When you say "HN", do you mean you? Who else was surprised? The place is full of people constantly commenting about how bad the US is, how corrupt the government is, how terrible CEOs (particularly Altman) are, late stage capitalism, etc., etc.
I’m one of those criticasters and I’m getting downvoted constantly. I don’t care about the downvotes. I do care about western countries slipping into fascism just because people are so proud to admit they voted for a stupid clown.
I'm more upset about the large group of people in the startup industry, possibly even a majority, who would be totally happy about countries slipping into fascism if they made a little more money along the way.
Who cares about ethics and morality? Those aren't profitable!
Yes, but it's not just personal moral failings, the system itself is corrupt. Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth. It shouldn't be all-or nothing. This is the result of our debt-based system. This is deeply abnormal. Rich people should be comfortable in every way and should have the surplus to take a moral stance without risking to lose everything. You can see this play out very clearly with OpenAI. Sam has enemies. He may have done some things that he fears would catch up with him if he loses power. It's always like this with the most powerful people; they usually end up making Faustian bargains which put them into extreme all-or-nothing situations and they take the entire world for a ride with them.
That's not to say anyone should be excused but the system's fragility compounds the problem.
Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth.
That does resonate to some extent, when I see people of actual merit (or at least, people who have done things with actual merit) like Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang, lining up to suck meritless people like Trump off.
The problem is, once the rich people have secured their fortunes through self-abasement, they never seem to use those fortunes to redress the humiliation they've suffered. That makes your argument a hard sell. Would Bezos and Musk and Cook and Huang and Dell and Altman and Soon-Shiong and Zuckerberg and Mickey Mouse -- all the figures from the famous Ann Telnaes cartoon and more -- still be as supportive of Trump if they didn't have to be?
Yep great point. I guess this is the most extreme case. This dependency that billionaires have on the government is a symptom of the same effect and it's terrible regardless of which party is in charge, just negatively impacts different people. The same dynamic of government dependency flows down to everyone else.
It's because the government can print money. The government is the ultimate fallback, if interest rates increase and money becomes scarce, these big corporations need the government to provide big contracts to back them up to get through that tough period.
This is what I mean by all-or-nothing situation. These big corporations NEED huge, constant inflows of cash to stay solvent. The system is always full of debt; the liquidity is always under threat of being sucked out rapidly... So all these big companies are terrified of such event. They need to know that if money gets scarce, they've got a reliable stream they can draw from and the only reliable source of money in times of monetary scarcity is the government.
I think a lot of voters didn't know what they were getting the country into, or just were too ignorant or misinformed to notice, in voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. There are actual fascists too, of course. I'm just disappointed that they won; the damage has already been immeasurable, and to some extent irreversible, and we're not even halfway into the term.
The first term was just him being an idiot. He's stupid.
The second term is Elon dismantling the entire intelligence system, infiltrating every government agency and compromising every datacenter, piping all the data into a centralized database for stalking and mass deportation, etc.
While it was absolutely clear that Trump's bad news, I don't think anybody quite predicted the absolute fascism that would spring up, and just how quickly it would overwhelmingly FUCK everything.
His first term was relatively harmless but I guess it really rallied the goons, who proceeded to have four entire years to prepare the next dark ages.
This is too naive. A lot of voters were eager and happy to vote for hurting other people on the premise that it was somehow going to turn into personal benefit. They are only now upset because it turns out they're being hurt too.
An dpeople have short memories when it comes to this stuff. If the USA somehow manages to survive this and Trump and his allies are peacefully voted out and removed from power, I'd bet $250 that a lot of 2024 Trump voters would still happily vote for a platform consisting mostly of Trump's 2024 platform and Project 2025 plans. They're not learning the lesson that the core policy approach is designed to facilitate our decline into corporate feudalism; they're just learning the lesson that Trump himself and a few other specific individuals are bad, for them, personally. Trump Regret is not going to be enough to save us.
