I find in America too I run into people who are casually ok with authoritarian ideas. I don't know why that is, or if it's more or less common now.
I suspect this issue extends far outside Australia and the US though.
I suspect this issue extends far outside Australia and the US though.
For example, the ruling party has strong links into coal, oil and gas companies (big political donations going one way, much bigger grants and subsidies going the other). They cut subsidies for renewables because they “always let the market decide”, and now when older coal power stations are increasingly uneconomic they’re literally bringing in a forced subsidy to keep them going (sold as a “capacity payment” to “ensure reliability of the grid” - even though the clunkers are increasingly unreliable). It’s going to cost somewhere between $150 and $400 a year per-household on our power bills if they get it through.
Other things are like trying to come up with some kind of way to fine or sanction banks who refuse to lend to fossil fuel companies, or stop activist investors trying to force companies to go green. This is all by the side of politics who claim the utmost commitment to free markets and small Government! Same party pushing all these authoritarian surveillance laws too…
People really seem to be hung up on equivocating a sitting president attempting to overturn an election with people on twitter saying mean things.
The FBI concluded in Aug. 2021 that there was no insurrection attempt.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-e...
Note that Pelosi is still trying to suppress why she didn't provide adequate Capitol security as requested for 100,000 attendees.
Late-term abortion at the state level? That's all I can even think of.
I find they are if the discussion is within 140 characters or less.
When the conversation turns long form with details of what's going on and the implications folks tend to get a bit shocked and don't like it.
Long form discussions sharing details are something we need more of. Short form opinions aren't helping us. Many people are just unaware.
It's more painful and fear-inducing to lose something you have, so the more you have the stronger the allure of laws that are sold as reducing your risk of loss.
The distance between rich and poor is now so big, both in economic and cultural terms, that anyone with even a modicum of wealth is obsessed with "not becoming one of Them", and will accept any rule as long as "it keeps Them in their place".
Curious if we saw a similar trend in pre-WWII America. The point being, maybe banding together and tolerating more-authoritarian tendencies is a natural human response to perceived threat. For Australia, this comes from China. For America...I don't know.
There's the PATRIOT Act for GWOT, but a lot of people don't seem to realize it didn't actually give law enforcement new powers. It extended powers they already had for drug and organized crime cases and let them apply to terrorism cases. We had already accepted an erosion of due process and civil liberties in order to defeat the Mafia and fight the War on Drugs.
This absolutely happens as a response to the perception of threat.
In fairness, it's not always clear this is universally wrong. The only reason the US has a federal government and a permanent standing military at all, which were not always givens, is in response to the threat that European colonial powers would have retaken all the land if we didn't, and this was probably a correct assessment.
Maybe rising authoritarianism is simply the natural outgrowth of overusing this impulse. The population, exhausted by the constant blaring of sirens over increasingly esoteric threats, would rather hand over the task of vigilance to some authority so they can finally catch some shut-eye.
We always need high level stress in my opinion. We need to always have a little bit of “it’s bad” in our life to set our priorities. Being comfortable for more than a few months is the absolute worst thing that you can ever do to yourself.
People who have time on their hands at home watch their neighbors and become Karens because they don’t have anything important to deal with.
People who don’t have an existential threat of world wars and a small country taking over the world don’t think it’s worthwhile to guard against that. (Not that I want a world war.)
They say you don’t know good until you’ve had it’s bad and I think that’s so true.
The first two points are fine, obvious even. Although they are not a satisfying answers to the questions "Why are authoritarian ideologies becoming more popular?" These answers seem equivalent to answering a physics question with "we live in a strange world" and then just leaving it at that.
The latter 2 points are bothersome. I much prefer the default "social contract" implied by most messages: "These are my thoughts. I welcome further thoughts or counter arguments. I may or may not participate in further discussion." That goes without saying and seems much nicer than "I'm smart and my arguments are sound, but don't expect further discussion, see ya".
There's an interesting discussion to be had around point 2 and the pros and cons of different ideologies. All of that was buried beneath points 3 and 4, asserting your intelligence and discouraging further discussion.
Especially when people are more safe than ever before, the measures proposed here merit some pushback.
If you are an IT professional, and earning 100k+ a years, there is no wonder you didn't meet much of these before. There is simply not a lot of opportunity for social classes to cross in daily life today.
We, rich people, learned it the hard way in Russia 20 years ago.
I call it a "revenge voting": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/10/electi...
I really believe the West needs to learn from how the early modern Russia unravelled, and how it came to 1991 being undone through effectively a democratic process.
Things will change. They always do.
I see similar on the left. You see a lot of people who had good things to say marginalized because they pushed back against the current populism or people who should know better embracing it so save their own hide (my senator being one of the latter).
Second to it, is the reality on the ground is that the latter outnumber the former tens of times over.
It ain’t poor people running these countries.
One of the elites who is on the outs or doesnt have a path forward uses it as a tool to grab power for themselves, then uses that power to do what elites always do.
It's pretty much NEVER that one of the lower classes is the one that rise up and gain power via populism. Even Stalin would be "Elite" in that he went to Seminary.
Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized and used against the west.
> A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives- including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against president Biden- to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.
> Throughout the election cycle, Russia's online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow's long-standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people.
