Tremendous.
People say to me, "Donald, I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say." And they're right! They right! They said nothing, they thought of nothing to say.
They Thought They Were Free (1955)
271–280 of 545 posts
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spaced repetition promotes learning.
Seriously though, this is the first time I've seen it (and I visit HN daily).
Unfortunately a common occurrence here.
One very helpful workaround is to browse the HN "front page" displayed at
so that you don't have to worry about HN censorship / algorithm fuckery
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
This line of reason is actually becoming more frequently used to justify things. For years, the right wing propaganda machine has been establishing the concept that conservatism and America as a whole is besieged by authoritarian leftists and their smug out-of-outch enablers the liberals. THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat,…
Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view? When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings. I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said…
You must separate actions from words, and government actors from private citizens, and powerful monied interests from powerless randos.
If you don't do this your brain will remain cooked.
There are no "Leftists" in government. No, Bernie and AOC do not count. Soc Dems are nice, don't get me wrong, but the vanguard they are not.
There is no "Leftist" billionaire funding propaganda, no the boogyman 'Soros' doesn't count. He's very much a 'liberal' capitalist, just ask the UK.
There is no major US media outlet or platform owned by a "Leftist". If you insist that actually Biden, Obama, Clinton, Schumer, or Pelosi are leftists, please please just stop talking about politics.
Again, I'm begging you to separate "things pseudonymous people say online" from "things government officials say and do"
Let's try an example: "Fascists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies" or "Leftists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies"
Which of these statements is true?
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
IR is more complex. They know very well what it's leading to, since it's part of their founding history. Half the population do go out on streets to rotest, while the other half go out to protest the protests. So it is the opposite of the lack of awareness/too busy with life and changes etc the article talks about. meanwhile, this is very pertinent to USA current climate. But interestingly, people will repost this, c…
He’s been impeached twice already and the GOP has chosen party over constitution and country twice. The handful of token GOP senate votes for conviction don’t matter. With a GOP house, an impeachment stops there without going to the Senate, there’s already been a House vote to impeach this year that failed. A bunch of Democrats voted against it.
One man had the chance to make the Jan 6th impeachment stick. If McConnell had maintained his integrity, I have no idea who would be president now, but it wouldn’t be Trump.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#275> 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
Universities will not be safe from government meddling until they comprehensively stop taking money from the government first . Until such a point, they run the real risk of censorship and becoming the agents of the very thing that they are warning about.
This kind of reasoning works for private companies, not for the government.
It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them.
But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent.
But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
so what are you suggesting causes, for example, the French to strike more often than other Western countries? or Japan to typically have particularly low inflation? or Argentina to typically have particularly high inflation?
Waiting for the country of people who fly out of their mother's wombs or whom are born in a sack on their father's backs and further those who mentally convince themselves to pass through walls.
so there not being the difference between a human and a kangaroo or a frog and a bat means that the difference between an Argentine and a Japanese person isn't real either? literally meaningless analogy
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're using trans people's participation in sports (once uncontroversial) as a wedge to drive in the larger wedge of trans existence. They can do this because, intuitively, many people think there's an advantage to be had. If there were such advantages, then we'd have to consider the thorny topic of what constitutes an "unfair" advantage, and whether the social implications of excluding a marginalised population ou…
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And FIDE "disagrees with me on the question of male physiological advantage" in… chess. https://doc.fide.com/docs/DOC/2FC2023/CM2_2023_45.pdf There's clearly more to this "ban trans people from sports" phenomenon than dispassionate assessment of the evidence.
dang has asked you to stop commenting like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108551. If you're explaining your position, I'd consider that fine (though dang might not), but throwing out claims that are easy to state and hard to rebut (without stooping to the "fight rhetoric with rhetoric" level) does not encourage thoughtful discussion.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view? When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings. I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said…
In what way are democrats (or, “leftists,” if you must) authoritarian? Requiring face masks in a pandemic (which happened under the trump admin, in case anyone forgot) is not the same as masked goons throwing brown people into vans.
