"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's happened in American society, particularly the silence, confusion and cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking. It should have been required reading in American schools, when there was still time to educate people against these dangers.
i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this.
at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
> at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
Yes, extremists always want to dismantle education to control the population. For instance, in the US, Trump got the votes from the uneducated. He has not interest in an educated country.
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
Nah, cynicism is the only rational reaction now. Lots of people died from covid and our poor government response, but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see.
You seem unaware of the actual meaning of the word genocide, and I would suggest not using it in that case.
What the US did to the native Americans was a genocide. Siding with a foreign country in a conflict with a terrorist force is not a genocide, and throwing verbal atom bombs into an already maximally heated discussion isn’t helpful.
In France, I remember we read several classic allegories on that theme at schools. Rhinoceros by Ionesco (even watched it in the theater as a school trip), also The Plague (Albert Camus). I didn't think much of it when I was a teenager, but I'm looking at them on the light of these recent events. Especially Rhinoceros on ideological contagion.
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
You can find similar images from apartheit South Africa and apartheit southern US states before 1970. And in those cases they believe they are happy because of the protective wall of state violence against other humans.
There was always what you might call a "particle" of fascism throughout the War on Terror (maintained by both parties! because it was popular with the public!) Things like the unaccountable secret prisons in Gunatanamo or Abu Gharib, or the US sniper who amused himself by randomly murdering hundreds of civilians (eventually convicted .. then pardoned). And then in the war on Gaza everyone (bipartisan) was falling over themselves to say that it was children's own fault for being in the same school as Hamas and that the Israeli government was right to bomb them.
Back at home in BLM, everyone stood up for the right of the police to unaccountably murder citizens. Because that power would only be used against bad people, right?
Point to be noted is that Rudolf Hoss wasn't the leader of a random Nazi camp. He was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered, making him one of the biggest mass-murderer of the last century.
> Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
Do I understand that while the United States is undergoing a radical neonazi revolution lead by the tech industry your take away is that the people who called out the right-wing and tech industry were wrong to do so and bear responsibility for the horrific state of the world?
No, what you should takeaway is that misoverusing the term Nazi as an insult patently no longer works precisely because noone cares about being called a Nazi anymore due to its misoveruse.
In a different timeline, Trump being called a Nazi or any of the vicinity terms should have been an immediate termination of his campaign chances.
What actually happened is Trump ignored it (as he should) and the American people shrugged "OK" and went to vote for him with complete disregard.
Then Musk got called a Nazi at the inauguration, and the American people shrugged "OK" and went back to facepalming at just how much sheer waste the government has with complete disregard.
The moral you should take away is you should not invoke Godwin's Law. It's probably too late for "Nazi", "racism", "sexism", and a host of other insults the Left have thrown around to see what sticks (none have), but that doesn't mean future originally-valuable-terminology have to face the same fate.
Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, not unlike the original meaning behind the term "Yankee" which was originally an insult not unlike "Kraut" or "Jap" but is now one of the fondest nicknames of Americans.
> Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns...
It depends on the insult; sometimes that doesn't work. One of the purest expressions of joy I've seen in politics was Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) back in 2019 analysing [0] a group of anti-Trumpers trying to rally around being called "human scum". He had a lot of interesting things to say back then about the art and science of persuasion.
Trump is a neonazi, openly aligned with American white supremacist militias, attempted a violent coup in 2021, and "the American people" who shrugged "OK" are neonazis. It is the inescapable reality of our present moment, and it has been visible for a very long time.
Godwin himself openly endorsed calling Trump a Nazi.
My takeaway is exactly the opposite, that not only were people right to call out radical fascist elements and influences in our society, they (we) were wrong to be cowed.
The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.
I don't know if there was intent behind it, but during and after WW2 the nazis and ww2-era Germans were depicted as textbook villains, in media, documentaries, school books, etc, but they did so in a dehumanizing fashion, as in, there were only a few named individuals (Hitler, Goebels, Göring, etc), but a generalised and unified "Them". Which made them completely unrelatable to those that weren't "them", which also opened people up for sleepwalking into facism - as long as they don't look too much like "them", and only when "they" got into power did their true colours reveal, including the caricature of Musk doing a nazi salute. I mean he didn't need to do that, and for the facist takeover it would've been better if he didn't because there's now a strong correlation between the two, but he did at the moment it was too late.
