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Comment by quantum_state | Hacker News Reader

It is self evident that labeling any knowledge, technology, or artifacts to be against open society is completely nonsense and contradicts the very concept of open society itself.

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It’s not nonsense, as you cannot carry on mass-killing events like the Holocaust or the Goulag without a modern-ish technology like the railway system. Or, to go directly to the source, let’s use Goebbels [1], as he was explaining that without modern technologies like the radio or the airplane the nazis’ ascent to power wouldn’t have been possible:

> It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio and the airplane. It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio.

[1] https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb56...

Also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

IBM and the Holocaust

So? let's make any modern-ish technology illegal?

Why not?

Let's make leveraging technology to harm or control those who cannot effectively wield it illegal, or at least compensate for such power imbalances.

Genghis Khan didn't need modern technology to kill millions.

Yeah he did, it was called the stirrup.

Genghis Khan had a technological advantage over his competitors: the mongolian bow, the stirrup, the logistical ability to coordinate over a distance that was unthinkable for most of the other nations that ever tried to chase nomads into the steppes and then all the knowledge and tools necessary to forage in the steppe.

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