They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955) | Hacker News Reader

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

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240 pointspanax382 comments

The most chilling part is "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

Many wait for that single moment when the line is crossed for everyone to stand up and take (non-violent) action and speak out, but that moment never comes. That's not how this works. Authoritarianism rises gradually and relies on people looking away from it, unable to confront inconvenient truths. The time to speak out is early and not to wait for that moment for others to do so.

Exactly. Consider the erosion of long-standing norms in the west over the last four years and how far society has slipped. These are the first, strong, signs that things are starting to go off the rails.

Last year has had a greater loss of norms of Western thought than we have seen since the dawn of the modern world in almost every Western country. Say what you want about the virus response, but powers that be don't give up newly founded power after they seized it once (the lockdowns never will truly end).

>the lockdowns never will truly end

unless, somehow, it should turn out they were really bad for business in which case out they go once no longer needed.

on edit: clarification at end.

They did last time, and in the middle of the Palmer Raids at that. The necessary and proper use of pulic health orders during pandemics has been thourougly adjuticed in the US, and has a basis in precedent centuries old. This is hardly a regression.

Why don't you worry instead about whether we get a trial before we get shot or locked up?

The difference of today is our world's global businesses look up to the major Communist force of our world today instead of seeing it as a competitor, they have noted the methods of censorship and totalitarianism and have taken notes back-home.

China is Communist the same way the third reich was Socialist: in name only.

Just taken a bit off guard: do you not dispute the other claim?

I think the general point is correct but I don't think the businesses are influenced by China specifically. That puts too little blame on us.

Our home-grown flavor of fascism is influenced by Nazi Germany in particular but has far outpaced it by systematically co-opting and diluting any attempts to divert from the status quo. Pride parades are paid for by banks, Black Lives Matter is supported by companies with histories of racial discrimination, hell, the phrase "All Cops Are Bastards" was taken by Liberals to mean "some cops (not your friends) are bastards (but they're good people just forced to do some bad stuff)". The Right has convinced the populace that the Left wants to censor and restrict the people when in reality the opposite is true. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

I think China is still learning to ride the bike of authoritarianism. A truly totalitarian government will seem to its people to be completely democratic.

Jesus christ man, responding to a national health crisis in exactly the same way we did 100 years ago does not make us and authoritarian government. What's next, "the food rationing so our troops can keep fighting the actual nazis make us just as bad as them"?

"If I can afford it I should be able to buy more than 4 gallons of gas a week! We're a capitalist society, not socialist! Market forces will solve this! Down with rationing!"

Are the "powers to be" simple comic book villains motivated by something as simple as a hatred of freedom? Why would governments across the world nearly uniformly sabotage their own economies for something so intangible? And all acting in concert? Communist China and the capitalist USA are in this together?

Game theory alone tells you that if this were deliberate and unnecessary then there would be an immense payoff to any power that decided not to wreck their economy as this would catapult them ahead of their neighbors.

I am reading some unstated skepticism about the scope or severity of the pandemic in your response here, the so-called "Plandemic". I would urge you to look at this issue again, as you clearly are concerned about creeping authoritarianism, but feel you are making a serious attribution error here.

Its almost like there is some ulterior motive surrounding COVID for some reason - though damned if I can figure out what it is!

That is easily perceptible change. Consider instead the last 20 years. The US now has "papers please" air travel, the police are much more highly militarized, we're under constant electronic scrutiny of all kinds, and we the people have even less of a common understanding of the world, making us less likely to band together to defend ourselves.

That is frightening.

Unfortunately if/when people do speak out or rise up about abuses of/from authority they are countered by bootlickers, or people who genuinely believe 'it could never happen here'.

Or people who believe 'my side could never do it'.

the nationalists and statists are more dangerous than the footsoldiers themselves. the gestapo are like the ori on stargate. the only power they have they get from the submission and worship by their followers.

If 2016-2020 gave us a window into what it's like, I would say your last bit isn't quite right:

Authoritarianism rises gradually and relies on people looking away from it, unable to confront inconvenient truths.

I feel like many people paid a lot of attention, and confronted truths, and spoke out about it. Yet, Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not risk being shot in the streets at Step B, why should you finally take arms & march at Step C? And so on to Step D.

(Unless in your statement, "relies on people looking away..." refers to a subset of people, not the nation as a whole)

Assume Covid didn't happen. Are you absolutely sure the voting outcome would have been the same?

I was not referring to any specific group of people. And you are right, there has been a great deal of attention and action. I think it is a healthy sign and may be a reason for cautious optimism, but this is a continuous effort and we need to remain vigilant.

Mostly I'm reflecting on how I had understood this document previously. I'd read portions before 2016, and I'm now thinking it was not quite precise enough. Maybe I'd revise your statement like this:

Authoritarianism rises gradually and relies on [a critical mass of] people looking away from it, unable to confront inconvenient truths.

The story of Germany paints a picture where no one speaks up. Yet, as we've seen it can still happen with less than universal complicity. As a result I think the lesson shifts.

Trump stepped into the exact amount of power that Obama had at the end of his term. And he inherited it from Bush. And on and on.

The ammunition of the authoritarian is collectivism. The more of Those People there are, the easier it is to Divide and Rule.

I was also struck by this:

"Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

I was reminded of the gradual but seemingly inexorable shift of control in the digital world away from the user and towards the provider: EULAs. Register for this. Sign in for that. Do you want to upgrade now or be nagged again tomorrow? (Not upgrading is not an available option.)

Also, for the last three years I was working for a startup which was recently acquired by a huge multinational corporation which I will not name. The sudden onslaught of bureaucracy was a real shock. Before, if there was a technical problem, I could either fix it myself or, at worst, talk to a sysadmin who would take care of it, often in a matter of minutes. Now progress is measured in days. And some problems just can't be fixed. They are the result of some policy instituted by someone -- no one knows who -- and the policies are immutable. That some of these policies result in egregious inefficiencies or even security vulnerabilities doesn't matter. No one cares. There isn't even the pretense of a "suggestion box" whose contents gets dumped into the trash. They are not even trying to hide the fact that no one in power gives a flying fuck what anyone on the ground thinks.

I work at a (very) small electronics manufacturer (in a low-regulation industry), and the amount of regulatory compliance we have to do is almost crushing. Everything from having to report our company's ownership in a 30-page form, to having to fill out another 25-page mandatory 'industry survey' that has nothing to do with us, to having to answer impossible questions about conflict minerals... it just never ends, and the governments keep adding requirements that I'm sure nobody is actually reading.

When I read that I immediately thought of social media and how it sucks up everyone's time and energy.

There's an introspective journal written about the run-up to WWII, which although personal also takes in societal and political observations, by Louis MacNeice, called Autumn Journal. In it, he writes:

And the individual, powerless, has to exert the

Powers of will and choice

And choose between enormous evils, either

Of which depends on somebody else’s voice.

It's, maybe, 80 or so pages of poetry, but imo well worth reading. It's available, among other places, at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.184237

"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."

Very good read, thanks for this.

> "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.

The problem is the road to hell and heaven are both paved with good intentions.

History is littered with so many warnings of false positives and false negatives, it's hard to be know what to resist and what to accept.

But power corrupts absolutely and I think it's safe to fear unchecked power and those who are loyal to people instead of loyal to ideas. Ideas don't change when they gain or lose power, but people always do.

Genuinely curious: what are some historically significant examples of "false positives"? By which I assume you mean a time when people rose to resist something they didn't really have to.

History is written by the victors. From this perspective, every successful resistance was necessary and every failed resistance was not.

Take the American Civil War, for example. If you (still) believe in the cause, it was a true positive. If you don't, then it was a false positive.

Or, to be less inflammatory, consider the French Revolution. Was that a true positive or false positive, especially considering the aftermath?

I think this is probably true for armed conflict, but for civil conflicts in liberal societies, I think it's fair to assume that over time things converge to a more moral and just society over time. (So, the "victors" can be presumed legitimately moral.) However, this has an assumption that a society is liberal, and provides the free exchange of ideas, which is something that seems to ebb-and-flow itself.

The free exchange of ideas falls prey to the paradox of tolerance.

Only if you don't understand the paradox.

Would you mind explaining it then? I feel like this is a major problem in society today and I'd be edified by exposure to a solution.

The paradox of tolerance demonstrates a fatal flaw in the concept of "tolerance", not in the free exchange of ideas. I have become increasingly convinced that the concept of "tolerance" has been corrupted over time until it became susceptible to the paradox, and thus able to act as a strawman of (classical) liberal beliefs.

You will find absolutely nothing in "equality before the law" which falls victim to the paradox.

The paradox is that you can exchange ideas freely until someone uses your openness to new ideas to argue against the free exchange of ideas; whereas people who don’t believe in the free exchange of ideas will not allow you to advocate for the free exchange of ideas because they don’t believe in the free exchange if ideas and the free exchange of ideas is one of the ideas they prohibit.

Afaik, no serious historian is talking about French revolution in terms of single good side vs single bad side.

The anti Women's right to vote movement, anti Civil Rights movement, anti Gay marriage movement, etc. A vocal minority was stoking fears of the implications of recognizing the rights of the disenfranchised as the imminent breakdown of society, family and law and order. Turns out they were just bigoted.

all of the anti things You just wrote had quite popular support in society at that time

To elaborate on aazaa's comment: think of the labels "patriot" and "terrorist" and think of how frequently they correlate with "winner" and "loser".

The Founding Fathers were patriots, because America is now the dominant world superpower. But there are a number of groups that attempted to do to America exactly what America did to the British. Daniel Shay, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, the entire Confederacy, the Anarchist movement of the early 1900s, the Business Plot of 1933, McCarthy, Vietnamese nationalism, Osama bin Laden. How does history remember them now?

Sitting Bull is in interesting company.

This isn't to be taken as a show of support at all, but I had similar thoughts when the story of the kidnapping plot against Michigan gov Gretchen Whitmer broke. The militia had been heavily encouraged by multiple undercover FBI agents-provocateur who themselves were integral in engineering the plot - and it's really unclear whether the militia would have even considering doing such a thing without these agents egging them on and offering to provide explosives.

If the British Empire had the technology and infrastructure of today's intelligence agencies, the founding fathers would have been arrested as terrorists before they could get 10 people in a room together. There would have been some undercover agent of the Crown showing up to meetings trying to convince George Washington that they needed to go kill the king - and history would remember them all as nothing more than evil terrorists justly apprehended for plotting violence against the state.

I'm not deeply versed in the Whitmer case, but Federal agents are supposed to follow a set of guidelines to avoid entrapment, which is what you're describing & is supposed to cause the case to be thrown out.

If the FBI did that, that's entrapment and might be an eligible defense. However, if the FBI assisted or even encouraged an existing plot, then I don't think it would qualify.

> Entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a "crime" that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit

> Depending on the law in the jurisdiction, the prosecution may be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not entrapped or the defendant may be required to prove that they were entrapped as an affirmative defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment

Remember, remember, the 5th of November ...

> How does history remember them now?

You've picked a set of figures whose historical legacy spans a very wide spectrum. At one end (largely positive) are Tecumseh and Sitting Bull, and at the other are (largely negative) are Osama and the Confederacy. Shays sits somewhere in the middle, mostly because other than history buffs no one even knows who that is.

That was deliberate. The point of this sub-thread is that historical narratives get written and re-written by the victors, and the "right" side of history depends on when you're located in history.

Tecumseh and Sitting Bull have positive legacies because Native Americans are not realistic threats to the United States at this point. They weren't always viewed as such: see for example the (fraudulent) Speech at Tuckabatchee, which indicates how people might've viewed Tecumseh in 1860:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh#Speech_at_Tuckaubatch...

Sweden in the past 30-40 years.

Perhaps not historically significant, yet, but clear as night and day when you have lived here over the course of that time.

What has happened in Sweden during this time? It was until very recently almost impossible to have any public, critical opinion about migration without risking being labeled racist. Why? Not sure. But seems to me, a reaction due to fear that Sweden could evolve to something like Nazi Germany. Which of course was not going to happen.

Been in Sweden last year. Couldn't buy almost anything with cash. People have not noticed how an important liberty has been taken from them. Once cash is gone, government has complete information about you, and complete control over you, no shackles needed.

How about the people who thought UN troops in black helicopters would take over the US? Eg, US Congressman Helen Chenoweth, from Idaho.

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

Arab Spring has been a disaster.

> I think it's safe to fear unchecked power and those who are loyal to people instead of loyal to ideas

For all its many failings, I think this is one of the benefits that religion (an particularly the form of religion popular in Europe during the the last 2000 years) can provide. By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.

The US Constitution is a similar sort of cannon, but the ideas it proscribes are much more limited.

I don't see that at all. You can still end up in a theocracy with an inquisition for everyone who doesn't follow the dogma.

Religion is perfectly exploitable for this and has been more often than not in history.

It's exploitable, sure, same as any shared ideology (twist it to your purposes, burn the heretics). But unlike ideologies that don't purport to be objective from humanity, religion carries the seed of its own undoing. Much like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door, an abuse of the ideal can be countered by the ideal. I can't think of any non-religious ideology that has done that; countering those abusive ideologies requires ascribing to a different ideology. Nazism didn't defeat or replace Nazism, but Christianity has defeated Christianity before.

But that said, I agree that someone saying "God is on my side" is inherently problematic in a different way than just "I have the most power to enforce my will". Of course, I don't see that as a value judgement on the existence of religion; after all, regardless of my, or society's, beliefs, the power behind the individual is still there, or not, regardless of their claim of God's support.

  s/cannon/canon/g

Most scoundrels throughout the history you invoke, clung tightly to their Christian identity. The millions of peasants subject to the predations of the Church over scores of generations didn't praise the Lord for their good fortunes. That Hitler wasn't particularly Christian himself, probably was because Christianity was already a tarnished brand in early 20c central Europe.

“s/cannon/canon/g”

Never seen this before. Simple, elegant, and doesn’t make the poster feel bad. I’m stealing it...

Religion works this way: you make a false statement, and punish anyone who does not agree with it. From there you can derive and enforce any other false statement (Principle of Explosion). People in power routinely used this mechanism to make false statements allowing them to take what they want at the expense of others.

> By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.

Where do events such as the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades fit into that idea?

Those are appropriate examples as in each of those, popular and political movements were checked by the shared morals of Christianity, and the desires of kings were moderated by widely accepted church teachings.

>> By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.

I'm an agnostic whose beliefs wrt good and evil correspond much more closely to those of many of my Catholic or Jewish neighbors than those of my extended family who are Baptists or Evangelicals or whatever the hell it is they're doing.

I doubt this is unusual at all.

> For all its many failings, I think this is one of the benefits that religion (an particularly the form of religion popular in Europe during the the last 2000 years) can provide.

Europe was home to the most horrific religious violence in human history. From the pogrooms of the views to the spanish inquisition to the horrors of protestant and catholic rivalry. Even nazism drew upon centuries of european religious past.

