Hacker News Reader

Comment by java_script | Hacker News Reader

Slippery slope. Reminds me of that one poem.

“First they came for the big pharma capitalists that caused opioid epidemic, and I did not speak up because I was not a big pharma capitalist that caused the opioid epidemic.” Etc.

What if I work real hard and become one of those guys one day. I don’t wanna get executed.

View on HN

Don’t knowingly create a mass death epidemic and you won’t be executed.

That sounds literally identical to 'If you're not doing anything wrong do you haven't anything to hide.' or 'Don't commit crime if you don't want to be raped in prison.' "Lets just throw out civil rights." is an incredibly dangerous notion.

Don’t see anything anti “civil rights” about using a punishment often given to people who kill a single victim to people who kill hundreds of thousands, just because the more efficient killers do so from an office building.

There’s another quote which I think you illustrate perfectly:

“[…] the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

— John Steinbeck

People post this quote all the time, but he never actually said that. It's a misinterpretation of one of his stories where the "temporarily embarrassed millionares" are people that voted to have a socialist society thinking that everyone would become wealthy, but in reality everyone became poor except for people in the government. They consider themselves temporarily embarrassed because they believed that giving the government full control of their lives would be better than capitalism, and they don't want to admit that they were all naive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com