I mean it wasn't and isn't too late of course, that's defeatism, people can quickly be removed from power once people get their act together. Jan 6 proved that, and that was a fairly unorganized mob with only a handful actually prepared to arrest / kidnap or do worse to the congresspeople (thinking of the one guy with the tie wraps).
Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.
So far they are expanding power, firing dissents and trying to reduce spending to humanitarian causes and education, to expand its hegemony, to agitate allies. They even attempt to increase means of incarceration.
It's probably best to start by not appointing a serial liar, convicted felon and conman to head it.
But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable.
Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and neither do any of the checks and balances.
You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
> In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
Thrown into internment camps by Democrats. It was also Democrats who did Jim Crow. It was also Democrats who created the KKK. It was also Democrats who were the party of slavery, and who killed Lincoln, the emancipator of slaves.
And the same party that is now othering anyone they disagree with and calling for violence. Senators and representatives of this party were just yesterday calling for war and labeling people as nazis, etc.
Over a duly elected president actually paying attention to what is being spent on what.
Their main complaint is that he's actually being effective this time.
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
But what is happening right now is not really the same as to what happened the last four years, is it? If we forget about partisan wars for a second, are there precedents to what Trump is trying to do? Genuine question, I'm not a USA citizen and I can't keep up with everything.
In a functioning democracy, the guardrails last until the person trying to break them leaves office, and then that person is not elected again; and if they break laws in office, they are convicted of them.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
It’s not moral panic, it’s because Trump is reducing legitimacy and stability of the government. Killing foreign civilians is normal, locking everyone out of a government job with zero notice is not.
COIN sucks, civilians get killed, the closest thing to a fortress in modern warfare is a city. The US has a better record than most in protecting civilians but it’s impossible to save everyone.
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
As I understand it, this wave of US policy change is inspired by a combination of white supremacy and US exceptionalism. But rest of the world is effected by few different things, for example, xenophobia in the case of EU and UK, expansionism in Russia, zionism in Israel, nationalism in China (and Japan, really) etc. It looked the same if you stand far, but they're all different, so I wouldn't call it "global".
There is a documentary from Deutsche Welle titled "The rise of the ultra-right in the US": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhREluLdBs. Maybe worth a watch if you want to see an "outside" perspective on this.
Yes the US is uniquely fucked, really. At least the previous global hegemon fought two world wars to lose its place. The US is basically committing geopolitical suicide at the top of its powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
1. The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
2. The USA will likely avoid war.
3. The USA will likely experience large-scale economic growth due to regulatory change, efficient government services, compounding industrial ecosystems and robotics
4. The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
5. And, of course, the current trajectory of AI seems to support if not promote an unprecedented humanism. Unlike past automation, it doesn’t require humans to act like machines — instead, it lets us leverage our intuition, emotion, and vibes. And this intelligence is available to all, worldwide.
We already have smarter AI than 99% of humans — and this creates certain transformative opportunities. There is little doubt that this will be applied across society at an unbelievable scale and speed.
Why is this desirable, you might ask? In short, China’s economic model (low-corruption communistic capitalism) is working way better than liberal democratic models.
We don’t want war. But we do want the ability to compete effectively with China — and with the European model, it’s not happening.
There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
And, with the global distribution of high-intelligence AI, there is plenty of room for distributed, decentralized local growth that can enable all people around the world to participate in economic development and super-abundant resources.
Things will continue to accelerate. And the biggest wellbeing challenges will come from overabundance of resources rather than their scarcity.
Note: these are hypotheticals for a reason! But I think it is important to identify plausible positive futures so we know where we want to go — we have plenty of negative futures we are trying to avoid.
Because they have zero connection to reality? Can I have a pony in this hypothetical too? How do we get to any of them while having to climb over the additional hurdle of a far right anti-science government?
