"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's happened in American society, particularly the silence, confusion and cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking. It should have been required reading in American schools, when there was still time to educate people against these dangers.
It's probably best to start by not appointing a serial liar, convicted felon and conman to head it.
But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable.
Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and neither do any of the checks and balances.
He literally bragged about it before he was elected the first time.
I know we live in chaotic times and all but "grab them by the pussy" without clear consent is, in fact, sexual assault, no matter how much of a celebrity you are.
And there's a long trail of credible accusations against him ranging from various forms of sexual assault to unequivocal rape:
So far they are expanding power, firing dissents and trying to reduce spending to humanitarian causes and education, to expand its hegemony, to agitate allies. They even attempt to increase means of incarceration.
I'd also emphasize that a dictator is smaller than a Congress, but not better, and "fewer written rules" can easily conflict with "more freedom for individuals."
Just imagine if the many state laws concerning crimes and misdemeanors were torn up in favor of "don't piss off the police." Sure, it's way shorter, but you've simply replaced the hard-fought written rules (which you have a chance to see, understand, contest, etc.) with hidden unwritten ones that change semi-randomly.
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
Point to be noted is that Rudolf Hoss wasn't the leader of a random Nazi camp. He was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered, making him one of the biggest mass-murderer of the last century.
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
Do I understand that while the United States is undergoing a radical neonazi revolution lead by the tech industry your take away is that the people who called out the right-wing and tech industry were wrong to do so and bear responsibility for the horrific state of the world?
No, what you should takeaway is that misoverusing the term Nazi as an insult patently no longer works precisely because noone cares about being called a Nazi anymore due to its misoveruse.
In a different timeline, Trump being called a Nazi or any of the vicinity terms should have been an immediate termination of his campaign chances.
What actually happened is Trump ignored it (as he should) and the American people shrugged "OK" and went to vote for him with complete disregard.
Then Musk got called a Nazi at the inauguration, and the American people shrugged "OK" and went back to facepalming at just how much sheer waste the government has with complete disregard.
The moral you should take away is you should not invoke Godwin's Law. It's probably too late for "Nazi", "racism", "sexism", and a host of other insults the Left have thrown around to see what sticks (none have), but that doesn't mean future originally-valuable-terminology have to face the same fate.
Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, not unlike the original meaning behind the term "Yankee" which was originally an insult not unlike "Kraut" or "Jap" but is now one of the fondest nicknames of Americans.
Trump is a neonazi, openly aligned with American white supremacist militias, attempted a violent coup in 2021, and "the American people" who shrugged "OK" are neonazis. It is the inescapable reality of our present moment, and it has been visible for a very long time.
Godwin himself openly endorsed calling Trump a Nazi.
My takeaway is exactly the opposite, that not only were people right to call out radical fascist elements and influences in our society, they (we) were wrong to be cowed.
The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.
> Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns...
It depends on the insult; sometimes that doesn't work. One of the purest expressions of joy I've seen in politics was Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) back in 2019 analysing [0] a group of anti-Trumpers trying to rally around being called "human scum". He had a lot of interesting things to say back then about the art and science of persuasion.
So, Americans were insulted by being called Nazis and in true progressive fashion decided to reclaim the term and, well, embrace it?
Cool - it’s nice that you say this is an American trait. I was almost about to say that this entire setup was manufactured to pit Americans against each other, weaponising victimhood and identity, with the complicity of legacy media and big tech. And out of the three players in this game - the ‘left’/‘libs’, ‘right’/‘conservatives’ and the billionaire fascists up top pulling the strings, only the billionaires stand to win.
Well, I think so. Because many didn't understand they were fascists too.
The fascism was always in the vast majority of us, if we wanted to look at it. Just look at the structure of our workplaces, which accounts for half our waking lives. There's no free speech in them. With few exceptions, they're intensely hierarchical, people passing orders downward. Those "unlucky" enough to make it inside one of them, often sleep in the nearby alley.
The bizarreness of this form of organization isn't lost on those on top of the hierarchy. They're used to battalions of people doing what they want, and they seek out philosophers who apply this vision to other aspects of life. It wasn't hard; for example, the US had a 4 year king anyway. Usually a warmonger callous to the vast majority of his population.
One problem is "calling out." Name-calling. The current administration is showing direct action, which impresses many who find their lives increasingly intolerable. Many didn't like him, but rather rationally rolled the dice with the change candidate, even if it was probably going to end up as bad change. Like hitting the computer.
No I'm noting that to fight better we must realize what we did inefficiently and correct course so that we can mobilize more people.
Right now If I discuss the events around me, many are apathetic, because they think I'm exaggerating. Because that's what they have been used to.
And your comment is directing your anger at someone that very likely share a lot of your value system while he was trying to make a self-reflecting point. This is a waste, and it divides us.
When everything is an outrage, the outrage is worth nothing.
And while you are fighting on semantics with potential allies, for virtue signaling no less, the real threat is showing a united front, no doubt, no debate.
I don't know if there was intent behind it, but during and after WW2 the nazis and ww2-era Germans were depicted as textbook villains, in media, documentaries, school books, etc, but they did so in a dehumanizing fashion, as in, there were only a few named individuals (Hitler, Goebels, Göring, etc), but a generalised and unified "Them". Which made them completely unrelatable to those that weren't "them", which also opened people up for sleepwalking into facism - as long as they don't look too much like "them", and only when "they" got into power did their true colours reveal, including the caricature of Musk doing a nazi salute. I mean he didn't need to do that, and for the facist takeover it would've been better if he didn't because there's now a strong correlation between the two, but he did at the moment it was too late.
I mean it wasn't and isn't too late of course, that's defeatism, people can quickly be removed from power once people get their act together. Jan 6 proved that, and that was a fairly unorganized mob with only a handful actually prepared to arrest / kidnap or do worse to the congresspeople (thinking of the one guy with the tie wraps).
Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
You can find similar images from apartheit South Africa and apartheit southern US states before 1970. And in those cases they believe they are happy because of the protective wall of state violence against other humans.
There was always what you might call a "particle" of fascism throughout the War on Terror (maintained by both parties! because it was popular with the public!) Things like the unaccountable secret prisons in Gunatanamo or Abu Gharib, or the US sniper who amused himself by randomly murdering hundreds of civilians (eventually convicted .. then pardoned). And then in the war on Gaza everyone (bipartisan) was falling over themselves to say that it was children's own fault for being in the same school as Hamas and that the Israeli government was right to bomb them.
Back at home in BLM, everyone stood up for the right of the police to unaccountably murder citizens. Because that power would only be used against bad people, right?
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In my experience, most of the people who get accused of being Nazis do turn out to be actual Nazis. Sometimes they are stupid enough to make overt Nazi gestures (e.g. Elon Musk) which is pretty much the only way the average person will accept that someone is a Nazi. Much more frequently they turn out to agree with Nazi ideas such as ethnic cleansing, but do not do the salute, and people will say they're not really a Nazi because they didn't do the salute.
That's exactly why this book is so valuable and important. It shows the link between a happy daily life in a nice clean country (that happens to be at war) and the insane things those people ignored at the same time in order to act normal every day. Once you read it, you will look around at America in a completely different way. Because unlike ignoring something done in the past (slavery, colonization) this is not arguably not the fault of the people pretending normal through it. It's happening in realtime. The thing to look for is the mix of apathy and fear.
i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this.
at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
Nah, cynicism is the only rational reaction now. Lots of people died from covid and our poor government response, but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
> I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem. We see the same thing in the UK. You can't fight a thing that people have made up in their heads with facts.
(I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them)
> Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
Many of the democrats are simply too old. Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84. Feinstein died in office at 90. There's an entire missing generation, the party should be averaging 50-65. People are supporting them because there's no alternative, which is .. not durable.
> if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this.
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.
> but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
You guys need to stop being so disingenuous (and get some new material). EVERYTHING got a lot more expensive under the previous administration. Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant. A poor economy motivates people to vote for the other party, ESPECIALLY when the average person felt they had better economic prospects when “the other team” was in power (again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant).
> again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant
For democracy to work, you need voters with a good enough civics education to understand how the different parts of government interact, and a trustworthy media providing factual news so voters can understand the dilemmas their politicians are facing.
If what you're saying is right, and American voters are unable or unwilling to understand how their vote and current events combine to cause certain outcomes, doesn't that mean democracy in the US cannot possibly work?
What you're describing sounds closer to a popularity contest or a sports competition than politics.
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Personally, I believe a major part of this issue is caused by the political system and media landscape of the US.
In a two-party system as in the US, the legislative only represents half the population (as bipartisan efforts are rare), leading to resentment among the other half.
In a mixed-member proportional system[1], as in Germany, New Zealand and many Scandinavian countries, you end up with many more different parties in parliament (Germany currently has 8 [2]). For any law to pass, you need multiple parties to work together, which allows more voters to be represented.
Similarly, while in Germany newspapers and public broadcasters still provide high-quality news (less than 20% of the population distrust the public broadcasters and major newspapers as of June 2024 [3]), in the US the media tried to improve their ratings by replacing factual reporting and analysis with ever more emotional content.
The level of polarization in the US as it is today will lead to a new civil war, or worse, if it continues. How can a democracy continue if the majority of voters cannot even agree on basic facts?
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The perfect example for this is the discussion around the re-categorization of Pluto. Which has no real-world impact on anyone, yet everyone had an immutable opinion on.
The arguments for categorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet were relatively simple: We've found many other objects like Pluto. They're more similar to one another than to the other planets. Some of them are larger and heavier than Pluto. Either our solar system has 17 planets, or it has 8.
But the arguments against re-categorizing Pluto were of a very different nature. People had spent a lot of effort memorizing the planets in school, and didn't want all that effort to be wasted. People were emotionally attached to the way things had been. People preferred the emotional comfort of something that wasn't real, over the inconvenient truth.
One argument is based on logic and scientific fact, the other on emotional attachment to a middle-school understanding of the world.
The Enlightenment once replaced the emotional, religious order of the world with scientific fact and logic. This is the basis the US and modern democracies are based upon.
How did we end up in a situation where half of the political spectrum wants to tear down the very foundation of democracy and replace it with emotion, religion and tradition, medieval concepts we had long left behind?
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
This is pretty much the premise of Bob Altemeyer's work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer His book The Authoritarians is the one that most elaborates on it, so works that cite or respond to it would probably be exactly what you're looking for.
> at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
Yet extremists always want to dismantle education to control the population. For instance, in the US, Trump got the votes from the uneducated. He has no interest in an educated country.
I don't believe in this "natural stupidity" theory, many well-educated people voted red. Fascism is not a natural state of mind, it is carefully and relentlessly cultivated over years by a giant propaganda machine, at the hands of the capital class who stands to benefit the most from the current situation.
This is no coincidence that Trump's cabinet is the most billionaire-friendly ever. Total deregulation of businesses is the point, fascism is the mean. Eventually, fascism becomes the point and even billionaires become losers. I don't think we're quite there yet, but close.
I think, then, there's a difference between "well-educated" and "intelligent" or even "critical thinker". I would go on to argue that most "well-educated" people are perhaps well-educated in generalities only, other than perhaps a narrow special-interest field.
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work
I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditional anti-intellectualism; it seems to be almost an active view that it is better that people in authority do not know how to do their job.)
Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes.
We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity.
On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.
>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout
Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"
Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.
More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions.
The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power.
That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
> That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now
... I mean, you could just ban that sort of research; slightly less extreme. Though, frankly, I wouldn't bother; it appears highly unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon.
Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions.
Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt).
Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world.
Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects.
Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.
So, to confuse the issue, the country is officially called Ireland (it's in the constitution!), and that is the name normally used in Ireland and in Europe. The UK government officially referred to Ireland as the Republic of Ireland until 1998 (it now calls it Ireland) and as a result people in the UK often call it the Republic of Ireland.
People calling it the Irish Republic usually have an agenda in doing so, yeah.
ED:
> Not to politicise this discussion
I mean, this is on a thread about the Nazis; I think you don't need to worry too much about further politicising it :)
> What agenda? I do not know enough about the history to understand the implications
Traditionally, you mostly see weird names for Ireland in British media with an anti-Irish viewpoint (you saw a lot of this from the right-wing tabloids during Brexit, in particular). In particular ‘Eire’ and ‘the Irish Republic’ are red flags; ‘Eire’ has never been correct to use in English, and ‘the Irish Republic’ was never _really_ the name of the country at all. At best it comes across as ignorant (a bit like Americans calling the UK ‘England’) but in practice it tends to only be used by a certain type of publication.
(In particularly extreme cases you sometimes see ‘the Irish Free State’, presumably from journalists who are over a century old.)
> How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?
Ah, well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? In cases where it could be ambiguous, Irish media tends to say ‘the state’, but that doesn’t really work elsewhere. In practice where disambiguation is required “the Republic of Ireland” is a reasonable neutral term.
And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too.
In fact you don't have to choose between these identities. But when you frame the question like that it make sense that people would choose what is closer to them.
America is a bit different and, for some generations, consider ourselves better than the ugly factionalism and national identitarianism that led Europe into centuries of pointless warfare. One can be an African-Mexican-Asian-Queer-Irish-Jewish-Italian-American without subjugating one's identity.
Basically that's because "American" isn't a breed, like Scots or French. It's a political choice and an identity which is (should be) open to anyone who lives here and adopts the Constitution as the set of laws they want to live by.
Ironically, this is why Yarvin and Musk and Thiel will fail in their attempts at overthrowing the US government to create "network states". The US is the original state founded on a set of ideas rather than identities. (Since, at least, the Roman Republic). That is its strength, and something difficult for Europeans to really understand.
I’m not sure this is correct; in general many people would think of themselves as X and European, where X is the country of origin or citizenship. The EU is not a country.
For that matter, the UK, despite being a country, has some aspects of this; while Northern Ireland in particular is complicated for historical reasons, plenty of English and Scottish and Welsh people would think of themselves as English or Scottish or Welsh AND British.
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'.
The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them.
However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback.
Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.
I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway.
I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years.
Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc.
It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand.
The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting.
In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things.
In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better.
tldr I think we've hit a point where:
- The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate
- People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world
- Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith
- Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones
- Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty
- People are sick of feeling bad or guilty
- People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them
Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better.
ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.
You assume that people have the bare requisite knowledge to even accept a simplified explanation of complex things. For example, I said something like, "I can't believe they're shutting down USAID" to someone the other day and their response was, "what's USAID?"
This was an American. This caused me to think back to my schooling and you know what? I don't think I ever did take a class that went over all the divisions and (larger) programs of the US government. It was like you suggest, a simplified explanation (three branches and that's about it).
Clearly, that wasn't enough. Even something as simple as, "USAID provides humanitarian aid to foreign countries in order to give the US a strong influence in those places" would've been better than nothing.
Right now we have a critical US foreign influence apparatus in a non-working state and most Americans don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.
You make some really good points in your comment. One of the most unfortunate (that I believe to be true) is:
> don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.
Apathy is a problem in so many different social, political, and even technological systems - for instance, if people cared just a little bit more about digital privacy, the entire adtech scene probably wouldn't exist.
There is a lot in this that is phenomenally well stated. I don't disagree with most of it.
I'd point out that there was a lag between when extremely well informed people started to get the firehose of bullshit and when they became able to parse some facts from it; right about at that moment, the firehose was turned on the totally unprepared, uninformed mass of other people, and since that point it's been a power struggle over who controls this out of control hose. But that's not to say that, at some point, the incredible level of distrust among the confused and ill-informed won't turn against whoever seems to be pointing the hose at them at the moment. If simple answers are what people need, then information overload has its own logical way of overwhelming whoever is trying to control the flow of information.
Thanks for sharing this. I've been slowly coming to this conclusion, though I haven't lived in a red state since I was 16.
Your description fits our current world, IMO, far better than every other narrative I've seen. Some of those narratives feel good and fit OK, but they fall apart at the edges. The idea fits with why Hilary Clinton was so hated, better than anything.
On a personal level, I've become much more wary about seeming smarter. When I help and engage I try to do it in a way that doesn't threaten. I'm quick to say when I don't know something. I offer to help "figure it out" with others rather than preach.
Another comment somewhere in these threads talks about how social media has accelerated our problems by 10 or 100x. I think that's true for this, too.
I'm in a red state and I hard disagree with your generalizations. Even in red red red states Kamilla got 30%-40% of the vote. Trump got 40% in California.
I think you should re-read what they wrote. Asserting that you're part of a group of people who agree with you (aka conformism) is what they're saying is common in places that hate intellectualism and are scared of individualism. You're kind of just doing what they said you'd do.
Not just that, but your post is almost a perfect example of the attitude which most of the Germans in the book "The Germans 1933-1945" ended up regretting, if not on moral grounds, then after it led to the destruction of their country.
This is a very good description of the paranoid, mob-mentality anti-intellectual subculture I've seen wax and wane in America throughout my lifetime. And I grew up in the 80s surrounded by people who were rejects from this anti-intellectual culture, who were smart enough to think all kinds of unauthorized thoughts for themselves. I believed that, above all things, this rejectionist safety-seeking and fearful mob mentality was old and that it was inevitable that its smarter progeny would rebel against it.