> This is too naive. A lot of voters were eager and happy to vote for hurting other people on the premise that it was somehow going to turn into personal benefit. They are only now upset because it turns out they're being hurt too.
That is literally exactly what Leopards Eating People's Faces Party means.
> "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
Right, but my point is that the people who vote for leopards eating faces in the first place aren't thinking critically about the leopard ended up eating their face. Conservatives are angry at Trump specifically, and they are completely missing the big picture that the entire movement of conservatism is controlled by powerful interests in service of furthering along the corporate feudalism project. They are voting emotionally with a narrow focus on whatever issues are right in front of them, unaware how extensively their attention and focus is manipulated by propaganda and the media, both mainstream and alternative. That is why people keep voting for the leopards eating faces over and over.
There are a lot of comments criticizing who do not get downvoted constantly. I know because I have read them.
You may criticize and you may get downvoted, but it may not be the case that you are being downvoted just because you criticize, and it is certainly not the case that all criticism gets downvoted.
You know those people have existed since practically forever, right? You learn to tune it out and then you never notice if they start being less wrong.
It's the surface details problem: people post nice sounding things on the internet but don't think about them and do the nostradamus thing of predicting everything because caused by everything.
If you predict a corrupt cartel in "the US" will do a thing, then on a long enough timescale you'll eventually be right in general but wrong about every significant detail.
(also the people with this opinion don't seem to do anything with it - it doesn't appear to motivate them to vote, organize, think critically or come up with compromises - they simply turn out to belittle people on the internet while actually acting to normalize new excesses).
They've been around forever, even before Trump's first administration. But a broken clock is right twice a day.
Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
Clearly, HN doesn't want us to listen to them.
Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
That is "HN". HN is the people who read and post here.
> Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
I'm sure some are but quite a few are not because I have been able to see them quite a lot without clicking.
> Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
I must say that I have never seen that happen, but I don't tend to trawl through a lot of hidden comments. There certainly seem to be some favored billionaires who might upset people to criticize here. Trump is obviously not among them.
Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.
NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.
All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.
All commercial art is soulless. Music, movies, professional painting and sculpting.
One thing I'm hoping for if AI destroys much of the value of soulless art, is human actual art reverting to the motivation of the desire people have to share things with those they love.
This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).
> For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
Blocking a propaganda outlet by a hostile foreign government is not censorship and certainly not "general censorship that is normalised."
If you know that a foreign actor intentionally tries to undermine your government you honestly think the right course of action is to just relax and let it happen? Absurd.
Europe has seen it's share of dictators and knows that a democracy needs to also protect itself.
It depends. One prominent figure of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany has been called a Nazi. When he sued the originator the court decided that, considering the circumstances, was not an insult in the sense of the law.
That was argued to be a satirical skit rather than sincere statement I think. Which is quite an outlier but would be still probably quite interesting to compare with other cases.
But in general if you were walking down the street or talking about something on the internet and somebody else called out or posted and said you are a nazi. Hate speech?
As mentioned before - it depends on the circumstances. If you call someone wearing a full Nazi outfit a Nazi, it probably will not be seen as hate speech/insult. If you call someone showing nothing in that regard a Nazi out of the blue, it could. But that would be handled as personal insult, then. For hate speech it needs to affect more than one person, I believe.
I don't know what Joe Rogan says or who his ilk are, but this is a pretty extreme characterization of the situation that I don't think is accurate.
For example, UK police track what they consider to be undesirable "non-crime" speech, build databases of people, and intimidate them for these non crimes (knock on their doors, invite them to come to police station, advise them not to say such things, etc). This is quite a new thing, within the past ~10 years.
There have also been other high profile cases of people being arrested for posting things that were not like that burn the hotel down case. They arrested 12,000 people in 2023 and convicted 1,100 of those. For cases where the evidence is as cut and dried as posts made online, they could only secure convictions in 8% of cases, which seems staggering to me when UK's conviction rate generally is like 80%.