>The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
And this presidency will ensure that this jump in productivity only benefits the wealthy. Proposed tax cuts by Trump would make middle class people pay more and wealthy people pay less
>There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
Oh yes, the guy that wanted to have a say in what the fed does. The guy who proposed and eventually rolled back tariffs on its neighboring countries, sending a lot of companies (both in usa, Canada, and Mexico) in panic. I could go on for hours
I'm curious if what is happening in the US and what has happened in Britain with Brexit actually ends up slowing some of these marches towards illiberalism in other places. Like when people are upset at the direction of a country or current policies, they may take a "throw the bums out" attitude even if the alternative is far worse. But perhaps they're looking at the complete shit show in the US and how unproductive Brexit was and are thinking "OK, maybe not like that..."
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
Ask Hawaii what happened when a bunch of businessmen wanted more profits and less government oversight! Back then it was Dole (the PERSON) and sugarcane companies, today it is auto manufacturers and probably access to the northern sea route that is rapidly becoming de-iced and relevant for shipping to bypass the Panama Canal. Canada better take this threat seriously and treat the USA, at the very least, like a neighbor who is shooting a rifle at a massive tank of propane.
In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
I don't think it changes anything on a base level for how humans behave en mass. Unfortunately it looks like we will always be susceptible to populism and propaganda. At best what you're seeing is a temporary inoculation against illibralism.
In France at least, Brexit made the idea of leaving the EU obsolete in political discourse, both on the left and far right.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
Notice that this benevolence and protection by the media is granted to Musk (and Trump) by their complete subservience to Israel's demands and wants. Trump just proposed ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip and cleaning up the rubble with American money and work so it can be handed over to Israel in a nice shape.
I suspect a large part of the subtext is that considerable real estate holdings, hotels, casinos, apartments, etc. will mysteriously end up slightly off book on some TrumpCo. spinoff or another.
No, that's missing the point. What hotels, casinos and apartments were promised to the Biden administration to flood Israel with money and weapons to flatten the Gaza strip into rubble and kill and maim hundreds of thousands?
It's not important what leverage Israel has used to make yet another US president do exactly what they want, contrary to any idea of justice, international law, basic humanity and common sense. The point is that Israel has that kind of leverage and nobody is able to resist it.
This "leverage" arguement to me is a dog whistle for anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. There is clearly no specific leverage that one of the world's smallest ethnic groups has over the world's most powerful nation, it simply that America regards Israel's defensive actions against October 7th as entirely within international law in its true meaning which allows the extensive bombing of civiliab infrastructure used for military means if it is proportionate to the military threat posed (in this case Hamas whih intended to repeat Oct 7). The lowest civilian to fighter ratio in urban fighting ever should warrant praise for international law not accusations of breaking it.
As much as I hate the Nazis at the top of Israel's government and Western complicity in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza (and more recently the West Bank too), I find your statement disturbing.
Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel. French media were pretty critical of Joe Bidden being too old for the job, despite Bidden giving Netanyahu all he wanted.
Edit: OK given that other response of yours in this thread[1], it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews.
In addition to being disgusting, Antisemitic talks like these are actually counter productive: they help the Israelis as it gives them an excuse to victimize themselves once again.
Honestly, what would these protests do? Serious question.
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
The point isn't to sway the emperor. (When the facts change, he changes the facts.) But there are many people answering to him who currently don't have the backbone to say no to him. Seeing a million people out there shouting that the emperor has no clothes on may give them that little extra bit of courage necessary to make the right choice in one of the many daily situations where they have the choice between being pandering yes-men and doing the right thing.
A successful protest with a large turnout shows people that they are not alone with these opinions. This instills confidence so that they dare to act "rightfully" later on.
I mean, technically he controls it, however as a former officer in the military I have to believe (perhaps stupidly) that the majority of officers in the US military will refuse to be deployed illegally to squash protesting, even if it's a bit violent. If not, then I guess the people I served with were extraordinary. I hope they were run of the mill, I really do.
The purpose of a protest in general should not be to affect the people in power, it should be for enpowering and bonding the people to further enact post-protest. A moralle boost, a conversation starter, an ignition to call more people to action.