It's really only when you look at it through the frame of the Weimar Republic, or, the 60s youth in Argentina or Chile or the 50s in Hungary or right now in Russia or China, that you see how fragile individualism is, because it is so damn easy to whip up a mob against anyone who thinks differently, as you're describing. What is so telling about this book is how the mob itself barely even thinks it's a mob. Most of the time it doesn't even think it's doing any harm or anything unpopular. That is the lesson that we need to learn as a species - not some vague idea of freedom, but that hard individualism is more valuable than easy camaraderie. There were about 50 years worth of Hollywood movies trying to reinforce this notion, but about 10 years of social media obliterated it.
The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College):
> “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”
I think a more apt description is the misconception that democracy supposedly means everybody gets their "equal proper timeshare of being considered correct".
I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions.
And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are.
It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now.
So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.
Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country.
But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.
Do not overlook the largest player in this game, who is not "for-profit", well not directly, they are pure "for-power" players. That player is religion, primarily the manipulating faiths of Christian and Muslim religion, which is at the seat and center of anti-intellectualism.
Is this still true as it used to be? I of course see what you refer to, but I also know many highly intelligent and culturally literate people who are devout muslims and christians. Furthermore a lot of anti-intellectualism today is secular: flat earthers, people who call sugar "basically poison", anti-vaxxers, etc. I think this comes from a very different place: these theories/viewpoints distract people with a feeling that they're getting a look behind the curtain on how the world "really" works. And there is a good deal of overlap (think: tiktoker talks about the "secret code" they cracked in the bible) but I think these are distinct phenomena. I think the latter phenomenon is caused by low trust in society, I think, plus a hodgepodge of stuff like crappy faux-marxism ("every problem is just rich people", which although there is a grain of truth, does certainly not literally describe reality), laundered anti-semitism ("the world is actually run by lizard people cabals who are coincidentally jewish"), and new age speculation about stuff like mass psychosis. In fact i'd argue that "new age spirituality" seems to be a nexus for all of this (and curiously still overlaps with christianity), attracting both marks and conmen in crowds.
Or to put it another way, I don't see how Q Anon theories can be tied back to religion in any direct way, even if many posts do draw from antisemitism. I'd even put the "russiagate" stuff in this category—it's true that many of the allegations seem substantial, but feels highly disingenuous when AIPAC wields such naked influence over both parties. Surely by any metric that Trump is controlled by Russia, Israel's influence outstrips it by many orders of magnitude.
Tbh, some of it is also just inability to interpret media. Particularly coverage of politics. Watching cable or reading opinion columns you'd think the parties were diametrically opposed and represent two wildly different aspects of america—when it takes about half an hour of reading a sampling of how politics works in other countries to realize how similar our parties are compared to basically every other party system on earth (excepting Britain, I guess?). Interestingly, for a country that prides itself on voting and political opinions, we're actually quite terrible at ceding the conversation to "experts" who are often even worse-informed and less educated than many of us.
Chomsky has this great bit about how Americans will call into a baseball show as an expert to criticize everything. The coaches, tbe players, etc. most of these people don't play baseball at all but feel very confident and passionate. He then points out how those same people will not have opinions about how government should work and leave criticism and demands to "pundits" even though they are much better equipped to figure out if they are being represented well than they are to judge the performance of a professional athlete. I think the internet cracked that open and now everyone has opinions. I'm curious how much anti-intellectualism just comes from democratization of public discourse and little has actually gotten worse, we're just more aware than we were before.
I believe it is more subtle, it is the effect of intolerance, in general, on the education system, which appears most often from religious perspectives. This is multiplied by a generalized impressment of obedience to adults and authority in school aged children. Children are taught that certain thoughts and lines of reasoning are sinful to the degree they face damnation, which to many imaginative young minds equates to a terror brainwashing where they become afraid to think, crippling their critical analysis before it can develop. They are rendered old children with childlike understandings of life's unanswerable questions, which they get answered by their faith. They never develop working secondary considerations, and are gullible because of it. Such people are perfectly capable of becoming research scientists, doctors, even attorneys, because we have an incredible compartmentalism capability. As you point out they are incapable in interpreting media, and why would they? It's not their specialization. They can apply critical analysis and secondary considerations within their career, because it was hammered into them in that compartmentalization, but it is not innate to them, they are not natural critical thinkers. So politics using indirect language and wolf whistling Nazi signals is just right over their heads, they will argue with you how their candidate never says racist anything.
This is the part where liberals are, caught up in their own inherent contradictions, desperately trying to understand whats happening so they reach for things they do understand, meaningless pop psychology.
I didn't really want to experience that particular part of German history repeating itself but here we are. "Wer hat uns verraten?"
A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.
I think you are terribly mistaken and, if I may, you are the one who seems to refuse to be educated (I don't say this as an insult). It is very easy to say "they are brutes" instead of looking at what exactly is going on and why democrats lost the elections.
As a non-US, I see very little difference between democrats and republicans, except maybe Trump. Democrats are the typical neoliberals: free markets, global capitalism, corporate rule, worldwide patents, etc. There is the famous chart that shows that since around the 80s the productivity went up while wages stagnate. Workers in the US right now are not in a much better position than 20 years ago.
Did the democrats campaign for improvements, raising the wages, improving healthcare, education? No, it was business as usual, "please don't vote Trump so we can keep things like now". Thus, many people said "fine, I'll vote for the other, he says things will be like before, literally".
So it's the Democratic Party who has baked into its DNA that things should not change, no matter what. I would say they could've won easily with some concessions, but those concessions go against their core beliefs.
Unfortunately, and because of this, Trump, a liar and conman, won. If they wanted to win they should've lied better, like Trump did.
yeah i concede i don't know everything, but honestly if you're not from or living in the US i would also re-examine your view of things. you have a different objective view but miss a lot of the context. it's easy to intellectualize the whole situation and come up with these solutions. this kind of reasoning is what i've gone through already trying to make excuses for people and it sounds nice on paper but it doesn't hold.
i'll tell you from personal experience there exists huge swaths of people in my community that voted for trump not because of any of his policies or a feeling that dems didn't bring change, but because they worship him like a religious figure. or they demonize anything that isn't conservative and treat it like team sports. it really doesn't seem to be much more complicated than that for some people no matter what angle you try to come in with (lack of education, not tending to their needs, etc.)
This idolisation can also happen for the left (not democrats, I mean real left), but I think it's the minority. Unfortunately, people choose something new and potentially bad vs the same as usual. Not because of education, but because of limited choices.
Hmm, if somebody idolizes a serial liar, cheat, fraud, convicted felon, horrible personality, sleazy conman etc. who is also a billionaire who laughs at poor then problem lies deeper.
Failed upbringing, failed education, failed by society. If I substract those people who we can call unfortunate from pool, the only stuff that remains is really not anyhow pretty, in contrary.
Those people in your community that voted for him - are they happy with his steps now and firm direction he is taking? If yes, then it confirms the line above.
On one hand, you're partially right: It's a pretty sad state of affairs that our only choices in the previous election were "maybe let's not elect a fascist" and a fascist. I can totally agree with you that I would have loved an option that was "let's make life better".
On the other hand, what does it say about our society that given those two options, we picked the Fascist? It's not like the messaging from the Republicans was unclear: they ran on a platform of attacking the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. And more than 30% of the citizens of our country said "sounds good. Count me in". Another 30-odd% decided it didn't really matter to them one way or the other. Only 30-something-percent of Americans said "wow, that's kinda fucked up. Let's not do that".
I don't think people who voted for Harris thought "yeah, let's keep healthcare pro corporate and screw the poor", they voted for other stuff. And I think people who voted for Trump didn't vote specifically against LGBTQ+ policies necessarily.
Of course, media and social media had a heavy influence, but on everybody.
The coworkers I felt comfortable asking why they voted for Trump came out of the gate with some variation on "no pretend girls in girls sports and locker rooms". To some of them being gay is apparently "just something pedos do". Plenty of people voted against lgbtq+ rights explicitly. But beyond that we are all stupid on the issues, and to some extent that is unavoidable. We can't all be experts in economics. So we can't vote on issues, we need to vote on character. When faced with a wolf in sheep's clothing and a wolf, pick the one still pretending. At least pretending to feel shame about corruption sends the message that it is wrong.
> social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
Social media took away the hesitation of crowing about stupid things. If many people are saying it, maybe I am not stupid after all. The legitimisation and amplification of dumbness is a big contributor to the current state. Among other things of course.
When there started to be money made, and even better real power to be gained by herding such crowds then its not anymore just about self-organization over time, the push becomes very proactive
Social media no longer represents "many people are saying it".
The early internet could give an overview of what's being said in general on a particular topic - but today's content is often manipulated to support or attack a particular viewpoint.
You don't need to explain with malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
In fact that's one of the roads to fascism - constantly looking for "manipulators" everywhere and other witch hunt types.
The longer I live the more I am convinced that the average person has next to 0 ability for critical thinking. They just sort of stumble between local maximas until they end up wherever they are.
> In fact that's one of the roads to fascism - constantly looking for "manipulators" everywhere and other witch hunt types.
Bollocks. Studies suggest as much as 35% of social media posts are fake, and as high as 40% on some forums. This isn't Fascism or paranoia, this is just how large tech companies make money. Like, if you don't understand how AI and scripting align with marketing and propaganda goals then you're gonna get played like a rube every time.
The problem is that "marketing works even when you understand how marketing works", and that it is very hard to maintain constant vigilance.
>there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
That’s not what the pointed text is about though. It specifically mention the concern is about those that should be considered of higher education in the context, as opposed for example to a baker¹.
¹ This is the example given in text, not some condescendence of bakers from my part here.
Thought I should expand to explain the group gets larger as the economy suffers and people are too poor busy and hopeless for anything other than a hopeful narrative.
And the group gets dumber when skipping school is glorified, education gets funding cuts, and people mass consume media.
I can only recommend Dietrich Bonhoeffer's essay "Von der Dummheit" (On Stupidity), which he wrote while being imprisoned by Nazi Germany. It's a short read and a terribly accurate description of what's happening.
It's the combination of a desire for student obedience and the intellectual damaging power of religion. Far too often a young student is told their youthful and essentially unsocialized behavior is sinful, including their own thoughts, and that coupled with an Orwellian level of obedience socialization with religion and you create crippled intellects that are afraid of their own thoughts and are perfectly obedient church members and employees. They are minions in the most literal sense and the United States is filled with them, obedient and terribly dangerous.
In particular this excerpt is frustrating though. As said directly in the text, it's hard to see the beginnings. Yes, many things are changing right now, but to be fair, if you went to any random trump supporter and showed them this text they would immediately recognize it and tell you all the things the prior admins have done that matches these "sudden" decisions "made in secret" that nobody should disagree with.
It discusses tactics, which are easy to recognize in expansion of power, but also in illiberal thinking anywhere, but I don't see in this excerpt (or remember in the original book) discussion of root causes. One thing that really stuck with me though was that many of the interviewees were quite happy with what the party had done for the country, on an individual level. This was rebuilding, providing party benefits, etc. And many joined up because they had to to advance socially or in their career. Again, things that become a Rorschach blot even in hindsight because, I guess, they are always using these tactics to push their agenda over ours until it spirals out of control, regardless of who "we" / "they" are.
I read this book years ago and it had a huge impact on my thought.
I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.
"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.
"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.
Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.
The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.
We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.
The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.
In the unlikely event it genuinely was then this would be solveable with subsidized genetic engineering for the masses.
I also think there's a lot to improve in education. While making everyone a rationalist is unrealistic, most of the ideas such as sampling bias and messy word meanings can be taught to almost all.
> at this point i just want to call it "stupidity".
At this point people are celebrating cruelty:
> We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated[1] from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists[2] when he mocked a child with down syndrome[3] who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse[4] suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre[5] (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake,[6] the women who said the president sexually assaulted them,[7] and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting.[8] There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents[9] shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement[10] who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.
[…]
> This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
People voted for Trump (the first time) because he promised The Others pain, but when you get /r/LeopardsAteMyFace moments:
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Stupidity is when one fails to genuinely see things from some other perspective than their own.
It is not that hard to do, and does not prevent from taking a side eventually, but it helps one to realize that the distance to someone else taking a radially oposite approach is usualy not that large.
Unfortunately, this kind of mind gymnastic is rarely encouraged because it goes against the creation of stronger social circles I guess.
So, all that to say: don't give up. Cynicism is like a drug that feels right at the begining but that will damage a brain eventually.
> it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
I think this is probably correct. It's inevitable. It's who we are - we (some percentage of?) humans simply want to hurt each other.
Nobody in the history of humanity has had it as good (by any material metric) as Americans living in 2025, yet here we go again.
This sentiment is exactly what David Lynch explores over, and over, and over:
Why are some people willing to be so evil.
I think we tell ourselves it’s environment or inequity or education… but the older I get, the more I think there is a kind of lack of conscientiousness that most people have, and that they are decent folks is only that they have something to lose.
Unless a theory can explain the prevalence of litter, which should effectively never happen based on most criteria, than that theory of why bad things happen is insufficient.
There is a theory, and it's called sadistic child abuse. Maybe optimistically only 20% of people who had wicked and abusive parents grow up to take that sadism out on others. But they have a draw on their peers, as sociopaths, enticing them to indulge in or excuse sadistic acts. And of course they perpetuate it through violence on their own children. Once they reach a critical mass in a society, you have Russia.
If they do it but they're not quite aware of it, and think they're teaching children a lesson, then you have Germany.
And if they do it because they're saving their children's souls, you have red state America.
Of course, it's abuse, a psychotic perversion dressed up as a social norm. But the point is it's contagious.
In France, I remember we read several classic allegories on that theme at schools. Rhinoceros by Ionesco (even watched it in the theater as a school trip), also The Plague (Albert Camus). I didn't think much of it when I was a teenager, but I'm looking at them on the light of these recent events. Especially Rhinoceros on ideological contagion.
Yes we did, but I think that the people who needed it the most, were the ones who either didn't had to read it (the ones not in a "lycée général") or whent through because it was required but didn't tried to understand the meaning.
More broadly, as teenagers, most of us didn't had the maturity to truely grasp the meaning ; and the ones who did probably already where sensitive enough to don't fall in the same traps.
In the hundreds of people I crossed path with during my school time, I don't remember a single one who was actually enlightened by things in the program.
The only ones who had kind of a shift from their original mindset did that outside of school or because of a teacher who went out of their way (and of the official program) to explain things.
I don't think I was enlightened at that time, but at least, we discussed these topics and they are part of the collective knowledge in Europe. It's probably why Musk nazi salutes resonate differently in Europe vs the US. That being said, populism is raising in Europe too.
Odd things can enlighten someone. I was outside a gay bar in Avignon when a guy I knew who was hardcore FN hesitated and then sat down next to me, a Jew, and had an honest conversation. I think it doesn't take too much to enlighten French people, because much of the template for plurality and tolerance is already there and built into the culture. Then again, there are always some true assholes.
Is "The Plague" considered an allegory of the struggle against upcoming extremism?
While reading it I saw some parallels with occupation: people trying to escape, some suffering from being separated from their loved ones, those abusing the system and enriching themselves with contraband, help being flown in irregularly, etc. But I didn't get as far as Nazism.
Do you happen to remember which elements supported that supposed theme?
I'm having a hard time googling the book you mentioned. Is it by any chance called 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45'? That's the closest thing I could find.
Watching Gaza get razed has pretty much ended any sense I had that liberal society is capable of learning lessons or improving itself. I grew up a good liberal, but as an adult I realize that so much of peoples' attraction to liberalism is simply inability to resolve conflict, center values in society, or establish a shared culture. There are better ideals to structure society around, like material rights.
Fwiw i also believe we should dismantle our government as it is not, actually, very democratic and doesn't actually function well and mostly exists to serve itself and its corporate clients. The current parties are simply the last people on earth I'd trust to do it.
What makes you think I hate liberalism? I was just pointing out it's not sufficient for a functional society, contrary to the tenets of our civic religion. If it was, our country wouldn't be such a dysfunctional shithole our citizens log on to China's instagram to talk about how much of a dysfunctional shithole this country is. Hilarious and hugely embarrassing.
Granted, I do abhor the part of liberalism that makes people think their voice has any inherent value and that political action begins and ends with voting. I'd like to remind readers that Hitler was voted into office, but the civil rights act was legislated out of fear of cities burning down, and it took a literal civil war to end slavery in this country (outside of prisons anyway). Most of the few labor rights we have in part because the labor movement was bombing buildings and shutting down entire cities. We live in an arguably progressive society in spite of liberalism, not because of it.
Am I naive for thinking americans are capable of making a government we can ACTUALLY not be embarrassed by? That can actually prioritize its own citizens over its GDP and bombing places that never did us wrong? Whose flag isn't seen by many groups of people as a hate symbol? With a culture not based on being proudly ignorant? Probably. But we all need hope. Liberalism certainly ain't gonna get us there by itself—at some point we need actual values to orient around aside from greed and the right to be an asshole in public.
