Hacker News Reader

Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>Not really, no,

What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?

I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society or democracy people think of when they say "we have a free society and a democracy."

From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.

It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks, much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New York without paying all your profits out to the cops. People in Peoria had enormous freedom in 01930, 01960, and even 01990 that people in Minsk, Shanghai, and Alexandria just didn't.

Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.

Just FYI the zero-padded date thing is incredibly distracting and weird. (Yes I know there’s some “foundation” pushing this, but still).

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

It is totally useless to zero pad a date in a sentence, it is human to human communication.

BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.

It makes your post come off as an ad for this foundation that 99.9% of people don’t care about and that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed; it’s as if I inserted [DRINK MORE COCA-COLA] into random parts of my comment.

Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally attracting attention to something completely unrelated is bad.

People who are looking for an excuse to give others grief for harmlessly violating social conventions probably should not be posting on a site named "Hacker News"—after all, hackers have always been weird, think of Turing. In any case they are not capable of engaging with my substantive points, should I have any, so I'm not losing anything by discomforting them.

And it's good to know who those griefers are before that becomes a life-or-death question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz, Assange, and so many others.

To be consistent, you should pad the other numbers you use too. Like money amounts. And I think you should pad dates out to eight digits, just to be safe.

I think I'll also pad out your name, Nate______.

Ok that's funny. Thank you for not padding me with zeros.

That would be inhumane.

What foundation?

The Long Now Foundation

Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about when you say "free society." It sounds like a weird mantra.

edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?

In 1990 school kids were pledging our fucking allegiance to an evil empire. Hell no we didn’t have a free society then.

100%

I remember it well. Hands on hearts, droning on between the food pyramid (wherein the USDA redefined "healthy" to mean "buy what the grain lobby sells") and a D.A.R.E. poster. Meanwhile, the CIA was getting caught selling crack.

Only they weren’t getting caught because the media was censored and nobody knew about it. The people talking about it were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com