> By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.

Actually it makes such demagoguery much easier as it makes it easier to demonize others - infidel, unbeliever, christ killers, apostate, etc. Religion does half the work for the demogogue.

> Europe was home to the most horrific religious violence in human history.

I'm not sure this is true. There has been a lot of horrific religious violence in human history, most of it hasn't been well documented.

Even if it is true, it's not a useful fact. Pre-enlightenment Europe had more religious violence than post-enlightenment Europe because all official violence in per-enlightenment Europe had to be religious. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure post-enlightenment wars in Europe were significantly more violent than the per-enlightenment wars.

> power corrupts

The full quote is worth repeating here.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

> But power corrupts absolutely ...

Even accounting for the misquote (no hate :) I disagree. History furnishes us with examples aplenty of people who were powerful yet uncorrupted. I believe Frank Herbert was closer to the truth when he wrote:

> “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”

The problem is, more of us are corruptible than we think.

Well, per Herbert's quote, I think the attractiveness of power is directly and inversely proportional to how corrupt(ible) a person is. The best leaders are the servant ones, who see leadership as a burden to bear, and to assume only begrudgingly as need thrusts it upon them. Those who look to it for the ability to change the world, even with the best intentions, are imminently corruptible; they're already approaching it with the idea that they know best, and others who disagree are wrong and need to be kept subservient.

That's why we need more women in power.

I agree that we need more women in power; I don't really agree that that's the reason why. If women are generally more disinclined to pursue power I suspect it's cultural, and liable to change.

Out of curiosity, who had unchecked power and was not corrupted by that?

The only resistance to power corrupting is the belief that you don’t deserve the power (humility).

Or just no one in power, like a horizontal governed political system.

The context of this being shared is obvious, but I want to point out that both sides of the American divide right now would likely instinctively identify the other (or their presidential candidate) as the Hitler in this scenario. I say this not to argue that one, or both, or neither, has no reason to make that connection. I say this to illustrate that it's easy to look at superficial signifiers - especially when saturated in fear - and enter the slippery slope of characterization and narrative-building that only deepens said fear, furthering the cycle.

Everyone wants to be able to read the tea-leaves. After World War 2 the world collectively asked itself, "what the hell just happened?" Psychological studies were performed to understand the mechanisms that could lead otherwise-decent people down such a horrifying path. Anecdotes were scrutinized for early warning signs that could have predicted what was to come. And I'm not saying that any of this was a waste.

But the reality is that no two societies, or trajectories, are exactly the same. There never has been and never will be another Hitler aside from Hitler himself. There have been and will be other tyrants, other psychopaths, other societal downfalls, but none of them will be exactly the same as that one was. And we should be very careful about looking at things through that lens, drawing conclusions based on rough impressions. The human mind is very good at squinting until things look right, especially when fear or preconceived notions are involved.

Be aware. Pay attention. There are real dangers to our society right now. But keep your head and don't succumb to blind pattern-matching. Stay focused on our society, and don't lump it in with a perceived archetype.

Came here to make a similar point. Both political sides in the US can point to the observations in the excerpt as chilling historical illustrations of current and potential near-term events. That illustrates in my mind what is so terrifying right now. That there is something bigger going on than political ideology and I don't think anyone can stop it. In fact I would posit that thinking so makes it all the less likely to be stopped. This is because either side will identify a different source of the problem and both will be wrong.

It's a shame comments like this require throwaway accounts on hacker news.

People refuse to consider the other sides perspective, insisting that they are right without doing the mental exercise to even consider the other side having a shred of truth or valuable thought. There are very smart people on all sides of the political spectrum.

What makes it worse, is if you don't take the time to consider the other side's perspective, YOU are fueling the hate and polarization.

I'd strongly recommend https://www.allsides.com for a relatively quick and easy way to get exposed to both sides.

I'm not American, but is there really two sides to consider when one calls a US election stolen and has started to replace military officials? I call that an attempt at a coup.

The way I see it, there are three sides right now: the left, the right, and Donald Trump. Much (not all) of the right has been convinced that their only hope of saving the country from an evil, terrible fate is to throw in with Trump. Trump himself acts out of pure, unadulterated narcissism. I honestly think accusing him of attempted coup is giving him too much credit: he simply does whatever he wants, at any given moment. He doesn't want to lose, so he says he didn't lose (without any real plan to prevent it). He is a petulant child.

Here's what I know: I have lots of family and some friends on the right. And as confusing and frustrating as the past four years have been, I continue to believe that most of them are good people. I have the ability to mentally frame things in such a way that I can see where they're coming from, how they slipped down this slope, why they think Trump really is their last hope. The reality of the situation - and all of the things that really are very wrong with it - is extremely complicated. But labeling all conservatives as nazis is not only wildly inaccurate, it further marginalizes people and pushes them towards more and more ethical compromises that they feel are necessary to ensure the continuation of their way of life. Nazis exist, and they do tend to align themselves with the right, but treating them as representative of the whole is a gross oversimplification that we can't afford to be making.

“Trump himself acts out of pure, unadulterated narcissism.”

Is this a professional diagnosis? Do you know him personally?

Or is this a projection? It sounds an awful lot like projection. Your post does this a lot about a lot of people...

It may be correct. It may not. But it doesn’t help your case to play Freud on, what is in your case, pixels on a screen.

You can’t seriously call someone a “petulant child” unless you’ve actually interacted with the person. This is a 74 year old whose best-known expertise is in constructing artificial personas to better negotiate deals. Think about that. He’s not your father.

The commonly accepted term is “loose cannon”. It skips the psychoanalytic overhead very few people are in the position to do. You say “loose cannon” and, for a large group of people the situation, and how to mitigate it, comes into better focus.

I’m sure your family and friends are delighted that you continue to think they are good people. And it is noble of you to have developed the ability to frame things in such a way as to not reflexively demonize those who disagree on this matter. But edit before you post.

"You can run the best campaign, you can even be the nominee. And you can have the election stolen from you" - Hillary Clinton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77i_pC3lp04)

"Why is Trump making these controversial staffing changes now? No one knows for sure, but it’s probably not as sinister as some fear. When the resignations and appointments were announced, some worried that a sinister plot was afoot — that Trump loyalists were “burrowing” into the Defense Department so they couldn’t be removed when Biden takes office, or that there was some sort of coverup going on, or even that Trump was setting the stage for a coup. But experts I spoke to doubt those explanations, and suspect what’s really going on is that Trump finally had an opening to clean house at the Pentagon with the election now over, and that he’s putting in people more amenable to his wishes in order to finally accomplish some of the policies the Esper-led Pentagon had pushed back on — such as withdrawing all remaining US troops from Afghanistan before Christmas."

https://www.vox.com/21560260/trump-pentagon-defense-secretar...

Yes, there are other sides to consider. There always are. Now you decide how reasonable they are--but you cannot skip taking the time to understand the other side.

I'm skeptical about part of that story, seeing as Esper literally earned the nickname "Yesper" for being a floor-mat to the president's wishes. But I also think the likelihood of a coup is way overblown. After Esper was pushed out, the other three people resigned; they weren't fired.

People said the same thing about a coup when he was first elected, when characters like Steve Bannon were in the White House whispering in his ear. At peak Trumpism across the country, before his approval rating started going down, that probably would have been a better time to do such a thing if it were going to happen. And yet... it just didn't. Lots of callous and shortsighted and regressive policy-making ensued, to be sure, but nothing like a coup.

I really hope you’re right. At the end of the day, if he doesn’t concede then only the military can remove him on January 20th, which he can try to get sufficient control over. I think people are not taking his disregard of the election seriously enough.

I think it's serious either way, just in the longer-term. He continues to sow discord and distrust in our institutions which will last beyond this election cycle, and will only continue to weaken the country as a whole. But I don't think it'll amount to a sudden takeover. Fingers crossed.

Is our him, or the media reporting that sows mistrust and discord?

Tldr: it's the media

"“I am formally announcing that we will implement President Trump’s orders to continue our repositioning of forces” from Afghanistan and Iraq, Miller told reporters at the Pentagon."

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/526362-trump-orders-penta...

We have to go all the way back to 2000 when Bush v Gore happened and Democrats claimed the election was stolen. Actually no, we just have to go back literally to just the last election when Hilary asked for recounts after conceding and then the Democrats used false claims of Russian interference to discredit the election. Heard of the Muller probe? This is a highly unorthodox election due to the high number of mail-in ballots. We have unprecedented censorship of social media by corporations that function as arms of a political party. Trump has a right under law to challenge it. Hillary asked for recounts very late in the process in just the last election with no evidence of corruption. It is not a coup to challenge under law an election process and refuse to concede till then. It’s happened literally multiple times in US history. You are not from the US but you may be surprised to learn the US is not a direct democracy but has a system in place called the electoral college which is there for managing electoral disputes.

There is a very big difference between asking for recounts and declaring yourself winner and the election stolen before there is even an attempt to discover any evidence. Aldo in Gore's case it actually was extremely close, unlike in current elections. So, I'm sorry, but this just reads like standard whataboutism.

No opinions here, but as a thought experiment to get a perspective on the other side, what if it was indeed stolen? Of course in reality there is no proof, but that's the danger of conspirations: in that case, you are on the good side, here something like "trying to prevent communists from taking over America with fake votes". Until the "truth" on facts is agreed (here no fake votes), both sides live in their reality trying to make what is right given their respective premise.

I do actually always try to get multiple angles from different angles on a topic, but when even most of Fox News doesn't support Trump's narrative in something I don't have to look further into it. People who support this narrative are simply too far gone and there's nothing to discuss with them anymore.

Too far gone in terms of a warped reality (in this case), yes. Fundamentally evil, no. That's the important distinction here.

I think there is no such thing as fundamentally evil.

Consider that the military officials being forced out were just reported to having been lying to the President about troop numbers in conflict zones... Then think about which direction the coup may have been coming from

The scariest thing in this, that all these things happening now in the world again. Even in Europe (I live in Hungary), I can feel all this happening, the false creation of enemies, let it be inner or external. There is always some fight we have to win, airing in the mostly state related media. And one by one every institution is grinded into the system, by small or big changes in the constitution, hinding under other less controversial laws, changes, usually proposed a day or hours before the parliament votes on it. And the only thing I can think about now, is to move out of the country, like a coward.

A good companion book on the subject, "The German War", is about the German 'home front' during WW2. Very readable, one neat anecdote was how security agencies like the Gestapo were increasingly hollowed out as the war dragged on.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-1945/dp/...

Imagine you're living through the events described in the essay. You know exactly where things are heading and that the situation is dire. You're willing to do whatever it takes to prevent the inevitable from playing out.

What's your plan and your next move?

Protect yourself, your loved ones, and leave?

It’s hard to fight the tide.

If you have a family, you flee. If you are willing to commit, you infiltrate and sabotage. Once the mass turns, as described in the article, you have to subvert or you may as well just get out.

> Imagine you're living through the events described in the essay. You know exactly where things are heading and that the situation is dire.

While your question is interesting, isn't this exactly the problem? People didn't know where things were headed.

> 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.

We know things can go off the rails but we can't know when that process is occurring. We can only look back and decide that it has already occurred. If we manage to stay on the rails, we'll tell ourselves that we were never close to the edge.

Start researching uranium purification.

You have to flee, if you can.

This however goes only for some non Jewish Germans - nazi party sympathizers.

The social democrats and their sympatizant were attacked in 1933, right after Hitler got to power. That is when first camps were created. They housed political opponents. Plus, politically unreliable people and Jews they were excluded from civil service in 1933.

The German Jews were also under no illusion that they were free. In April 1933, German law restricted the number of Jewish students at German schools and universities. In the same month, further legislation sharply curtailed “Jewish activity” in the medical and legal professions. Subsequent decrees restricted reimbursement of Jewish doctors from public (state) health insurance funds. The city of Berlin forbade Jewish lawyers and notaries to work on legal matters, the mayor of Munich forbade Jewish doctors from treating non-Jewish patients, and the Bavarian interior ministry denied admission of Jewish students to medical school.

It's worth mentioning for context that they gained power via a coalition government and the Reichstag fire: 'In January 1933, the Nazis apparently had only 32% of the seats.' They really did seize control very quickly from that position.

Full quote:

'After the November 1932 German federal election, the National Socialist Workers (Nazi) Party had a plurality, not a majority; the Communists posted gains. Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor and head of the coalition government on 30 January 1933. As Chancellor, Hitler asked German President Paul von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and call for a new parliamentary election. The date set for the elections was 5 March 1933. Hitler's aim was first to acquire a National Socialist majority, to secure his position and to remove the communist opposition. If prompted or desired, the President could remove the Chancellor. Hitler hoped to abolish democracy in a more or less legal fashion, by passing the Enabling Act. The Enabling Act was a special law that gave the Chancellor the power to pass laws by decree, without the involvement of the Reichstag. These special powers would remain in effect for four years, after which time they were eligible to be renewed. Under the Weimar Constitution, the President could rule by decree in times of emergency using Article 48.[7] The unprecedented element of the Enabling Act was that the Chancellor possessed the powers. An Enabling Act was only supposed to be passed in times of extreme emergency and had only been used once, in 1923–24 when the government used an Enabling Act to end hyperinflation. To pass an Enabling Act required a two-thirds majority vote in the Reichstag. In January 1933, the Nazis had only 32% of the seats.'

[source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire]

Joachim Fest's memoir Not I makes for interesting reading. His father, as a member of a republican organization--I think it translated as "Red-Gold-Black League"--lost his job as school principal immediately. The family was not particularly molested, but the old man was unemployable for the duration of the regime.

Still same things is being repeated with Demonisation of Muslims in India, Just that it is more of level of 1933 or even earlier level. So ruling party and their supporters can field not the same defence while slowly boiling frog and killing dissent.

I wrote this three years ago on reddit but no one read it. Ironic, I know. It'll happen again, seeing as how this is a two day old story, but posterity matters.

I'm really late to the party (and people probably won't see this), but I'm going to earnestly give you what I think is going on and why we desperately need to breathe new life into our idea of what civility is in this country or be ready to pull the plug and start anew. This is going to be meandering--just a warning.

The Weimar Republic was established in Germany after the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I. As most people know, this government fell within two decades into the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. What fewer people know is the cultural context before and during the Weimar Republic that made that ascension (of one revolutionary or reactionary stripe or another) generally inevitable.