I think the thing that has been most surprising to me is how utterly transparent our current situation has been. I like to say "When it comes to the end of the Republic, I thought it would have all been quite a bit sneakier."
Like the way that all of the Republicans in congress folded like a cheap suit and are now completely subservient to Trump - "Profiles in Cowardice" from top-to-bottom, with the exception of a few outliers who have now been ejected from the Republican party. My favorite current example is Bill Cassidy - what a total coward! I knew all of his "concerns" about RFK Jr. were a charade, and then even given his oath and knowledge as a doctor that he would eventually fold, and come out with some BS statement about how "After a really long conversation with RFK Jr. he assured me on some of my concerns blah blah blah..." And it happened like that to a T. Almost exactly like the Susan Collins/Brett Kavanaugh situation "I was shocked pikachu! I mean he assured me he wouldn't overturn Roe v. Wade!"
I'm just surprised at how it's all playing out exactly to script, and the "scripts" from previous history aren't even that old or forgotten...
From a German who lived through the 30s (from memory): "at the time, I couldn't determine if Hitler was a good phenomenon with some bad side-effects, or a bad phenomenon with some good side-effects".
In hindsight the answer is pretty obvious. But in 1934 Germany? A lot less so.
This is one of the best books I ever read. I picked it up pretty randomly a few years back. It changed me.
Before reading it, I was firmly of the opinion that good people (like me! and everyone I like!) will (mostly) resist a fascist takeover. At least passively resist. As in not actively collaborate. Mostly. Reading that book obliterated almost all of those beliefs. (What little was left was destroyed by having children, and actually directly experiencing what it means when people say "I'll do anything for them").
I think it's the most upset I've been since I was a child and asked my parents why people suffering in a war on the news didn't just say that they don't wanna be in the game anymore. Because that was the rule that applied in kindergarten.
This all sounds very depressing. But read the book. It's a damn important book. (And it's very short and almost free – just read it).
My mom was born in late 1930s Germany. She remembers being bombed out of her appartment. She came to US and is not happy with the way things are going here.
Yes the US is uniquely fucked, really. At least the previous global hegemon fought two world wars to lose its place. The US is basically committing geopolitical suicide at the top of its powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
Triggered. If we are pathetic, then look forward to our enlightened successors.
I don't know what will happen in American politics, nor what effect it will have on the world or the permanence of those effects, but there are demagogues everywhere, America is not exceptional.
America is exceptional in that it is the global hegemon self destructing before our eyes and for largely nonsensical domestic reasons. That is exceptional.
And I don’t know about triggered, but rather just sad, because I was one of those people who really believed in the US at one time!
Then share the reasons. We are witnessing the end of the era of American global dominance. The four years of Biden were but a reprieve. Trump 2.0 is here to finish the job and end it all once and for all. The American Experiment has failed.
I'm curious if what is happening in the US and what has happened in Britain with Brexit actually ends up slowing some of these marches towards illiberalism in other places. Like when people are upset at the direction of a country or current policies, they may take a "throw the bums out" attitude even if the alternative is far worse. But perhaps they're looking at the complete shit show in the US and how unproductive Brexit was and are thinking "OK, maybe not like that..."
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
In France at least, Brexit made the idea of leaving the EU obsolete in political discourse, both on the left and far right.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
Notice that this benevolence and protection by the media is granted to Musk (and Trump) by their complete subservience to Israel's demands and wants. Trump just proposed ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip and cleaning up the rubble with American money and work so it can be handed over to Israel in a nice shape.
I suspect a large part of the subtext is that considerable real estate holdings, hotels, casinos, apartments, etc. will mysteriously end up slightly off book on some TrumpCo. spinoff or another.
No, that's missing the point. What hotels, casinos and apartments were promised to the Biden administration to flood Israel with money and weapons to flatten the Gaza strip into rubble and kill and maim hundreds of thousands?
It's not important what leverage Israel has used to make yet another US president do exactly what they want, contrary to any idea of justice, international law, basic humanity and common sense. The point is that Israel has that kind of leverage and nobody is able to resist it.
As much as I hate the Nazis at the top of Israel's government and Western complicity in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza (and more recently the West Bank too), I find your statement disturbing.
Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel. French media were pretty critical of Joe Bidden being too old for the job, despite Bidden giving Netanyahu all he wanted.
Edit: OK given that other response of yours in this thread[1], it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews.
In addition to being disgusting, Antisemitic talks like these are actually counter productive: they help the Israelis as it gives them an excuse to victimize themselves once again.
> Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel
Netanyahu himself tweeted in support of Elon Musk after his nazi-like salute. This is obviously about Israel.
> it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews
I didn't mention Jews, you are the one confusing Jews and Israel. There are many Jews who are vehement opponents of Israel's nazi government and are denouncing it and its influence on American politics anywhere they can.
You are claiming that Israel has “irresistible leverage” over American presidents, so you're gonna need a lot of clarification to who that this isn't an antisemitic dog whistle. What exactly do you think this leverage is?
No I don't owe any clarification to support what is obvious. At this point, the fact that Israel has almost complete control of US politics is the null hypothesis. It's those who deny it that need to provide very convincing, non-handwavy, alternative explanations of why the US is constantly doing Israel's bidding against international law, the international community and basic human rights, damaging its own standing and authority and going against its own geopolitical interest. And why the representatives of US people fly the Israeli flag outside and inside their offices, and why AIPAC boasts to manage to get elected 95% of those it supports, and why such a foreign interference is even allowed in the country, etc. etc.
You're confusing: “the US has geopolitical interest in the middle East that are fully aligned with Isreal” and “Israel controls the US politics”.
Both have the same visible symptoms, but the causal explanation is different. I can write an essay on the former, you cannot give an explanation of "how" Israel is supposed to control the US (that isn't a conspiracy theory about the Jews, that is), that's the problem.
If you want to change my mind, that's easy, just explain how, by which lever, does Israel controls the US. Not the symptoms like you did, but the phenomenon itself as you think it exits.
I don't think it changes anything on a base level for how humans behave en mass. Unfortunately it looks like we will always be susceptible to populism and propaganda. At best what you're seeing is a temporary inoculation against illibralism.
In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
> In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
Oh god. There I was thinking it couldn't get worse and hoping you'd made a mistake, but no, you're right, somehow it is.
Damn, you're right :( Thanks for killing my attempts at holding on to some threads of optimism! (Being sarcastic, but really I'm just laugh/crying). Oh well, guess I should just stock up on more boxed wine...
Ask Hawaii what happened when a bunch of businessmen wanted more profits and less government oversight! Back then it was Dole (the PERSON) and sugarcane companies, today it is auto manufacturers and probably access to the northern sea route that is rapidly becoming de-iced and relevant for shipping to bypass the Panama Canal. Canada better take this threat seriously and treat the USA, at the very least, like a neighbor who is shooting a rifle at a massive tank of propane.
As I understand it, this wave of US policy change is inspired by a combination of white supremacy and US exceptionalism. But rest of the world is effected by few different things, for example, xenophobia in the case of EU and UK, expansionism in Russia, zionism in Israel, nationalism in China (and Japan, really) etc. It looked the same if you stand far, but they're all different, so I wouldn't call it "global".
There is a documentary from Deutsche Welle titled "The rise of the ultra-right in the US": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhREluLdBs. Maybe worth a watch if you want to see an "outside" perspective on this.
The right wing of the US is not driven by white supremacy. It's driven by a belief in a variety of mostly false grievances, about immigration, the economy, the wealth gap, etc. Those bogus beliefs are held by white and non white people.
Consider that Trump won almost 50% of Latino male voters. As a percentage of the vote, Trump did better with racial minorities and women in 2024 than 2020, and much better compared to 2016.
White supremacy is real and it has some effect in US politics, but it's not a driving force anymore. I say this as someone who has lived both in and outside the US. The outside perspective is not always better. Germans may be seeing the US through the lens of their own history.
Well, I would like to clarify that I was not criticizing any country. To me, all of those examples are just nations learning and exploring what's good and what's bad again under this new age. The world will adjust and slowly but surely get better. See? This time, so far no body is getting burned for claiming that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
And for all the other points, only time will tell.
BTW, I don't hate Mr. Trump either. When he was elected, I brought in some financial products anticipating his unconventional method (and most importantly, I did not buy in some other products). Now I seeing ~5% return in just half a month. I thank that man for his straightforward.
So if I'd say, fearmongering is useless and opportunity for goodness is still reachable.
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
Honestly, what would these protests do? Serious question.
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
The purpose of a protest in general should not be to affect the people in power, it should be for enpowering and bonding the people to further enact post-protest. A moralle boost, a conversation starter, an ignition to call more people to action.
Having sayd that, a very successfull protest does affect the upper ones, only temprorarily and tactically. A policy maker will still want to make X move, but ever so slightly delay it or figure out a differnt narrative to bring it back some time later.
The point isn't to sway the emperor. (When the facts change, he changes the facts.) But there are many people answering to him who currently don't have the backbone to say no to him. Seeing a million people out there shouting that the emperor has no clothes on may give them that little extra bit of courage necessary to make the right choice in one of the many daily situations where they have the choice between being pandering yes-men and doing the right thing.
I mean, technically he controls it, however as a former officer in the military I have to believe (perhaps stupidly) that the majority of officers in the US military will refuse to be deployed illegally to squash protesting, even if it's a bit violent. If not, then I guess the people I served with were extraordinary. I hope they were run of the mill, I really do.
A successful protest with a large turnout shows people that they are not alone with these opinions. This instills confidence so that they dare to act "rightfully" later on.
Yes. It's about the threshold to hold an opinion and to act. Different people have different thresholds for how much they dare to break from the status quo. With widespread protests we change the range of standpoints people feel comfortable to take.
Just like, the comparison is relevant, the public display of nazi symbols changes the range of nazi opinions that some people are comfortable expressing..
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
As far as their public website tells (https://www.riec.nl/) the RIEC is about a targeted bundling of knowledge, experience and resources to better deal with the effects of organized crimes, instead of everyone working in their own little silo.
The "interventions" are basically the forming and supporting of work groups / special interest groups around a specific organized crime phenomenon, with the intent of devising an approach to deal with the specific phenomenon. They publish a report of those so-called interventions here: https://www.riec.nl/documenten/publicaties/2024/12/18/interv...
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
It is probably good to remember that this talks about the experience of a German, under Hitler's Nazi government.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
I don’t see the call to action. It describes perfectly the feeling of hopelessness I’ve had for years now. The election was the last chance and everyone blew it.
There is still a lot we can do. Every demagogue and authoritarian regime collapses eventually, often quickly- and they haven't even succeeded in seizing total control yet. As long as we are alive, we can resist.
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
There may be a tipping point, but as we can see by the comments here and elsewhere, and the intent behind writing and reading things like the shared article, being able to see it before it happens is the hard bit, maybe the impossible bit.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
Having small parts of the overall government checked and cut is not radical, and current world events and US history show much more radical moments.
Again, perspective.
It'll be radical if a security agency is cut (given their power), or if a constitutional amendment occurs that has minority public support, the US invades a nearby country, a national health service is instituted… there are so many examples I could be here all night listing them all, but fiddling with less than 10% of an enormous budget that has ballooned is not radical. I can remember Bill Clinton's government, that wasn't radical and that's the direction of this government.
Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000, and never really gave it up. Russians were still holding large-scale pro-democracy protests over 10 years later.
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
Τhe promise of the NRA+ folks is that guns in the hands of citizens will avert such a situation. Let's see if at least one of the things they claimed is not a lie.
> You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
The opposition blew their chance in 2024. They are going to have to either back-off on the identity-oppression olympics or accept the loss in 2028.
They need to stop blaming the voters while being out of touch with said voters.
I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.
I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.
Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."
We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.
I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;
> It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about the fundamental things. One had no time.
We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.
But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.
This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.
They can be very different, but still both push our governing structures and our thinking in directions that are not good for us individually or collectively.
To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.
Examining that analogy in light of the electoral outcome, would you prefer to be in the timeline in which someone throws you a chair but there is a boat full of others who might throw you something useful, or the one in which someone has thrown you a heavy block, has drilled holes through the hull, and is actively pushing everyone else overboard?
I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
An actuall global event that killed hundreds of millions of individuals is a very different thing than what Musk is doing, without any such precipitation...
I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...
Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.
> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.
We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.
I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...
Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
It seems alarmist until you consider that Musk is a Nazi. He did the Hitler salute, live on national television. His followers tried to downplay it, but his own answer to the question "Are you a Nazi?" was "I bet you did Nazi that coming!"
People joke that he went from being the Henry Ford of our generation to being the Henry Ford of our generation.
I don't know whether I would say that Trump is a Nazi*, but the fact that he put a Nazi in charge of firing govt employees that don't follow orders does not bode well.
EDIT: * If only because he has never publicly admitted to being a Nazi like Musk has.
No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
Maybe they weren't at the end of that sentence yet, but they were definitely at the start of it. "governed by surprise" yes. "receiving decisions deliberated in secret" very much yes.
Or did you mean Biden dropping out itself? I don't see how anyone could have reasonably offered more notice that he was dropping out - presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.
> presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.
That's a generous assumption that doesn't really fit with how he seemed in public appearances before and after. The alternative possibility is that the narrative where he drops out of the primary and so the D candidate "has to" be appointed at a time when it's "too late" for the public to be involved was a deliberate one.
At this point we're at "the democrats might have planned for a single surprise, under circumstances that would be both difficult and suspicious to repeat".
It feels... exceedingly charitable to say that is "habituating people to surprise" in any real sense. If anything, I'd argue it has had the opposite effect: if the Democrats pull a second surprise like this time any time in the next couple of decades, quite a lot of people are going to be outraged.
I'm not really sure why they'd want to skip the Primary anyway? If she failed to pass as a candidate there, it would be pretty clear evidence that she wasn't going to beat Trump. If she passed the Primary, she's got more support behind her. It's a lose/lose to do what you suggested
As a purely mechanical point: having a D president with R house and senate and supreme court is a very different situation to having R all across the board, which is why the "checks and balances" have stopped working.
No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
The claim was Germans (not some, not a lot, not most; just "Germans") knowingly voted for all that came after. That would be false even if Hitler had been actually elected, instead of appointed.
Fascists always are, that's how they gain enough support to gain power. Hitler had a lot of friends in the capitalist class, and the socialists and communists were the first to go under his rule.
Closest I found is this one: ```I'm generally sympathetic to what you're doing. But I hope you will take your time and do it carefully. This isn't just a company," Graham wrote on X during a back-and-forth with Musk on Tuesday.```
While not technically defending it's still pretty disgusting.
It's unbelievable that Paul Graham wouldn't understand how this forever and utterly compromises the Treasury. Nor is it remotely believable that he thinks Musk is capable of doing something like this "carefully" (as if there's a careful way to illegally tamper with the Treasury's innards).
Seems like he is just tweeting so that later he can say "Well I tried; I told him to be careful". Doesn't look smart tho.
Btw, afaik Paul G isn't CEO of YC, and hasn't had an "active leadership role" since 2014.
> Whoever made the original graphic doesn’t understand the scale and speed of smart high IQ people who can program, and what they can do in a moment when intelligence now on infinite tap using LLMs
Thanks. Eesh. Garry Tan's Twitter feed has certainly been an experience...
Perhaps the key for understanding the wildly credulous optimism on display in that feed is to remember that money 'saved' from the Treasury will likely fund promised tax cuts for the .1%.
How can anybody here like or admire musk (yeah, very small m) these days is beyond me. I would be properly ashamed to drive tesla, and have 0 sympathies to numerous keyed owners, its not like he became fascist overnight if you actually listened to him. I would stop giving any money to company doing any work with his companies.
Heck, there may soon be some new badges 'musk-free' as some sort of moral badge for businesses to attract and retain young customers.
What I dont understand is what the democrats and constitutionalists are doing? Where are they?
Trump only cares for loyalty and power. Hes also really thin skinned, so what mystifies me is how he's let Musk take all that power from him?
Why aren't the "opposition" hammering the point that Musk is/has effectively usurped Trump?
If I wanted to eject Musk's control over the state, that is where I would start. Trump knows that musk yeets anyone who he sees as weak, so why not exploit that to get some level of constitutional control back?
I mean that's the key point right? if its not getting through then the medium of delivery is not working.
Why are appointments not being delayed? There are many logistical hurdles that can be put up to get a better outcome for the _country_, but it appears they are not being used.
it seems that people are more concerned with getting fund-raising for the next election, which seems a bit premature, given that the dollar might not be the currency in 4 years time.
(Since there are posts on economy related factors and the OP was about Nazi Germany)
At a different level is this somewhat reflective of USA today? (USA today is by no means poor, although it is true that the bottom 50% has stagnated for quite long)
The West harbors a profound moral delusion, judging the world through selective standards while ignoring its own historical crimes. It preaches human rights and democracy while supporting oppressive regimes that serve its interests, arbitrarily categorizing violence based on convenience. This hypocritical narrative of moral superiority masks systemic oppression, allowing the West to maintain its global moral high ground without genuine accountability.
