Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

There's a long history of naming yourself after the negative term your enemies use for you in order to neutralise it. Also "entitled vocal minority" works nicely as a parody of "moral majority".

View on HN

The Bolsheviks were actually a minority.

That statement by itself requires knowledge that bolshevik means something like "majority" in russian.

No they were the majority in 1917. Earlier they had been the minority, but post Kornilov they were a majority at the time of the storming of the winter palace.

The Bolsheviks were a majority within the RSDLP in 1903. The extent of their support in 1917 within the wider population is highly debatable but their thought-leadership led to sufficient mindshare to (belatedly) ship the October revolution and scale their product to numerous global markets from the Americas to China within the 20th century. Adoption is currently stagnating while the product is being refactored.

The Bolsheviks, was a faction founded by Vladimir Lenin that split from the Menshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) at its Second Party Congress in 1903. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsheviks

You should write a whole history book in terms we can understand.

I was referring to Falwell's lot, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority ; I never knew that "Bolshevik" came from the Russian for "majority"! Every day this website teaches something.

If you suddenly and violently seize power and repress your opposition, you don't stay a "minority" for long! You take an opinion poll and people say, "oh yeah, I'm totally with the Bolsheviks...please don't send the Cheka after my family...."

I think it’s a twist on the silent majority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com