291–300 of 301 posts
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Ironic? Or timed specifically to overshadow it in the news?
But the US troops are still there.
Stay tuned to see if it incites another massive terrorist attack leading to permanently diminished civil rights.
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Everything you said about Islam has direct correlations in Christianity in fairly recent history. But, as you say, things evolve over time. Christians for the most part are now against slavery, as I would bet most Muslims are too. Countries that are no longer communist still have dissidents in prison, which would suggest that is not the fault of communism, but other ideologies still rampant in those countries. I'm no…
While you claim there are correlations, there is a massive difference in trajectory. Christianity has a very long and documented history of driving the movement against slavery. The abolitionist movements were rooted deeply in Christian theology and the belief that all people are created in the image of God. There are Christian abolitionist movements from the age of the Byzantine empire. In contrast, we see an ideolo…
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Definitions must be consistent with each other. Conventionally, “right” means more capitalist and “left” means more socialist. To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade, etc. It would refer to libertarians, not anti-immigration populists.
> To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade, Yes, the far right parties in the UK are trying to do most of that (1) as well as inciting race riots against immigrants. I don't think that you have a point here. 1) not so much on the free trade, they talk a good fight on potential…
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In two of these posts, people might take issue with some of the sources. The rest should all be considered trustworthy by anyone. All flagged: Posts flagged for showing how politics has meddled in science (unfortunately one of those facts was overstated, as a commenter kindly alerted me to. Including the correction did not prevent flagging): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344 https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
I did a sampling, and in my opinion all of those were correctly flagged (or at least, I can understand why). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344 is being deliberately obtuse; it's not engaging with the parent's statement at all, just claiming false equivalence and expecting other people to know what you actually mean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242 is like a powerpoint slide with too many bul…
2. Only someone actively trying not to understand, can't spot the double-standards. If reading 1-2 sentence titles and comparing them is too much, then I simply can't help you.
3. If by "a childish and illegitimate claim", you're referring to the part about trying to claim credit for destroying science, that's just a (very obvious) rhetorical flourish. If you mean the part about academia destroying science itself, the rest, that you didn't bother to read, are all sources showing how exactly it's doing that.
4. I'm not expecting them to read the whole article - the title and subtitle would suffice. What makes the claim hollow? And yes, I did articulate my own thoughts - that's what the "hollow claim" was.
In essence, you're demanding that my posts should do the thinking for the reader. Not just lead them to water, but force them to drink too. Since you're clearly being deliberately obtuse, I'll spare you from further replies.
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> To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade, Yes, the far right parties in the UK are trying to do most of that (1) as well as inciting race riots against immigrants. I don't think that you have a point here. 1) not so much on the free trade, they talk a good fight on potential…
The U.S. isn’t a counter example, it proves my point. People call the Trump GOP “far right.” But Trump abandoned the Bush GOP’s project of privatizing social security and promised not to touch Medicare. And Trump eliminated taxation of social security benefits. It hasn’t tried to repeal Obama’s additional regulation of banks. And it has destroyed the Reagan/Bush free trade framework. In all of those areas, the Trump…
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Did France, Germany, the UK, etc. spend a trillion dollars in Iraq? How did they get themselves in the same ballooning deficit death spiral? The US did spend a Trillion on Iraq. But during Covid they spent nearly $5T...in 1/4th the time they spent 1 in Iraq. They also spent $9T on QE. Iraq is a drop in the bucket. The real problem is a structural one with modern democracies. Turns out when you can legally take your c…
If the problem is booming deficits, then the cause isn't taking citizens money at gunpoint, because that doesn't cause a deficit. The cause is the voters, they want the benefits now but they don't want to pay for them, so they pass the bills onto their children and grandchildren. The government is doing exactly what the voters are asking for.
If the US didn't have the world's reserve currency like Germany/France/UK/etc, the bill would come due via the bond markets. The demand for Euro-denominated debt is not near-infinite in the same way the demand for USD-denominated debt has been (at least up until now).
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Bin Laden’s ultimate objective was to evict US military forces from the Middle East. In response to 9/11, we massively expanded our footprint in the region and formed even deeper relationships with the Saudi government (whom Bin Laden hated for in his view, “[suspending] Islamic laws, and replacing it with statuary laws”). You can read it all in his original, late 90s declaration of jihad against the United States[1]…
I think there's a reasonable case to make that 9/11 broke American politics in a fundamental way, by fully unlocking and granting a permission structure for politicians to reach for nativism and xenophobia to justify basically everything. It's clear that Bin Laden did not "win" in any immediate sense, but America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory. The truly erratic and unstable nature of…
the same way that now "progressive leftists" are completely working themselves into an anticapitalist frenzy, and before them the (performative) woke and the reactive antiwoke mania spread like wildfire, before that it was the homophobia and islamophobia (triggered by 9/11), and before that the red scare, and the reefer madness, and whatnot.
https://www.npr.org/2004/12/15/4229442/from-direct-mail-to-a...
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con (2012 by Rick Perlstein)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_the_Un... (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-682x.... (Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter, 1991 by Daniel Rigney)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2018.1... (Anti-intellectualism is a virus, 2018 by Michael A. Peters)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI (Conspiracy, 2025 by ContraPoints)
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Teutoburg wasn't a battle but an ambush, and Rome killed almost everyone involved in the next years. This didn't represent a retreat: Germans weren't conquered because they had nothing to conquer. Rather, hopefully, Iran will be to the US what Turks were to Byzantium.
> Rather, hopefully, Iran will be to the US what Turks were to Byzantium. An invading force that settles within it and ultimately destroys it before launching expansionist invasions to all of its neighbors?
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In two of these posts, people might take issue with some of the sources. The rest should all be considered trustworthy by anyone. All flagged: Posts flagged for showing how politics has meddled in science (unfortunately one of those facts was overstated, as a commenter kindly alerted me to. Including the correction did not prevent flagging): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344 https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
I did a sampling, and in my opinion all of those were correctly flagged (or at least, I can understand why). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344 is being deliberately obtuse; it's not engaging with the parent's statement at all, just claiming false equivalence and expecting other people to know what you actually mean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242 is like a powerpoint slide with too many bul…
I recommend a book 'Silk Roads' by Peter Frankopan. It’s an attempt to show world’s history as a continuous movement of center of civilizational gravity. It’s not without flaws, but interesting nonetheless. Frankopan describes most of modern US history as a series of blunders. This approach is maybe a bit harsh, but it shows how difficult it is for a dominant power to stay on top. I would summarise the book with a se…
> I recommend a book 'Silk Roads' by Peter Frankopan. Thank you for the recommendation! > In fact you can look at China or India - future dominant powers, and guess which of their flaws will make them fall. Are these flaws talked about in the book or are they something you've worked out since after you read the book?