Oh, goody. Isn't it great the Democrats prioritized keeping "the groups" and their donors happy? You know, instead of actually reorganizing around countering the existential threat they complained so loudly about?
Genocide is above and beyond 'politics'. So is a bunch of tech bros being given physical access to the US Treasury under the direction of a tech oligarch, in defiance of dozens of laws. Entire federal agencies are being shut down on a whim, again, in defiance of dozens of laws and safeguards.
These things directly impact the tech community in a massive way - just look at Google dropping their pledge not to use AI for military purposes, this week of all weeks.
I don’t feel like the comparisons to Hitler are useful, at least when talking about the current US administration.
There are lots more recent examples — Russia in the early 2000s under Putin, Hungary under Orban, South Africa under Apartheid — where democratic norms were gradually eroded, and the international community just sort of sighed and said "oh well, the people have spoken".
I think this mostly comes down to (1) people are more aware of Nazi Germany and thus its easier to use that context than another and (2) the Nazis were extreme even by comparison to their contemporaries and thus have been (presumably) studied the most.
Yeah, but it breaks down because Trump also knows that history, and knows that people want to compare him to Hitler, so he does a bunch of things that make the comparison harder.
Trump says things like "there's no greater friend to Israel than me" and "I'm the best president for black people". One of his most viscerally anti-immigrant lackeys (Stephen Miller) is Jewish.
Trump’s choice of "illegals" as the cause of America's woes is smart, because (1) they can’t vote and (2) even American-born children of undocumented immigrants hear that and think "oh but he's not talking about us". He was careful to not say "Latino immigrants", even though that's what a lot of his white supporters heard.
The actions are right out of Hitlers playbook. Find a group or groups, to blame and demonise, that are powerless. Deflect and encourage the wider populations grievances and dissatisfaction onto them to provide a common enemy and warning to others that they could be next if they don't join in. That together with establishing a cult and encouraging extremes echos the establishment of the Natzi party surely?
Berlusconi is the architect of the modern oligarchy. Control the media, control the public opinion and narrative. I think that what is happening in America is something new though. The dismantling of the US government is weird on it's own, but the step down from US soft power is what really makes no sense. The previous 80ish years of US world dominance was build on a combination of military might and soft power. Europe was rather ruined after WW2, the reason it's as advanced as it is today, and the reason we are/were such close allies with the USA is because of programs like the Marshall plan. Which was essentially the USA giving Europeans the money to buy American products. Stuff like access to US produced tractors revolutionised European farming as an example. On the US side this meant that the USA investment into Europe made it possible for the American wartime industry to restructure itself. So that instead of producing tanks, factories could produce farm equipment and so on. Total win-win.
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
Comparing this to the current situation in America, both Hitler and Musk/Trump largely said what they wanted to do before hand:
>Mein Kampf, in essence, lays out the ideological program Hitler established... Hitler's revolutionary goals included expulsion of the Jews, and the unification of German peoples into one Greater Germany. Hitler desired to restore German lands to their greatest historical extent, real or imagined. (Wikipedia)
On the other hand Musk/Trump are mostly about reducing government bureaucracy, excessive wokeness, illegal immigration and the like which is quite a different thing.
Maybe that was lost in all the other noise domestically but in international news the extremist was quoted musing about annexing Panama, Canada, and Greenland. And recently Gaza? Not sure about Mexico.
there are certainly some parallels with what's happening today but analogies are always difficult. i could be wrong but i really don't think of this administration as murderous in the way that Nazi Germany was.
Of course, the biggest asterisk beside the analogy is the lack of warmongering. Like, kind of the most important part, and Trump is acting more like Woodrow Wilson in that respect. Didn't Woodrow Wilson once say that the US isn't a melting pot but a garbage can?
You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
> In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
Really, in democratic societies there are three levels; those where the offending politician is actually deposed, those where their unconstitutional action is blocked by the courts or by another arm of government (as with Boris), and those where _they never do the thing in the first place because they realise they can't get away with it, and there'll be unpleasant consequences for them_ (this is by far the most common, particularly in parliamentary democracies, where Dear Leader can be fired at a moment's notice). If none of these happen, then typically the democracy ends.
The US is probably unusually vulnerable to this sort of thing; it has an unusually powerful executive, and a highly politicised Supreme Court, in particular. Though, it kind of remains to be seen how far the Supreme Court will be pushed. Some or all of Trump's appointees may take the view that they got into the job to screw over minorities and aid business, but not necessarily to actually end democracy in the US. They are likely not all that beholden to him.
R v Miller was important but ultimately overtaken by events - while Parliament did want to discuss Brexit, they were unable to find a viable solution and we still got no-deal Brexit where vital things like the status of Northern Ireland had to be patched up later. For whatever insane reason, the demand to eject us from the Single Market was just too strong.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister (not to be confused with R v Miller, or R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the solution here is clearly to just stop naming people 'Miller', to avoid further confusion)) was probably ultimately more important in its precedent than its concrete outcomes, though, yeah.
In a functioning democracy, the guardrails last until the person trying to break them leaves office, and then that person is not elected again; and if they break laws in office, they are convicted of them.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies? I think the only thing people have been habituated to is the enormity of the government; go back to any other point in history, was the government this big in terms of independent agencies, employee/contractor count, budget/debt as percentage of gdp?
Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
Because those agencies are funded by the federal budget. We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? And don't tell me this is just a small part of the federal budget. Oh its just a couple billion here and there. That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt. This level of fiscal irresponsibility is basically taxation without representation on the unborn.
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
> because it's explicitly in American interests to do so
Please elaborate, and be precise because every interventionist argument is like, "but our trading partners, but our allies" but always fails to link exactly how that improves the lives of Americans. So tell me exactly what we are afraid of. If its trade tell me exactly what the comparative advantage is or what the resource we need is. And if its defense, tell me exactly what the threat vectors are, not just, "the island chains".
We've doing truly stupid things in the name of bullshit concepts like "containment" which led us into Vietnam, or "stabilizing the region" which led us into the middle east.
We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student; please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
That's your(American) argument, not mine. When I ask why is America building anti-missile batteries and stationing their troops in my country, the answer is "because it furthers their interests". There is of course always some bullshit of "because it improves our security" - but everyone knows that's not true. They are here because they want to project they are a superpower and therefore have bases all over the world, not because they love us.
>>We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student
Well I had to look it up, and apparently this is what Trump said about it:
"We also blocked $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Forty-five — that’s a lot of money for diversity scholarships in Burma. You can imagine where that money went," Trump said.
I wish he was more specific. What is he insinuating, exactly?
>> please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
Having a population of burma(a historically very active conflict area) that is well educated and more likely to oppose the military Junta? Of course no one will ever say that openly, it's "humanitarian aid".
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?
I work alongside highly skilled experts in my job and I've never heard them say anything remotely like this when someone disagrees with them, so I'm pretty skeptical that you actually are one. This sounds more like something that a rebellious high-schooler would say
I'm pretty open minded so if you have a detailed answer, I would love to hear it. Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of hand wavy answers around like "stabilizing" or "soft power" because I feel like vague language masquerades corruption and misuse of funds. What I want to know are the direct causal links between our money and our interests.
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
> I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
So, for you, an acceptable solution to "the budget is too big," is "let's rip up the Constitution?"
If Trump wants to veto budget bills and demand certain cuts in exchange of passage, that's fine, totally within his power, and would probably work.
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.
Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.
Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.
Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.
Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.
You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.
Explain how shutting down USAID due to documented fraudulent spending strengthens the president’s power. I can’t think of a single way myself, but maybe I’m overlooking something?
If he gets away with shutting down USAID by fiat then it makes it clear that he can go outside the bounds of law and demand anything of the executive branch.
The next step might be going to the DOJ and telling them to detain, let's say, Ilhan Omar on suspicion of treason. This illegal demand will have much more force because anyone refusing it will know that they stand on their own and have no recourse through the courts or congressional oversight.
He’d have a long way to go to get down to the number of federal agencies that existed in 1900, let alone the number in 1800, yet the US had its constitution, then, too.
Since 1800 congress has used its constitutional power to establish agencies. It is congress who has the constitutional power to shut them down, not the president. The president executes the laws passed by Congress.
On HN, reposts are fine (which is to say, aren't treated as dupes) when a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
But it's great to link to examples of past threads, because readers like to look at them—so this was a good contribution! just not with the tag "duplicate".
Edit: basically, there are two disjoint cases when it makes sense to link to a previous submission of the same story:
(1) when a prior submission of the same story had significant attention in the last year or so, then linking to it with the word "duplicate" or "dupe" is helpful;
or
(2) when a prior submission had significant attention more than a year ago, then linking to it with the phrase "past discussion" or "discussed at" (or something like that) is helpful.
(And for completeness: when a submission has not gotten significant discussion, it's best not to link to it at all. There are plenty of those in the archives, and they're mostly harmless.)
Thanks for that last note, it's been my argument for a while and I've had a few discussions with people on that point, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40849927>. I'll try to remember this comment to share for those cases.
One of the great (and unexpected!) side effects of voting for Trump has been getting all the immature hysterical people off of the AI threads and into these Fascist Nazi threads.
I, for one, appreciate the absence of the European degrowth types
>"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's happened in American society, particularly the silence, confusion and cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking. It should have been required reading in American schools, when there was still time to educate people against these dangers.
sure, making the government smaller is basically the same as putting the government in control of everything.
> sure, making the government smaller is basically the same as putting the government in control of everything.
Come on. A "hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy" is completely orthogonal to the size of government, before or after the takeover.
How do you clean up a corrupt organization?
Surely not by appointing other oligarch and cronies at high position of said organization.
By making it more transparent
It's probably best to start by not appointing a serial liar, convicted felon and conman to head it.
But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable.
Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and neither do any of the checks and balances.
He's a rapist too, isn't he?
He literally bragged about it before he was elected the first time.
I know we live in chaotic times and all but "grab them by the pussy" without clear consent is, in fact, sexual assault, no matter how much of a celebrity you are.
And there's a long trail of credible accusations against him ranging from various forms of sexual assault to unequivocal rape:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
IANAL, but if you're asking for a technically-correct answer, it depends on which place's laws you're using for the statement.
If the crime can be done with hands and objects, yes.
If the crime requires an actual phallus, no. (It'd still be something else, like sexual assault.)
Bernie Sanders has been trying to tell you this since I can count.
Corruption is fought by cutting off external, financial influence and lobbying and by putting the voters front and center.
It is however _not_ fought by firing and going after dissents, pardoning violent extremists, stepping over the separation of power.
> How do you clean up a corrupt organization?
1) The US government isn't "corrupt." It might be inefficient, it might be bloated, but it isn't generally corrupt.
2) You definitely don't try "clean up corruption" by out-doing it in corruption and lawlessness.
Is this admin making the government smaller?
So far they are expanding power, firing dissents and trying to reduce spending to humanitarian causes and education, to expand its hegemony, to agitate allies. They even attempt to increase means of incarceration.
But there’s no attempt to decentralize power.
> government smaller
I'd also emphasize that a dictator is smaller than a Congress, but not better, and "fewer written rules" can easily conflict with "more freedom for individuals."
Just imagine if the many state laws concerning crimes and misdemeanors were torn up in favor of "don't piss off the police." Sure, it's way shorter, but you've simply replaced the hard-fought written rules (which you have a chance to see, understand, contest, etc.) with hidden unwritten ones that change semi-randomly.
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
I’ve not watched it yet, but a recent film called the Zone Of Interest sounds like it aligns to this.
It’s about the Hoss family that lived next to one of the Nazi concentration camps, the father/husband ran the camp.
Also, I recently watched The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and it again aligns to that point of view a bit.
Point to be noted is that Rudolf Hoss wasn't the leader of a random Nazi camp. He was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered, making him one of the biggest mass-murderer of the last century.
Apologies, I’m not tuned into the details of the film as it’s on still my witch list. I didn’t want to overstate it just in case I was incorrect.
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
Do I understand that while the United States is undergoing a radical neonazi revolution lead by the tech industry your take away is that the people who called out the right-wing and tech industry were wrong to do so and bear responsibility for the horrific state of the world?
No, what you should takeaway is that misoverusing the term Nazi as an insult patently no longer works precisely because noone cares about being called a Nazi anymore due to its misoveruse.
In a different timeline, Trump being called a Nazi or any of the vicinity terms should have been an immediate termination of his campaign chances.
What actually happened is Trump ignored it (as he should) and the American people shrugged "OK" and went to vote for him with complete disregard.
Then Musk got called a Nazi at the inauguration, and the American people shrugged "OK" and went back to facepalming at just how much sheer waste the government has with complete disregard.
The moral you should take away is you should not invoke Godwin's Law. It's probably too late for "Nazi", "racism", "sexism", and a host of other insults the Left have thrown around to see what sticks (none have), but that doesn't mean future originally-valuable-terminology have to face the same fate.
Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, not unlike the original meaning behind the term "Yankee" which was originally an insult not unlike "Kraut" or "Jap" but is now one of the fondest nicknames of Americans.
Trump is a neonazi, openly aligned with American white supremacist militias, attempted a violent coup in 2021, and "the American people" who shrugged "OK" are neonazis. It is the inescapable reality of our present moment, and it has been visible for a very long time.
Godwin himself openly endorsed calling Trump a Nazi.
My takeaway is exactly the opposite, that not only were people right to call out radical fascist elements and influences in our society, they (we) were wrong to be cowed.
I sincerely thank you for perfectly demonstrating my point.
The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.
Indeed. The allegation of "racist" has lost its power because people feel free to be openly in favor of racism again.
> Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns...
It depends on the insult; sometimes that doesn't work. One of the purest expressions of joy I've seen in politics was Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) back in 2019 analysing [0] a group of anti-Trumpers trying to rally around being called "human scum". He had a lot of interesting things to say back then about the art and science of persuasion.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_3HGjAVv0M 1:30 to 7:30
Direct link to segment: <https://www.youtube.com/embed/1_3HGjAVv0M?start=90&end=450>
So, Americans were insulted by being called Nazis and in true progressive fashion decided to reclaim the term and, well, embrace it?
Cool - it’s nice that you say this is an American trait. I was almost about to say that this entire setup was manufactured to pit Americans against each other, weaponising victimhood and identity, with the complicity of legacy media and big tech. And out of the three players in this game - the ‘left’/‘libs’, ‘right’/‘conservatives’ and the billionaire fascists up top pulling the strings, only the billionaires stand to win.
If this had been true, Musk and other far right people wouldn’t have tried to defend Musk’s nazi salute. But they did.
Well, I think so. Because many didn't understand they were fascists too.
The fascism was always in the vast majority of us, if we wanted to look at it. Just look at the structure of our workplaces, which accounts for half our waking lives. There's no free speech in them. With few exceptions, they're intensely hierarchical, people passing orders downward. Those "unlucky" enough to make it inside one of them, often sleep in the nearby alley.
The bizarreness of this form of organization isn't lost on those on top of the hierarchy. They're used to battalions of people doing what they want, and they seek out philosophers who apply this vision to other aspects of life. It wasn't hard; for example, the US had a 4 year king anyway. Usually a warmonger callous to the vast majority of his population.
One problem is "calling out." Name-calling. The current administration is showing direct action, which impresses many who find their lives increasingly intolerable. Many didn't like him, but rather rationally rolled the dice with the change candidate, even if it was probably going to end up as bad change. Like hitting the computer.
Excuse me, I forgot a 'not': Those "unlucky" enough NOT to make it inside one of them
So radical anti-capitalism caused the gambling public to spin the slot machine?
No I'm noting that to fight better we must realize what we did inefficiently and correct course so that we can mobilize more people.
Right now If I discuss the events around me, many are apathetic, because they think I'm exaggerating. Because that's what they have been used to.
And your comment is directing your anger at someone that very likely share a lot of your value system while he was trying to make a self-reflecting point. This is a waste, and it divides us.
When everything is an outrage, the outrage is worth nothing.
And while you are fighting on semantics with potential allies, for virtue signaling no less, the real threat is showing a united front, no doubt, no debate.
I don't know if there was intent behind it, but during and after WW2 the nazis and ww2-era Germans were depicted as textbook villains, in media, documentaries, school books, etc, but they did so in a dehumanizing fashion, as in, there were only a few named individuals (Hitler, Goebels, Göring, etc), but a generalised and unified "Them". Which made them completely unrelatable to those that weren't "them", which also opened people up for sleepwalking into facism - as long as they don't look too much like "them", and only when "they" got into power did their true colours reveal, including the caricature of Musk doing a nazi salute. I mean he didn't need to do that, and for the facist takeover it would've been better if he didn't because there's now a strong correlation between the two, but he did at the moment it was too late.
I mean it wasn't and isn't too late of course, that's defeatism, people can quickly be removed from power once people get their act together. Jan 6 proved that, and that was a fairly unorganized mob with only a handful actually prepared to arrest / kidnap or do worse to the congresspeople (thinking of the one guy with the tie wraps).
Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can find similar images from apartheit South Africa and apartheit southern US states before 1970. And in those cases they believe they are happy because of the protective wall of state violence against other humans.
There was always what you might call a "particle" of fascism throughout the War on Terror (maintained by both parties! because it was popular with the public!) Things like the unaccountable secret prisons in Gunatanamo or Abu Gharib, or the US sniper who amused himself by randomly murdering hundreds of civilians (eventually convicted .. then pardoned). And then in the war on Gaza everyone (bipartisan) was falling over themselves to say that it was children's own fault for being in the same school as Hamas and that the Israeli government was right to bomb them.
Back at home in BLM, everyone stood up for the right of the police to unaccountably murder citizens. Because that power would only be used against bad people, right?
> They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
You may wish to watch this movie on the banality of the life of those who ran the concentration camps and who lived next to them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film)
> They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
the reason for this contradiction is that, in their view, some people are not considered human
that's how nazis see jews, how colonizers see natives, how slaveholders see black slaves, how zionists see palestinians
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In my experience, most of the people who get accused of being Nazis do turn out to be actual Nazis. Sometimes they are stupid enough to make overt Nazi gestures (e.g. Elon Musk) which is pretty much the only way the average person will accept that someone is a Nazi. Much more frequently they turn out to agree with Nazi ideas such as ethnic cleansing, but do not do the salute, and people will say they're not really a Nazi because they didn't do the salute.
If you haven’t seen it, the 2023 film “The Zone of Interest” is an excellent movie that shows the banality of daily life in the Nazi regime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film)
That's exactly why this book is so valuable and important. It shows the link between a happy daily life in a nice clean country (that happens to be at war) and the insane things those people ignored at the same time in order to act normal every day. Once you read it, you will look around at America in a completely different way. Because unlike ignoring something done in the past (slavery, colonization) this is not arguably not the fault of the people pretending normal through it. It's happening in realtime. The thing to look for is the mix of apathy and fear.
i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this.
at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
Nah, cynicism is the only rational reaction now. Lots of people died from covid and our poor government response, but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
> I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem. We see the same thing in the UK. You can't fight a thing that people have made up in their heads with facts.
(I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them)
> Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
Many of the democrats are simply too old. Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84. Feinstein died in office at 90. There's an entire missing generation, the party should be averaging 50-65. People are supporting them because there's no alternative, which is .. not durable.
> if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this.
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.
> but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
You guys need to stop being so disingenuous (and get some new material). EVERYTHING got a lot more expensive under the previous administration. Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant. A poor economy motivates people to vote for the other party, ESPECIALLY when the average person felt they had better economic prospects when “the other team” was in power (again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant).
(Note: I'm not an american)
> Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant
> again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant
For democracy to work, you need voters with a good enough civics education to understand how the different parts of government interact, and a trustworthy media providing factual news so voters can understand the dilemmas their politicians are facing.
If what you're saying is right, and American voters are unable or unwilling to understand how their vote and current events combine to cause certain outcomes, doesn't that mean democracy in the US cannot possibly work?
What you're describing sounds closer to a popularity contest or a sports competition than politics.
________________________
Personally, I believe a major part of this issue is caused by the political system and media landscape of the US.
In a two-party system as in the US, the legislative only represents half the population (as bipartisan efforts are rare), leading to resentment among the other half.
In a mixed-member proportional system[1], as in Germany, New Zealand and many Scandinavian countries, you end up with many more different parties in parliament (Germany currently has 8 [2]). For any law to pass, you need multiple parties to work together, which allows more voters to be represented.
Similarly, while in Germany newspapers and public broadcasters still provide high-quality news (less than 20% of the population distrust the public broadcasters and major newspapers as of June 2024 [3]), in the US the media tried to improve their ratings by replacing factual reporting and analysis with ever more emotional content.
The level of polarization in the US as it is today will lead to a new civil war, or worse, if it continues. How can a democracy continue if the majority of voters cannot even agree on basic facts?
________________________
The perfect example for this is the discussion around the re-categorization of Pluto. Which has no real-world impact on anyone, yet everyone had an immutable opinion on.
The arguments for categorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet were relatively simple: We've found many other objects like Pluto. They're more similar to one another than to the other planets. Some of them are larger and heavier than Pluto. Either our solar system has 17 planets, or it has 8.
But the arguments against re-categorizing Pluto were of a very different nature. People had spent a lot of effort memorizing the planets in school, and didn't want all that effort to be wasted. People were emotionally attached to the way things had been. People preferred the emotional comfort of something that wasn't real, over the inconvenient truth.
One argument is based on logic and scientific fact, the other on emotional attachment to a middle-school understanding of the world.
The Enlightenment once replaced the emotional, religious order of the world with scientific fact and logic. This is the basis the US and modern democracies are based upon.
How did we end up in a situation where half of the political spectrum wants to tear down the very foundation of democracy and replace it with emotion, religion and tradition, medieval concepts we had long left behind?
________________________
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU
2. https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2021/e...
3. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...
Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo
Some people won’t change their mind even with contradicting evidence is shoved in their face.
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
And with the social media of today, they also got a performant platform for wider and broader congregation, with the effects that we see.
This is pretty much the premise of Bob Altemeyer's work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer His book The Authoritarians is the one that most elaborates on it, so works that cite or respond to it would probably be exactly what you're looking for.
Thank you! This really helps to have an initial breadcrumb into the idea. I can scrutinize it further.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
> at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
Yet extremists always want to dismantle education to control the population. For instance, in the US, Trump got the votes from the uneducated. He has no interest in an educated country.
I don't believe in this "natural stupidity" theory, many well-educated people voted red. Fascism is not a natural state of mind, it is carefully and relentlessly cultivated over years by a giant propaganda machine, at the hands of the capital class who stands to benefit the most from the current situation.
This is no coincidence that Trump's cabinet is the most billionaire-friendly ever. Total deregulation of businesses is the point, fascism is the mean. Eventually, fascism becomes the point and even billionaires become losers. I don't think we're quite there yet, but close.
> many well-educated people voted red
I think, then, there's a difference between "well-educated" and "intelligent" or even "critical thinker". I would go on to argue that most "well-educated" people are perhaps well-educated in generalities only, other than perhaps a narrow special-interest field.
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work
I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditional anti-intellectualism; it seems to be almost an active view that it is better that people in authority do not know how to do their job.)
Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes.
We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity.
On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.
>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout
Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"
Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.
> "you can't have X"
More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions.
The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power.
That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
> That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now
... I mean, you could just ban that sort of research; slightly less extreme. Though, frankly, I wouldn't bother; it appears highly unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon.
Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions.
Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt).
Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world.
Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects.
A lot of evidence based policy is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U
Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.
So, to confuse the issue, the country is officially called Ireland (it's in the constitution!), and that is the name normally used in Ireland and in Europe. The UK government officially referred to Ireland as the Republic of Ireland until 1998 (it now calls it Ireland) and as a result people in the UK often call it the Republic of Ireland.
People calling it the Irish Republic usually have an agenda in doing so, yeah.
ED: > Not to politicise this discussion
I mean, this is on a thread about the Nazis; I think you don't need to worry too much about further politicising it :)
Right you are. Also, if you're Rob Synnott I'm pretty sure I remember you from back in the early blogging / podcast days. Hope you're well.
What podcast is this?
Was wondering that as well; I don’t remember ever doing a podcast :D
What agenda? I do not know enough about the history to understand the implications
How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?
> What agenda? I do not know enough about the history to understand the implications
Traditionally, you mostly see weird names for Ireland in British media with an anti-Irish viewpoint (you saw a lot of this from the right-wing tabloids during Brexit, in particular). In particular ‘Eire’ and ‘the Irish Republic’ are red flags; ‘Eire’ has never been correct to use in English, and ‘the Irish Republic’ was never _really_ the name of the country at all. At best it comes across as ignorant (a bit like Americans calling the UK ‘England’) but in practice it tends to only be used by a certain type of publication.
(In particularly extreme cases you sometimes see ‘the Irish Free State’, presumably from journalists who are over a century old.)
> How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?
Ah, well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? In cases where it could be ambiguous, Irish media tends to say ‘the state’, but that doesn’t really work elsewhere. In practice where disambiguation is required “the Republic of Ireland” is a reasonable neutral term.
Even more confusing, the constitution defines the name as Éire, but using this term is considered passé or rude if you're not speaking English.
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/cons/en/html
ARTICLE 4
The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.
Sorry, I meant if you’re not speaking Irish
> DO people identify as British or European?
And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too.
In fact you don't have to choose between these identities. But when you frame the question like that it make sense that people would choose what is closer to them.
They can have multiple identities, but may not want to be British and European.any more than a Scottish nationalist wants to be Scottish and British.
This is a very common conflict for many communities around the world and rarely is “just be both” a satisfactory solution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatism
America is a bit different and, for some generations, consider ourselves better than the ugly factionalism and national identitarianism that led Europe into centuries of pointless warfare. One can be an African-Mexican-Asian-Queer-Irish-Jewish-Italian-American without subjugating one's identity.
Basically that's because "American" isn't a breed, like Scots or French. It's a political choice and an identity which is (should be) open to anyone who lives here and adopts the Constitution as the set of laws they want to live by.
Ironically, this is why Yarvin and Musk and Thiel will fail in their attempts at overthrowing the US government to create "network states". The US is the original state founded on a set of ideas rather than identities. (Since, at least, the Roman Republic). That is its strength, and something difficult for Europeans to really understand.
I’m not sure this is correct; in general many people would think of themselves as X and European, where X is the country of origin or citizenship. The EU is not a country.
For that matter, the UK, despite being a country, has some aspects of this; while Northern Ireland in particular is complicated for historical reasons, plenty of English and Scottish and Welsh people would think of themselves as English or Scottish or Welsh AND British.
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'.
The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them.
However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback.
Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.
I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway.
I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years.
Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc.
It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand.
The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting.
In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things.
In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better.
tldr I think we've hit a point where:
- The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate
- People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world
- Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith
- Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones
- Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty
- People are sick of feeling bad or guilty
- People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them
Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better.
ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.
You assume that people have the bare requisite knowledge to even accept a simplified explanation of complex things. For example, I said something like, "I can't believe they're shutting down USAID" to someone the other day and their response was, "what's USAID?"
This was an American. This caused me to think back to my schooling and you know what? I don't think I ever did take a class that went over all the divisions and (larger) programs of the US government. It was like you suggest, a simplified explanation (three branches and that's about it).
Clearly, that wasn't enough. Even something as simple as, "USAID provides humanitarian aid to foreign countries in order to give the US a strong influence in those places" would've been better than nothing.
Right now we have a critical US foreign influence apparatus in a non-working state and most Americans don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.
You make some really good points in your comment. One of the most unfortunate (that I believe to be true) is:
> don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.
Apathy is a problem in so many different social, political, and even technological systems - for instance, if people cared just a little bit more about digital privacy, the entire adtech scene probably wouldn't exist.
There is a lot in this that is phenomenally well stated. I don't disagree with most of it.
I'd point out that there was a lag between when extremely well informed people started to get the firehose of bullshit and when they became able to parse some facts from it; right about at that moment, the firehose was turned on the totally unprepared, uninformed mass of other people, and since that point it's been a power struggle over who controls this out of control hose. But that's not to say that, at some point, the incredible level of distrust among the confused and ill-informed won't turn against whoever seems to be pointing the hose at them at the moment. If simple answers are what people need, then information overload has its own logical way of overwhelming whoever is trying to control the flow of information.
Thanks for sharing this. I've been slowly coming to this conclusion, though I haven't lived in a red state since I was 16.
Your description fits our current world, IMO, far better than every other narrative I've seen. Some of those narratives feel good and fit OK, but they fall apart at the edges. The idea fits with why Hilary Clinton was so hated, better than anything.
On a personal level, I've become much more wary about seeming smarter. When I help and engage I try to do it in a way that doesn't threaten. I'm quick to say when I don't know something. I offer to help "figure it out" with others rather than preach.
Another comment somewhere in these threads talks about how social media has accelerated our problems by 10 or 100x. I think that's true for this, too.
I'm in a red state and I hard disagree with your generalizations. Even in red red red states Kamilla got 30%-40% of the vote. Trump got 40% in California.
I think you should re-read what they wrote. Asserting that you're part of a group of people who agree with you (aka conformism) is what they're saying is common in places that hate intellectualism and are scared of individualism. You're kind of just doing what they said you'd do.
Not just that, but your post is almost a perfect example of the attitude which most of the Germans in the book "The Germans 1933-1945" ended up regretting, if not on moral grounds, then after it led to the destruction of their country.
This is a very good description of the paranoid, mob-mentality anti-intellectual subculture I've seen wax and wane in America throughout my lifetime. And I grew up in the 80s surrounded by people who were rejects from this anti-intellectual culture, who were smart enough to think all kinds of unauthorized thoughts for themselves. I believed that, above all things, this rejectionist safety-seeking and fearful mob mentality was old and that it was inevitable that its smarter progeny would rebel against it.
It's really only when you look at it through the frame of the Weimar Republic, or, the 60s youth in Argentina or Chile or the 50s in Hungary or right now in Russia or China, that you see how fragile individualism is, because it is so damn easy to whip up a mob against anyone who thinks differently, as you're describing. What is so telling about this book is how the mob itself barely even thinks it's a mob. Most of the time it doesn't even think it's doing any harm or anything unpopular. That is the lesson that we need to learn as a species - not some vague idea of freedom, but that hard individualism is more valuable than easy camaraderie. There were about 50 years worth of Hollywood movies trying to reinforce this notion, but about 10 years of social media obliterated it.
The anti mask, anti vax, anti chromosomal expression, anti 'tariffs are taxes' are beyond "anti-expert"
These positions are flatly anti-base-reality. If you want to frame them in terms of authority rejection, you could call them anti-first graders
> anti chromosomal expression
Genuinely couldn't figure out what this is a euphamism for.
> anti chromosomal expression
What's this? I've literally never heard this phrase before in my life.
> there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment.
Anti-intellectualism in the US goes back decades (if not centuries):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
The first two US colonies were Jamestown (looking for El Dorado North; gold; riches) and Plymouth (religious society):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...
* https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland
The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.
I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
> “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”
I think a more apt description is the misconception that democracy supposedly means everybody gets their "equal proper timeshare of being considered correct".
I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions.
And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are.
It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now.
So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.
> this is just who we are as a people.
I do not believe that. I believe this situation is engineered, and we have some very long game playing manipulators being very successful today.
Society engineering is real, and there are many players active in that game.
Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country.
But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.
Do not overlook the largest player in this game, who is not "for-profit", well not directly, they are pure "for-power" players. That player is religion, primarily the manipulating faiths of Christian and Muslim religion, which is at the seat and center of anti-intellectualism.
Is this still true as it used to be? I of course see what you refer to, but I also know many highly intelligent and culturally literate people who are devout muslims and christians. Furthermore a lot of anti-intellectualism today is secular: flat earthers, people who call sugar "basically poison", anti-vaxxers, etc. I think this comes from a very different place: these theories/viewpoints distract people with a feeling that they're getting a look behind the curtain on how the world "really" works. And there is a good deal of overlap (think: tiktoker talks about the "secret code" they cracked in the bible) but I think these are distinct phenomena. I think the latter phenomenon is caused by low trust in society, I think, plus a hodgepodge of stuff like crappy faux-marxism ("every problem is just rich people", which although there is a grain of truth, does certainly not literally describe reality), laundered anti-semitism ("the world is actually run by lizard people cabals who are coincidentally jewish"), and new age speculation about stuff like mass psychosis. In fact i'd argue that "new age spirituality" seems to be a nexus for all of this (and curiously still overlaps with christianity), attracting both marks and conmen in crowds.
Or to put it another way, I don't see how Q Anon theories can be tied back to religion in any direct way, even if many posts do draw from antisemitism. I'd even put the "russiagate" stuff in this category—it's true that many of the allegations seem substantial, but feels highly disingenuous when AIPAC wields such naked influence over both parties. Surely by any metric that Trump is controlled by Russia, Israel's influence outstrips it by many orders of magnitude.
Tbh, some of it is also just inability to interpret media. Particularly coverage of politics. Watching cable or reading opinion columns you'd think the parties were diametrically opposed and represent two wildly different aspects of america—when it takes about half an hour of reading a sampling of how politics works in other countries to realize how similar our parties are compared to basically every other party system on earth (excepting Britain, I guess?). Interestingly, for a country that prides itself on voting and political opinions, we're actually quite terrible at ceding the conversation to "experts" who are often even worse-informed and less educated than many of us.
Chomsky has this great bit about how Americans will call into a baseball show as an expert to criticize everything. The coaches, tbe players, etc. most of these people don't play baseball at all but feel very confident and passionate. He then points out how those same people will not have opinions about how government should work and leave criticism and demands to "pundits" even though they are much better equipped to figure out if they are being represented well than they are to judge the performance of a professional athlete. I think the internet cracked that open and now everyone has opinions. I'm curious how much anti-intellectualism just comes from democratization of public discourse and little has actually gotten worse, we're just more aware than we were before.