From "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans

> These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were unusually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914 this had resulted in a politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if an ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and its organizations: he could read a Social Democratic newspaper, go to a Social Democratic pub or bar, belong to a Social Democratic trade union, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, go to Social Democratic festivals and plays, marry a woman who belonged to the Social Democratic women’s organization, enrol his children in the Social Democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a Social Democratic burial fund. Similar things could be said of the Centre Party (which could rely on the mass organization of supporters in the People’s Association for a Catholic Germany, the Catholic Trade Union movement, and Catholic leisure clubs and societies of all kinds) but also to a certain extent of other parties too. These sharply defined political-cultural milieux did not disappear with the advent of the Weimar Republic. But the emergence of commercialized mass leisure, the ‘boulevard press’, based on sensation and scandal, the cinema, cheap novels, dance-halls and leisure activities of all kinds began in the 1920s to provide alternative sources of identification for the young, who were thus less tightly bound to political parties than their elders were (emphasis mine). The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find compromise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easy.

Now what Richard Evans doesn't consider salient enough to mention is that those same means and methods of creating mass leisure also allowed mass polarization. Those means actually rewarded the development of echo chambers amongst the elder political activists as well, furthering the break between activists. Why argue or listen to your opponents when you can just find people that think exactly like you already? Why spread your opponents message for them when you can just blanket them out with your propaganda?

Then you had the normalization of information cascade[^1] and social proof[^2] as behavioral strategies for survival. The rate and breadth for which these political groups demanded new tokens of loyalty became so rapid and outside your scope that it just made sense, that even if you felt, thought, or acted differently in private, to publicly go along with things with which you disagreed. With this kind of chilling effect[^3] on public dissent, eventually even silence becomes synonymous with complicity with the enemy. In the end, you can't be the last person to clap for Stalin[^4].

What assisted these elements in rising was the further degeneration of political discourse and a corresponding rise in political violence as a legitimate means of expression:

Ibid.

> The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence. After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers (emphasis mine).

Now clearly, we're not quite there yet, but the rise of groups like Identity Evropa, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Rise Above Movement, Proud Boys, etc are all furthering the breakdown in political discourse and normalizing political violence. These group allegiances also act to politicize things that were previously entirely apolitical, simply through propagation.

The Internet, like the advent of pulp publishing, the cinema, and radio before it in the Weimar Republic, has enabled a fantastic amount of stimulus and incoherent messaging that can be directly, without any kind of curation, accessed directly by younger people. This easily leads to a state of "hyperreality"[^5] if you're a leftist neo-Marxist or Bezmenov's "demoralization"[^6] if you're a rightist neo-Fascist. The particular emphasis differs between the two concepts, but the fundamental point of both is that an individual can no longer determine what is actually real and what isn't (i.e. societal gaslighting[^7], which creates a sense of alienation and impotence that creates learned helplessness[^8]). This trend has really been ascendant for the last twenty years or so in youth culture.

This entire package overall creates a sense of cultural rootlessness amongst youth segments across all demographics. Note the simultaneous rise of "normie" and "cishet privilege" as insults towards majority culture in the background Internet cultural milleux by fundamentally opposing groups. The mass capitalization of culture has destroyed any sense of historical or cultural context for young people and the overall cultural and economic downturn since 2008 has also prevented their own integration into society in meaningful ways as individuals. They are plagued by impostor syndrome[^9] if they're inside groups and are plagued by fear of missing out[^10] if they're not. This psychological inferiority applies in every realm of their lives. They are buffeted from everywhere with contradictory messages. They are told by every form of media that they are inferior to an ever-shifting ideal. They are told that to exist socially as functional adults, they need to meet now-impossible cultural expectations--they need to be attractive, have lots of money, own houses, have high paying jobs, have great experiences all the time, etc.

Fight Club was really prescient in nailing that emerging pathos:

> Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Even for those that somehow meet and exceed those expectations, they are so outside the norm that the success itself kind create a kind of survivor's guilt[^11] and alienation unto itself.

Now unlike in the Weimar Republic, youth in the United States don't really have public myths about frontline soldiers or the recent experience of the Bolshevik revolution to provide new forms of rootedness and resistance to the system that is perceptually ruining their lives. But they do have access to fundamentally off-limits cultural forms through the Internet that serve the same mythical function. They have access to historical information about systems that were ostensibly opposed to the current paradigm. In societal systems that are neither compassionate nor just, those suffering will look towards other systems to fulfill these ideals. While this is a major simplification, leftists have Communism and the rightists have Fascism. However, the United States state security apparatus was really, really effective at destroying the actual living cultural forms[^12] of these during the mid-60s and through the near present, and made their public social promulgation impossible (barring extremely insular communities like universities and prisons). The Internet has fundamentally changed this. Books that were previously impossible to find are publicly and immediately available digitally. Pamphlets, speeches, ideas, and memes that were publicly impossible to hold now have social venues. They have communities. They have reading groups. They have voluntary propaganda departments that are targeting people already ripe for indoctrination.

From Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes":

> Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.

The main bulwark against the integration of these digital radicalized personae into people's normal daily existence has been that the "adult" political discourse simply didn't allow for it. In the last two decades the 24-hour news cycle, the rise of popular think pieces over neutral reporting, and Super-PAC-indoctrination have stripped every notion of good faith between political actors, their constituents, and their rivals. This was a powder-keg that the election of Barack Obama sparked for the right-wing and Donald Trump sparked off for the left. Now yellow journalism, astroturfing, and echo chambers are in total control of where the discourse travels in either direction. Neither side has any incentive to reduce the invective lest the other side win. Both sides have villanized their opponents so much by this point that the social penalty for not displaying tokens of loyalty is the same as actually being a member of the opposite group, effectively creating an extremely narrow opinion corridor[^13] on anything if you don't want to be considered a gulag-sending Stalinist or a jew-baiting Nazi merely by association.

The truth is that all signs point to some form of despotism coming to America[^14].

A final quote:

From "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer

> National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government--against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man's repudiation of "the rascals." It's motif was, "Throw them all out." My friends, in the 1920's, were like spectators at wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and sweat, the match is "fixed," that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal "exposed" another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends. (One sensed some of this reaction against the celebrated Army-McCarthy hearing in the United States in 1954--not against one side or another but against "the whole thing" as "disgusting" or "disgraceful.")

> While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life-preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers; only the Communists and Nazi objected.

---

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

4 - https://mannerofspeaking.org/2010/05/12/some-chilling-public...

5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

6 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2OtFprM3No

7 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

8 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

9 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

10 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

11 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt

12 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

13 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_corridor#Overview

14 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ayxot9vQ_k

I read it this time, at least.

I'm not sure about the Internet and young people and groups. I think the internet may be magnifying the impacts more than we realise and that these political games are trends to be worn one day and taken off the next with not much fundamental change.

There certainly seems more polarization on Twitter for example but I wonder whether in reality it's like this. Loud people on Twitter make loud noises and newspapers hear loud voices. Most people can avoid joining sides quite happily, that they don't need to belong to any political club. I'm not American so it doesn't seem that polarizing where I am.

I think that on the Internet, we are not being taught skills for peace and co-existence. Ironically real tolerance and peace is not being promoted by any political group, mainstream or anti-mainstream no matter how much they are against intolerance. Seems like thats what religions used to do?

A Jew sat down with Nazis to see what made them tick. This book could not be written in 2020.

This is a powerful piece about a time in Germany where people couldn't, to paraphrase, see where things could go, and so couldn't really understand when things have started.

I suspect that readers will see this piece as a reflection of their greatest fears about our own Republic. Unfortunately, the message will be lost by those who are most in need of hearing it. That includes many of the readers of this piece who think their side are the victims and the other side are the creeping fascists.

Hate to break it to you, in the United States we're screwed two ways over. Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys). Both the left and the right in the US have enemies lists, and have effective propaganda wings that eviscerate opponents and call basic and decent democratic norms into question (free speech, elections). Both sides use identity and demographics to sow division and resentment between groups.

Maybe there's some hope for the shrinking, rational middle that two creeping fascisms cancel each other out, and will in the future. But that's a pretty long bet to make, too.

For the rest of us paying attention and who, in the words of the piece, "think about fundamental things", it has already started and it is very, very scary where it may end up.

Antifascists aren't holding rallies chanting "Jews will not replace us" and showing up to peaceful protests with weapons to kill protesters. The amount of paramilitary activity on the left is minimal, especially when compared to the right, adherents of which been caught in several (edit: at least one, Governor Whitmer, I can't find evidence of others right now) plots over the past few months to kidnap and even murder Democratic government officials.

I'm not denying that the left has ever used extreme violence in the US. The Weather Underground is the most famous example. I will however argue that those days are over for the left, with the vast majority of leftists being nonviolent and pacifists, and a small few committed to armed defense, but not offense.

Instead, they're chanting "White silence equals violence". I'm sure demonization of a group that's on the way to becoming a minority will work out great.

The left and right deploy violence differently. Right wing violence is more precise, organized, surgical. Left wing violence is more chaotic, mob-driven, indiscriminate. Hence the mass rioting and destruction this summer, tacitly supported by major sections of the left-wing power structure in the US (local government and media).

Much of the violence at protests this past summer was actually organized by right-wing extremists, possibly as a false flag: https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-po...

Fake spin meant to assuage the girondins, the well-to-do leftists. The footage and evidence is extensive and obvious.

This is based on information from BlueLeaks, which you're free to call fake spin, and I am free to disagree with you on.

There's nothing in that article suggesting a false flag. At most Hina Shamsi suggests that leftist actions are being judged more harshly.

Fair enough. Why would right-wingers show up to a left-wing protest with violent intentions? There's no legitimate reason, but I apologize for extrapolating from their actions.

Escalating the situation and change public perception to "hurt the left" seems what I interpret from the situation.

Left-wing protests throughout the summer have frequently turned violent, with it being directed at random passersby, police, businesses, etc. I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to by "violent intentions" but that it has happened frequently in the past is a legitimate reason why right-wingers would show up prepared for the fact that violence will likely commence.

You're dodging the question though. Why are right-wingers showing up to a left-wing protest movement in the first place, if they aren't counterprotesting? Wandering around with rifles is not a protest.

Their presence is in itself counterprotest if you're able to figure out they're right-wing in the first place. I'm not sure what type of arbitrary behaviour you're looking for here.

It's intimidating to be walking around with guns drawn. That's what I'm trying to get at.

It's also intimidating to try to counterprotest in the face of such a huge mob when there's been numerous instances of violence from them in the past. I certainly wouldn't go without a gun if I were to show up at one of these things lest someone see me as an easy victim.

You're just vastly overstating the prevalence of violence at these protests. Do you have evidence for these assertions or are you just throwing them blindly?

Is it a surprise that armed people would show up to oppose the trashing of their cities?

Yes, it is, because taking up arms is not how we deal with social problems in civilized society, and civilians are not authorized to use force against other civilians except in extreme circumstances involving a direct threat against one's life.

I can imagine arming myself if I felt my neighbors or myself were in danger, but the idea of arming myself and my friends to drive to some other neighborhood or city to “protect” them is beyond anything that makes sense to me.

You really can’t imagine why vigilates’ sense of citizenship would extend beyond a neighborhood? And if we are assuming only selfish self interest, what happens in one neighborhood doesn’t stay there. I’m not saying their actions were right, but they’re not hard to understand.

Would you please stop using HN for political and ideological flamewar? As you know, this is not what HN is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-po...

> But while the White House beat the drum for a crackdown on a leaderless movement on the left, law enforcement offices across the country were sharing detailed reports of far-right extremists seeking to attack the protesters and police during the country’s historic demonstrations, a trove of newly leaked documents reveals.

According to what I saw and interpreted, it was mostly right influence attempting to escalate the situation to "hurt the left".

Saying "fake spin" is not going to convince me otherwise. I'd prefer statistics though.

( Belgian, so not in the US)

It's not necessarily the actions, but the perceived intent by "the other side" that is important. Events become provocation draws provocation draws backlash, etc etc.

I'm a fairly liberal person, but it doesn't take an inhuman amount of mental gymnastics to look at riots, anti-police sentiment, etc, and see a coordinated hostile agenda. I am lucky that I get to talk to both hardcore right and hardcore left people regularly, and they both tend to follow logical interpretations to inevitably polarizing and unhealthy conclusions. Both are not living in current reality, they are projecting their beliefs about the other side's agenda based on what they see on the news, and saying "I don't want to live in that world".

What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate? Who isn't living in reality here? This is not a far left position, and it's not the left that is driving FUD about US election integrity.

You're supposed to recognize that many of your positions look equally bizarre and scary to the other side, and conclude that to a significant degree this is a gap in understanding rather than a gap in morals.

Yes, but what matters most is not how my beliefs appear to the other side, but whose beliefs are closest to the truth. I have little control over what other people believe, but I have some control over what I believe, and I strive to be rational and realistic and follow the truth.

That depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to move beyond self satisfaction and actually effect change, you need to be concerned with how your message is conveyed.

What are your beliefs for?

>That depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to move beyond self satisfaction and actually effect change, you need to be concerned with how your message is conveyed.

This is a conflation. Trying to be rational is valuable independent of what message you have. Messaging is secondary. When messaging becomes primary, the truth suffers, and freedom dies. I'd rather be self-satisfied and correct than highly influential and wrong. The latter is far more dangerous.

I recall a scant four years ago when many on the left were suggesting that the electors be faithless electors to get Clinton in office. After all, she won the popular vote, right?

"What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate" indeed?

"Many on the left" meaning every Democratic senator and congressperson, and the Democratic president himself too?

What, you think Obama and the Clintons would have minded terribly if it turned out that way?

Anyway, we're not shifting the goalposts to the leaders, we're talking about the people, which is the subject of the article. The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!

And somehow you missed this point. Which leads me to a question: why? Perhaps you didn't hear about it. Perhaps you forgot it. Maybe you brushed it aside. Or maybe you recalled it and decided it wasn't worth mentioning. Each of these are mechanisms through which people are steered.

You accuse the far right of doing something that the far left was doing just four years ago, and still you have thought yourself objective, but it doesn't work.

You can find people of any background who will spout contradictory rhetoric. I don't think you're making this argument in good faith. 2016 was a whole lot closer than 2020, and Clinton conceded and there was no serious calculated attempt to overturn the election results by either the public at large, or people who had any power to do so.

Equating that with what's going on now does not seem like an argument made in good faith.

I was hanging out in lefty circles in 2016; the faithless electorate idea was wildly popular, as was the "the popular vote should win." These were the last hope for many who were previously so confident.

It's true that the popular vote should decide the presidency but unfortunately it doesn't in the US. It's a bad sign that we keep electing presidents who didn't win a majority of the popular vote. Nonetheless, we have to follow the rules and processes in the Constitution until we get the opportunity to change them.

The popular vote should win is still popular on left. In large part because both Clinton on Biden won popular vote.

And partly because they don't count as real Americans in popular rhetoric and are getting increasingly ressentful about that.

>The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!

Well, I certainly wasn't, and I contest that this belief was widespread within the left, but without evidence one way or another we're not going to resolve this aspect of the disagreement. What I do know is that no significant number of people with political positions and political power used that power to throw the election results into doubt, as Mitch McConnell and GOP congresspeople are now doing.