Having sayd that, a very successfull protest does affect the upper ones, only temprorarily and tactically. A policy maker will still want to make X move, but ever so slightly delay it or figure out a differnt narrative to bring it back some time later.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
As far as their public website tells (https://www.riec.nl/) the RIEC is about a targeted bundling of knowledge, experience and resources to better deal with the effects of organized crimes, instead of everyone working in their own little silo.
The "interventions" are basically the forming and supporting of work groups / special interest groups around a specific organized crime phenomenon, with the intent of devising an approach to deal with the specific phenomenon. They publish a report of those so-called interventions here: https://www.riec.nl/documenten/publicaties/2024/12/18/interv...
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
As a purely mechanical point: having a D president with R house and senate and supreme court is a very different situation to having R all across the board, which is why the "checks and balances" have stopped working.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...
I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
An actuall global event that killed hundreds of millions of individuals is a very different thing than what Musk is doing, without any such precipitation...
I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...
Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.
We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.
Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.
No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
They can be very different, but still both push our governing structures and our thinking in directions that are not good for us individually or collectively.
To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.
Examining that analogy in light of the electoral outcome, would you prefer to be in the timeline in which someone throws you a chair but there is a boat full of others who might throw you something useful, or the one in which someone has thrown you a heavy block, has drilled holes through the hull, and is actively pushing everyone else overboard?
They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.
But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.
This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.
I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
Given their failure to resist Trump over the last 8 years and the apparent risk to their persons; should the Democratic party perhaps voluntarily disband?
>"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
Oh, goody. Isn't it great the Democrats prioritized keeping "the groups" and their donors happy? You know, instead of actually reorganizing around countering the existential threat they complained so loudly about?
It is probably good to remember that this talks about the experience of a German, under Hitler's Nazi government.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
I don’t see the call to action. It describes perfectly the feeling of hopelessness I’ve had for years now. The election was the last chance and everyone blew it.
There is still a lot we can do. Every demagogue and authoritarian regime collapses eventually, often quickly- and they haven't even succeeded in seizing total control yet. As long as we are alive, we can resist.
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000, and never really gave it up. Russians were still holding large-scale pro-democracy protests over 10 years later.
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
> You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
The opposition blew their chance in 2024. They are going to have to either back-off on the identity-oppression olympics or accept the loss in 2028.
They need to stop blaming the voters while being out of touch with said voters.
Τhe promise of the NRA+ folks is that guns in the hands of citizens will avert such a situation. Let's see if at least one of the things they claimed is not a lie.
There may be a tipping point, but as we can see by the comments here and elsewhere, and the intent behind writing and reading things like the shared article, being able to see it before it happens is the hard bit, maybe the impossible bit.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
I don’t feel like the comparisons to Hitler are useful, at least when talking about the current US administration.
There are lots more recent examples — Russia in the early 2000s under Putin, Hungary under Orban, South Africa under Apartheid — where democratic norms were gradually eroded, and the international community just sort of sighed and said "oh well, the people have spoken".
I think this mostly comes down to (1) people are more aware of Nazi Germany and thus its easier to use that context than another and (2) the Nazis were extreme even by comparison to their contemporaries and thus have been (presumably) studied the most.
Yeah, but it breaks down because Trump also knows that history, and knows that people want to compare him to Hitler, so he does a bunch of things that make the comparison harder.
Berlusconi is the architect of the modern oligarchy. Control the media, control the public opinion and narrative. I think that what is happening in America is something new though. The dismantling of the US government is weird on it's own, but the step down from US soft power is what really makes no sense. The previous 80ish years of US world dominance was build on a combination of military might and soft power. Europe was rather ruined after WW2, the reason it's as advanced as it is today, and the reason we are/were such close allies with the USA is because of programs like the Marshall plan. Which was essentially the USA giving Europeans the money to buy American products. Stuff like access to US produced tractors revolutionised European farming as an example. On the US side this meant that the USA investment into Europe made it possible for the American wartime industry to restructure itself. So that instead of producing tanks, factories could produce farm equipment and so on. Total win-win.