I believe it is more subtle, it is the effect of intolerance, in general, on the education system, which appears most often from religious perspectives. This is multiplied by a generalized impressment of obedience to adults and authority in school aged children. Children are taught that certain thoughts and lines of reasoning are sinful to the degree they face damnation, which to many imaginative young minds equates to a terror brainwashing where they become afraid to think, crippling their critical analysis before it can develop. They are rendered old children with childlike understandings of life's unanswerable questions, which they get answered by their faith. They never develop working secondary considerations, and are gullible because of it. Such people are perfectly capable of becoming research scientists, doctors, even attorneys, because we have an incredible compartmentalism capability. As you point out they are incapable in interpreting media, and why would they? It's not their specialization. They can apply critical analysis and secondary considerations within their career, because it was hammered into them in that compartmentalization, but it is not innate to them, they are not natural critical thinkers. So politics using indirect language and wolf whistling Nazi signals is just right over their heads, they will argue with you how their candidate never says racist anything.
This is the part where liberals are, caught up in their own inherent contradictions, desperately trying to understand whats happening so they reach for things they do understand, meaningless pop psychology.
I didn't really want to experience that particular part of German history repeating itself but here we are. "Wer hat uns verraten?"
A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.
I think you are terribly mistaken and, if I may, you are the one who seems to refuse to be educated (I don't say this as an insult). It is very easy to say "they are brutes" instead of looking at what exactly is going on and why democrats lost the elections.
As a non-US, I see very little difference between democrats and republicans, except maybe Trump. Democrats are the typical neoliberals: free markets, global capitalism, corporate rule, worldwide patents, etc. There is the famous chart that shows that since around the 80s the productivity went up while wages stagnate. Workers in the US right now are not in a much better position than 20 years ago.
Did the democrats campaign for improvements, raising the wages, improving healthcare, education? No, it was business as usual, "please don't vote Trump so we can keep things like now". Thus, many people said "fine, I'll vote for the other, he says things will be like before, literally".
So it's the Democratic Party who has baked into its DNA that things should not change, no matter what. I would say they could've won easily with some concessions, but those concessions go against their core beliefs.
Unfortunately, and because of this, Trump, a liar and conman, won. If they wanted to win they should've lied better, like Trump did.
yeah i concede i don't know everything, but honestly if you're not from or living in the US i would also re-examine your view of things. you have a different objective view but miss a lot of the context. it's easy to intellectualize the whole situation and come up with these solutions. this kind of reasoning is what i've gone through already trying to make excuses for people and it sounds nice on paper but it doesn't hold.
i'll tell you from personal experience there exists huge swaths of people in my community that voted for trump not because of any of his policies or a feeling that dems didn't bring change, but because they worship him like a religious figure. or they demonize anything that isn't conservative and treat it like team sports. it really doesn't seem to be much more complicated than that for some people no matter what angle you try to come in with (lack of education, not tending to their needs, etc.)
This idolisation can also happen for the left (not democrats, I mean real left), but I think it's the minority. Unfortunately, people choose something new and potentially bad vs the same as usual. Not because of education, but because of limited choices.
Hmm, if somebody idolizes a serial liar, cheat, fraud, convicted felon, horrible personality, sleazy conman etc. who is also a billionaire who laughs at poor then problem lies deeper.
Failed upbringing, failed education, failed by society. If I substract those people who we can call unfortunate from pool, the only stuff that remains is really not anyhow pretty, in contrary.
Those people in your community that voted for him - are they happy with his steps now and firm direction he is taking? If yes, then it confirms the line above.
On one hand, you're partially right: It's a pretty sad state of affairs that our only choices in the previous election were "maybe let's not elect a fascist" and a fascist. I can totally agree with you that I would have loved an option that was "let's make life better".
On the other hand, what does it say about our society that given those two options, we picked the Fascist? It's not like the messaging from the Republicans was unclear: they ran on a platform of attacking the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. And more than 30% of the citizens of our country said "sounds good. Count me in". Another 30-odd% decided it didn't really matter to them one way or the other. Only 30-something-percent of Americans said "wow, that's kinda fucked up. Let's not do that".
I don't think people who voted for Harris thought "yeah, let's keep healthcare pro corporate and screw the poor", they voted for other stuff. And I think people who voted for Trump didn't vote specifically against LGBTQ+ policies necessarily.
Of course, media and social media had a heavy influence, but on everybody.
The coworkers I felt comfortable asking why they voted for Trump came out of the gate with some variation on "no pretend girls in girls sports and locker rooms". To some of them being gay is apparently "just something pedos do". Plenty of people voted against lgbtq+ rights explicitly. But beyond that we are all stupid on the issues, and to some extent that is unavoidable. We can't all be experts in economics. So we can't vote on issues, we need to vote on character. When faced with a wolf in sheep's clothing and a wolf, pick the one still pretending. At least pretending to feel shame about corruption sends the message that it is wrong.
People who voted for Trump voted for "let's keep everything including healthcare pro corporate and screw the poor".
The anti LGBT and especially anti trans messaging was strong and clear from the conservative side. There was no ambiguity or potential for mistake.
Trump voters were not misled, they wanted the things parent comment list.
> social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
Social media took away the hesitation of crowing about stupid things. If many people are saying it, maybe I am not stupid after all. The legitimisation and amplification of dumbness is a big contributor to the current state. Among other things of course.
When there started to be money made, and even better real power to be gained by herding such crowds then its not anymore just about self-organization over time, the push becomes very proactive
Social media no longer represents "many people are saying it".
The early internet could give an overview of what's being said in general on a particular topic - but today's content is often manipulated to support or attack a particular viewpoint.
You don't need to explain with malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
In fact that's one of the roads to fascism - constantly looking for "manipulators" everywhere and other witch hunt types.
The longer I live the more I am convinced that the average person has next to 0 ability for critical thinking. They just sort of stumble between local maximas until they end up wherever they are.
> In fact that's one of the roads to fascism - constantly looking for "manipulators" everywhere and other witch hunt types.
Bollocks. Studies suggest as much as 35% of social media posts are fake, and as high as 40% on some forums. This isn't Fascism or paranoia, this is just how large tech companies make money. Like, if you don't understand how AI and scripting align with marketing and propaganda goals then you're gonna get played like a rube every time.
The problem is that "marketing works even when you understand how marketing works", and that it is very hard to maintain constant vigilance.
>there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
That’s not what the pointed text is about though. It specifically mention the concern is about those that should be considered of higher education in the context, as opposed for example to a baker¹.
¹ This is the example given in text, not some condescendence of bakers from my part here.
Once you see how stupid and useful this group is, it's hard to unsee the deliberate attempts to make this group larger and dumber.
Thought I should expand to explain the group gets larger as the economy suffers and people are too poor busy and hopeless for anything other than a hopeful narrative.
And the group gets dumber when skipping school is glorified, education gets funding cuts, and people mass consume media.
I can only recommend Dietrich Bonhoeffer's essay "Von der Dummheit" (On Stupidity), which he wrote while being imprisoned by Nazi Germany. It's a short read and a terribly accurate description of what's happening.
It's the combination of a desire for student obedience and the intellectual damaging power of religion. Far too often a young student is told their youthful and essentially unsocialized behavior is sinful, including their own thoughts, and that coupled with an Orwellian level of obedience socialization with religion and you create crippled intellects that are afraid of their own thoughts and are perfectly obedient church members and employees. They are minions in the most literal sense and the United States is filled with them, obedient and terribly dangerous.
This is a beautiful book.
In particular this excerpt is frustrating though. As said directly in the text, it's hard to see the beginnings. Yes, many things are changing right now, but to be fair, if you went to any random trump supporter and showed them this text they would immediately recognize it and tell you all the things the prior admins have done that matches these "sudden" decisions "made in secret" that nobody should disagree with.
It discusses tactics, which are easy to recognize in expansion of power, but also in illiberal thinking anywhere, but I don't see in this excerpt (or remember in the original book) discussion of root causes. One thing that really stuck with me though was that many of the interviewees were quite happy with what the party had done for the country, on an individual level. This was rebuilding, providing party benefits, etc. And many joined up because they had to to advance socially or in their career. Again, things that become a Rorschach blot even in hindsight because, I guess, they are always using these tactics to push their agenda over ours until it spirals out of control, regardless of who "we" / "they" are.
I read this book years ago and it had a huge impact on my thought.
I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.
"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.
"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.
Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.
The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.
We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.
The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.
> it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
In the unlikely event it genuinely was then this would be solveable with subsidized genetic engineering for the masses.
I also think there's a lot to improve in education. While making everyone a rationalist is unrealistic, most of the ideas such as sampling bias and messy word meanings can be taught to almost all.
> at this point i just want to call it "stupidity".
At this point people are celebrating cruelty:
> We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated[1] from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists[2] when he mocked a child with down syndrome[3] who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse[4] suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre[5] (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake,[6] the women who said the president sexually assaulted them,[7] and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting.[8] There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents[9] shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement[10] who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.
[…]
> This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
* https://archive.is/ex0TP
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/the-cruelty-...
People voted for Trump (the first time) because he promised The Others pain, but when you get /r/LeopardsAteMyFace moments:
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...
Stupidity is when one fails to genuinely see things from some other perspective than their own.
It is not that hard to do, and does not prevent from taking a side eventually, but it helps one to realize that the distance to someone else taking a radially oposite approach is usualy not that large.
Unfortunately, this kind of mind gymnastic is rarely encouraged because it goes against the creation of stronger social circles I guess.
So, all that to say: don't give up. Cynicism is like a drug that feels right at the begining but that will damage a brain eventually.
> it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
I think this is probably correct. It's inevitable. It's who we are - we (some percentage of?) humans simply want to hurt each other.
Nobody in the history of humanity has had it as good (by any material metric) as Americans living in 2025, yet here we go again.
This sentiment is exactly what David Lynch explores over, and over, and over:
Why are some people willing to be so evil.
I think we tell ourselves it’s environment or inequity or education… but the older I get, the more I think there is a kind of lack of conscientiousness that most people have, and that they are decent folks is only that they have something to lose.
Unless a theory can explain the prevalence of litter, which should effectively never happen based on most criteria, than that theory of why bad things happen is insufficient.
There is a theory, and it's called sadistic child abuse. Maybe optimistically only 20% of people who had wicked and abusive parents grow up to take that sadism out on others. But they have a draw on their peers, as sociopaths, enticing them to indulge in or excuse sadistic acts. And of course they perpetuate it through violence on their own children. Once they reach a critical mass in a society, you have Russia.
If they do it but they're not quite aware of it, and think they're teaching children a lesson, then you have Germany.
And if they do it because they're saving their children's souls, you have red state America.
Of course, it's abuse, a psychotic perversion dressed up as a social norm. But the point is it's contagious.
In France, I remember we read several classic allegories on that theme at schools. Rhinoceros by Ionesco (even watched it in the theater as a school trip), also The Plague (Albert Camus). I didn't think much of it when I was a teenager, but I'm looking at them on the light of these recent events. Especially Rhinoceros on ideological contagion.
Yes we did, but I think that the people who needed it the most, were the ones who either didn't had to read it (the ones not in a "lycée général") or whent through because it was required but didn't tried to understand the meaning.
More broadly, as teenagers, most of us didn't had the maturity to truely grasp the meaning ; and the ones who did probably already where sensitive enough to don't fall in the same traps.
In the hundreds of people I crossed path with during my school time, I don't remember a single one who was actually enlightened by things in the program. The only ones who had kind of a shift from their original mindset did that outside of school or because of a teacher who went out of their way (and of the official program) to explain things.
I don't think I was enlightened at that time, but at least, we discussed these topics and they are part of the collective knowledge in Europe. It's probably why Musk nazi salutes resonate differently in Europe vs the US. That being said, populism is raising in Europe too.
Odd things can enlighten someone. I was outside a gay bar in Avignon when a guy I knew who was hardcore FN hesitated and then sat down next to me, a Jew, and had an honest conversation. I think it doesn't take too much to enlighten French people, because much of the template for plurality and tolerance is already there and built into the culture. Then again, there are always some true assholes.
Is "The Plague" considered an allegory of the struggle against upcoming extremism?
While reading it I saw some parallels with occupation: people trying to escape, some suffering from being separated from their loved ones, those abusing the system and enriching themselves with contraband, help being flown in irregularly, etc. But I didn't get as far as Nazism.
Do you happen to remember which elements supported that supposed theme?
>cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking.
That's the least of your concerns.
What you should be opposing is the US' government participation in genocide.
The American publics' scale of tolerance of evil needs serious and earnest re-callibrating.
This can only happen with war crimes prosecutions.
I'm having a hard time googling the book you mentioned. Is it by any chance called 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45'? That's the closest thing I could find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free
Yes. "They thought they were free" is the main title. "The Germans 1933-1945" is the subtitle.
Watching Gaza get razed has pretty much ended any sense I had that liberal society is capable of learning lessons or improving itself. I grew up a good liberal, but as an adult I realize that so much of peoples' attraction to liberalism is simply inability to resolve conflict, center values in society, or establish a shared culture. There are better ideals to structure society around, like material rights.
Fwiw i also believe we should dismantle our government as it is not, actually, very democratic and doesn't actually function well and mostly exists to serve itself and its corporate clients. The current parties are simply the last people on earth I'd trust to do it.
If you hate liberalism, wait until you find out about illiberalism.
What makes you think I hate liberalism? I was just pointing out it's not sufficient for a functional society, contrary to the tenets of our civic religion. If it was, our country wouldn't be such a dysfunctional shithole our citizens log on to China's instagram to talk about how much of a dysfunctional shithole this country is. Hilarious and hugely embarrassing.
Granted, I do abhor the part of liberalism that makes people think their voice has any inherent value and that political action begins and ends with voting. I'd like to remind readers that Hitler was voted into office, but the civil rights act was legislated out of fear of cities burning down, and it took a literal civil war to end slavery in this country (outside of prisons anyway). Most of the few labor rights we have in part because the labor movement was bombing buildings and shutting down entire cities. We live in an arguably progressive society in spite of liberalism, not because of it.
Am I naive for thinking americans are capable of making a government we can ACTUALLY not be embarrassed by? That can actually prioritize its own citizens over its GDP and bombing places that never did us wrong? Whose flag isn't seen by many groups of people as a hate symbol? With a culture not based on being proudly ignorant? Probably. But we all need hope. Liberalism certainly ain't gonna get us there by itself—at some point we need actual values to orient around aside from greed and the right to be an asshole in public.
I think the thing that has been most surprising to me is how utterly transparent our current situation has been. I like to say "When it comes to the end of the Republic, I thought it would have all been quite a bit sneakier."
Like the way that all of the Republicans in congress folded like a cheap suit and are now completely subservient to Trump - "Profiles in Cowardice" from top-to-bottom, with the exception of a few outliers who have now been ejected from the Republican party. My favorite current example is Bill Cassidy - what a total coward! I knew all of his "concerns" about RFK Jr. were a charade, and then even given his oath and knowledge as a doctor that he would eventually fold, and come out with some BS statement about how "After a really long conversation with RFK Jr. he assured me on some of my concerns blah blah blah..." And it happened like that to a T. Almost exactly like the Susan Collins/Brett Kavanaugh situation "I was shocked pikachu! I mean he assured me he wouldn't overturn Roe v. Wade!"
I'm just surprised at how it's all playing out exactly to script, and the "scripts" from previous history aren't even that old or forgotten...
Yes, pinning our hopes on Bill Cassidy to head off catastrophe was a bit like hoping your oncologist would show up bright and early with good news...
From a German who lived through the 30s (from memory): "at the time, I couldn't determine if Hitler was a good phenomenon with some bad side-effects, or a bad phenomenon with some good side-effects".
In hindsight the answer is pretty obvious. But in 1934 Germany? A lot less so.
This is one of the best books I ever read. I picked it up pretty randomly a few years back. It changed me.
Before reading it, I was firmly of the opinion that good people (like me! and everyone I like!) will (mostly) resist a fascist takeover. At least passively resist. As in not actively collaborate. Mostly. Reading that book obliterated almost all of those beliefs. (What little was left was destroyed by having children, and actually directly experiencing what it means when people say "I'll do anything for them").
I think it's the most upset I've been since I was a child and asked my parents why people suffering in a war on the news didn't just say that they don't wanna be in the game anymore. Because that was the rule that applied in kindergarten.
This all sounds very depressing. But read the book. It's a damn important book. (And it's very short and almost free – just read it).
To make matters worse, this is not only "rehappening" in the US. It's global
What a way to utterly waste the likely last few generations of "civilized" humanity on Earth... :(
Nobody really remembers, hence, the same mistakes will be made.
Some people remember. I have a neighbor who was a child living in Berlin in ‘45. Looks like the story of her life will have literary bookends.
My mom was born in late 1930s Germany. She remembers being bombed out of her appartment. She came to US and is not happy with the way things are going here.