I don't think Obama would have supported it as he called Clinton urging her to concede early on election night.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307536-obama-urged-cli...

Admittedly, I wasn’t following as closely in 16, but I really don’t remember much of this coming from authorities at all. Was it senators and Ms. Clinton herself? Because that is what is happening this year

Maybe you overlooked a multi-year investigation and failed impeachment over the notion that the president in collusion with Russia interfered with the '16 election?

The impeachment succeeded but the senate refused to even investigate so he wasn't convicted.

This has gotten extremely off topic, and in the worst direction: generic, tedious, partisan flamewar. You posted 41 comments moving the thread in this undesirable direction. Could you please refrain from doing that here? The more threads go in this direction, the more off topic for HN they become.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not disagreeing with you, I respect your views and feelings and the importance of the issues. But HN's mandate is curious, thoughtful conversation about topics of intellectual interest. When the thread gets reaches this degree of fiery political minutiae, it has left that far behind. In fact it's at the far end of the solution space from ontopicness.

One could argue that the electoral college (and in the past, Senators elected by state legislatures) was intended to be a circuit breaker or hurdle to prevent grossly unqualified candidates from reaching office. I challenge you to find a candidate that was less qualified and more dangerous than Trump.

Yes, we can simultaneously recognize that the Electoral College was intended to stop candidates like Trump, while also accepting that once it actually voted for Trump, he was in fact the legally and constitutionally legitimate President.

Right. But then none of that ever happened.

And Meanwhile, Clinton admitted defeat and Obama invited Trump to while house as every other president before. And Obama cooperated on power handover. Was not threatening to fire people for cooperating with new President.

You really can't bothside this.

I agree they are being sore losers, but you should think that they are exercising the legal rights they are entitled to in order to challenge what they perceive to be irregularities in the process. If irregularities are found (which they probably won't be) then cases should be heard by the courts. If they are not, Trump should ultimately concede or be forced from office.

Be patient and let the process play out in a legitimate way.

Nobody's saying they don't have a right to challenge irregularities, but many government officials say this was the most secure election in American history and deny any evidence of systemic fraud: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...

I agree it was a secure election. What I mean to say is that this is a perception issue. There is a belief along many on the right that elements of the civil service, the media, and the educated classes are strongly biased against Donald Trump and would like to undermine him. To be honest, they are probably right (although I would argue that the bias is warranted given Trump's abysmal job performance). They therefore think that the left would try to undermine the electoral process to remove Trump at all costs and that their intent is fundamentally malicious. The way you deal with this problem is through transparency and patience. You allow Trump unencumbered access to the largely republican courts and if any irregularities exist Trump is allowed his day in court. Once that is over, you then say we have dealt with you in good faith and you can see we weren't trying to screw you over. We now expect the same from you. This gives you the moral high ground and makes you look reasonable. If Trump refuses to cooperate you can then say he is breaking the law and remove him.

There will be some on the right that will never be convinced that this election was legitimate, but this pacifies the more reasonable people on the right. Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.

Remember once all of this is over we still have to live with these people.

> Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.

You're getting this backwards. The legal means are not there to fight the outcome of the election, they are there to make sure every vote is counted properly. This is a subtle but important difference: nobody denies that there may be minor and insignificant improprieties in this election, as there are whenever a country of 300 million people votes. What is being denied is that there was whole-scale interference with the election system. I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence. People being upset about an election outcome is no reason to ignore the reality of this situation.

> I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence.

I agree and so do the courts which is why this problem will likely solve itself if you just let it play out.

I'm not arguing doing anything more than letting it play out and reporting accurately on what's going on. You seem to think we shouldn't be discussing it as such. I think it's important to talk about what they're doing, because it's poisonous to our democracy.

Trump was not prevented access to court. He and his prior are however not allowed to make public claims about fraud unopposed. The patience you suggest would lead to public that hears what he says, but does not hear about claims being bogus.

The kind of pacification you call about is not something Trump or republican party awarded to anyone last 4 years. They enjoyed to trigger libtards. There was no patience I could detect.

What you suggest does not work, because it demands one side to follow norms that other side does not have to follow.

There is no real right to file frivolous lawsuits (which the lawyers know in their hearts are frivolous, let's be abundantly clear), that is a complete myth.

I never said there was. The lawsuits that have been frivolous have been swiftly thrown out by the courts so frivolous lawsuits are largely a non-issue.

That's wrong. Frivolous lawsuits made with the intent to overturn a legitimate election result may be legal, but they're incredibly dangerous for the health of our democracy.

The probability of a frivolous lawsuit succeeding in such a way that it could overturn the results is literally zero. Frivolous suits are not legal, the courts have identified and nullified all frivolous lawsuit attempts so far, and they have signaled that they will not be tolerated. If Trump wants to bring frivolous suits then it only makes him look less legitimate in the eyes of everyone and bolsters the case for forced removal if need be. These events really don't pose any danger to our democracy. The danger to our democracy occurs when you allow one side to build a narrative that the election isn't legitimate and that one side (the left) is refusing to even hear out the right when they claim a lack of legitimacy.

Give them their time and then we can all move on.

So to clarify, you're agreeing that the GOP is trying to overturn a solid election result, but you think the left poses a greater danger to democracy, because they are talking about what the GOP is doing? If we're sitting next to each other reading books and you start yelling about how I just hit you and stole your wallet, I'm not in fact required to hear you out on that if I did not just hit you and steal your wallet.

> So to clarify, you're agreeing that the GOP is trying to overturn a solid election result, but you think the left poses a greater danger to democracy, because they are talking about what the GOP is doing?

No, I don't think this and never said anything like that. I believe the right ultimately poses the greater danger in this context. What I am saying is it's very obvious what Trump wants to do: he wants to build and support a narrative that this election is illegitimate. He wants to do it through stoking resentment against the left and center and suggesting systemic bias. We resist this by calmly saying that we as a nation are committed to fair elections, and we agree that we need to investigate any cases of impropriety that he can find in courts which are independent (and if anything are largely friendly towards his party).

If he fails to discover any issues, we say we cooperated fairly / openly, he failed to produce evidence of impropriety, this suggests the process was fair, and now we can move on. What we don't do is scream that he's wasting our time, that Republicans are assholes, that they're trying to undermine democracy, and that this whole process is bullshit. If we do, it allows Trump to say "SEE?! I told you they are biased against us! What are they trying to hide??? Why are they so impatient?!" It hands him the ammunition to build the narrative that there has been a conspiracy. If there was no conspiracy, why is the left so impatient and hostile? Why are they trying to subvert the process? Politics isn't just about facts it's about feelings and opinions. At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient. This is a lesson the left generally fails to grasp: screaming at people and calling them assholes is not a particularly effective way to get them to agree with you.

The most effective thing we can do is allow Trump et al to burn themselves out.

>At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient.

The thing is, most Republicans already accept the result. And I'm not saying the whole process is bullshit! Nobody is saying that. It is pretty bad that we can have an election with the popular vote won by five million and counting and have the result disputed, but that's mostly orthogonal to this situation.

The country has voted. The election is still in progress. There are allegations of malfeasance and even fraud that need to be investigated and adjudicated. This has been true in many previous elections. The rule is to count every legal vote and only legal votes.

Once this all plays out, and it will in the near future, then we can determine the "legitimate election result", per the Electoral College.

Should Biden continue to prevail, I'm not expecting any significant unrest. Unhappiness, yes, but that is normal.

>There are allegations of malfeasance and even fraud that need to be investigated and adjudicated. This has been true in many previous elections. The rule is to count every legal vote and only legal votes.

There are allegations by enormously unscrupulous people which have as yet been completely debunked by the courts and labeled by government officials as misinformation attempts: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...

"And if there are legitimate problems to be found, they will be, the coalition declared. Its statement said that all of the states with close results have paper records, which allow for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. ... Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”

That's right.

> What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate?

You should think the same way about this as you do about the "russia hacked the election" cries about how the 2016 election was illegitimate.

I don't ever recall hearing that Russia hacked the election, not even in internet memes.

Russian interference however in the 2016 election is well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20....

The impeachment vote could have been easily avoided if Trump had come out and denounced Russian meddling and let the investigators do their jobs.

The NYT has a URL and web page dedicated to russia election hacking: https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/russian-election-hacking

Let's hypothetically assume that Trump was ahead in the counts right now. Would Biden concede? Hillary Clinton is on record as having said "under no circumstances" concede the election. Would Biden's team not be looking at their legal options to challenge the result? Would Biden supporters not be losing their minds on social media, news media, and in the streets?

This was a very partisian election, in which half the country was not going to be happy with the result. I don't see a smooth acceptance of the outcome regardless of how it comes out.

> It's not necessarily the actions, but the perceived intent by "the other side" that is important.

We should regard "perceived intent by the other side" as most important, and there's no way that dishonest actors could weaponise that? No risk of concern trolling, double standards or phoney outrage?

Are you not paying any attention at all to modern politics?

> showing up to peaceful protests with weapons to kill protesters.

In Portland, an anti-fascist protestor shot a man (rightly or wrongly). Anti-fascists can and do show up with weapons. It is not a false equivalence to say so.

That man never got a trial, he was killed extrajudicially: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/us/michael-reinoehl-antif....

That does not contradict my point.

You're saying he shot someone. That was alleged, and he was never arrested or charged. Like I said, some leftists are believers in armed self defense. I am not. But the fact of the matter is we will never know the full details of that case. I condemn bringing weapons to protests as fully as I condemn equating the role of violence on the left and the right in America right now.

Vice interviewed the person who killed the Trump supporter in cold blood. Yes, there was no official case against the person. But the police knew who the murderer was. This is why a shootout occurred and no other individual is being charged or sought after AFAIK.

> the police knew who the murderer was.

This is not how the justice system works in America, just so you know. The system you describe is horrifying.

Does it also apply for you to terrorists that commit suicide attacks? By definition they will never be arrested nor charged. Would you say that "we will never know" if they did kill people?

This is a red herring and a non-sequitur.

We've banned this account for using HN for political/ideological battle. That's not what this site is for.

Please don't create accounts to break the site rules with; it eventually gets your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I loathe this online obsession with painting an amorphous group of "leftists" with the largest, most inaccurate brush known to man.

And even when they don't show up with guns, they show up with molotov cocktails and water bottles filled with cement (and urine). Those aren't guns, but they aren't Girl Scout cookies, either.

Antifa have committed numerous enough acts of violence to be labeled a domestic terrorist group and instead of plots you have actual congressmen (Steve Scalise) being shot by a leftist. HN is a place for avoiding our biases not doubling down on them.

Don’t forget Aaron Danielson, Lee Keltner, David Dorn, and Antonio Mays Jr., if for not other reason than to understand anger on the right (and from moderates) at their deaths.

edit: Downvoted for relevant, if uncomfortable factual statements on HN? I thought we were better than this.

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/aaron-jay-daniel...

https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/10/16/lee-keltner-wife-want...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_Dorn

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...

Why not double down? Go on - a few more clicks and you won't even see be reminded anymore of what everyone has seen over the summer in many US cities. And it worked!

Anybody can label anybody as a terrorist group. I’m not sure that says anything useful. The shooting does count though, as far as I know.

How quickly we forget the heavily-armed antifa militia that occupied 3 city blocks in downtown Seattle, whose assault rifle-wielding “security team” assaulted journalists, intimidated residents, and murdered an unarmed black teenager.

Residents and businesses owners are currently suing the city for abandoning the neighborhood’s police station, providing porta-potties to the armed occupiers, and ceding control of this area to the violent mob for roughly a month.

edit: Downvoted for relevant, if uncomfortable factual statements on HN? I thought we were better than this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone

https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2020/07/seattle-times-rep...

I'm friends with several people that participated in CHAZ and your assessment of it is incorrect. It was doomed from the start but calling the people occupying it a violent mob is not correct. I personally believe it was a mistake because the people occupying it did not have or want a monopoly on the use of force in their area, meaning that it became a site of unrelated mob and gang violence because the police were not present. That's different from saying it was a violent mob who occupied it with the intent to harm others.

The armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge was also “mostly peaceful.” Much more peaceful than CHAZ/CHOP, in fact.

I am friends with people who lived close by and visited the CHAZ/CHOP, and I watched live-streams from the CHAZ nearly 24/7 for the entire span of its existence. It was a lawless area patrolled by gun wielding far-left activists who routinely harassed journalists, ripped phones out of streamers’ hands to delete footage of the “security team’s” deadly mistakes, assaulted visitors of the wrong political stripe, and ultimately were responsible for the shooting deaths of several people. While the atmosphere was more “street festival” during the day, at least for a while, at night and as the occupation wore on it swiftly devolved into violent anarchy.

Remember Raz Simone, the local rapper who showed up on the first night with an AK-47? Remember how he handed out rifles to seemingly random untrained people from the trunk of a car? Remember how his crew assaulted and pistol-whipped a graffiti tagger on the very first night of CHAZ/CHOP, on a Facebook Live stream, saying “we are the police now?” Many similar incidents.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-autonomous-zone-leaders-w...

Precisely this. It was unacceptable when Bundy et al performed their actions, and what occurred in CHAZ / CHOP was equally unacceptable. The fact that people do not see these events as roughly analogous is amazing to me.

It's amazing what people overlook when the offenders belong to the same tribe as you.

It's pretty hard to be sure you've got the right story with the latter, though. Makes it hard to pass judgement. I think Bundy et al was fairly cut and dried, generally everybody agreed on what happened, and disagreed on whether it was OK.

Where's your evidence that the security team were responsible for the shooting deaths of several people?

umm this? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53224445

No one disputes there was violence. What is disputed is who perpetrated it. As far as I know, there is no evidence it was committed by CHOP participants.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Bigoleboy420/status/1287132537329...

Here is a protestor describing in vivid detail the killing of Antonio Mays Jr. by CHOP security, minutes after it happened while his blood is still wet on the ground. Clipped from Omari Salisbury’s stream (warning - disturbing):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5bA-iUPvqI&t=1m27s

Lorenzo Anderson was shot inside CHOP (though not by the “security team”), and died after amateur CHOP medics and confused city EMS flubbed his medevac. EMS couldn’t get to him quickly since the shooting scene wasn’t able to be secured.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-police-and-fire-confusi...

The guy who murdered the teenager had nothing to do with the CHAZ security team. He snuck in specifically to murder the other kid.

I have a feeling you know this.

You are probably referring to a separate shooting death in CHOP, that of Lorenzo Anderson. I am referring to the murder of Antonio Mays Jr. by antifa security. This murder was filmed from multiple angles and recordings are widely available.

Short clips from several of the vantage points (skip to roughly 1:40 - warning, disturbing):

https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=_K0tXOBPMHA

Not really sure what I saw on that video. It's a mess.

The last I heard Antonio Mays murder was an active investigation with no arrests made: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...

