The WEIRD world is becoming increasingly more authoritarian. I’m already detached from real conflict and scarcity, knowing nothing but peace and prosperity, and the TikTok generation behind me meming about WW3 doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Said differently, the belief in non-violence can be stated as "I believe in pursuing non-violent means in absolutely every situation except for those in which another actor acts violently toward me"
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Political_Compass_stand...
I guess the Liberal Party in Australia has some similarities to the Conservative Party in the UK.
I think this word should be banned from such comparisons. Equal outcome can equal opportunity and different takes on what matters. Right-wing libertarianism tends to be the most "pure technical freedom" for the individual but tends to lead to little practical freedom for those without significant capital.
You could rightfully argue that the far end of either in its pure form is the meaningful flavor of "freedom".
Authoritarianism is orthogonal to that, in either case.
Though individuals have been changing their values as well. On the left and the right, and the center as well, there is more support for authoritarian. Part of that is due to COVID, so maybe it will fade. Hopefully it will, but we'll see I guess.
People have found a vulnerability and learned how to hack it.
On the other hand, the world is probably the most united it's been in a while because of Russia so there's that.
I'm convinced that deepfakes will be as easily generated as a Snapchat filter within a few years, substantially less time than society will require to adjust to this reality.
Filming a deepfake with a DV cam pointed at your screen is very convincing. Sadly.
World War 1 was very much avoidable. Time and time again World War 1 has been called unnecessary because the original dispute that triggered the conflict was limited.
The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.
There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-...
Source?
Nearly 9% of US presidents have been assassinated. Over a much much smaller timeframe. I would bet you would be less likely to have been assassinated as a Tsar than as a President.
That seems substantial, at least compared to Presidents, especially considering the threat of assassination was a serious consideration given all the political intrigue. Whereas AFAIU U.S. Presidents didn't take the threat of assassination seriously until the 20th century, exposing themselves to the public in ways that would be unthinkable to Tsars; or monarchs and, later, autocrats generally for that matter.
On the other hand, likelihood of death per year looks more comparable. For Tsars I get 2.1% (5 / (1917 - 1682)). For Presidents I get 2.3% (3 / (1917 - 1789)) or 1.7% (4 / (2022 - 1789)), depending on the range.
These days autocrats don't invest themselves much in establishing national political legitimacy or institutional legitimacy, focusing almost exclusively on building and grooming a power base where everyone in power has a vested interest in keeping the leader alive. So Putin probably doesn't have much to worry about, excepting perhaps some patriot military General.
EDIT: It's 27% of Tsars and 1.6% likelihood of death per year if starting from 1613, the start of the Romanov Dynasty. (Refreshing my Russian history as I go.) Numbers don't really change if we go back to 1547, Ivan the Terrible and first self-styled Tsar of Russia, as we add another intervening murder. And that's being charitable on the first metric given rapid succession and overlap during the Time of Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_monarchs
My guess is both attempts and successes are fewer over time and will approach 0 until some structural change shocks increasingly complacent protections.
The Syrian civil war was over 15 countries and factions. War in Afghanistan over 5 countries, technically much more.
None of these wars were consider WW3, and just because the war between Ukraine and Russia is in Europe doesn’t make it any different.
> There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.
And Hill responds “we’re already in it”
Maybe you disagree, but I was surprised by that response and found it very thought provoking
After 9/11 we had the GWoT mainly in the Middle East after the NYC attack. Global War on Terror, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syrian, Yemen and Africa.
The Eastern European conflicts 2008 Georgia, and the Ukrainian conflict since 2014.
The official start of WWI was a month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, even though it's so heavily identified nowadays as "the start of the war". It's entirely possible that in the future, the instigating event will be identified as something that already happened and it's just taking a while for the shooting to start as alliances solidify, and that people who think we're already in WWIII have the same "the instigating event is the start of the war" association.
Russia's incursion into Ukraine near the end of February could, for example, end up being it.
That is an interesting take on it. It may not be wrong, but I hadn't heard that before.
(If any one is interested in the book I will hunt it down as I don’t remember the name).
Another anecdote that speaks to the sentiment of the beginning of the war is Britain’s initial deployment of troops. The troops were literally marching towards Germany with music and percussionists that was supposed to motivate the troops and strike fear into the enemy. I imagine an army like you would see in Game of thrones (walking from point A to point B and making camp in between). Germany used their planes and promptly dispatched the British troops which suffered devastating losses. After this event Britain changed their tactics and took the war seriously.
(This event may have been WW2 which would make the story even more ridiculous).
But now you hear about it. The world you planned for was always an illusion. It never existed outside a narrow slice of time in post-WW2 peace and prosperity, and only for the thin slice of humanity that got to enjoy it. Now the hard part is: what do you do about it now that you know you were fed pleasing lies?
The world is certainly dark but I find comfort in knowing that the majority of us simply want to live peaceful lives, and watch our families prosper.
If course mistakes happen when you stop blindly accepting everything S valuation.