What's happening in the US is in a whole other league of fucked
Yes the US is uniquely fucked, really. At least the previous global hegemon fought two world wars to lose its place. The US is basically committing geopolitical suicide at the top of its powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
Triggered. If we are pathetic, then look forward to our enlightened successors.
I don't know what will happen in American politics, nor what effect it will have on the world or the permanence of those effects, but there are demagogues everywhere, America is not exceptional.
America is exceptional in that it is the global hegemon self destructing before our eyes and for largely nonsensical domestic reasons. That is exceptional.
And I don’t know about triggered, but rather just sad, because I was one of those people who really believed in the US at one time!
I look forward our new Chinese overlords.
We’re getting fascism installed because a bunch of chuds want to be able to say “retard” again.
The British Empire was not inflitrated and was not pursuing policies that prioritized another entity's interests.
> powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
What is sad imo is thinking that the above the actual reason for the shenanigans. US has been unlike itself since 9/11. Everything changed.
Then share the reasons. We are witnessing the end of the era of American global dominance. The four years of Biden were but a reprieve. Trump 2.0 is here to finish the job and end it all once and for all. The American Experiment has failed.
I'm curious if what is happening in the US and what has happened in Britain with Brexit actually ends up slowing some of these marches towards illiberalism in other places. Like when people are upset at the direction of a country or current policies, they may take a "throw the bums out" attitude even if the alternative is far worse. But perhaps they're looking at the complete shit show in the US and how unproductive Brexit was and are thinking "OK, maybe not like that..."
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
In France at least, Brexit made the idea of leaving the EU obsolete in political discourse, both on the left and far right.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
Notice that this benevolence and protection by the media is granted to Musk (and Trump) by their complete subservience to Israel's demands and wants. Trump just proposed ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip and cleaning up the rubble with American money and work so it can be handed over to Israel in a nice shape.
I suspect a large part of the subtext is that considerable real estate holdings, hotels, casinos, apartments, etc. will mysteriously end up slightly off book on some TrumpCo. spinoff or another.
It's the new Riviera after all . . .
No, that's missing the point. What hotels, casinos and apartments were promised to the Biden administration to flood Israel with money and weapons to flatten the Gaza strip into rubble and kill and maim hundreds of thousands?
It's not important what leverage Israel has used to make yet another US president do exactly what they want, contrary to any idea of justice, international law, basic humanity and common sense. The point is that Israel has that kind of leverage and nobody is able to resist it.
As much as I hate the Nazis at the top of Israel's government and Western complicity in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza (and more recently the West Bank too), I find your statement disturbing.
Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel. French media were pretty critical of Joe Bidden being too old for the job, despite Bidden giving Netanyahu all he wanted.
Edit: OK given that other response of yours in this thread[1], it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews.
In addition to being disgusting, Antisemitic talks like these are actually counter productive: they help the Israelis as it gives them an excuse to victimize themselves once again.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945588
> Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel
Netanyahu himself tweeted in support of Elon Musk after his nazi-like salute. This is obviously about Israel.
> it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews
I didn't mention Jews, you are the one confusing Jews and Israel. There are many Jews who are vehement opponents of Israel's nazi government and are denouncing it and its influence on American politics anywhere they can.
You are claiming that Israel has “irresistible leverage” over American presidents, so you're gonna need a lot of clarification to who that this isn't an antisemitic dog whistle. What exactly do you think this leverage is?
No I don't owe any clarification to support what is obvious. At this point, the fact that Israel has almost complete control of US politics is the null hypothesis. It's those who deny it that need to provide very convincing, non-handwavy, alternative explanations of why the US is constantly doing Israel's bidding against international law, the international community and basic human rights, damaging its own standing and authority and going against its own geopolitical interest. And why the representatives of US people fly the Israeli flag outside and inside their offices, and why AIPAC boasts to manage to get elected 95% of those it supports, and why such a foreign interference is even allowed in the country, etc. etc.
You're confusing: “the US has geopolitical interest in the middle East that are fully aligned with Isreal” and “Israel controls the US politics”.
Both have the same visible symptoms, but the causal explanation is different. I can write an essay on the former, you cannot give an explanation of "how" Israel is supposed to control the US (that isn't a conspiracy theory about the Jews, that is), that's the problem.
If you want to change my mind, that's easy, just explain how, by which lever, does Israel controls the US. Not the symptoms like you did, but the phenomenon itself as you think it exits.
I don't think it changes anything on a base level for how humans behave en mass. Unfortunately it looks like we will always be susceptible to populism and propaganda. At best what you're seeing is a temporary inoculation against illibralism.
In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
Reform is such a corporate op. It's so obviously astroturf .. but the media are also astroturfing it, because the hate for immigrants is universal.
Also not surprisingly immigration increased after Brexit. It has always been a wedge issue and a red herring for those in power.
> In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
Oh god. There I was thinking it couldn't get worse and hoping you'd made a mistake, but no, you're right, somehow it is.
The right wing party will take power in Australia shortly too, for similar idiotic reasons.
Damn, you're right :( Thanks for killing my attempts at holding on to some threads of optimism! (Being sarcastic, but really I'm just laugh/crying). Oh well, guess I should just stock up on more boxed wine...
Unfortunately, one key difference is that Britain didn't have a leader who wanted to expand their territory.
Europe is already weak, economically and militarily. I don't know how long our votes will matter when we have a belligerent and powerful neighbour.
Ask Hawaii what happened when a bunch of businessmen wanted more profits and less government oversight! Back then it was Dole (the PERSON) and sugarcane companies, today it is auto manufacturers and probably access to the northern sea route that is rapidly becoming de-iced and relevant for shipping to bypass the Panama Canal. Canada better take this threat seriously and treat the USA, at the very least, like a neighbor who is shooting a rifle at a massive tank of propane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1887_Constitution_of_the_Hawai...
Oh I know, I think Elon wants nothing less than to be emperor of the world.
Wait until you have the Liz Truss budget. That's going to be economic chaos.
As I understand it, this wave of US policy change is inspired by a combination of white supremacy and US exceptionalism. But rest of the world is effected by few different things, for example, xenophobia in the case of EU and UK, expansionism in Russia, zionism in Israel, nationalism in China (and Japan, really) etc. It looked the same if you stand far, but they're all different, so I wouldn't call it "global".
There is a documentary from Deutsche Welle titled "The rise of the ultra-right in the US": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhREluLdBs. Maybe worth a watch if you want to see an "outside" perspective on this.
The fear of foreigners or racial "others" is the common element. And some of the propaganda is common, too.
The right wing of the US is not driven by white supremacy. It's driven by a belief in a variety of mostly false grievances, about immigration, the economy, the wealth gap, etc. Those bogus beliefs are held by white and non white people.
Consider that Trump won almost 50% of Latino male voters. As a percentage of the vote, Trump did better with racial minorities and women in 2024 than 2020, and much better compared to 2016.
White supremacy is real and it has some effect in US politics, but it's not a driving force anymore. I say this as someone who has lived both in and outside the US. The outside perspective is not always better. Germans may be seeing the US through the lens of their own history.
Well, I would like to clarify that I was not criticizing any country. To me, all of those examples are just nations learning and exploring what's good and what's bad again under this new age. The world will adjust and slowly but surely get better. See? This time, so far no body is getting burned for claiming that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
And for all the other points, only time will tell.
BTW, I don't hate Mr. Trump either. When he was elected, I brought in some financial products anticipating his unconventional method (and most importantly, I did not buy in some other products). Now I seeing ~5% return in just half a month. I thank that man for his straightforward.
So if I'd say, fearmongering is useless and opportunity for goodness is still reachable.
I see the overwhelming emphasis on DEI and “woke” as very clearly white supremacy.
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
When he was first in office there were protests all over. I attended multiple.
Where are they now?
I was recommended this book a few months ago, by a friend's partner.
Reading it was difficult, and impossible not to see the parallels of what we were approaching.
This excerpt is phenomenal on its own, but the full book is worth your time.
For those who want to do something, what is the 2025 version of Indivisible?
Indivisible still exists, and is still active: https://indivisible.org/
There are protests planned for today (Wednesday) across the US
Honestly, what would these protests do? Serious question.
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
is your argument that protests do nothing, therefore people should stay home?
Frankly, you are both right. We have to protest, because sitting silently is nothing but complicity.
But protests alone almost certainly won't solve this.
There is a 'progression' of boxes in resisting tyranny, and protests are the soap box.
> is your argument that protests do nothing, therefore people should stay home?
Or maybe something else that isn't a protest? Not sure what that would be, but protests are traditional but seem very performative and ineffectual.
Honestly, I think the real reaction should probably be re-organizing over a more reasonable and moderate form of populism.
Protest outside your senator's residence. Every day. Until Trump is impeached (again!) and removed.
The purpose of a protest in general should not be to affect the people in power, it should be for enpowering and bonding the people to further enact post-protest. A moralle boost, a conversation starter, an ignition to call more people to action. Having sayd that, a very successfull protest does affect the upper ones, only temprorarily and tactically. A policy maker will still want to make X move, but ever so slightly delay it or figure out a differnt narrative to bring it back some time later.
The point isn't to sway the emperor. (When the facts change, he changes the facts.) But there are many people answering to him who currently don't have the backbone to say no to him. Seeing a million people out there shouting that the emperor has no clothes on may give them that little extra bit of courage necessary to make the right choice in one of the many daily situations where they have the choice between being pandering yes-men and doing the right thing.
> He has the army on his side
I mean, technically he controls it, however as a former officer in the military I have to believe (perhaps stupidly) that the majority of officers in the US military will refuse to be deployed illegally to squash protesting, even if it's a bit violent. If not, then I guess the people I served with were extraordinary. I hope they were run of the mill, I really do.
A successful protest with a large turnout shows people that they are not alone with these opinions. This instills confidence so that they dare to act "rightfully" later on.
Yes. It's about the threshold to hold an opinion and to act. Different people have different thresholds for how much they dare to break from the status quo. With widespread protests we change the range of standpoints people feel comfortable to take.
Just like, the comparison is relevant, the public display of nazi symbols changes the range of nazi opinions that some people are comfortable expressing..
This is a scam to get dollars
50501 - https://50501.carrd.co/
It's today.
Though I'm abroad...
This part is interesting:
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
As far as their public website tells (https://www.riec.nl/) the RIEC is about a targeted bundling of knowledge, experience and resources to better deal with the effects of organized crimes, instead of everyone working in their own little silo.
The "interventions" are basically the forming and supporting of work groups / special interest groups around a specific organized crime phenomenon, with the intent of devising an approach to deal with the specific phenomenon. They publish a report of those so-called interventions here: https://www.riec.nl/documenten/publicaties/2024/12/18/interv...
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
The rest of this excerpt is harrowing.
It is probably good to remember that this talks about the experience of a German, under Hitler's Nazi government.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
I don’t see the call to action. It describes perfectly the feeling of hopelessness I’ve had for years now. The election was the last chance and everyone blew it.
There is still a lot we can do. Every demagogue and authoritarian regime collapses eventually, often quickly- and they haven't even succeeded in seizing total control yet. As long as we are alive, we can resist.
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
It is ironic that the most useful thing Musk and Trump will do is wake people up to the fact their house is on fire...
I very much doubt they'll wake up anti-woke people.
There may be a tipping point, but as we can see by the comments here and elsewhere, and the intent behind writing and reading things like the shared article, being able to see it before it happens is the hard bit, maybe the impossible bit.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
I don't know what you would consider radical if you think what is happening now is incremental.
Having small parts of the overall government checked and cut is not radical, and current world events and US history show much more radical moments.
Again, perspective.
It'll be radical if a security agency is cut (given their power), or if a constitutional amendment occurs that has minority public support, the US invades a nearby country, a national health service is instituted… there are so many examples I could be here all night listing them all, but fiddling with less than 10% of an enormous budget that has ballooned is not radical. I can remember Bill Clinton's government, that wasn't radical and that's the direction of this government.
Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000, and never really gave it up. Russians were still holding large-scale pro-democracy protests over 10 years later.
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
Τhe promise of the NRA+ folks is that guns in the hands of citizens will avert such a situation. Let's see if at least one of the things they claimed is not a lie.
> You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
The opposition blew their chance in 2024. They are going to have to either back-off on the identity-oppression olympics or accept the loss in 2028.
They need to stop blaming the voters while being out of touch with said voters.
This is hard to read.
I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.
I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.
Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."
We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.
I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;
> It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about the fundamental things. One had no time.
We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
Welp.
Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
I think you are correct precisely because both US major parties are on the same side, the side of capital.
But they are not the same. One party is weaponizing racism and ignorance to illegally destroy institutions that have taken decades to build.
They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.
But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.
This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.
Scary times.
They can be very different, but still both push our governing structures and our thinking in directions that are not good for us individually or collectively.
To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.
Examining that analogy in light of the electoral outcome, would you prefer to be in the timeline in which someone throws you a chair but there is a boat full of others who might throw you something useful, or the one in which someone has thrown you a heavy block, has drilled holes through the hull, and is actively pushing everyone else overboard?
In this timeline we’re all gonna be drowning.
and the side of israel? which happen to be the solidest evidence to prove someone is a nazi
no matter who you voted for, no matter if you voted or don't vote, you can not change this, you have no power to change it
...why this got downvoted :(
which part of this is wrong?
The part where participating in collective cowardice overwhelms the individual will to seek truth.
> Because they feel the same way about your side.
Yes, this is surely true.
> So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
Not necessarily.
Is Russian resentment of Ukraine equivalent to Ukrainian resentment of Russia merely because both citizenries feel their own resentments passionately?
I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
An actuall global event that killed hundreds of millions of individuals is a very different thing than what Musk is doing, without any such precipitation...
I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...
I completely agree with your point, but it’s hundreds of millions of cases and ~10 million deaths I thought
Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.
I actually think Biden/Harris are moderates, and tried to de-escalate things. Whereas Trump is anti-democracy and anti-rule-of-law.
> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
> the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
Yeah. I think the way to counteract this is for moderates to speak up against the extremists, including the extremists on their own side.
For example, Biden criticized the extreme left in the summer 2020 protests: https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/we-are-a-nation-furious-at-inju...
> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.
We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.
I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
And of course January 6, a literal coup attempt, was perpetrated by the Rs. Nothing remotely like that on the D side.
You’re being gaslit.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...
Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
It seems alarmist until you consider that Musk is a Nazi. He did the Hitler salute, live on national television. His followers tried to downplay it, but his own answer to the question "Are you a Nazi?" was "I bet you did Nazi that coming!"
People joke that he went from being the Henry Ford of our generation to being the Henry Ford of our generation.
I don't know whether I would say that Trump is a Nazi*, but the fact that he put a Nazi in charge of firing govt employees that don't follow orders does not bode well.
EDIT: * If only because he has never publicly admitted to being a Nazi like Musk has.
> That is the next step. Lists of names.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/federal-health-wo...
> Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example.
I have never really understood this parallel. What laws got broken, there?
Don't confuse legality with morality.
Okay, but that still begs the obvious question: what was immoral about it?
No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
What information was withheld? I hadn't heard national security invoked in this context before.
Maybe they weren't at the end of that sentence yet, but they were definitely at the start of it. "governed by surprise" yes. "receiving decisions deliberated in secret" very much yes.
Is it really fair to call it a surprise when prediction markets had 80% odds on her since the day Biden dropped out? (https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-t...)
Or did you mean Biden dropping out itself? I don't see how anyone could have reasonably offered more notice that he was dropping out - presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.
> presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.
That's a generous assumption that doesn't really fit with how he seemed in public appearances before and after. The alternative possibility is that the narrative where he drops out of the primary and so the D candidate "has to" be appointed at a time when it's "too late" for the public to be involved was a deliberate one.
At this point we're at "the democrats might have planned for a single surprise, under circumstances that would be both difficult and suspicious to repeat".
It feels... exceedingly charitable to say that is "habituating people to surprise" in any real sense. If anything, I'd argue it has had the opposite effect: if the Democrats pull a second surprise like this time any time in the next couple of decades, quite a lot of people are going to be outraged.
I'm not really sure why they'd want to skip the Primary anyway? If she failed to pass as a candidate there, it would be pretty clear evidence that she wasn't going to beat Trump. If she passed the Primary, she's got more support behind her. It's a lose/lose to do what you suggested
As a purely mechanical point: having a D president with R house and senate and supreme court is a very different situation to having R all across the board, which is why the "checks and balances" have stopped working.
Fascism took over Germany not by foreign attack, not by domestic civil war, not by subversion or trickery.
Fascism came with a whoop and a holler.
It was what most Germans wanted, or came to want under pressure from both reality and illusion.
They wanted it, they got it, and they liked it.
No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
If you don't want to read all of Arendt's book, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/nazi_genoci... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung#Rise provides some details of the violence before and during Hitler's rise to power.
This line in particular is frightening:
> They thought that the Nazis were just another right-wing, nationalist party and that Hitler would be 'tamed' by power.
You don’t even need a sophisticated defense against trickery and propaganda.
