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Comment by shermantanktop | Hacker News Reader

This is a well established pattern: someone who grew up in the Soviet Union and had traumatic experiences with ideological conformity now reacts to something happening in the US with a ferocity of feeling that ends up comparing that thing to pogroms, forced collectivization and ideological purges.

Is it warranted? Depends what they are saying, and their points should stand on their own. But they are larded with Cassandra-style predictions about how the junior administrator down the hall is the first step toward the KGB.

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Some patterns are so self-evident and prophetic that the end results are axiomatic. In tech, one example is “let’s add encryption backdoors so the Good Guys can Save the Children”. There is no doubt how that will end. In society, when a junior administrator can _force_ a greater mind to parrot The Message about the Current Thing (under the threat of removing their livelihood and making them radioactive) that heralds the end of free speech and free thought. Those who lived under a dictatorship know the pattern too well.

That pattern is not in evidence here. He seems very level about the whole thing, and much different than your caricature:

“ At the same time, the stakes were never nearly as dire as those in the society he’d left. As he put it, “Unlike in the Soviet Union and today’s Russia, it appeared that no one was sent to a labor camp, prison, or psychiatric ward. Another big difference with the Soviet practices was that to have the support of a few colleagues was often enough to stem the tide.””

He explicitly says he is concerned that it is sloppy, damaging thinking, but does not claim an analogy to the Gulag.

The U.S. (and the West more generally, to some extent) has its own history of enforced ideological conformity, viz. the Red Scare. It's not something that's inherently limited to Soviet Russia or Maoist China, it has happened here before. The concern is thus quite justified if only on that basis - and yes the ideological basis of the McCarthyist Red Scare was somewhat different to the current trends, but this does not really alter the underlying dynamic.

People born in Soviet Union are very good at detecting propaganda, because they learned to recognize what the system did to them. Americans have never learned this important skill. As someone born in a foreign country (not USSR though), I have a very well developed sense of when the government is lying to me. In my opinion, Americans are extremely easy to deceive.

The mistake here seems to be the somewhat naïve suggestion that the Soviet Union only took its path because the wrong people happened to find their way into leadership, rather than recognising that attempts at coërced ideological purity always seem to follow the same path historically no matter how well intentioned the ideology might have been.

I think we can call that an ad hominem attack:

"This person sounds like other people I don't like. Therefore I don't like him."

The force of an argument should rest on what someone says, not their special backstory or whatever lurid grim stories they can tell. If anything, I think the pattern I described is all about ad hominem credit, not attack.

I don’t fully discount this persons experiences. But I’m wary of an appeal to emotion.

> they are larded with Cassandra-style predictions about how the junior administrator down the hall is the first step toward the KGB

"larded" : kinda strong, don't you think?

also the florid ridicule: "the junior administrator down the hall", "the KGB"

Can’t be helped. Florid is my brand.

You can't help yourself. Good to know.

It was a norm in Soviet Union that to advance academically you had to produce work that somehow endorsed communism. It was very good if you were able to put some citations of Lenin or Marx into your completely unrelated work at minimum or better to produce complete body of work that somehow academically promoted communism even when you worked as mathematician.

Of course many people understood that it is all bullshit but had to play along to have a meaningful academic career. Of course any obvious political dissent was observed and punished.

Therefore I think that it is not about what may or may come next but first about the clear absurdity of this forced ideological conformity itself.

But he is quite specific in fact and I'll recommend to read it and think about it.

Is this where all that stuff about Marx anticipating calculus came from?

> Of course many people understood that it is all bullshit but had to play along to have a meaningful academic career.

And this is exactly the case with Academic DEI statements. You just have to say the correct things, and a checkbox is checked and you can get your grant or your job or your tenure. Nothing else really changes.

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