Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

press.uchicago.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 536 posts

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#141

Post by labster »

ookblah wrote: post #134
noduerme wrote: post #73

"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 h…

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 wo…

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.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#142

Post by asdasdsddd »

afiori wrote: post #137
asdasdsddd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and we managed to do that for 150 years with a fraction of the current government size.

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 unstab…

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.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#143

Post by gambiting »

pessimizer wrote: post #43

[flagged]

It would be awesome if HN stopped looking at every single thing through the lens of US politics. "liberals" doesn't even mean anything in most of the world, and indeed I struggle identifying what kind of group you're talking about. The text is about historical events that have already happened - you can take whatever lesson you want out of them, you can see parallels with your own country or you don't have to. But not everything is about America.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#144

Post by a_victorp »

subsistence234 wrote: post #116
palmotea wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

By making it more transparent

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#145

Post by nirui »

pagutierrezn wrote: post #19

To make matters worse, this is not only "rehappening" in the US. It's global

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.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#146

Post by aisenik »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #109
noduerme wrote: post #73

"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 h…

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 te…

> 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?

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#147

Post by jvdongen »

hcfman wrote: post #69

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 o…

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...

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#148

Post by gambiting »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #139
gambiting wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 representatio…

>>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.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#149

Post by suraci »

suraci wrote: post #42
dontlaugh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are correct precisely because both US major parties are on the same side, the side of capital.

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?

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#150

Post by block_dagger »

guelo wrote: post #84
mjfl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
Post reply on HN