The thing that works almost automatically, with exceptions, is decentralized power:
- direct voting on issues by all citizens
- compartmentalization of government into specialized units
- bottom up federalism
- appointment of representatives on a per project basis, not for general power
With decentralized power, people make pragmatic decisions, because they are focused on solving problems and not on maintaining power.
The claim was Germans (not some, not a lot, not most; just "Germans") knowingly voted for all that came after. That would be false even if Hitler had been actually elected, instead of appointed.
Do you think there was any way at all to prevent what came after?
I'd say of course, but that's easy to say with hindsight.
I recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third...
HackerNews is suddenly getting political content at the very top, right after PG slams the "woke" agenda.
Is the HN crowd finally waking up to what a danger to the US the "most successful startup entrepreneur of all time" is?
…and the YC CEO defending the hostile takeover of government agencies by (smart, I give you that, but still) teenagers.
Trumpists may be against democracy but they seem pro capital or at least pro big tech capital.
Fascists always are, that's how they gain enough support to gain power. Hitler had a lot of friends in the capitalist class, and the socialists and communists were the first to go under his rule.
I hadn't seen that, and am not finding it.. Have you got a link?
Closest I found is this one: ```I'm generally sympathetic to what you're doing. But I hope you will take your time and do it carefully. This isn't just a company," Graham wrote on X during a back-and-forth with Musk on Tuesday.```
While not technically defending it's still pretty disgusting.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-investor-paul...
Huh, weird exchange [0].
It's unbelievable that Paul Graham wouldn't understand how this forever and utterly compromises the Treasury. Nor is it remotely believable that he thinks Musk is capable of doing something like this "carefully" (as if there's a careful way to illegally tamper with the Treasury's innards).
Seems like he is just tweeting so that later he can say "Well I tried; I told him to be careful". Doesn't look smart tho.
Btw, afaik Paul G isn't CEO of YC, and hasn't had an "active leadership role" since 2014.
0 - https://x.com/paulg/status/1886741943050211408
This is the tweet I was referring to:
> Whoever made the original graphic doesn’t understand the scale and speed of smart high IQ people who can program, and what they can do in a moment when intelligence now on infinite tap using LLMs
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1886283334466302201
Thanks. Eesh. Garry Tan's Twitter feed has certainly been an experience...
Perhaps the key for understanding the wildly credulous optimism on display in that feed is to remember that money 'saved' from the Treasury will likely fund promised tax cuts for the .1%.
A 20 something is hardly a teenager. Alexander Hamilton was like 21 years old at the start of the American Revolution
I don't think you can compare the maturity of a 21 year old from the time of the American Revolution with the maturity of a 20 year old nowadays, no..
Fair
How can anybody here like or admire musk (yeah, very small m) these days is beyond me. I would be properly ashamed to drive tesla, and have 0 sympathies to numerous keyed owners, its not like he became fascist overnight if you actually listened to him. I would stop giving any money to company doing any work with his companies.
Heck, there may soon be some new badges 'musk-free' as some sort of moral badge for businesses to attract and retain young customers.
More than half of you nerds voted for this shit and you're supposed to be the intelligent ones. I lost all hope.
Dictators want you to loose all hope. Then it is easier for them to rule.
The "oh we need to educate" stage is well passed.
What I dont understand is what the democrats and constitutionalists are doing? Where are they?
Trump only cares for loyalty and power. Hes also really thin skinned, so what mystifies me is how he's let Musk take all that power from him?
Why aren't the "opposition" hammering the point that Musk is/has effectively usurped Trump?
If I wanted to eject Musk's control over the state, that is where I would start. Trump knows that musk yeets anyone who he sees as weak, so why not exploit that to get some level of constitutional control back?
they are. search for it.
If their response isnt strong enough, I highly reccomend forumlating your own, and add to the voices pushing against it.
> search for it.
I mean that's the key point right? if its not getting through then the medium of delivery is not working.
Why are appointments not being delayed? There are many logistical hurdles that can be put up to get a better outcome for the _country_, but it appears they are not being used.
it seems that people are more concerned with getting fund-raising for the next election, which seems a bit premature, given that the dollar might not be the currency in 4 years time.
Well, you are in an environment where things aren’t going to be given to you.
So you need to search.
And it’s a Google search, so all things considered, it’s still doable.
Russians still think they are free.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power...
(Since there are posts on economy related factors and the OP was about Nazi Germany)
At a different level is this somewhat reflective of USA today? (USA today is by no means poor, although it is true that the bottom 50% has stagnated for quite long)
The West harbors a profound moral delusion, judging the world through selective standards while ignoring its own historical crimes. It preaches human rights and democracy while supporting oppressive regimes that serve its interests, arbitrarily categorizing violence based on convenience. This hypocritical narrative of moral superiority masks systemic oppression, allowing the West to maintain its global moral high ground without genuine accountability.
Oh, goody. Isn't it great the Democrats prioritized keeping "the groups" and their donors happy? You know, instead of actually reorganizing around countering the existential threat they complained so loudly about?
Well they've tried absolutely nothing and they're all out of ideas
Don't let hacker news become habituated with politics.
Genocide is above and beyond 'politics'. So is a bunch of tech bros being given physical access to the US Treasury under the direction of a tech oligarch, in defiance of dozens of laws. Entire federal agencies are being shut down on a whim, again, in defiance of dozens of laws and safeguards.
These things directly impact the tech community in a massive way - just look at Google dropping their pledge not to use AI for military purposes, this week of all weeks.
Well I for one an quite relieved by this. Trump has done none of this in secret. He told us what he was going to do.
The surprise is finding about the foreign spending that cannot possibly advance USA strategic interests.
I don’t feel like the comparisons to Hitler are useful, at least when talking about the current US administration.
There are lots more recent examples — Russia in the early 2000s under Putin, Hungary under Orban, South Africa under Apartheid — where democratic norms were gradually eroded, and the international community just sort of sighed and said "oh well, the people have spoken".
I think this mostly comes down to (1) people are more aware of Nazi Germany and thus its easier to use that context than another and (2) the Nazis were extreme even by comparison to their contemporaries and thus have been (presumably) studied the most.
Yeah, but it breaks down because Trump also knows that history, and knows that people want to compare him to Hitler, so he does a bunch of things that make the comparison harder.
Can you elaborate on those things?
Trump says things like "there's no greater friend to Israel than me" and "I'm the best president for black people". One of his most viscerally anti-immigrant lackeys (Stephen Miller) is Jewish.
Trump’s choice of "illegals" as the cause of America's woes is smart, because (1) they can’t vote and (2) even American-born children of undocumented immigrants hear that and think "oh but he's not talking about us". He was careful to not say "Latino immigrants", even though that's what a lot of his white supporters heard.
The actions are right out of Hitlers playbook. Find a group or groups, to blame and demonise, that are powerless. Deflect and encourage the wider populations grievances and dissatisfaction onto them to provide a common enemy and warning to others that they could be next if they don't join in. That together with establishing a cult and encouraging extremes echos the establishment of the Natzi party surely?
Berlusconi is the architect of the modern oligarchy. Control the media, control the public opinion and narrative. I think that what is happening in America is something new though. The dismantling of the US government is weird on it's own, but the step down from US soft power is what really makes no sense. The previous 80ish years of US world dominance was build on a combination of military might and soft power. Europe was rather ruined after WW2, the reason it's as advanced as it is today, and the reason we are/were such close allies with the USA is because of programs like the Marshall plan. Which was essentially the USA giving Europeans the money to buy American products. Stuff like access to US produced tractors revolutionised European farming as an example. On the US side this meant that the USA investment into Europe made it possible for the American wartime industry to restructure itself. So that instead of producing tanks, factories could produce farm equipment and so on. Total win-win.
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
ΕU is currently handed over to China. There is absolutely no reason to stick with the US. Same as Latin America (bar maybe Mexico).
Comparing this to the current situation in America, both Hitler and Musk/Trump largely said what they wanted to do before hand:
>Mein Kampf, in essence, lays out the ideological program Hitler established... Hitler's revolutionary goals included expulsion of the Jews, and the unification of German peoples into one Greater Germany. Hitler desired to restore German lands to their greatest historical extent, real or imagined. (Wikipedia)
On the other hand Musk/Trump are mostly about reducing government bureaucracy, excessive wokeness, illegal immigration and the like which is quite a different thing.
Maybe that was lost in all the other noise domestically but in international news the extremist was quoted musing about annexing Panama, Canada, and Greenland. And recently Gaza? Not sure about Mexico.
there are certainly some parallels with what's happening today but analogies are always difficult. i could be wrong but i really don't think of this administration as murderous in the way that Nazi Germany was.
Of course, the biggest asterisk beside the analogy is the lack of warmongering. Like, kind of the most important part, and Trump is acting more like Woodrow Wilson in that respect. Didn't Woodrow Wilson once say that the US isn't a melting pot but a garbage can?
Annexing Gaza is likely to be a murderous undertaking, if it develops beyond yesterday’s public fever dream.
President is unilaterally shutting down federal agencies. If this goes on there really isn't a constitution anymore, not in practice anyway.
You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
> In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
George Carlin, years ago. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1242679-boy-everyone-in-thi...
I mean, see, say, South Korea. Or, for a less spectacular example, see Boris Johnson's defeat in his attempts at a bit of tinpot dictatorship of his own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...
Really, in democratic societies there are three levels; those where the offending politician is actually deposed, those where their unconstitutional action is blocked by the courts or by another arm of government (as with Boris), and those where _they never do the thing in the first place because they realise they can't get away with it, and there'll be unpleasant consequences for them_ (this is by far the most common, particularly in parliamentary democracies, where Dear Leader can be fired at a moment's notice). If none of these happen, then typically the democracy ends.
The US is probably unusually vulnerable to this sort of thing; it has an unusually powerful executive, and a highly politicised Supreme Court, in particular. Though, it kind of remains to be seen how far the Supreme Court will be pushed. Some or all of Trump's appointees may take the view that they got into the job to screw over minorities and aid business, but not necessarily to actually end democracy in the US. They are likely not all that beholden to him.
R v Miller was important but ultimately overtaken by events - while Parliament did want to discuss Brexit, they were unable to find a viable solution and we still got no-deal Brexit where vital things like the status of Northern Ireland had to be patched up later. For whatever insane reason, the demand to eject us from the Single Market was just too strong.
To be clear, there wasn't a no-deal Brexit in the end. There was what was originally called a hard Brexit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit_withdrawal_agreement), but a no-deal Brexit would have been far worse.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister (not to be confused with R v Miller, or R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the solution here is clearly to just stop naming people 'Miller', to avoid further confusion)) was probably ultimately more important in its precedent than its concrete outcomes, though, yeah.
The President has unitary power over the executive, within the bounds set by congress.
trump really doesn't care about the bounds set by congress or anyone else
In a functioning government, it shouldn’t matter if the president cares or not. The limits on each branch should be enforceable and enforced.
In a functioning democracy, the guardrails last until the person trying to break them leaves office, and then that person is not elected again; and if they break laws in office, they are convicted of them.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies? I think the only thing people have been habituated to is the enormity of the government; go back to any other point in history, was the government this big in terms of independent agencies, employee/contractor count, budget/debt as percentage of gdp?
Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
How is that related to shutting down agencies?
Because those agencies are funded by the federal budget. We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? And don't tell me this is just a small part of the federal budget. Oh its just a couple billion here and there. That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt. This level of fiscal irresponsibility is basically taxation without representation on the unborn.
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
>>Or you know, we can stop getting into wars?
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
> because it's explicitly in American interests to do so
Please elaborate, and be precise because every interventionist argument is like, "but our trading partners, but our allies" but always fails to link exactly how that improves the lives of Americans. So tell me exactly what we are afraid of. If its trade tell me exactly what the comparative advantage is or what the resource we need is. And if its defense, tell me exactly what the threat vectors are, not just, "the island chains".
We've doing truly stupid things in the name of bullshit concepts like "containment" which led us into Vietnam, or "stabilizing the region" which led us into the middle east.
We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student; please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
>>So tell me exactly what we are afraid of
That's your(American) argument, not mine. When I ask why is America building anti-missile batteries and stationing their troops in my country, the answer is "because it furthers their interests". There is of course always some bullshit of "because it improves our security" - but everyone knows that's not true. They are here because they want to project they are a superpower and therefore have bases all over the world, not because they love us.
>>We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student
Well I had to look it up, and apparently this is what Trump said about it:
"We also blocked $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Forty-five — that’s a lot of money for diversity scholarships in Burma. You can imagine where that money went," Trump said.
I wish he was more specific. What is he insinuating, exactly?
>> please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
Having a population of burma(a historically very active conflict area) that is well educated and more likely to oppose the military Junta? Of course no one will ever say that openly, it's "humanitarian aid".
> Having a population of burma(a historically very active conflict area) that is well educated and more likely to oppose the military Junta
Ok so you haven't told me how this furthers Americans interests, that's pretty much every BS power projection argument I've heard for my entire life.
> When I ask why is America building anti-missile batteries and stationing their troops in my country,
Depending on your country, I'm ok with removing the batteries :)
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?
Or do you not trust experts at this point time?
> Or do you not trust experts at this point time?
I work alongside highly skilled experts in my job and I've never heard them say anything remotely like this when someone disagrees with them, so I'm pretty skeptical that you actually are one. This sounds more like something that a rebellious high-schooler would say
I’m not a foreign policy expert.
The question is if an expert could change your view.
And by your response I suspect the answer is yes.
I'm pretty open minded so if you have a detailed answer, I would love to hear it. Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of hand wavy answers around like "stabilizing" or "soft power" because I feel like vague language masquerades corruption and misuse of funds. What I want to know are the direct causal links between our money and our interests.
Found the normal German citizen in 1943
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
> I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
So, for you, an acceptable solution to "the budget is too big," is "let's rip up the Constitution?"
If Trump wants to veto budget bills and demand certain cuts in exchange of passage, that's fine, totally within his power, and would probably work.
[flagged]
Yes and we managed to do that for 150 years with a fraction of the current government size.
... there's a lot of people who aren't landing-owning white men who would disagree with you.
So you are saying if the founding fathers had 100 agencies then slavery wouldve been abolished?
I'm saying your premise is so hilariously ahistorical it deserves mocking.
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.
Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.
Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.
Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.
Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.
You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.
You think we protected everyone's rights in 1874?
> It is a weird concept for the libertarian mind
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He's not shutting down agencies to relinquish governmental power.
He's shutting them down to strengthen his own power.
What power has he gained.
He's apparently gained the power to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies, for one.
That's circular reasoning.
Joke's on you, circular reasoning works well when people accept it!
Explain how shutting down USAID due to documented fraudulent spending strengthens the president’s power. I can’t think of a single way myself, but maybe I’m overlooking something?
If he gets away with shutting down USAID by fiat then it makes it clear that he can go outside the bounds of law and demand anything of the executive branch.
The next step might be going to the DOJ and telling them to detain, let's say, Ilhan Omar on suspicion of treason. This illegal demand will have much more force because anyone refusing it will know that they stand on their own and have no recourse through the courts or congressional oversight.
Explain "documented fraudulent spending", who is making these claims, what evidence they've presented, and what groups have checked that evidence.
Off the top of my head and easily verifiable from their own website, how about funding "revolutions" in foreign countries? https://web.archive.org/web/20060130080730/http://www.usaid....
He’d have a long way to go to get down to the number of federal agencies that existed in 1900, let alone the number in 1800, yet the US had its constitution, then, too.
Since 1800 congress has used its constitutional power to establish agencies. It is congress who has the constitutional power to shut them down, not the president. The president executes the laws passed by Congress.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315
On HN, reposts are fine (which is to say, aren't treated as dupes) when a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
But it's great to link to examples of past threads, because readers like to look at them—so this was a good contribution! just not with the tag "duplicate".
Edit: basically, there are two disjoint cases when it makes sense to link to a previous submission of the same story:
(1) when a prior submission of the same story had significant attention in the last year or so, then linking to it with the word "duplicate" or "dupe" is helpful;
or
(2) when a prior submission had significant attention more than a year ago, then linking to it with the phrase "past discussion" or "discussed at" (or something like that) is helpful.
(And for completeness: when a submission has not gotten significant discussion, it's best not to link to it at all. There are plenty of those in the archives, and they're mostly harmless.)
Thanks for that last note, it's been my argument for a while and I've had a few discussions with people on that point, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40849927>. I'll try to remember this comment to share for those cases.
I'll occasionally note recent prior posts which aren't dupes on account of minimal discussion (< 20 comments, generally), just because I remember those appearances and wasn't immediately sure myself whether or not the present submission counts as dupes or not. E.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33186713>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41099760>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31864872>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002384>, and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242203> all below limits, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942714> just over the 1 year threshold.
And for multiple posts on a given topic see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41422938> (the indefagitable ChrisArchitect called the dupe, I explained it).
2nd chance queue can also cause confusion, generally not dupes: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071219>.
One of the great (and unexpected!) side effects of voting for Trump has been getting all the immature hysterical people off of the AI threads and into these Fascist Nazi threads.
I, for one, appreciate the absence of the European degrowth types
>"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
It us