> Foreign intelligence services are certainly doing a lot of crap online but it's not clear whether they've actually accomplished anything.
?
Government resource allocation is seldom based on a rational cost / benefit analysis.
> Throughout the election cycle, Russia's online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow's long-standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people.
The confidence undermining was all a local issue; Russia had nothing to do with it.
Isn't this just the ol' "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" problem? Hundreds of years of ago we couldn't see germs with a microscope doesn't mean they weren't effective in our lives.
And because we couldn’t see them we misattributed their effects and treated people with bloodletting. Confidently declaring your understanding of an unseen enemy and applying seemingly-appropriate countermeasures is likely to be harmful.
Their goal is to make our system dysfunctional by destroying people's trust in the information presented them.
It is what the Rand institute calls the "firehose of falsehood" https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
And they have been very successful at it.
Do you have a good source explaining concretely how a handful of people, even sponsored by enemy states, can cause such harm? It's hard to imagine that they would have such influence without the general population being more than receptive to it.
I think the trolls, shills and agitators are a symptom of dysfunction rather than the cause. And I think the idea that more authoritarian states are stronger/more stable/better because they don't suffer this is deeply misguided.
In the United States, our political class is deeply and fundamentally unserious. Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-election, and not the work they were elected to do.
Going to attempt a fix
Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-education, and not the work they were elected to do.
To quote chief Nazi propagandist Goebbels from 1928:
We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.
The modern-day far right is following exactly the same almost-100-years-old playbook, and there are still people who don't recognize that we are letting history repeat itself. What would your (great-)grandparents have thought if you told them that there would be open marches of swastika flag-bearing people in the US?
That happened to a far greater degree in the 1930s. There is nothing comparable today. Formal, large, organized groups representing literal fascism and communism were present in the US back then. Those great-grandparents were certainly aware of it. The US is a large and diverse nation - formed of the world's peoples in many regards - and you're allowed to follow almost any ideology you choose. That means extreme, violent statist-type elements - socialist, fascist, communist, theocratic, et al. - will never cease to be present.
"When Nazis Took Manhattan"
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...
"American Nazis in the 1930s—The German American Bund"
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if 'the west' has a coherent set of moral principles at all they are probably inextricable with the idea that more authoritarian states are more brittle/more stagnant/worse. Even if it's true that free speech is being used against 'the West', turning our back on it in response would mean there's nothing there to defend.
Indeed, "Let them eat cake." is the most famous thing Marie Antoinette never said, judging by the various anonymous and pseudonymous pamphlets and other printings that popularised during her time that and many other slanderous or otherwise hurtful remarks.
(( And no, I'm not saying a police state or anarchy would be an appropriate outcome. ))
"Better Amazon reviews" and "fewer Reddit shills" aren't worth much.
> I'm not suggesting stripping anonymity or free speech, I'm just pointing out the problem with anonymity online.
In the context of an article about removing anonymity, I don't think it's possible to set "removing anonymity" aside.
If you were buying a microwave oven via Amazon, you could take a gamble and trust Amazon product reviews by people you don't know or have any real reason to trust. Or you could pay an independent party to review it on your behalf[2][3]. Or you could look for a random reviewer on YouTube that receives free samples from manufacturers and compares multiple models side by side, careful to only highlight positives of each product. In any of these cases, the real identity of the reviewers is largely irrelevant. The YouTube reviewer could be wearing a clown suit and go by the name 'SillyClown123' and the review could be far more trustworthy and helpful than other types of review. What you actually want to know, and may not be able to determine, is the motivations for conducting the review, whether the reviewer has manipulated and narrowed (possibly inadvertently) the field of products compared and whether their criteria and weightings for review align with your own expectations.
[1] https://www.modernretail.co/platforms/how-amazon-sellers-are...
[2] https://www.choice.com.au/home-and-living/kitchen/microwaves...
[3] https://www.consumerreports.org/products/microwave-ovens-289...
Privacy, however, is something that needs to be strongly enforced, and that means you have complete control of what personal and private information and communication is available to third parties. Anonymity and Privacy are necessary in places (journalists, dissidents, etc), but many people tend to think of anonymity and privacy as one in the same.
Social media with anonymity allows bad actors to masquerade as whomever they want, say anything without recourse or accountability, and social engineer people at large scales. The issue is that we tend to trust people, and if those people are foreign disinformation agents then we end up with the division we have today. Social media should be private - complete ownership of your data and audience - but it should not be anonymous.
People that call for accountability are modern witch hunters in my opinion. The try to put blame on people that are probably not responsible for perceived ills.
I am pretty aware of the difference between anonymity and privacy and there is a strong correlation in many cases.
Do say, 2OEH8eoCRo0!
THAT is one of the most authoritarian things I've ever read. You're full on down the fascist road once you start believing things like that.
The net certainly increased possibilities for foreign actors to reach domestic audiences, but claims of such cases are vastly exaggerated in my opinion.
That said, troll, shills, agitators and propagandists might have a good understanding of peoples fears and desires and will use that against you. More effective the more you know about the target. This is why surveillance is dangerous.
I’m talking about the model of decision making and how distributed it is. That is fundamentally more important.
Ironically, HN is throttling my account for talking about this.
Where were you going with this?