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
This may come as a shocker to you, but there are people in this country who are driven by morals, not money. It’s true! Real life people, who vote and everything, who genuinely care for the poor and needy.
It would be awesome if HN stopped looking at every single thing through the lens of US politics. "liberals" doesn't even mean anything in most of the world, and indeed I struggle identifying what kind of group you're talking about. The text is about historical events that have already happened - you can take whatever lesson you want out of them, you can see parallels with your own country or you don't have to. But not everything is about America.
Some people form a belief and then look for evidence to support it, others look at the evidence and check for inconsistencies before getting attached to a belief. "Nobody" wants Trump to be Hitler, they're observing parallels which you have rejected because of your desired beliefs.
Yes, it's good to be careful to not label as people as fascists unless they do things like, for example, literally do the Nazi salute while publicly addressing a crowd.
We all saw the Nazi salutes with our own eyes, the man and his ex girlfriend both follow and interact with avowed white supremacists and Nazis on his own platform.
The lie is coming from Musk and his cult of supporters.
Confirmation bias. I watch one PBS news program and they cover white people's problems in rural America all the time. They just cover other people's problems as well.
And the reason is "drumroll", people like Musk. How exactly, is it that billionaires have continued to do so well for so long while the working class hasn't experienced a pay increase since the 70s?
You know pays those salaries, right? Big companies and the billionaires who chair them.
Of course, good job f'ing yourself over further, that safety net you might have had? Gone under Musk.
All the world's billionaires own about $20T. Distributing that equally among all the people of the world would provide each a $75 annuity indefinitely.
at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
Some people won’t change their mind even with contradicting evidence is shoved in their face.
Yes, extremists always want to dismantle education to control the population. For instance, in the US, Trump got the votes from the uneducated. He has not interest in an educated country.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
What the US did to the native Americans was a genocide. Siding with a foreign country in a conflict with a terrorist force is not a genocide, and throwing verbal atom bombs into an already maximally heated discussion isn’t helpful.
That's the least of your concerns.
What you should be opposing is the US' government participation in genocide.
The American publics' scale of tolerance of evil needs serious and earnest re-callibrating.
This can only happen with war crimes prosecutions.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
There was always what you might call a "particle" of fascism throughout the War on Terror (maintained by both parties! because it was popular with the public!) Things like the unaccountable secret prisons in Gunatanamo or Abu Gharib, or the US sniper who amused himself by randomly murdering hundreds of civilians (eventually convicted .. then pardoned). And then in the war on Gaza everyone (bipartisan) was falling over themselves to say that it was children's own fault for being in the same school as Hamas and that the Israeli government was right to bomb them.
Back at home in BLM, everyone stood up for the right of the police to unaccountably murder citizens. Because that power would only be used against bad people, right?
It’s about the Hoss family that lived next to one of the Nazi concentration camps, the father/husband ran the camp.
Also, I recently watched The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and it again aligns to that point of view a bit.
> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
Do I understand that while the United States is undergoing a radical neonazi revolution lead by the tech industry your take away is that the people who called out the right-wing and tech industry were wrong to do so and bear responsibility for the horrific state of the world?
In a different timeline, Trump being called a Nazi or any of the vicinity terms should have been an immediate termination of his campaign chances.
What actually happened is Trump ignored it (as he should) and the American people shrugged "OK" and went to vote for him with complete disregard.
Then Musk got called a Nazi at the inauguration, and the American people shrugged "OK" and went back to facepalming at just how much sheer waste the government has with complete disregard.
The moral you should take away is you should not invoke Godwin's Law. It's probably too late for "Nazi", "racism", "sexism", and a host of other insults the Left have thrown around to see what sticks (none have), but that doesn't mean future originally-valuable-terminology have to face the same fate.
Another moral is that insulting Americans probably doesn't actually work in general. "Deplorables", "Garbage", and others were turned around into rallying cries during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, not unlike the original meaning behind the term "Yankee" which was originally an insult not unlike "Kraut" or "Jap" but is now one of the fondest nicknames of Americans.