Even the conviction rate, even if you say yes there are laws to prohibit certain speech, how far is too far? Are these kinds of laws and convictions needed? Why don't all other countries need them? Why didn't UK need them 20 years ago when there was still internet and social media? Is it not concerning to you that we're told this kind of action is required to hold society together? I'm not saying that calls to violence don't happen or should be tolerated, but if it is not a lie that arresting thousands of people for twitter posts and things is necessary to keep society from breaking down then it seems like putting a bandaid on top of a volcano. It's certainly not developing a resilient, anti-fragile society, quite the opposite IMO.
Is nobody allowed to be concerned about any of this without being some horrible underground extremist, in your opinion?
> They arrested 12,000 people in 2023 and convicted 1,100 of those. For cases where the evidence is as cut and dried as posts made online, they could only secure convictions in 8% of cases, which seems staggering to me when UK's conviction rate generally is like 80%.
Isn't the conviction rate the number of people convicted divided by the number charged, not the number arrested?
> There have also been other high profile cases of people being arrested for posting things that were not like that burn the hotel down case
Such as?
> Is nobody allowed to be concerned about any of this without being some horrible underground extremist, in your opinion?
Horrible underground extremist? Not so much. More likely just someone who consumes a very particular slice of media that puts a dishonest (at best) spin on situations like this.
Arrested for saying "F--- Palestine. F--- Hamas. F--- Islam. Want to protest? F--- off to Muslim country and protest."
> Horrible underground extremist? Not so much. More likely just someone who consumes a very particular slice of media that puts a dishonest (at best) spin on situations like this.
Hmm. Was your previous post a dishonest (at best) spin on it too? That would be consistent with your claim if you are a consumer of a very particular slice of media and did not know you can find articles from a whole range of publications about this stuff easily on the internet.
You really don't need to be some obscure basement dweller to have any kind of vague inkling that something might be a little on the nose in the proverbial state of Denmark.
The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these. In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which requires tuning laws.
If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.
> The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech
Regardless of my personal thoughts on this (complicated), simply putting "many" in front of "Europeans" does a lot to diminish further alienation of those who don't, helping you achieve your goals. It takes 0.5 seconds.
> The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such.
Do they? Or is it being pushed upon them? And why is it "the key thing" here?
> Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these.
I suspect it has been the reverse, the ruling class desperately wants those powers and if the common people are now in favor of them it is more than likely because of intensive campaigns from their governments and corporations to change their minds.
> In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which requires tuning laws.
Some laws existing does not mean some other laws won't be unjust. Or that legislated laws will always be right and not require "some tuning".
> If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.
The different systems of law don't seem all that strange to me at least, but the thread you are replying to is discussing censorship in the European nation of the UK.
Further, what we are discussing involves executive police powers (intimidation, arrests, compiling lists), as well as legislated laws, so it is not really just some quirk of common law at all.
I think if you come from a German context the concept of free speech is probably strange to you in general - because no one in living memory has ever had it. Not in Weimar, not in the Nazi period, not in East Germany and not in the Federal Republic.
Unless you understand concepts like "Natural Rights" the idea of a government not being able to curtail what you say will remain completely foreign to you.
That isn't really what we perceive (at least if educated). We see that Free Speech is not an absolute right, but is secondary to the most important right which for Germans is Human Dignity. It might be foreign to you because your constitution and history doesn't put the same value on it than our history taught us.
I'm not American but I similarly don't care for the meek subservience to the government which characterizes European attitude on this.
Human dignity is not foreign to me at all, I just don't believe a life where the state protects your feelings from words, and that dictates what you may and may not talk about is not a dignified one.
It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc.
Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."
In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have). What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?
> It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc.
What is your evidence to that claim?
I think it is actually not easy to assume that position, as evidenced by vast numbers of Europeans who do not assume that position. I think that it is in fact far easier (as a majority, white, employed, etc.), to go through life believing your government will solve everything and protect your feelings from being hurt by hearing what other people think. I just think it is an undignified existence.
> Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."
I can see how bewildering this is for you, but my "argument" is also quite different in important ways.
> In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have).