If it's an open and shut case and the shooter is clearly identifiable why is that? Is the Seattle Police in on this conspiracy?

I of course assumed you meant the other kid because the murderer was actually, yknow, detained and charged so their identity is obviously known.

Once again, I'm sure you actually know all of this.

My understanding is that the shooter is not clearly identifiable, but people that night were bragging on Twitter about the "beautiful shot placement" by "security on the ground": https://twitter.com/EffInvictus/status/1277828963369353216/p...

Video taken in the aftermath captures people discussing how they will collect and hide the evidence. Seattle Police found and questioned the woman who filmed that video, but she told them she didn't know anything: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/woman-releas...

> Once again, I'm sure you actually know all of this.

This kind of talk is quite small.

Here is a protestor describing in vivid detail the killing of Antonio Mays Jr. by CHOP security, minutes after it happened while his blood is still wet on the street. The video was clipped from a stream recorded by Omari Salisbury, an independent reporter who lives and works on Capitol Hill. His coverage was some of the most immediately on-the-scene (warning - disturbing):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5bA-iUPvqI&t=1m27s

You’re right that witnesses aren’t talking. This is part and parcel with the “didn’t see shit, don’t know shit” mantra of BLM/antifa protestors. As another user linked, there is video of protestors intentionally destroying the crime scene. Due to this lack of cooperation, Antonio Mays’ family may never receive justice.

> I have a feeling you know this.

they call that feeling "paranoia"

How quickly people who don't live in Seattle shout nonsense about the CHAZ.

Let's break down what actually happened.

1. After weeks of protests, police intimidation, beatings, and frequent gassing of the entire street (much to the delight of people living there, who were unable to breathe inside their own apartments), including a right wing chap driving a car through a crowd, and shooting someone trying to pull him out of his vehicle, the police leave the east precinct, based on an FBI claim that it will be burnt down.

2. The protest moves into the blocks around it, and starts protecting the precinct.

3. The precinct does not burn down.

4. The protest moves elsewhere, and a block party starts.

5. An idiot called Raz, and his boys start providing 'security'. Nobody asked them for it. People who ran the protest didn't ask for it. People living in the area didn't ask for it. Smells like a gang moving into a power vaccumm to me.

6. Homeless folks move into the park area of CHAZ. The area gets a bit rough at night, but is still a block party during the day.

7. Someone in the homeless encampment gets killed in the early hours of the morning, presumably over drugs, but who knows.

8. A teenager steals a car and takes it on a joyride through the pedestrian areas of the CHAZ. (Remember all the car attacks against protest areas over the past few weeks in both Seattle, and the rest of the country? Not a smart move.)

9. Some unknown person kills him and injures his friend.

10. The police move back in to an unburnt district. They then set up a multi-block checkpoint, that demanded all entrants into the former CHAZ to show their ID to be allowed entrance. (When we were under the thrall of Warlord Raz, only drivers had to show ID at his checkpoint.)

That's right. My girlfriend in fact lived on Capital Hill at the time right outside, so I have a pretty good idea of the details.

There’s a lot to unpack in your post, but I’d just like to focus on “car attacks” here. You mention a “car attack” in Seattle. In actual fact, the incident I assume you mean was by all outward indicators a tragic accident, not a planned attack such as Charlottesville in 2017.

Driver Dawit Kelete (who is black, and not politically affiliated) was high on pills when he plowed through BLM protestors occupying a section of the freeway in the middle of the night. Tragically, one protestor died and another was seriously injured.

Most “car attacks” this summer have turned out to be simply reckless or confused drivers caught in the middle of unplanned, unannounced, often heavily-armed and aggressive street protests. Armed protestors have shot or shot at several such drivers, such as in Provo, UT and Aurora, CO.

https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/6/30/21308526/gunman-shot-...

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/08/03/man-charged-murder-sho...

By my reckoning, the actual count of “car attacks” this summer where a politically-motivated driver rammed a BLM/antifa protest can be counted on one hand. There has been a greater number of unprovoked attacks on drivers by protestors. This is the product of extreme paranoia among armed protestors, amplified by social media.

No, what I'm talking about is the one that took place on CH, during the East Precinct protests, not the freeway. You obviously don't live in Seattle.

The driver 'accidentally' turned, with speed, off an arterial, into the protest street, and despite having clear visibility of hundreds of people in his line of travel, kept driving, with people scattering out of his way.

He stopped when he hit a blockade, shot at one person who tried to open his car door, waved his gun around (With extra magazines jungle-taped together), and ran through the crowd directly into the police line. So much for being lost and confused, he seemed to know exactly where he was.

He was either planning a mass shooting, and lost his nerve at the last second, or was trying his damned hardest to provoke an attack on himself, presumably so he could respond with violence.

For an exercise - you try driving your car into a line of right wing militants protesting (or into a police line), and then shoot one of them. I doubt you will succeed in running to a line of safety, and I doubt their press will describe you as lost and confused.

Enough with the "You obviously don't live in Seattle." The event described by _iyig really did happen and was described accurately (except the "high on pills" part, I haven't seen any report of that, news I saw said he took a field sobriety test and was found to be unimpaired).

Unless you directly witnessed these events (which few people did, even amongst Seattleites), then you're getting your information second-hand just like everyone else.

Regarding pills, I read he had Percocet addiction problems and that drugs were found in the car:

>The charges say Kelete told jail officials that he was withdrawing from the narcotic Percocet and that he struggled with an “untreated addiction.” Washington State Patrol accident investigators found “several implements commonly used to smoke illegal substances” and a substance “that appears similar to crystal methamphetamine” in the car, according to the charges.

I hadn’t read about the field sobriety test (so thank you for providing that information!), only the drugs in the car and his opioid addiction. I don’t know whether a field sobriety test would detect that type of intoxication.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-man-...

> Unless you directly witnessed these events (which few people did, even amongst Seattleites), then you're getting your information second-hand just like everyone else.

I live here. I've spent weeks going to sleep to the sound of police grenades going off. I've been to CHAZ. I've watched, in bafflement, for weeks, at how news coverage - particularly national, but also local has painted an entirely different picture from what I've seen with my own two eyes.

The events he cites have taken place - but because of the superficial level of knowledge he has of the situation, he is omitting vital context.

I will absolutely gatekeep on this. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's quite clear that _iyig has no first-hand knowledge, and only superficial second-hand knowledge of what he's talking about.

At least, that's my most charitable interpretation of the situation.

>5. An idiot called Raz, and his boys start providing 'security'. Nobody asked them for it. People who ran the protest didn't ask for it. People living in the area didn't ask for it. Smells like a gang moving into a power vaccumm to me.

So you blocked the police out of a whole neighborhood of a few square blocks, and a gang moving into the power vacuum is a surprise? Come on!

> So you blocked the police out of a whole neighborhood of a few square blocks, and a gang moving into the power vacuum is a surprise?

It was completely unexpected. And it will be completely unexpected the next time, and the next time, and the next time...

Nobody blocked the police out of a neighborhood. They chose to leave, because they could not handle a peaceful protest outside their precinct, and could not restrain themselves from initiating violence.

And because they ran out of gas.

Contrast the SPD's behavior to how the Bellevue police department handled BLM protests. The police chief met with the protest organizers, treated everyone involved with respect, set some ground rules, and did not start a dozen unprovoked attacks on the public.

When all you have is a warrior cop, every problem looks like an insurgency to be put down. The SPD has an incredibly antagonistic attitude towards the public, and is institutionally incapable of de-escalating. It also seems to not actually be subject to any form of democratic oversight - as city council, despite passing many, many resolutions, is unable to reign them in.

Your links do not support your statement. While the wikipedia article mentions some armed presence, it clearly puts that as a response to outside right-wing violence. No mention of is made of an "rifle-wielding “security team” assaulted journalists, intimidated residents, and murdered an unarmed black teenager" in either article. There certainly have been some unfortunate shooting deaths in the area at the time, but not much is known about either the perpetrators or their motivation.

This is demonstrably false.

Feel free to demonstrate it :)

Certainly there has been far more violence from the left than from the right over the past few years as a read through any newspaper will indicate. I suppose I wouldn't classify most of it as paramilitary in nature though. I would describe antifa as an organized violent mob, at least.

"I've read a lot about it in a newspaper" is not a demonstration. Here, I'll give you some evidence for my position: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-gro...

You honestly dispute the claim that the large majority of political violence in the United States over the past year was leftist in origin?

> Unfortunately, the message will be lost by those who are most in need of hearing it.

It’s amazing. The top reply to his post does just this.

I care more about what is true than I care about trying to provide false balance between unequal positions. If you see me as missing the message, so be it. A request to treat "both sides" of this situation as equals is a request to ignore reality, which I refuse to do.

You are, again, simply speaking of your own reality. Simply because you hold an idea to be true does not make that idea true. This is not mathematics. You cannot ‘prove‘ one side to be true. This applies to my side as well as yours.

I believe there is a mentally-ill man down the hall that thinks he is Antifa, and definitely plans violence all the time, but he is too weak and unstable to do it in reality.. perhaps a powerful image for his weak and unstable mind to fixate on.. does this equate to a real threat? hard to say, he lives largely in a fantasy world and has few contacts with people..

Its no secret that the mentally ill, badly damaged and socially disadvantaged have historially flocked to extreme campaigns -> on either side <- of this inflamed debate

Peace as espoused by various religions, becomes a powerful antidote as a social message -- I support that messege, personally

It's not primarily mentally ill people who call themselves antifascists or Proud Boys though, and believing that is going to severely hamper your analysis of them.

Man accused of hatching plot to kidnap Whitmer is BLM supporter and made comments critical of police >> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-accused-of-hatching-pl...

In the age of agent provocateurs[0], it is hard to really know the truth even if you are present at the scene. There is only so much time in a day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/21/viral-imag...

>There’s no evidence that the suspects arrested in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are antifa activists.

>Before his arrest, one of the suspects attended a Black Lives Matter protest. Another suspect criticized the movement.

>State and federal documents make no mention of antifa or Black Lives Matter. Rather, they reference an anti-government militia group.

>Michigan’s attorney general has said white supremacist and anti-government groups acted “in concert based on a shared extreme ideology.”

What should the left do about the looting? Police confronting protesters in the front, looting going on in the rear..

(Here is a reminder video:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3LrRUfJsY

I am all for BLM protests in general, but the looting only provokes more extreme responses from the right. I also blame the police- they rather confront peaceful protesters than go after actual thugs. Having a class of people redlined into ghettos who have no stake in the wealthier parts of society is the root of this, but what to do about it?

>Antifascists aren't holding rallies chanting "Jews will not replace us" and showing up to peaceful protests with weapons to kill protesters.

They're not [1][2]?

[1] -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/08/wearea...

[2] -- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/29/key-finding...

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or political flamewar. The last thing we need here is yet another angry, generic argument between left ideology and right ideology. Those are utterly repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore off topic on HN.

That's not to say the issues aren't important; of course they are. But this site has a particular scope and repetitive flamewars aren't in it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086595. 40+ comments in a thread like this is beyond excessive.

Who exactly is rational middle in your view? Who exactly is right wing side and who exactly is left wing side? Is democratic party along with Joe Biden really controlling violent antifa? Is antifa actually killing people and attempting kidnappings? Is democratic party really attacking elections the way president is now?

The rational middle will be dwindling as long as they are always referred to in abstract without ever naming names.

I can’t speak for the person you’re asking, but Tulsi Gabbard is representative of what I see as the rational middle.

The only way you can see Tulsi as the "middle" is because the overton window has slammed so far right. In a rational society, Biden and Obama would be considered middle and AOC/Bernie left.

In most countries around the world, Sanders' policies are mainstream.

That's not entirely true, Sanders often doesn't support gun control

Yeah. Compared to the rest of the world, the entire left half of the political spectrum is more or less missing in the US.

The democrats are a center right party. The republicans are at this point, a far right party. It has been a deliberate strategy of the far right to paint the center as "socialism" (which a lot of Americans seem to mistake for communism...), because it makes their ideology seem less extreme. A lot of Americans have fallen for that nonsense, unfortunately. Definitions and framing and perspective matters a lot.

Honestly, socialism should be re-branded in the US as "Canadianism" or "Scandanavianism" to break free of that branding problem.

Americans aren't against socialized medicine or safety nets, just the "socialism" boogieman.

That’s not true. America, or at least its coastal big cities, leads the world in identity leftism. That is, the kind of leftism that finds its base in gays, transgenders, criminals, and other social “losers” (as opposed to economic losers) and their sympathizers. In fact, American leftists have contempt for the working class that used to form the base of old, economic leftism. They despise crass, vulgar, manly working men.

It’s obviously more complicated than this, but that’s the 5000 foot view.

You may be right. I may be right. You may view my response here as a false equivalency. Others might be frustrated and view one position as extreme and another as not. There likely is a false equivalency, but it will differ depending on who you ask.

This gets to a larger point. When the country was first founded, the different religious and political factions deeply distrusted each other. Religion was extremely important, and those who differed were considered wrong and/or corrupted in a way much deeper than I think modern, non religious people fully understand.

And yet despite this, they managed to cooperate with each other. It wasn’t perfect. And it didn’t always work; we did have a civil war. But it allowed for a regional plurality between peoples that were deeply different and factional, and no doubt considered the others evil or dangerous or a threat.

The only means by which I think we can escape this is a return to a respect for local autonomy. Allow people to shape the law where they live as they desire and reduce nationwide impositions. Give more authority to the states to create the world in which the people there want. If you think others would be trapped in repressive systems, give them a means by which to escape to yours.

Evil is perpetrated by violent coercion. The beliefs might be come to voluntarily, and may be more common in one framework than another. But the actual execution of evil requires coercion, which usually seems justified to the person perpetrating it.

Because the law inevitably requires coercion, coercion itself cannot be eliminated without lawlessness. But the laws people concede to can and should be varied. The social contract is only valid if the people have a choice. If we allow people that choice, people will flee the systems which coerce them unjustly, and they will wither. It will be painful to endure systems that seem obviously terrible without intervening. But there is no other way to audit your own biases then to let the people in each system decide which is better over time themselves, and no other way to avoid the inevitable violent conflict of imposing your values onto others who fundamentally disagree with them.

You misrepresent Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. She is no rightist. She has been one of the few voices for pacifism in Congress in the last decade.

There is no rational middle. Liberalism, the 18th and 19th century ideology that America was built on, is really just a truce between the monarchists and the jacobins. Everyone in between is simply confused.

Long time lurker, made an account just to commend the parent post. Then I read your post and made the account just to commend you. While everything he said is true, that doesn't necessarily mean that the truth is between the two candidates or two parties as it may imply. There is a status quo of mild corruption that has happened throughout almost any leadership, and there is an acute enemy to principles that hold modern and just societies in place.