As a libertarian, I see authoritarianism as the imposition of top-down control, often fine-grained, onto individuals' lives. The reflexive reaching for government/law to solve problems. The war on drugs. Mass surveillance, regardless of its goals or who is in charge. The crushing weight and lack of justice in the criminal justice system. The draconian copyright regime.
This makes the Democratic [establishment] bureaucratic authoritarians, while the current Republican [establishment] are autocratic authoritarians.
Obviously I would prefer anti-authoritarianism - a goal of reducing government control in our lives (including corporate de facto government). I think so would most people, but for being lured in by partisan messaging. Authoritarian singular-perspective narratives always sound so simplistically compelling.
But while the autocratic authoritarians weren't in power, it was all too easy to point to the bureaucratic authoritarians as a creeping problem. So now we have autocratic authoritarianism "good and hard". Between the two, I'd prefer bureaucratic authoritarianism as it at least keeps the worst impulses in check (eg the capricious tariff taxes, the naked corruption/bribes, politicizing departments to go after political enemies, wanton cruelty against immigrants for circenses, etc). The only real question is whether at least some of our institutions will hold out so that we can collectively decide to change course, or if it's just set now.
As far as the mask issue, I want to live in a world where they weren't mandated, but yet most everyone wears one out of enlightened self interest. The traditional Republican message would have been "wear a mask to protect yourself". The fact that it was self-harming contrarianism instead has more to do with edgelordism and foreign influence campaigns.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has always been a very moralistic country. From banning alcohol and burning witches to its long struggle to accept differences (in skin color, gender or even the definition of freedom). “Cancel culture” is part of America since its foundation. It’s a moral tug of war. It’s a different thing altogether to have the government itself weaponize “cancel culture”, however. As much as right wing people like to scream…
> there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge If you think that, you've not been paying attention. Both sides doing it is disgusting and I think the right does it more than the left (at this point in time), but the left DOES do it.
Great argument, congratulations
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#280This book's cover/spine features swastika — definitely controversial on a bookshelf, but can lead to some aggressive questioning ["why own this?" e.g.]. Unfortunately this detracts from the truths within this book (that National Socialist Ideology is attractive to the majority in a fascist regime change-over; you cannot fault ill-informed "nazi citizens" for their patriotism).
Instead of me rambling on about this for the dozenth time, I'm just going to provide some of my favorite passages from the book:
>"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends ... they were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it." —xiii
>"Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, 'the democratic part.' The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it." —p47
>"In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread." —p32, quoting a 51 baker, Nazi party manager, in 1933
>"When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, 'Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.' " —p47
>"The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security ... what does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing ... so things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?" — p48
>"...'in 1938, during a Nazi festival ... the entusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' " —p51, quoting an anti-Nazi German imprisoned for hiding Jews
>"The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere." —p56
>"You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community's. But are the community's attitudes respectable? That's not the point." —p60
>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69
>"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164
>" 'Many of the students—the best of them— understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today ... the young people, and yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those [earlier] years ... it is a very dangerous mistake, to think ... that Germans came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonesense that passed for truth' " —p192, a teacher reflecting on students
>" 'Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I belonged ... still—I didn't want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia ... it hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them.' " —p200
>" 'It is easy these days to say anti-Nazi and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.' " —p201
>" 'You say Totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so it is easy for you to say, Totalitarianism—no. But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.' " —p223
>"The six [most] extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, 'That was wrong' or 'That was going too far,' as if to say, 'The gas oven was somew2hat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.' My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life." —p183
>"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consuqence, not the cause of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists." —p277
>" 'It doesn't matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.' The sensitive cabinetmaker ... and the insensitive bill-collector ... said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one." —p284
>"There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build ... how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. 'Strategic bombing' was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit ... houses" —p296
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There're dozens of typos above, typed while drinking my morning coffee.I hadn't skimmed through they thought they were free [author's styling] since first reading this extremely challenging book, six year ago.
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Whenever I've recommended to IRL friends (seeing "the book on your bookshelf with a swastika on it!"), nobody wants to read about Nazi's... but this book is about why such ideologies are so attractive, and why ought be avoided.
Read this book, but if the topic interests you Ordinary Men by Chris Rush expands much further on this topic, following a geriatric brigade of conscripted laymen "Nazis."
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