Comment by hn-private-364 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn-private-364 | Hacker News Reader

This law is clearly made by people who know what they're demanding: instead of China's closed wall garden of internet, the ruling BJP party realizes they can have their cake and eat it as well.

They want to allow multi-national corporations to exist in the country because removing them in the near future is going to cause a dent in their own operational policy. But rather, they clearly want to control these companies so they peddle only their own approved messaging.

The approved messaging however is not to toe to any standards of tolerance or deceny. The ruling party has an active social media campaign with tens of thousands of people actively spreading hate and lies through WhatsApp and Facebook.

https://www.firstpost.com/india/massive-tweet-volumes-comple...

They prosecute citizens who stand up against them under sedition charges, which are non-bailable offences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56068522

They most recently started another WhatsApp Hate Factory group. https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/02/15/we-infiltrated-the-te...

This government is not shy about their right-wing communal leaning. They want to create a country that is hospitable to only one majority religion, and within that they do not allow free expression that goes against their wishes.

This is just another step in the direction, and the times are dark indeed.

There's clearly a trend: the more people live in a country, the more paranoidal and authoritarian its rulers. They are afraid of their people and want more control. That's understandable.

This prompts the next question... what can those of us who don’t want this slide towards authoritarianism to continue, do about it?

Regardless of political/social viewpoints, I don’t think it matters if you consider your political views left, right, up, down, a, b or start... for the most part these views are compatible with free expression and “lowercase l” liberal democracy. Notwithstanding notable exceptions such as capital F Fascism or capital N Nazism, where being authoritarian is literally part of the political philosophy.

So how do we resist this trend? I’m not talking about rallies and counter-protesting, that won’t help shit when it’s happening in other countries. How do we make liberty and democracy better so that people want it enough to say no to the continuing pressure towards alternatives... ?

I doubt you can make a free country out of a pile of greedy people who also want to control others. It's not just India, it's like that almost everywhere today: a bunch of sociopaths at the top, the clueless crowd in the middle who will support anything and anyone, and a minority of freedom seekers at the bottom. Eventually, the stream of evolution will wash the greedy and lazy out, but that will take tens of thousands of years.

That's what I was thinking too.

> the stream of evolution will wash the greedy and lazy out

Are there ways to speed up this tens of thousands of years of evolution? I can think of some things

On the other hand, is there a risk that instead this species gets stuck for millions of years, in a "local maximum" with somewhat bright sociopath dictators, and a huge crowd of clueless people (if there's evolutionary pressure against being a bright person? Are there such tendencies?, e.g. bright women just working, working, no babies, or political dissidents disappearing in prison?), with regularly occurring massacres of minorities, so that eventually anyone who looks slightly different is at risk? ... Well, until a 3rd world war with nukes, mostly puts an end to all of it

Looks like the so called (by you) dark times are just right for people of your ilk to exit the very country who's ruling government (BJP) is providing for your every need and most of the time luxuries, like the Internet access to allow you to post such derogatory comments and get away with it.

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