Having thought about this carefully¹, I have concluded that my position is the rational middle. All other positions are inexplicably extremist while I have carefully cultivated an intelligent rational position. Unusual among Mankind, I have been blessed with the power to apply reason to terrible subjects. It is sad that all the other people are such extremists for if they weren't we could have had such productive discourse. I could've convinced them of how right I am by application of reasoned discussion of evidence. But alas, I stand beset on all sides by irrational fear-mongers, violent identitarians, and wishful communists. Disgusting.

Naturally, any rebuke of my position is evidence of their extremism, for steeped in their emotion they are unable to be rational. I, on the other hand, am wise beyond belief, empowered by the reason that Nature and my own path to self-growth have given me.

¹ To be clear, I always think about things carefully. I only mention this because it is clear that almost everyone else doesn't, as evinced by the fact that they do not agree with me.

>Both the left and the right [...] call basic and decent democratic norms into question (free speech, elections).

I only see Republicans doing this, but I am not American so perhaps my perspective is not as acute as someone "on the inside". Can you link to instances of Democrats calling free speech and elections into question?

I suppose you missed the 3-year period where Trump was supposedly a Russian agent who stole the election?

That's just the tenor of American politics right now in general.

No one made that claim except right wing media. They said, and this was proven, there was collusion among members of his campaign to influence the election.

When the left complained that Trump became president while several million more people wanted his opponent to win, characterizing that as 'stealing the election' does not seem particularly unfair.

And given the oddly pervasive connections between Trump's family and Russia, I can't really fault people for thinking there might very well be a connection. An awful lot of smoke, there is.

Honestly, the _incredibly_ numerous sexual assault complaints against him should have disqualified him at the start, especially when combined with his publicly indecent behaviour.

If you allow for someone to be disqualified based on accusations which haven't been tried in court how are you going to prevent that from being weaponized? In fact, isn't that what they tried to do to Biden this election?

There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won. That's not stealing the election, that's winning by the rules. That's like saying that one team "stole" a baseball game because they had fewer hits than the other team. Yeah, but they had more runs, and that's the rules of the game.

> There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won

Correct. Which is why most of the grousing centered around the electoral college being archaic and undemocratic. Many people want to see the rules changed.

And I'm fine with that. That's the approach they should take.

Claiming "they stole the election" is not that.

Perhaps not Democrats per se, but the left (particularly the university left) has had a real problem with free speech over the last several years. Cancel culture, deplatforming, mobs trying to prevent speakers from appearing, getting people fired, and so on.

The left is not friends of free speech, at least not the current US left.

But the First Amendment to your constitution is about making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. It's about protecting the freedom of speech from the government, not about protecting the freedom of speech from other people who are free to protest your speaking event at their leisure.

Getting fired because of views you espouse is not a violation of your First Amendment rights.

There is a difference between freedom of speech as a cultural concept, and as a legal concept. When most people say "freedom of speech", I doubt they mean it in a specific, literal legal sense, but rather as a vague idea, a general principle. That idea may include corporations being allowed to fire people based on their political views. But when it becomes standard behaviour for people not to mention their political views publicly due to fear of losing their jobs, I doubt that is the kind of society that will have freedom of speech in culture or in working legal sense much longer. Nor do I think that people have such a society in mind when they imagine a "free society".

Ah, yes. There were very fine people on both sides!

I'm sorry, but there is no moral equivalence in the U.S. between the left and the right. It's certainly true that neither side is squeaky clean, but the left does not deny basic facts, and in particular, it does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections when the results are clear (and indeed has in the past thrown in the towel even when the results were not clear). I could go on and on, but those two things are key. Once you subscribe to the idea that whatever the Dear Leader says is true, evidence be damned, you are lost. The right is doing this even as I write this. The left never has.

> does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections

You may not be old enough to remember, but Al Gore (democrat) did _exactly_ this 20 years ago.

Al Gore never claimed that he was the only legitimate winner months before the election began and that any result in which he lost would be fraudulent.

It's quite the revisionist stretch to claim "exactly". There were many very different circumstances.

Relevant article posted on NPR just today:

FACT CHECK: What's Happening In This Election Is Not Like Florida In 2000

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13/934190243/fact-check-whats-ha...

You left out an important piece of context:

"does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections when the results are clear"

In 2000 the results were not clear. This year they are.

Furthermore, once the Supreme Court shut down the Florida recount, effectively handing the White House to George Bush (on very questionable legal grounds [1]), Al Gore conceded.

[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/please-dona8217t-cite-t...

Came down to 500 votes in a single state. This ain't that.

Al Gore gave a decent concession speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq5YdkYSyEE

I didn't recall the date though, I checked and it was on December 13th, 2000.

Come back on 14 December 2020 and tell me if that aspect is "exactly this".

because the narrow vote count margin aspect that time really isn't, and the claims of fraud and rigging this time really isn't. And neither bode well for a hypothetical Trump concession speech.

Al Gore disputed the outcome of a single state where he lost by a few hundred votes. He did not dispute the outcome of the entire electoral process or make baseless claims that it was rigged for months leading up to and after the election.

You're missing substantial historical perspective here. In both 2000 and 2004 - the last two Republican presidential victories that are old enough to talk about without inflaming modern political tensions - Congressional representatives on the left attempted to block the counting of electoral college votes from a crucial swing state. I don't mean to defend these kinds of challenges, I think they're dumb, but they're sadly quite common.

> Congressional representatives on the left attempted to block the counting of electoral college votes from a crucial swing state

Reference?

Florida in 2000: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-07-mn-9426-...

Ohio in 2004: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Boxer-delays-preside... . (It should be noted for the sake of fairness that the leaders of this attempt claimed they weren't trying to overturn the election results by blocking the count.)

Florida in 2000 bears no resemblance to this situation. Trump and his supporters are alleging widespread, systemic fraud for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Florida in 2000 was a historically close election for which there should have been a recount, but the election was handed to Bush by the Supreme Court instead.

Right. And in 2004 Boxer's action was a symbolic protest designed to draw attention to voting irregularities. She never seriously sought to change the outcome.

Again: there is no moral equivalence here.

Do you dispute that Ohio in 2004 bears a resemblance? Every Presidential election of course has its own unique context, so if you want to discuss broader patterns you have to be willing to step back from the nitty-gritty of each individual year.

I do, because Ohio was a single state with apparently some irregularities in the vote, and the effort to challenge was not even broadly supported within the Democratic party. What is being alleged here is that Democrats "stole" the election. Nonsense.

I think we're talking across each other here. I'm not attempting to draw a strict equivalence; I'm not saying this year is as bad as that year, this side is as bad as that side, this argument is as bad as that argument. I'm just saying that the original claim - that only one part of the political spectrum attempts to dispute clear election results - is flawed.

I'm not talking about in general though, I am talking about this year. And moreover, one senator and one representative cannot be taken as representative of a whole side. One objection is an aberration. A whole party objecting is a political strategy.

That sounds like we are indeed talking across each other, then. I'm not talking about this year.

You were bringing in historical perspective to justify the idea that the left commonly denies basic facts to dispute clear election results. I have argued, and I believe demonstrated, that the context you present does not support the conclusion you argue. This is disagreement, not misunderstanding.

Florida 2000 was indeed very different. That said, Gore was hoisted by his own petard and not by SCOTUS. It's important to remember that Gore did not wish to recount the entire state and all the ballots in the same way, but only in areas and ways considered favourable to Gore.

If Gore hadn't tried that stunt, the process wouldn't have dragged on until December, and the Court wouldn't have been able to interfere. Even more ironically, later attempts to check the count show that all of the recounting standards Gore had actually asked for would have led to Bush winning; Only a complete and fair recount may have allowed Gore to win.

Do you have a source for these allegations? It doesn't track my understanding of the Florida recount, and moreover it's pretty indisputable that SCOTUS acted illegitimately, regardless of what the outcome would have been.

See [0] for a SCOTUS-favourable perspective on Gore's original request and how even the Florida court version was tilted. As for recount results, wiki has a decent overview [1].

[0] http://www.floridalawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/L...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

See especially the NORC results. The wiki entry argues that if the Florida court had continued the proceedings, it may have applied a uniform standard where Gore would have won - but none of the existing orders did that, they used standards where Bush would have won [based on NORC]. Anyway, by Dec. 12 time was running out, the Federal deadline was Dec. 18.

I believe that if Gore had pursued the fair strategy from the beginning than there would have been time enough for the uniform standard recount and no cause for the partial recounts and the appeals that wasted so much time.

The governor of that swing state happened to be the brother of the Republican presidential candidate. That governor's secretary of state also purged the registrations of 90,000 black voters months before the election.

After the last election there was the attempted impeachment and RussiaGate witch hunt which found no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to influence the election. It's pretty brazen to ignore that ans say the left never disputed the election outcome.

> which found no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to influence the election

This is a straight-up lie. Mueller said explicitly they found evidence, but left it to Congress to pursue prosecution.

> Mueller said explicitly they found evidence

Instead of reading what "he said" I'd appreciate reading what the evidence is and what it shows. I'd honestly like to learn.

Edit: just checked, the linked Time's "debunking" confirms that there was no evidence of collusion: the best that they can come to is to claim:

"But the fact that the conduct did not technically amount to conspiracy does not mean that it was acceptable."

So the fact is, as I read it, there was no evidence of conspiracy. And that's it.

Edit 2: The quote in the answer doesn't say anything better:

"While none of these acts amounted to the crime of conspiracy, all could be described as “collusion.”"

Again, the fact in there is "none of these acts amounted to the crime of conspiracy." Then, claiming that it "could be described" ([by whom?] -- there would be at least such mark in a Wikipedia article) is just an attempt to rationalize that fact to these who were emotionally invested. The Democrats could have invested their energy in many other much more important problems they have among them. IMHO Hillary failed not because Trump or any foreign action but because there was awareness of Democrats rigging their party's election process and of she as a war hawk:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clin...

You can start with Time's debunking[1], but really should read what Mueller has written and said, both the report and following articles and interviews.

[1] https://time.com/5610317/mueller-report-myths-breakdown/

Edited in response to Parent's edit:

"While none of these acts amounted to the crime of conspiracy, all could be described as “collusion.”

You don't appear to be having an honest conversation, so I'll bid you good day.

2nd edit: what the heck, let's just quote justsecurity.org's summary of the Mueller report[2]:

"1. Trump was receptive to a Campaign national security adviser’s (George Papadopoulos) pursuit of a back channel to Putin.

2. Kremlin operatives provided the Campaign a preview of the Russian plan to distribute stolen emails.

3. The Trump Campaign chairman and deputy chairman (Paul Manafort and Rick Gates) knowingly shared internal polling data and information on battleground states with a Russian spy; and the Campaign chairman worked with the Russian spy on a pro-Russia “peace” plan for Ukraine.

4. The Trump Campaign chairman periodically shared internal polling data with the Russian spy with the expectation it would be shared with Putin-linked oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.

5. Trump Campaign chairman Manafort expected Trump’s winning the presidency would mean Deripaska would want to use Manafort to advance Deripaska’s interests in the United States and elsewhere.

6. Trump Tower meeting: (1) On receiving an email offering derogatory information on Clinton coming from a Russian government official, Donald Trump Jr. “appears to have accepted that offer;” (2) members of the Campaign discussed the Trump Tower meeting beforehand; (3) Donald Trump Jr. told the Russians during the meeting that Trump could revisit the issue of the Magnitsky Act if elected.

7. A Trump Campaign official told the Special Counsel he “felt obliged to object” to a GOP Platform change on Ukraine because it contradicted Trump’s wishes; however, the investigation did not establish that Gordon was directed by Trump.

8. Russian military hackers may have followed Trump’s July 27, 2016 public statement “Russia if you’re listening …” within hours by targeting Clinton’s personal office for the first time.

9. Trump requested campaign affiliates to get Clinton’s emails, which resulted in an individual apparently acting in coordination with the Campaign claiming to have successfully contacted Russian hackers.

10. The Trump Campaign—and Trump personally—appeared to have advanced knowledge of future WikiLeaks releases.

11. The Trump Campaign coordinated campaign-related public communications based on future WikiLeaks releases.

12. Michael Cohen, on behalf of the Trump Organization, brokered a secret deal for a Trump Tower Moscow project directly involving Putin’s inner circle, at least until June 2016.

13. During the presidential transition, Jared Kushner and Eric Prince engaged in secret back channel communications with Russian agents. (1) Kushner suggested to the Russian Ambassador that they use a secure communication line from within the Russian Embassy to speak with Russian Generals; and (2) Prince and Kushner’s friend Rick Gerson conducted secret back channel meetings with a Putin agent to develop a plan for U.S.-Russian relations.

14. During the presidential transition, in coordination with other members of the Transition Team, Michael Flynn spoke with the Russian Ambassador to prevent a tit for tat Russian response to the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions for election interference; the Russians agreed not to retaliate saying they wanted a good relationship with the incoming administration."

[2] https://www.justsecurity.org/63838/guide-to-the-mueller-repo...

You omit, from the very article there:

"Although the Mueller Report does not squarely address these questions of “collusion” that fall outside the scope of potential criminal liability, it can be mined for substantive information that provides some meaningful answers." Which precedes all the claims.

So even there it's written as scare quotes "collusion" while admitting that that "falls outside the scope of potential criminal liability."

In short, Trump's yes men behaved then as stupid as they continued to behave later, including now, but being stupid wasn't a crime. Sadly, the obsession of Democrats with all that wasn't less stupid (obviously, I'm writing completely non-partisan).

There was no attempted impeachment. Donald Trump was in fact impeached.

And yes, there was an investigation into possible collusion with the Russians. That investigation was launched and conducted by Republicans.

What does any of that have to do with disputing election outcomes or denying basic facts?

You can read the report, released by the Republican-controlled senate intelligence committee, for yourself:

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

This is the redacted report, correct?

Eg. Part of the redacting were removed and this was an example:

> But there are a few shreds of information that are really, genuinely new, and they’re damning of the president. Namely: Trump had direct knowledge of Roger Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, according to multiple witnesses interviewed by Mueller. He encouraged that outreach and asked his campaign chairman to pursue it further, those witnesses said. And Mueller’s office appears to have strongly suspected, without putting it in so many words, that Trump lied to the special counsel in his written answers to Mueller’s questions about the Stone affair.

I'm not going to read the version where they hide the important bits.

I would read a complete one though.

There is no question there was Russian interference in the 2016 election with reams of evidence to back it up. It was then spun that Trump specifically did not conspire.

Conspiring does not matter. It is entirely irrelevant to the goal of validating the integrity of the election. If they care so much about fraud they would have continued to investigate all of the irregularities around the 2016 election.

Give us the frigging evidence at last !!!

"they" blocked witnesses, lied under oath and released a "redacted" transcript.