Adjudicating disputes between private parties is clearly one of the real roles of government.
> What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?
I'm not sure if you are being rhetorical and actually want me to list the differences because you are unaware of them? Civil actions brought by private parties are different from government censorship and criminalization of speech. And I can be sued in civil court for what I say, I never said or even hinted that this should be disallowed that seems to be a strawman you have made up.
I don't think it should be easy to be found liable for damage if you tell the truth or give your opinion though.
What about you? Do you think calling AfD voters in general racists or extremists or selfish or xenophobic should be censored and criminalized by your government?
How could German history have taught you anything about human dignity?
You went from a military dictatorship to an unstable republic to a fascist state, then you split into military occupation zones, and then one of your military occupation zones annexed the other, the militaries left but you kept the laws, and now you arrest people for saying "from the river to the sea".
Using your German-ness to talk to anyone else about freedom or human dignity is patently ridiculous. If you have an ideological point to make, make it, but the whole "as a German" angle just does not hold water. "As a German" your history shows you don't understand this.
Your concept of Freedom of Speech is much closer to the Mainland Chinese model than an Anglo one.
A little less hyperbole would maybe help your arguments, but trying to argue that one of the most liberal democracies in the world is comparable to one of the most repressive regimes is hurting your argument (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/liberal-democracy-index).
Nobody is perfect, but Germans have learned a lot in the last century and a half. One of the things is that Freedom of Speech doesn't deserve the pedestal that primarily US Americans put it on. It has boundaries and one of those is calling for the displacement of an entire nation.
You make it sound like that Germany is just a puppet without its own mind, but in reality it is just some 80m people all with their own mind, history and education. The reality is that Germans are more aware of their history and the impact seemingly small decisions can have on the life of millions. That's why I talk about the German-ness, because many other countries can't or don't want to understand the weight of responsibility which arises from being the perpetrator of two world wars and the holocaust.
This is a textbook case of German Schuldstolz - you feel having been militaristic and having mass human right abuses entitles you to lecture others.
All you learned in the last centuries and a half is that you dont have the logistics to fight massive wars. You did not abandon anything due to your own enlightenment, you abandoned it because of massive foreign military interventions, where every single one of your newspaper, radio and television stations were replaced by your military occupiers.
The worst part about your Schuldstolz is that... the regime who did the most to end yours was even less moral and killed even more people than your own. Meaning you aren't even the best at being awful.
So no, I do not care what you have to see about freedom "as a German". You were militarily, ideologically and mentally conquered. Lecturing Anglos is this is just reflecing back our own beliefs but distorted with a German mindset that has no history or tradition of freedom of speech.
Never heard that word before. And I don't think I am lecturing you about something you should do. I was just talking about why Germans in their own free country are choosing to make decisions about their own laws.
If you feel like we are missing something about freedom of speech, that's fair enough. You are entitled to your opinion. What is strange to me is that Americans (and you as somebody from NZ) are starting to lecture us on that we are being censored by our government. Which in itself is ridiculous and even when explaining why we are preferring the rules we have, we get attacked for it.
Germans aren't mentally conquered, this is just bullshit. We have the same freedom to think what we want as all other Europeans. Things are also evolving, the second world war is so long ago, that very few Europeans were first hand involved. What we considered American values (I don't think the Anglo sphere is very united in these) has also rapidly changed. Americans no longer believe in multi-lateralism and shared values, so not sure what reflection you are alluding to.
Your views on the war are also not very informed. West Germany and East Germany were vastly differently handled by the occupation forces. While for East Germany your talking points of a total replacement it true, in West Germany many of the old elites had to be put back in power to aid the western allies in propping up Germany against the Russians. It took a lot of counter culture to fight those brown remains.
Last, I don't know where you take the energy and insights to say that we have no history of XYZ, but it just isn't true.
Even easier, electromagnetic radiation can be used to detect the presence and exact location and movements of not just automobiles, but also people! Many people have detectors for these things that can literally see through transparent material that makes up large sections of the walls of many houses and apartments.
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