karma) appears when you open a comment directly.
Otherwise, for this or any other request, email mods at hn@ycombinator.com. "@dang" is a no-op, and replies-to-comments are often overlooked: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39171237>.
FWIW, 500 karma is the threshold for downvoting, but I'm pretty sure the threshold for flagging is significantly lower, unless something has changed in the years since I was a new account.
There's a difference between "obedience to a authority as a guiding instinct" and "agreeing with the political goals of authoritarians, and then finding that they've taken over and are doing what you want".
One thing I find very frustrating about articles and books like these, and about governance in the US, is the lack of awareness by the Professional-Managerial Class that there are factions within the population that reliably support any form of government you can think of, no matter how "backwards" or violent it is. It is only through the federal and state partnership in law enforcement that multiple regions of the country don't devolve into various flavors of revolutionary communism, theocracy, monarchy, petty-warlord-ism, etc. The educated person's obsession with "democracy" as a guiding light becomes increasingly naive as the pool of voters expands to capture every individual, as "democracy" in the case of the US actually means "a very strict limit on what the People are allowed to vote for". The constant shock by ostensibly intelligent people that huge groups of Americans broadly support policies the PMC has labelled as "fascist" or "archaic" makes me more convinced that they don't realize that the US is kept in line at gunpoint, not by some voluntarily and consensually held allegiance to internal pacifism and democracy.
An example: what form of government do you think street gangs prefer? What about white collar criminals? What about cops?
Most people, logically, would prefer some sort of authoritarian that agreed with them on everything, that’s not really surprising or interesting.
What is interesting is this urge is usually held in check by people realizing they don’t want the “other side” to have that kind of power. The information environment has conspired to convince everyone the other side does have that kind of power and uses it. That makes the game escalatory.
Anarchy, kleptocracy, and, in the US, representative democracy, and in Germany, a democratic republic, and in the UK, a constitutional monarchy, and in....
When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.