It depends on the insult; sometimes that doesn't work. One of the purest expressions of joy I've seen in politics was Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) back in 2019 analysing [0] a group of anti-Trumpers trying to rally around being called "human scum". He had a lot of interesting things to say back then about the art and science of persuasion.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_3HGjAVv0M 1:30 to 7:30
Godwin himself openly endorsed calling Trump a Nazi.
My takeaway is exactly the opposite, that not only were people right to call out radical fascist elements and influences in our society, they (we) were wrong to be cowed.
I mean it wasn't and isn't too late of course, that's defeatism, people can quickly be removed from power once people get their act together. Jan 6 proved that, and that was a fairly unorganized mob with only a handful actually prepared to arrest / kidnap or do worse to the congresspeople (thinking of the one guy with the tie wraps).
So far they are expanding power, firing dissents and trying to reduce spending to humanitarian causes and education, to expand its hegemony, to agitate allies. They even attempt to increase means of incarceration.
But there’s no attempt to decentralize power.
Come on. A "hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy" is completely orthogonal to the size of government, before or after the takeover.
Corruption is fought by cutting off external, financial influence and lobbying and by putting the voters front and center.
It is however _not_ fought by firing and going after dissents, pardoning violent extremists, stepping over the separation of power.
But if for some insane reason you do, you probably want to keep him and his cronies accountable to the law of the land. The conduct expected from someone with that history should be unimpeachable.
Instead, what we got is the conduct of someone who is unimpeachable. None of the rules apply to him or his friends, and neither do any of the checks and balances.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
George Carlin, years ago. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1242679-boy-everyone-in-thi...
And the same party that is now othering anyone they disagree with and calling for violence. Senators and representatives of this party were just yesterday calling for war and labeling people as nazis, etc.
Over a duly elected president actually paying attention to what is being spent on what.
Their main complaint is that he's actually being effective this time.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
Ironic, considering the HN submission we are replying to.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
How is that related to shutting down agencies?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
He's shutting them down to strengthen his own power.
There is a documentary from Deutsche Welle titled "The rise of the ultra-right in the US": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhREluLdBs. Maybe worth a watch if you want to see an "outside" perspective on this.
1. The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
2. The USA will likely avoid war.
3. The USA will likely experience large-scale economic growth due to regulatory change, efficient government services, compounding industrial ecosystems and robotics
4. The American scientific establishment and education system are likely to be transformed to create massive jumps in productivity (in the age of AI)
5. And, of course, the current trajectory of AI seems to support if not promote an unprecedented humanism. Unlike past automation, it doesn’t require humans to act like machines — instead, it lets us leverage our intuition, emotion, and vibes. And this intelligence is available to all, worldwide.
We already have smarter AI than 99% of humans — and this creates certain transformative opportunities. There is little doubt that this will be applied across society at an unbelievable scale and speed.
Why is this desirable, you might ask? In short, China’s economic model (low-corruption communistic capitalism) is working way better than liberal democratic models.
We don’t want war. But we do want the ability to compete effectively with China — and with the European model, it’s not happening.
There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
And, with the global distribution of high-intelligence AI, there is plenty of room for distributed, decentralized local growth that can enable all people around the world to participate in economic development and super-abundant resources.
Things will continue to accelerate. And the biggest wellbeing challenges will come from overabundance of resources rather than their scarcity.
Note: these are hypotheticals for a reason! But I think it is important to identify plausible positive futures so we know where we want to go — we have plenty of negative futures we are trying to avoid.
Because they have zero connection to reality? Can I have a pony in this hypothetical too? How do we get to any of them while having to climb over the additional hurdle of a far right anti-science government?
And this presidency will ensure that this jump in productivity only benefits the wealthy. Proposed tax cuts by Trump would make middle class people pay more and wealthy people pay less
>There are very few ways to compete with China without very strong leadership — and now, it seems, we have that chance.
Oh yes, the guy that wanted to have a say in what the fed does. The guy who proposed and eventually rolled back tariffs on its neighboring countries, sending a lot of companies (both in usa, Canada, and Mexico) in panic. I could go on for hours
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
Europe is already weak, economically and militarily. I don't know how long our votes will matter when we have a belligerent and powerful neighbour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1887_Constitution_of_the_Hawai...