But other changes are for the better. And you don't need war to make these changes. If you make them before hard times come, you'll be better prepared for them: becoming more stoic (less emotional, less offended at everything), becoming more serious, more resourceful, more self-reliant, lowering your expectations, being more humble, being more careful with your words and who you speak openly with, knowing your place instead of speaking for the whole of humanity, being better able to negotiate, being better able to compromise, being more tolerant of other opinions, appreciating the wisdom of our ancestors more, and focusing more on what really matters.
To connect the two, you'd have to complete the scurrilous reference made that we are currently in a time of "weak men". You may or may not be aware that the "Hard times..." meme is widely used among not just stoics, but also fascist groups to suggest that the current generation is soft and weak, and that only by adversity can men become strong again.
One can do almost everything good you listed, and indeed aspire to it, without becoming stoic and emotionless. To have feelings isn't weak.
"We all" find our opinions are unwelcome on the internet when we say things like that.
What do you mean by this?
I don't know if the person I replied to knows that - I think there are a lot of people who don't. It's worth pointing out though there's a disconnect from the first sentence to the second. Why is it that we have to have hard times for us to be better? Well, the argument from the meme - which many people take seriously even if you or I don't - is that recent times have been easy and this has created weak (and other pejoratively described) men.
I compare it to kids having allergic reactions. If you grow up in a sterile environment your immune system reacts to minor environmental irritants. And that is maladaptive.
My parents were in their 20s during the Bangladesh independence war, when Pakistan engaged in genocide of Bangladeshis: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-reme.... Even leaving aside the violence—when they were growing up, 1 out of 4 kids didn’t make it to age 5. They can talk about the war in, if not neutral, objective and unemotional terms. They would never suggest they’ve encountered any adversity in their life. But certainly nothing that happens in America gets them all that worked up.
And I can’t help but feel that this really does make them better, more capable, and more effective people. They’re able to grapple with reality in all its messiness in a detached unemotional way.
I think we need catastrophe and suffering to bring out the best in ourselves, because without them society writ large trends inexorably in a direction that nobody would argue represents the best of our species.
Perhaps people want a more authoritarian world (without realizing it). The ratio of static to noise has been increasing year by year. People don't want to take (nor have) the time to balance alternate view points and spend the time to independently determine fact from opinion. I think the current lack of direction creates turmoil--there are too many options, too many sources of information, and the quality of all of them have gone down while they compete to pull at our amygdalas for seconds of our time. Maybe there is a higher percentage of people who just want answers from someone they trust so they can get on with their lives.
I think I've been on HN long enough to know that (re)implementing limitations on the control of information would make most of you scream. But maybe its for the best. It's already been proven many times over that people aren't going to research facts themselves. So having fewer organizations spoon feed choice bits of information can't be worse. Note that I am not suggesting to deliberately block information, but rather have organizations that are more selective (i.e. exactly like it was during the newspaper era).
I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship. We have too many checks and balances, and the decision making is cordoned off into many compartments, and the country is split 50/50 on who they vote for. An authoritarian-bent president would have to fight three branches of government, 50 governors (all of whom have their own state-level army, by the way), 100 senators, hundreds of congressmen, thousands of judges and lawyers, 150 million citizens, and so on and so forth. And on top of that, manage the country on a national and international level. I just dont see it happening. Trump did not bring us any where closer to that reality by the way (name one legislative/judicial change that moved the needle closer in that direction).
All this to say, there's nothing to be scared about. The internet has been a fun experiment but it's given a microphone to too many people, and has crumpled the gatekeepers who had the job of filtering out the diamonds from the mud (and did that job extraordinarily well, by the way, because they had to, or die). It feels like our culture has been dying. The influence artists had up until the 90s was comparatively huge. If resources were pooled to support the most talented (be it artists, journalists, architects, musicians, corporate / government leaders, etc), I think we would experience another golden era of culture.
1. Authoritarianism is not a good thing, hard stop.
2. The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.
Making consessions like you suggest is precisely how we slip into authoritarianism.
On a spectrum, where e.g. anarchy is on the other end, it is a good thing. Where to place the pin however is a challenge. Binary decisions such as that ("this thing can only be good or bad") is an extremely restricted way at seeing the world.
>The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.
I'd love to here why you think that.
Regarding the US falling to authoritarianism, there are at least two factors: 1. Most people are in a state of conditioned helplessness where they don't feel there is anything they can do to affect change. 2. Most people don't have minds of their own but just parrot what they hear in the media that aligns with their party. These two in conjunction leave an opening for someone to execute a soft coup. In fact a draft Trump executive order to discard the election results was released recently. He had convinced his base that the election was fraudulent. Seeing how far Trump got at eroding democracy, imagine someone like Trump but competent in the same situation. Every democracy that has gone authoritarian had plenty of branches and politicians and checks and balances in place.
Yes but only until a violent event that strikes fear in the minds of the people. Then the government may convince people to give up their freedoms in the name of security.
I think the question is how dedicated are we to our values, not in good times, but in uncertain times.