Hacker News Reader

Comment by peace4all | Hacker News Reader

Note that in the USSR, political questions and false accusations were often used to torpedo career competitors or to have vengeance at those who were more successful. Almost nobody in this story or in other cases were political dissidents. They didn't go out to protest or speak up on the political freedoms or other matters.

View on HN

Glad we live in a era were accusations and rumors are not used as political weapons against individuals.

I don’t recall anyone being sent to work camps for criticizing government policy in the US recently.

McCarthyism? (it is not 30s like in the article but it is 40s-50s)

Weird definition of "recently".

"Recently" ends upon uprootal.

70-80 years is not any reasonable definition of "recently," particularly when discussing politics.

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say

No prob, I'll be clearer. Phenomena may be indicated which, in form of episodes, very defined events, may be part of a "past", but the direction, inclination, patterns behind those events may still be lurking much later. (For instance, an expression of fascism ended in the forties, yet fascism may linger, emerge etc.) So, thin latency and occasionalities aside - minor traits and occurrences that just confirm exceptionality -, for the phenomenon to be over it must be uprooted. Unexpressed but latent is "not over": it remains of concern, it may express differently, it may re-explode.

Work camps are just the extreme of the policies that we have yet to implement. We seem to be lubing the slippery slope towards it though, with political correctness and cancel culture.

> Work camps are just the extreme of the policies that we have yet to implement.

Yet to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

> We seem to be lubing the slippery slope towards it though, with political correctness and cancel culture.

No we are not.

When do you think cancel culture started?

Probably it started thousands of years ago, but recently it has certainly changed and become a new and terrible thing with social media.

They weren't necessary sent to work camps. Some were just fired and couldn't get hired. Later, in 1950's & 60's, you would be effectively banned from career. Sometimes librarians would paint black their name if they were in references section. Since 1960's victims of these political battles could go to other institutions, probably at less important position.

This practice continued all the way till the collapse of the USSR, I heard of such stories in Moscow universities, and in the Academy of Science.

I would not compare anything that happened in the West to what happened in the USSR. I don't recall anyone in the West being sent to a work camp or shot because someone accused them of something they were not.

Along with what would happen to your family. In the USSR it was often not just yourself, they'd also target your family and its well-being just the same in the name of collective guilt.

Did I talk about forced labor in this comment above? I said: in later times, such clashes with bureacracy made people lose their entire career.

most people reading this have never missed a meal in their lives; a good number of people reading this have never been in a grown-up out-of-money situation where you face deadlines and have no source of money; probably a few people reading this have had to work doing low-skill work, but personal computers have changed access stories. The new version of "labor camp" is a phone that costs you little to nothing but is restricted, tracked and required, and work that is low-skill or away from a center of decision making somehow. Parts of this are happening in the USA out of sight, and elsewhere, and it may be increasing under new economics regarding income and housing. Smug dismissal among those that have never really had parts of it yet, can be expected IMHO

They literally shot politicals in GULAG for stepping out of a line. Nothing in the US even compared.

You're the first person in the thread to bring up work camps. How easily one can defeat a specter of one's own construction.

That’s 100% what happened to political offenders in the USSR even after GULAG officially closed. Theses scientists may have gotten article 58, but I didn’t dig that deeply. There is no US parallel.

This is low effort and specious. One person losing a job or appointment isn't the same as people being forced out of careers entirely or (literally) sentenced to years in a gulag because someone didn't like them.

There is surely space for reasoned discussion about "cancel culture" and its effects on public discourse that doesn't involve likening a bunch of hippies on Twitter to the Soviet repression machine. Can we please start being better about this?

You come with unduly assumptions with the contexts you throw in. «Political questions and false accusations» are still «used to torpedo careers» - just that.

In one place and time some excuses are more effective than others - if the counterpart is intentionally malicious they may just exploit that, irregardless the content.

>One person losing a job or appointment isn't the same as people being forced out of careers entirely

Try speculating publicly about

1. Heritability of intelligence/behavior

2. Genetic differences among ethnicities

Of course neither points go against scientific "consensus" individually, it's only discussing them simultaneously that risks your scientific career.

Now try publishing something critical of covid vaccines. Or the modern approach to diagnosis/treatment of gender dysphoria. There are relatively few examples of such cancellations because the threat is implicit but well known, and that's sufficient to suppress dissent and give the illusion of consensus, but I digress.

> Try speculating publicly about [...]

You just did! Let me know when you're canceled.

This argument is circular. You're saying the purported suppression can't be detected because its effect is already so widespread. And it's widespread because of the threat of cancellation. Which didn't happen. See the problem? The only way to get to your conclusion is to assume as a prior that this research doesn't exist because it's being suppressed, and not merely because it's wrong.

>You just did! Let me know when you're canceled

On an anonymous account. Meanwhile our org's job postings are "gendered" because they contain words like "strong", "independent", "analysis", and if I dare to pushback on the insanity I'm liable to lose my job. If I wrote publicly about it and gained any notoriety I'd risk being publicly shamed by the woke mob and effectively blacklisted a la James Damore.

>You're saying the purported suppression can't be detected because its effect is already so widespread. And it's widespread because of the threat of cancellation. Which didn't happen. See the problem

Your argument is dishonest. It does happen and these is evidence, I'm saying it's harder to detect. Look at the unwarranted treatment of James Watson for daring to suggest the relationship between genes, race, and intelligence.

>that this research doesn't exist because it's being suppressed, and not merely because it's wrong

See above. It doesn't take more than a few public examples to deter people from asking certain questions or even participating in a system when asking the wrong questions regarding certain topics becomes career and social suicide.

Probably should focus on implementing strong labor protections and encouraging union participation (which would blunt the effect this sort of weapon has), instead of eliminating them.

> in an era

Era? Read some history books

Twitter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com