U.S. insurrectionists received $500k in bitcoins from French donor • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. insurrectionists received $500k in bitcoins from French donor

#241

Post by hairofadog » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #240

redisman wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (rural growth, working/middle class jobs, wage stagnation, skyrocketing college, health costs, etc) This sounds like a Biden campaign ad. I don’t find takes where the Professional Twitter Opinion LoudPeople are “the left” and “the right” are very interesting. Picking an extreme/outlier take and saying “look what the left/right thinks! aren’t they crazy!!” is exactly why the political discourse is so dumb. What are…

Personally I think both parties should be dissolved, and new parties should be created. With real grassroot expression and representation (up to the minute), not decades or centuries of fossilized party lines. And this should begin by absolutely banning any kind of donation above, say, a small dollar amount per person (with very strict criminal penalties for bypassing this in any way). Want to get funding as a party?…

I’m not gonna disagree that campaign-finance reform would be a good thing, but the problem is that there’s no mechanism for dissolving the parties and enforcing campaign finance reform. It’s in the interest of the people currently in power (both politicians and the people donating high dollar amounts) to maintain the current system because that’s the system that put them in power.

Your comment makes me imagine a person in a room somewhere with the ability to change everything all around, but they just haven’t seen that they need to do it. The truth is that there are lots of people dedicating their life’s work to improving the system, but the system is complex – it has billions of people with competing priorities – and even pretending someone has the correct answer about how the system should be rearranged, implementing that system would be a task akin to moving oceans.

Re: U.S. insurrectionists received $500k in bitcoins from French donor

#242

Post by rchaud » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

flukus wrote: post #226

xg15 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the emotional appeal to a simple world with simple ideals and a connection to nature. I mean, I can understand the appeal, but it's sort of ironic that those fantasies are exchanged and amplified using the most unnatural and complex technology we have at our disposal. I wonder if this is less a longing for "simpler times" than a longing for a society in which one has more power. > Without real traumas and exis…

> I wonder if this is less a longing for "simpler times" than a longing for a society in which one has more power. I always thought it was more about control and self determination rather than power for most, something many here running linux and avoiding cloud services can naturally sympathize with. It's a very old urge with even the aristocrats of ancient Rome had similar notions, farming and getting your hands dir…

> anyone that desires to will be able to become fully self sufficient, we'll fire up our 3D printers to make a pencil instead of relying on the global supply chains we do now.

While probably unintentional, this sounds very similar to the practice of making high sulfur "pig iron" very inefficiently in backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.

It would be the height of irony if these far-right, hyper-libertarian types took their ideology to the extremities where it begins to resemble Mao or Pol Pot's ideas about autarky.

Re: U.S. insurrectionists received $500k in bitcoins from French donor

#243

Post by hertzrat » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 8:38 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #183

hertzrat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That applies to a lot of situations if taken literally. You have to use a lot of care when labeling somebody with such a charged word. We wouldn’t want to see a bunch of rioters from sent to Guantanamo.

Most of the protesters were just protesters. Some of them may have had quasi-violent intent, such as 'let's break in an make a point', but a very small few seemed to have some very dark intent. If you rile up enough people, then a small slice of them will be on the radical margins. It only took a ~5 Serbs to kill Franz Ferdinand.

That’s a scary observation. Those people weren’t the most important cause of world war 1, but they were the spark in an extremely dry barn that everyone kept adding gasoline to, daring the other side to spark it