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
It's the new Riviera after all . . .
It's not important what leverage Israel has used to make yet another US president do exactly what they want, contrary to any idea of justice, international law, basic humanity and common sense. The point is that Israel has that kind of leverage and nobody is able to resist it.
This is not so clear as you think. Israel is a nuclear-armed state that is not a participant in the non-proliferation treaties.
Everything that the world fears of Iran, is already the case with Israel.
Forward-deployed nukes are a hell of a blackmail.
Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel. French media were pretty critical of Joe Bidden being too old for the job, despite Bidden giving Netanyahu all he wanted.
Edit: OK given that other response of yours in this thread[1], it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews.
In addition to being disgusting, Antisemitic talks like these are actually counter productive: they help the Israelis as it gives them an excuse to victimize themselves once again.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945588
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
But protests alone almost certainly won't solve this.
There is a 'progression' of boxes in resisting tyranny, and protests are the soap box.
I mean, technically he controls it, however as a former officer in the military I have to believe (perhaps stupidly) that the majority of officers in the US military will refuse to be deployed illegally to squash protesting, even if it's a bit violent. If not, then I guess the people I served with were extraordinary. I hope they were run of the mill, I really do.
It's today.
Though I'm abroad...
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
The "interventions" are basically the forming and supporting of work groups / special interest groups around a specific organized crime phenomenon, with the intent of devising an approach to deal with the specific phenomenon. They publish a report of those so-called interventions here: https://www.riec.nl/documenten/publicaties/2024/12/18/interv...
The rest of this excerpt is harrowing.
Welp.
Fascism came with a whoop and a holler.
It was what most Germans wanted, or came to want under pressure from both reality and illusion.
They wanted it, they got it, and they liked it.
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
The thing that works almost automatically, with exceptions, is decentralized power:
- direct voting on issues by all citizens
- compartmentalization of government into specialized units
- bottom up federalism
- appointment of representatives on a per project basis, not for general power
With decentralized power, people make pragmatic decisions, because they are focused on solving problems and not on maintaining power.
This line in particular is frightening:
> They thought that the Nazis were just another right-wing, nationalist party and that Hitler would be 'tamed' by power.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
Yes, this is surely true.
> So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
Not necessarily.
Is Russian resentment of Ukraine equivalent to Ukrainian resentment of Russia merely because both citizenries feel their own resentments passionately?
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
Yeah. I think the way to counteract this is for moderates to speak up against the extremists, including the extremists on their own side.
For example, Biden criticized the extreme left in the summer 2020 protests: https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/we-are-a-nation-furious-at-inju...
> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.
We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.
I have never really understood this parallel. What laws got broken, there?
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.
In this timeline we’re all gonna be drowning.
But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.
This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.
Scary times.
no matter who you voted for, no matter if you voted or don't vote, you can not change this, you have no power to change it
which part of this is wrong?
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
Reading it was difficult, and impossible not to see the parallels of what we were approaching.
This excerpt is phenomenal on its own, but the full book is worth your time.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
Is the HN crowd finally waking up to what a danger to the US the "most successful startup entrepreneur of all time" is?
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
The opposition blew their chance in 2024. They are going to have to either back-off on the identity-oppression olympics or accept the loss in 2028.
They need to stop blaming the voters while being out of touch with said voters.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
There are lots more recent examples — Russia in the early 2000s under Putin, Hungary under Orban, South Africa under Apartheid — where democratic norms were gradually eroded, and the international community just sort of sighed and said "oh well, the people have spoken".
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
Of course it's not only fascists who can be totalitarian, but totalitarianism is a bad smell in any form of government and should be avoided.
The lie is coming from Musk and his cult of supporters.
And the reason is "drumroll", people like Musk. How exactly, is it that billionaires have continued to do so well for so long while the working class hasn't experienced a pay increase since the 70s?
You know pays those salaries, right? Big companies and the billionaires who chair them.
Of course, good job f'ing yourself over further, that safety net you might have had? Gone under Musk.