101–110 of 545 posts
I wonder how many people interpret this based on “the other side” rather than objectively?
As a German outside observer I can tell you there is only one side going down the facist path. The "other side" isn't great either. Would be great to have a sane alternative, I guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are clearly very many countries that tick most of those boxes. Including some that i wouldn't necessarily define as fascist. Prominent examples are China, Russia, Iran North Korea and other middle eastern countries. I'm not saying this list is incorrect, per se, but it is vague to the point of uselessness.
1930s fascism can never occur again. It was a product of its time. But the psychology behind fascism stems from deep human quirks and is something eternal. All those nations, except perhaps China, share the DNA. If we didn't already have names for their systems, we probably would describe them as fascistic. What Trump has turned the American government into is closer to Fascism than to Liberal Democracy, no? In futur…
The Trump presidency is the culmination of a roughly 45 year campaign to return the United States to the Gilded Age, and to ensure it stays that way until it's bled dry and nothing remains of its corpse. The political and social problems that led to his second election have been a long time coming.
What's interesting is that the gaps in our political system that allow him to do so many illegal and distasteful things have always been there. The framers of the constitution never anticipated all three branches of government colluding together in alignment and bad faith, with the vociferous support of roughly half the voting population.
I remember particularly the teacher's statement that (paraphrasing, it's been a while) "if I could not resist, it means that anyone else of my station or below could also not resist".
The idea that an admission of impotence is not just a personal note, but also an observation of an actionable waterline that anyone with fewer means will also be unable to rise above...
"If I am unable to do X, who else is unable to do X?" is such a powerful question to consider.
Posted here multiple times before: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)
It’s been 7mo and we’re not all here every day. It’s fine. I appreciate the post and discussion it sparked. Why does it bother you?
Occasional reposts are well within HN's norms, and when something is reposted, it's common to link to past discussions for comparison.
I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people and even political movements were just as slippery then as they are now. But you may come away with something completely different. It’s an odd but interesting book.
> They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966, 2017 by the University of Chicago. Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free. And if freedom begins to disappear, even those who believe themselves safely conformist are not safe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
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Free societies are not ruled by decree.
Free societies are not ruled through masses.
"…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 fundamental things. One had no time." Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.
Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…
It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.
The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First they came for those who thought the sky was pulsating green, but I did not speak out for I did not dare to question the blue sky narrative. Then they came for those who thought the earth was flat, but I did not speak out for I did not dare to question the round earth narrative. Then they came for those who thought the internet was carried by little elves, but I did not speak out for I did not dare to question t…
But, key difference, the people pushing green sky or flat earth narrative don't get deplatformed, fired, yelled at or called Nazis. I still haven't seen anyone attempt to do a cost-benefit on whether the COVID lockdowns were a net good. I do note we had a big social and economic disjunction and since then it has been pretty much nothing but war and trouble. The part where they were shutting up people with PhDs on You…
For covid, there are not only oodles of papers on the topic you describe here, but entire books written by academics on the topic. These people remain employed at premier institutions. The question of the cost benefit analysis of remote schooling (costs to education outcomes and costs to parents having less available childcare against costs to public health) has been a particular vigorous topic of discussion.