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Comment by ryanbrunner | Hacker News Reader

That really all depends on your definition of what constitutes a credible threat. I'm sure any activist would say that continued police brutality against minorities, widespread and increasing hate crimes, etc. represent a credible threat to affected populations.

We can argue about how genuine / common these threats really are, but at the end of the day I think it's fair to say at the absolute minimum that activists genuinely believe they are threats.

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Quick question, without checking the numbers, about how many black people do you think were killed by police last year and how many of them were unarmed? I'm interested in knowing what you think the numbers are in reference to them possibly being a credible threat.

While those things are bad, I think we can agree that there is a difference between global thermonuclear warfare and police brutality and hate crimes. At the very least, GTNW is a literal existential threat for every person, while brutality and hate have been pretty normal in human history and liberalism is the antidote (indeed, the rich American liberal tradition is what makes hate and brutality seem so shocking)—giving up liberalism in the name of combatting hate is inappropriate, and IMO very likely the thing which drives up hate crimes in the first place (left wing behavior pushes many people to the right and sets up illiberal precedents for them to follow).

Of course - there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war. Police brutality, on the other hand, is real.

That’s hindsight.

>there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war

This seems like an odd thing to say. Is it meant as sarcasm?

Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I won't say anything about that.

But have you heard of the Sino-Soviet crisis of 1969? Allegedly (I'm neither a historian nor any other kind of authority on it) the USSR was going to launch nuclear missiles at China during a border dispute, and asked the Nixon administration to remain neutral.

Instead, Kissinger replied that the US would nuke hundreds of Russian cities in response.

This story appears to be reflective of the official Chinese Communist Party historical account.

https://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict

What I’ve really meant is: there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war, unless started by US. The example above demonstrates this nicely.

The example above is a counterexample, where the USSR threatened to initiate.

Not from the description above - it says USSR wanted to use nukes in a local conflict; it's the US that threatened to make it global.

It doesn't say anything about the entire globe, just Russia.

You may be mistakenly equating nuking of hundreds of cities with planetary destruction.

There were hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapon tests during the cold war. If that had been the end of the world, we wouldn't be talking about it.

The Red Scare began in the 1920s, long before nuclear weapons were invented, so the threat of nuclear war was not the primary determinant factor characterizing that situation

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