Biden also said at least once that he might not accept the result of the election if he lost. (Sorry, don't have a reference handy, but I saw it.) I believe that his point was that he would also have to look at fraud. And he said it much less often than Trump did. Still it was rather scary to have both sides saying it.

> Sorry, don't have a reference handy

Res ipsa loquitur.

I believe that what you're thinking of was that Biden was counseled not to concede early (1)

Which is not the same thing. And given the way it turned out with late-counted postal votes, quite wise.

1) https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-idUS...

Clinton said, rather injudiciously, that Biden shouldn’t concede. What she probably meant was that the mail-in ballots have historically favored the Democratic Party, and are in most cases counted after Election Day.

Neither side should concede until the ballots are sufficiently evident. We’ve reached that point.

> Sorry, don't have a reference handy, but I saw it.

The unfortunate refrain of too many people repeating falsehoods online and in person these days.

the left does not deny basic facts, and in particular, it does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections when the results are clear

Hillary Clinton has been claiming that Trump's election was illegitimate for years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum.... 66% of Democrats believe that Russia directly hacked and manipulated vote counts in the 2016 election: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

> Trump's election was illegitimate

But she does not deny the fact that he did win. She's just saying that he won because of dirty tricks (voter suppression, intentional promulgation of falsehoods), which is plausible. Certainly within the bounds of an opinion one could legitimately hold.

> 66% of Democrats believe that Russia directly hacked and manipulated vote counts in the 2016 election

Sure. A fair percentage of Democrats would probably say that they think that Trump is Satan incarnate. That doesn't change the fact that Democrats do in fact recognize the fact that Trump won the 2016 election. Republicans by and large are not conceding that Biden has won the 2020 election. (They also deny basic facts about climate change, COVID, etc.)

Left denies basic facts about:

1. Trump's legitimate election in 2016 - see all the hysterical reactions like "Not my president" protests or urging faithless elector to vote for anyone else but trump route or "Russia-gate" (left's Benghazi?) or the impeachment farce. (I don't think I need to provide any citations here).

2. Illegal immigration - left doesn't acknowledge that this is a problem. And then you see left's contradictory messaging ("illegal immigration has slowed down to a trickle") to thousands of children showing up on our borders. Couple that with ridiculous demands like "Abolish the ICE" or calling Obama the "Deporter in Chief". Concrete example of a prominent leftist: https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-abolish-ice-hysterectomy-whistl...

3. Economics: there is a broad agreement among the economists (including someone like Krugman) that rent control doesn't work. Yet you keep seeing repeated attempts from the left. Latest example: CA Prop 21.

Read the Ukraine transcript and say it wasn't a flagrant abuse of power with a straight face.

The transcript combined with the many House testimonies.

It amazes me that because the Senate didn't convict or even have a trial (for political self-preservation alone), people just think it's a farce.

> Illegal immigration - left doesn't acknowledge that this is a problem

It certainly does. That's why the left supports policies like DACA.

The disagreement is not about whether or not illegal immigration is a problem. The disagreement is very much about what the right way to fix the problem is, which is well within the bounds of legitimate policy disagreement.

> rent control doesn't work

Of course it does. Rent control keeps rents from going up. Whether or not this is desirable, or whether it has undesirable ancillary effects that outweigh the benefits, is again the subject of legitimate disagreement over policy.

> impeachment farce. (I don't think I need to provide any citations here).

You could just watch the House testimony? Trump clearly tried to use the United States' leverage to get another country's leader to create bad press for the man who he saw as his biggest threat to the re-election.

Imagine if nobody blew the whistle and the Ukrainian president did what Trump wanted. Trump could've beaten Biden off the back of that. Off the back of abuse of power!

That's not to say the issues aren't important; of course they are. But this site has a particular scope and repetitive flamewars aren't in it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I sympathize, and I've been doing my best to keep my comments narrowly focused on matters of fact rather than policy. This is one of the problems we face: facts have been politicized. And the politicization of facts is not evenly distributed along the ideological spectrum. That, too, is simply a fact.

The moment you decide that everyone else is crazy and you are the rational guy in the middle, it's time to take a step back.

"Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys)." I'm not sure I would consider Antifa "paramilitary". Antifa doesn't have a military style chain of command, nor an organized use of firearms. While the proud boys have more of a hierarchical command structure, it's still a bit of a stretch to call them "paramilitary", there does however seem to be some shared membership with right wing paramilitary militia.

This is both-sidesism, which is an intellectually lazy excuse to avoid taking action while appearing morally above the fray.

Trump literally uses cult-like techniques to control his followers, traffics in conspiracy theories, attacks as "fake" any news media which doesn't praise him effusively, and is actively undermining democracy itself by claiming that any votes against him are illegitimate. There is no vaguely liberal or left politician in US history who has done what Trump has.

I broadly agree with you. That being said, I don't think it's fair at this point to equate what's going on on the left to what's going on on the right. They are leagues apart.

That's not to say that the same thing couldn't happen on the left or that the people on the left in some way are superior. Quite the opposite. I think the people on the left are just as susceptible to the type of effects happening on the right.

I often wonder what would have happened if Trump had run as a democrat in 2016 instead talking about being pro-choice and how we need to get medicare for all etc. If he had run against someone like Ted Cruz, I would not be surprised if a lot of the left (myself included) had voted for Trump and excused all his talk as "locker room talk" or "speaking his mind" just like the right ultimately did. It may be nothing more than an accident that the right was the side that "fell victim" to his antics.

This brings me to a serious worry of mine. A lot of people are talking about how Trump is too incompetent to successfully install himself as a dictator, but that the next person may be much more competent. These "warnings" are directed toward the right. However, there's nothing that prevents the next dictator wanna-be from being on the left, and the left needs to be equally vigilant.

The left had something similar in 2016, in Bernie Sanders. The differences were that he didn't have the locker room talk (that I know of), and he didn't have the dictatorial tendencies (that I know of). But he was an insurgent from outside the party (he wasn't a Democrat, though he may have joined the party in 2016 for his run). In the same way, Trump wasn't really a Republican. (He did join the party, but somewhat recently.) Yes, I realize that this is degenerating into No True Scotsman, but both were outsiders who tried to hijack the parties. Trump succeeded, Bernie failed because the Democratic Party manipulated things and the Republican Party let things happen.

The groundwork has been laid, on both sides. And the Democrats got raked over the coals for tilting the scales against Bernie, so they might not do it next time.

To be fair, the Republican Party only let things happen after they tried really hard to get rid of Trump themselves.

I guess while he was an outsider I'm not sure that he would have proven to be authoritarian in the way Trump is. I'm mostly worried about our democracy and not necessarily so much about policies.

I agree; I specifically said that I had no basis for claiming that he was authoritarian. The rest is quite similar, though - the outside insurgency and the populism. So the playbook is there for it to happen on the left as well as on the right.

I don’t think the guy who said Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. was going to have a shot on the Democratic side.

Yeah, I was a little surprised at the assumption that Trump would be feasible in a Democratic Primary. Or, a larger segment of the party wanted to support people like Sanders and Warren for a specific ideological reasons. Plus, a lot of Democrats felt Biden’s views and past behaviour made him unsuitable to be president. It’s hard to imagine those same factions in the party nominating Trump.

I’m not an American though, so I may be missing some context.

I'm not necessarily saying that it could have happened, I'm mostly exploring how it would have played out if it had.

The left seems to suggest that only an immoral (or possibly dumb) person could possibly vote for Trump and that we need to put country over politics. That's easy to say when putting country over politics happens to agree with your own political views. I don't know if many democrats would have voted for a person like Ted Cruz in 2016 if Trump (or someone like him) had been the democratic candidate. I can almost certainly say that I personally would have played the same games of semantics that the right was playing then (and still are).

There's a lot of "right-shaming" going on when I suspect that it's just an accident that the right was the side that fell for it this time. The left should be extra vigilant to make sure that we don't fall for it ourselves.

It is disheartening that a person such as yourself (looked at your bio) would draw these false equivalences between radicalism on the right and left. Four years ago these concepts would not have even remotely been part of your vocabulary, but now you sort of lay down and accept it as "we're screwed two ways over?" This is exactly the kind of psychological creep eluded to in the article.

"Great people on both sides", that's the rally chant of the US president...

That's intentionally taken out of context. He specifically said that nazis and racists are not included and that they should be condemned.

> Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys).

They are both irrelevant comparing to the US military. Germany, when Hitler rose to power, had a bad economy and weak military but I think he did give up to the military choices at the end of the day. The US military is a behemoth who could decimate the left and right paramilitaries in a few days, and then go to invade Argentina.

Having lived in a region where countries changed regimes from dictatorship to democracy to dictatorship multiple times, it seems that there is one similarity: The military has the final shot; and a weak or no military meant chaos (Libya/Yemen/Lebanon) since every paramilitary now has a shot at power.

It'll be much easier to predict the outcome by knowing the US military. Does it support Republican or Democrat values? Does it care for democracy? Is it fed up with current day politics?

In my personal experience, the U.S. military - Army in particular - firmly drills “loyalty to the Constitution, not the President” into every soldier. The top U.S. general gave a speech to that effect earlier this week. You can draw your own conclusions as to the timing of his remarks:

>” We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution. And every soldier that is represented in this museum, every sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman, each of us will protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price," Milley said during remarks at the opening of the US Army's museum.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/politics/mark-milley-pentagon...

This is a terrible opinion dressed up in nice writing and this approach is usually used as a tactic by far right conspiracy theorists to recruit people in doubt to their side. The left/liberal/progressive side is not nearly as offensive, manipulative, or fascist as the right/conservatives even in the most extreme cases, and saying so is harmful.

Just watched The Sound of Music again a few weeks ago. As a kid I just knew the bad guys come and the heroes outsmart them.

These days, I see more and more the acting chops of Christopher Plummer - the bad guys are already here and all that's left is hope and trying to maintain a bubble for your children. From scene one he is a goose on a pond. Serene above the waterline but roiling below.

Ironically did you ever notice that The Sound of Music is actually sympathetic towards fascism under the surface?

http://www.critical-theory.com/watch-zizek-explain-why-the-s...

> Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys).

If you believe this, you are severely misinformed; if you don't believe this, you are a liar. Either way, it is nefarious.

I've been to every single counter-protest of the proud boys in Portland.

Who brings guns? Proud boys, 3%ers, PatPrayer, and Trump supporters.

Who doesn't bring guns? Counter protestors.

Who gets arrested from bringing guns to a protest? No one.

Who protects the proud boys? The police.

Who gets shot at by police? Counter protestors.

I had a gun pointed at me by a Proud Boy amongst his militia several months ago. I've been bear-sprayed but thugs with ARs strapped to their bloated bellies. Don't for one instant try to pull this "both sides have mililitias" bullshit.

It is so clearly right-wing propaganda.

P.S. And I know what you are about to say next, "But a Trump supporter got shot in portland..." YEs, he did, and it was awful, and then the Feds shot the perp w/o due process, while Rittenhouse gets a pat on the back. There were NOT heavily-armed groups of counter protestors on the left, but there sure as hell are from the right, all the time.

"antifa" isn't paramilitary or any other sort of group. It's a contraction of "anti-fascist" and is simply a tenet that many people hold.

"Proud Boys" are an organized domestic terrorist group, not a label for a set of beliefs.

There was real, violent, semi-organized left-wing radicalism in the USA in the 1970's. Not since. It may return! But it hasn't yet.

You might want to be more skeptical of the media you're consuming that led you to believe this. Or the persons you've been talking to.

Looks like I accidentally started a flame war here! Funtimes.

My answer to some common replies:

1) "But the [left/right] is much worse": you're sorta making my point. Even if the other "side" may be worse now, if you're honest with yourself, I'm sure you can see where your partisans have crossed some lines, too. And the whole point of this piece is authoritarianism and fascism grows slowly over time, so "We're slightly further down the fascism hill right now so we're better" isn't a heartening response

2) "This is 'Both sidesism'!!!" First of all, I don't claim there are good people on both sides, I claim there are bad people on both sides. Very bad, sycophantic people who see the worst in others, assume the worst motives, and are willing to stop at nothing, including murder, to achieve their ends. Yes, for many issues there is a "right" and a "wrong" and these could theoretically be discovered through empirical testing and observation. But we're not talking about individual issues here, we're talking about national / political identities and the complex social and tribal bonds that make people even choose "a side" in the first place.

3) "You have to speak out / choose a side, or are you morally complicit in evil" Don't entirely disagree. That said, extremism is polarizing and destructive of rationality and humane discourse, regardless of where it comes from. Just because we are all sort of forced to "pick a side" when the gravitational forces are so strong, that doesn't mean that the side we pick will be right all the time or even a force for moral good, just a temporary stopgap against moral evil. That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to identify evil and speak against it when you see it. It's just a lot harder for those people who see much evil amongst two large constituencies that see themselves as wholly Good, than it is for those people who are wholly convinced of their Good and the absolute Evil of the other side.

And although I don't claim to be either rational or in the middle, I do believe I am right about the creeping fascist tendencies present in the polar extremes of American politics -- and there's no better evidence of the truth of my comment that it is being downvoted and commented into oblivion by partisans on both sides :)

Please neither start nor perpetuate political flamewars on HN. We don't need fiery arguments about endlessly repeated details that are available everywhere else. We need thoughtful, curious conversation on non-obvious topics of intellectual interest. Political interest may intersect with intellectual interest but the two are not the same, and they become disjoint as passions rise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hi dang -- I appreciate what you're trying to do, but please understand it was neither my intent to start one or perpetuate a flame war, nor was my comment inflammatory in any reasonable sense of the word. Seems unfair to single me out here, given how perfectly bland my comment was, especially when compared to other comments made in this thread.

I get that it wasn't your intent, but you're underestimating how provocative it was. That's standard for internet comments. Most provocation is unintentional, which why it always feels like other people cause the problem.

There's a sense in which the root comment of a flamewar is responsible for the flamewar whether it was intended or not: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Still, if you hadn't posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086238, I wouldn't have replied. Note the phrase "nor perpetuate" above! And I certainly didn't single you out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086665

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086711

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086595

Fair enough. Although to be clear, I was being sarcastic about it being "funtimes." I hate flame wars and really didn't seek to invite or perpetuate it, nor did I think my original or follow-up comment would invite one.

Thanks for the explanation and for the great work you do moderating this community!

All the Left politicians are talking about how they're going to spend this cycle rolling back what the last cycle rolled back and that's not what I want. We can absolutely do that, after.

What I want is to know why we had a seated president who could get away with so much shit. A smarter autocrat would have taken us to a scarier place much faster. Mercifully, Hitler's dumbest lieutenant could talk circles around His Cheetoness. I'd like to know why the Executive branch had so much privilege and what we can do legislatively to make sure nobody else can do a few of those things ever again.

Unfortunately without flipping the Senate, the only way that's going to happen is if Biden pulls the same shit. The Senate Majority leader will get over the Ends Justify the Means, remember "checks and balances" and move with uncharacteristic speed to redraw the lines.

