321–330 of 545 posts
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Free societies are not ruled through masses.
Who gets to rule, then, and why? Your position that the masses shouldn't rule is at odds with a government legitimized by the consent of the government. Why should I or anyone else obey a government I don't consider legitimate?
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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 (tho…
As an example, here's what women in chess have to deal with: https://www.fide.com/fides-statement-on-sexist-remarks/
That statement makes the point that FIDE are well aware this is a problem, and is one they're trying to solve:
"FIDE not only strives to increase women’s representation in professional sports and official positions but also to change the perception of chess as purely a men’s world. Our community has to be a place where women feel safe and respected. Therefore, any action that carries disrespect, sexism or physical, verbal or emotional assault is unacceptable."
Now, some people might argue that if a male competitor claims to have a woman identity, whatever that is, then that player should be permitted to compete alongside women. Given their aim of increasing female participation in chess, FIDE have been somewhat more skeptical of this argument, as you can see in the policy you linked.
> 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.
I made a comment about the perspective of World Athletics on this, and linked to their statement as evidence. Why would you feel the need to rebut this? Instead of considering it thoughtfully.
For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.
I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.
Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.
The excuses are worse than the stupidity.
I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still
There really needs to be a Second American Revolution. It should be bloodless and as simple as 90% of the country showing up to take back the wealth that was stolen from the middle classes during the neoliberal assault. The popular momentum exists for this project in both the MAGA camp and lefties that support Sanders. It seems like the only alternative is liberal authoritarianism which we're seeing from Vance and Pe…
Ah yes, the syllogism of thieves strikes again. - You have it. I want it. Therefore you must have stolen it from me and I am justified in taking it "back". Have you read history at all? "Revolutions" by entitled thieves who feel that every transaction they agreed to is somehow retroactively unfair because somebody else has more money is the surest way to kill an economy. Nobody wants to do trade with cannibals.
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The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil. 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 Pin…
This should be the top-voted comment of the whole thread. I used to teach history; it makes me roll my eyes when I hear comparisons between Nazi Germany and the current moment. It reflects both a lack of historical familiarity with the unique circumstances of Germany in the 1920s and 30s (including recently losing a world war), and also, as you say, a lack of knowledge of other more relevant historical examples — of…
Personally I think the most apt historical comparison is the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, but since we don't LITERALLY live in the Middle Ages and have ethnic divisions between Greeks and Latins one might say that's not a relevant comparison either.
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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?
Unless we disagree on the meaning of "national character", isn't that easy to come up with 100 other reasons to explain those economic/political differences?
I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable. 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 an…
To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
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Because HN says I should take you seriously, I will take you seriously. I think you are uninformed. Of course, we're all aware of the limitations of over-the-air broadcasts and why there are limitations there. > Nobody is denying anyone's ability to communicate over privately owned channels. There's several dimensions to this that I think you are lumping in to the simplest possible explanation, because you're uninfor…
> Trump himself said "When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech Pulling this quote out of context fits in a general pattern of demonization of Trump that goes all the way back to the "fine people" Charlottesville hoax. What Trump meant about free speech is that once 97% of a broadcast consists of partisan attacks, the broadcaster can no longer hide beyond the fig leaf of indivi…
> A broadcast that consists of 97% demonization of a people on one side of an issue that splits the country 50-50 isn't serving the interest of the public.
It's almost as if you are calling for the return of the fairness doctrine (sometimes incorrectly referred to as "equal time rule")?
In any case: criticism of the current government is absolutely the intent and purpose of the First Amendment. Demonization is not what happened. Just go ahead and watch/read what Kimmel actually said. It's not trying to demonize, it's a critique of the party in power misrepresenting the truth.
> Anyone who's listened to him knows what he meant.
I am finding it harder and harder to take you seriously. Anyone who's listened to Trump knows that he is thin skinned and abuses his power to retaliate against those who critique him. Anyone who's listened to Trump knows that he can't spell the word "spectrum" much less think about how the government should help judiciously guide civil discourse without infringing on free speech.
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> Like, once your thinking goes beyond "just win the next election" things are kinda over as far as "democracy" goes. Elections are not the only form democratic participation can take. We can take local action, coordinated action, talk to our representatives at various levels, and so on.
Your suggestions aren't really addressing the things people are actually worried about here. If leadership-aligned politicians won't dare step out of line, and those opposed are systematically marginalized by the executive, other legislators, and the courts, then what good does that do? Deliberately neutralizing the opposition's power renders the opposition's ideas, efforts, and proposals useless, and the allied poli…
It seems abundantly clear that there will be no peaceful/rule-of-law transfer of executive power in January 2029 to anyone but a hand-picked Trump successor that wins an election. A democratic victory (or even a Republican primary winner that isn't appropriately selected) will be resisted at all levels of the executive, and... we'll just see. Whatever the result, the losing party will call it a coup and illegitimate, and such an administration will survive only so long as it can hold control of the government by authoritarian means.
It may even happen earlier. A lot of the kerfuffle around redistricting is being presented to right wing audiences in a way that would be very easy to spin as "cheating". What do we do if democrats win the house next year and Johnson simply refuses to seat the California delegation to keep power? Are we prepared?
Basically, the End of the American Experiment may have already occurred.