That's not a jab at the Right, that's a jab at Congress. When "our" asshole does something within their rights but ethically sketchy as hell, it's okay because we Had to Do It. When the other side copies us, well that is an affront to the Constitution and we must stop it.

Nobody ever learns a goddamned thing, whether they live in Germany, the US, or in a small remote tribe.

Because this political system couples your support for a set of policy choices to your support for a particular leader, and people perceive that in order to support their team's policy positions, it's simply unavoidable that you may have to accept a poor leader.

Seems that simple to me. It's easy to say that if there was a left-version of Trump who promised to implement sweeping tax reform to tax the rich, create a real public option, save the rainforest in Brazil and plant a new one in America, and truly address racism, that the left would say 'forget his policy goals, even if they are so aligned with what I want, I will speak out against him and vote for a republican in the next election'. But perhaps many would see it as still the lesser of two evils to continue to support the poor leader in order to signal support for their team's policies and hopefully implement meaningful change.

If we had a different form of democracy, perhaps decoupling leadership from policy choice, would we still be able to elect a Trump? Don't think so.

Perhaps the two party system (and the way it has evolved despite not being part of the constitution at all and warned against by George Washington) would be the easier thing to change than the political system per the constitution, but still. It seems the coupling is the culprit.

Could you drill down to specific examples of things Trump did that you think no president should be able to do?

I'll go first but in an ironic way. Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord which, if you peruse the Constitution [1], you might notice Obama entered the U.S. into seemingly illegally, without consent of Congress in the first place [2]. How did that happen? The Kyoto agreement was also never submitted to Congress for ratification [3]. And let me show my cards and say thank God we never ratified these documents, as that would be tantamount to allowing a world government control over our economy. Treaties you see are the supreme law of the land around here [4].

I don't know if you'd consider Trump's action on this particular treaty to be part of the shit he "got away with" but I find it to be a fitting example of something your average Republican president would probably just go along with, knowing it's a toothless treaty that would never be ratified. But Trump, for political or whatever reasons, felt like reversing Obama's policy in the same way he implemented it. And Congress having no part in the whole affair.

In fact the vast majority of what Trump did was in the form of executive order, most of which had very little impact on state's or individual rights.

So yeah what are these things that Trump did that Congress was either remiss or enabling him to do? If it's stuff related to the border, immigration policy, foreign policy, or the like, that's mostly outside Congress's purview, except the aforementioned treaty power.

Just trying to figure out what's the ethically sketchy stuff that should have been checked by Congress or perhaps the courts. That way we can narrow down a set of principles that could possibly apply to Biden (assuming he's elected).

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol#Non-ratificatio...

[4] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-6/clause-2/

> That's not a jab at the Right, that's a jab at Congress. When "our" asshole does something within their rights but ethically sketchy as hell, it's okay because we Had to Do It. When the other side copies us, well that is an affront to the Constitution and we must stop it.

But wasn't it Trump that talked of an "Obama judge" to much criticism? It's hard to combat court packing if it's not fully acknowledged (or it's only something the "other" side do).

And today it's absolutely the same situation like the one described in the article.

History taught no one. Once again, no one seems to be willing to resist the beginnings and consider the end.

The beginnings go by the name COVID-19 and include lockdowns, closure of national borders, obligatory mask-or-starve-to-death, social distancing, temp checks, QR codes assigned to people in order to leave home, and other totalitarian bullcrap that would be considered absolutely insane and unacceptable as little as a year ago. Everyone is trembling with terror at dying from the single virus and the single disease as if no millions of other viruses and diseases existed. Everyone is so scared for their dear asses that all critical thinking is blocked, because, to cite the original text of the article, 'there is so much going on around', and so they turn a blind eye to all the manipulation and brainwash backed by absurd amounts of money. All they want is that the great wise men in power come and save them. And the end is clearly a one-world medicine-mediated techno-fascism even Hitler and his creators couldn't dream about.

But instead of thinking, what will my bright contemporaries do now? They'll engage their downvote machineguns and flag me the hell out of existence. And HN will help them by counting their pro-covid downvotes as 3 to 5 regular ones. Start your timers, gentlemen, if any still remain here, and watch this post disappear in no time.

But always mind the end, dear downvoters and especially, flaggers.

I know you probably think you're right, but I can't help read this with pity that you think you're in the same position as the precursor to a totalitarian state because people don't want to kill their grandparents.

There is always an excuse that "this time is not the same as before", and this is exactly why the history keeps repeating itself.

There's always a deception that makes the most part of population believe THEY'RE right, be it a virus that kills elderly, a foe nation weaving plots against the fatherland, whatever, it's literally anything that makes people act with pride as if they were fighting the greatest evil. But the Hell is paved with best intentions. Failing to understand that will keep you feeling pity for those who predicted what comes next, and then feeling pity for yourself for you did not listen when it was not too late.

Look, we are all a death threat to each other, but there's one thing called immunity that keeps us from dying out. Elderly always were less immune; are you 100% sure that none of your droplets ever killed someone less immune back in the reckless unmasked days? Someone with a rare condition? Did you track fates of all people you ever contacted?

You people seem to have some panic button in your minds that has been activated by some great NLP masters, which now prevents you from accepting simple facts of life and death. Especially of death. You are willing to wrap life in masks and barbwire, to make it immobile and constrained, to eat and inject all kinds of poisons, to accept any kind of atrocious attitude and orders just in order to keep this undead state for indefinitely long. But that's not going to happen, and you all know that. The clock is ticking for everyone. The only way out of this mess is to live a good fearless life and enjoy every second of it.

And I highly recommend watching these 2 videos in succession to all the good intended people who believe there's nothing ominous going on right now.

Berlin in 1936: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es6f7K4c-y8

Berlin in 1945: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5i9k7s9X_A

Be well and do try to join the dots...

Reads like a mirror of whats currently happening regarding all the covid associated law changes.

/edit I added some more context in a child comment

Can you give an example?

We are in a state of emergency where the government has taken pretty direct control of people's lives, and businesses only remain in existence due to massive government intervention.

It is for a good cause. However a couple of years from now, there will remain a temptation to use the same tools to address whatever normal problems we have. And that is a big step towards a planned economy like the Soviet Union had.

It may sound like a wild conspiracy theory, and certainly the people who are doing it don't intend any such end. However I cannot forget that 9/11 has transformed us into a permanent surveillance state where our communications are tracked, travel by plane involves a search where someone gets to look at your privates, and it is considered normal in low crime neighborhoods to require security badges and/or passing armed guards to get into office buildings. If you'd asked the people who did that whether they had any such intent, I'm sure that they would have said no.

> It is for a good cause. However a couple of years from now, there will remain a temptation to use the same tools to address whatever normal problems we have. And that is a big step towards a planned economy like the Soviet Union had.

It is difficult for me to imagine another set of scenarios that could plausibly lead to popular support of a lockdown. Even our past lockdowns from this year were poorly enforced and basically voluntary (the worst punishment was largely being fined). Yeah businesses shuttered but at GREAT political expense to politicians which is why we have half assed our lockdowns repeatedly. Politicians couldn't bear any more pain. The last thing they want to do is lock down again.

> I cannot forget that 9/11 has transformed us into a permanent surveillance state where our communications are tracked, travel by plane involves a search where someone gets to look at your privates

Yeah 9/11 definitely enhanced the surveillance state which is deeply unfortunate, but we had security screening for planes long before we had 9/11, and it wasn't just 9/11 that made the experience miserable, it was the 10 follow on attacks targeting different vulns in the screening process (liquids, shoes, blah blah). The security measures need to be decently strong because we vehemently refuse to employ the more effective authoritarian technique of flagging passengers based on history and demographics like they do in places like Israel (eg, simply flag anyone with a higher probability of being a muslim because most attacks were performed by muslims). We are actually resisting the aggressive response in this case.

> it is considered normal in low crime neighborhoods to require security badges and/or passing armed guards to get into office building

This has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.

Actually there was no attack involving liquids. There was "chatter" indicating that someone might be thinking of combining liquids to make a bomb. We freaked and instituted the rule. Then discovered that it was a false alarm.

But, having alerted everyone that terrorists could try to make a bomb that way, we now have the liquids rule. (Though the arbitrariness of 3 ounces is made clear by the rule that now lets 12 ounce bottles of hand sanitizer through...)

The security measures need to be decently strong because we vehemently refuse to employ the more effective authoritarian technique of flagging passengers based on history and demographics like they do in places like Israel (eg, simply flag anyone with a higher probability of being a muslim because most attacks were performed by muslims). We are actually resisting the aggressive response in this case.

There are two issues at play here.

The first is that for political reasons, we don't want to do enhanced checks against the actual biggest danger - Saudi Arabia. (Half the 9/11 bombers were from there.)

Second, targeting on the basis of religion poses some major Constitutional problems in the USA. And religious affiliation is not information that we can rely on having about people coming from elsewhere in the world.

And third, the supply of potential terrorists is sufficiently large and Al Qaeda sufficiently well-organized that they could simply choose terrorists who don't appear to fit whatever our screening criteria happened to be. Israel doesn't have that problem because there aren't a supply of people from around the world who are willing to die for the Palestinian cause. However we had a British guy carrying a bomb in his shoe, a Russian (well actually Chechen) who set off a bomb in Boston, a white American shooting up an army base in Texas, and a Nigerian who carried a bomb in his underwear.

This has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.

To the contrary. I lived in New York when 9/11 happened. A ton of office buildings went from no security guard to security guards. Other office buildings that I later worked in in Los Angeles made the same shift at about the same time.

The timing wasn't a coincidence.

I see that I am downvoted and I guess it is because my comment has been very simplistic and not explained well.

I will try (in a perspective here from Germany):

In general nothing here is really bad, nobody is killed or deported. So of course a comparison to the linked article is an exaggeration. But nonetheless since April the general mood in the country is be-surprised-and-accept driven: Businesses are closed on short term (last time on a friday end of september it was decided that on monday all restaurants, sport centers etc) must close (*takaway only). Because covid is propagated as this extreme dangerous risk nobody can complain. The whole public is only waiting what next rule is announced from week to week or month to month. People who refuse to wear a mask (for various reasons in various situations) are losing their jobs - either because the employer wants to get rid of them anyway and uses the not-mask-wearing as excuse or because their is real hate and fear between people in different groups. Their is no real philosophically based discussion about risk realted tradeoffs - only dictated policy.

And in the background basic laws are rewritten/adjusted to reduce the overall freedom. For example here in Germany a basic right of privacy at home so except with an order of a judge the police is not allowed to enter. But it is tried (or even succeeded? I do not know) to allow police to enter homes in general in order to check if more than X people are inside. Or it is argued that people who violate a quarantine order should be locked into a psychiatry. Some (few) people fight back but in genral changes are just announced and accepted.

It's a really slow process so many do not or want not to notice it but since april there are a lot of long term changes on the way that will alter the whole system to be more tolitarian/less free and which for sure will persist even after covid - all with covid as excuse.

I appreciate your clarification, and for the record I am not one of the ones who downvoted you.

I agree that police being free to enter your house without probable cause of a crime is not good, and I'm not sure how many people are arguing that those who violate the quarantine should be put in psychiatric care. That just seems like nonsense, I'd have to have proof that someone is seriously advocating that before opining.

However, I think it's acknowledged that in dire times such as war and pestilence, the government can temporarily do things it couldn't do before until the crisis is over. For example, if an invading force has set up a machine gun on your property and the army attacks them, you probably shouldn't be able to sue them for trespassing. On the other hand, we have a constitutional right not to be required to give quarter to soldiers. What's the difference? It's the duration and immediacy of the danger I think. This is a judgment call.

Of course the problem lies in the government usurping power for an unlimited or ill-defined time, such as for the "war on terror" which never ends.

The pandemic, on the other hand, should have a definite and quantitative end, and I don't think stay-at-home orders or mask mandates necessarily lead to authoritarian progressions or curtailing of personal rights. Nobody is saying that the government should have a right to curtail, for example, the right to peaceably assemble forever; just until thousands of people per day stop dying.

Maybe I'm wrong though, what do you think?

Regarding psychatric care it was at least discussed in april but then discarded due to harsh critique [1].

In general I agree with you and would not take an extreme position to deny the goverment everything in a crisis situation.

But on the other hand there are people (medical experts?) arguing that in the coming years or decades there will be many new viral deseases to encounter. So espacially with all this worldwide awareness and fear I find it easy to imagine that there will be an increased afford to detect virsus leading to maybe one new virus in focus every few years keeping the whole system in an alarmed state (including all the "special" [reading the permanent] laws) active for the whole time. Generations growing up from now on may not even know the times before. Same as with the "terror" theme now. Every few month there are reports about terrorist attacks and the whole thing becomes a meme and is used to justify anything.

[1]: https://deutsch.medscape.com/artikelansicht/4908831

The current law changes are definitely terrifying, but I too would like to hear some specific points about how these are similar situations.

I tried to list a few examples that came to my mind in a sibling comment. But the issue is that it's not just about specific examples but about the overall drift in perspective, production of fear and slooow but steady changes. From my understanding that's exactly one of the points the OP article touched uppon: If you ask for specific examples of bad changes I can name a few and you can justfy each of them in one way or another. But the sum of it all points to a really bad outcome from which we all be looking back in a few years and will wonder how we got there.

Actually the downvotes my original comment receives demonstrate the exact behavior the OP article describes.

Lmao, Dang must not be awake, because this is far more of a "political flame-bait' thread than basically any other I've seen on this website in quite some time.

This is an historical analysis. It provides no dictum for current behaviour, and no comparison to current events or people. You seem to be suggesting that merely looking at history should not be allowed in case we are able to draw a conclusion from it that suggests something remiss in the political sphere now. That's pretty chilling.

But when postings only focus on the excesses of one particular political regime in one corner of a field, it becomes a meta-rhetorical device. When I see similar analyses presented on Mao, Stalin, French revolutionaries, and the motley crew of past authoritarians, left and right, I will be as sanguine as you.

When papers/media exclusively cover the crimes of only one group (blacks, Jews, etc.), you would agree that would be (in the case of Nazis was) a concern from the standpoint of manipulating public opinion.

Only highlighting the dangers of Nazi Germany in a forum, and never talking about similar abuses in other left-wing regimes? Now that is chilling.

I wasn't awake—good guess! But actually the bulk of this thread is pretty good.

What we want to avoid is veering into tedious, predictable flamewar - that did happen, but at least it was concentrated in one subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083956).

Substantive discussion of an interesting historical article is always welcome on HN. I don't know if it seems like the moderation standard is obscure but to me it's pretty clear: we're just trying to optimize for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Curiosity dies a flaming death as partisan and ideological passions take over, but there's plenty of space for it if one can steer clear of those supernovas.

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