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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right.

This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.

For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura...

So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.

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As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.

It happens in multiparty systems as well. All it takes is a significant portion of the population feeling like their voices are not heard, and then one of the parties taking up their banner as one part of the overall campaign (which doesn't even have to be in their new constituents' interests).

This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn't have to be. We've seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.

And Europe is actually resisting better than US due to election system. Here in best case scenario they are number 2, and took them a long time to get there after Trump

In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties.

Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is just a bad comparison.

The extreme right won the Dutch elections though - and they’re not the only country - so your argument that “best case (...) number 2” isn’t true. They can and do win elections.

What did winning mean, though? Is it Republican-style minority rule where they can work the system push through policies which a majority of Americans oppose, or a coalition government where half of his coalition is pledged to rein in his more extreme positions?

Are French Presidential elections so different? And the UK only has two major parties, so the outcome will be similar.

The UK system has a much less powerful Executive though.

To be clear: FPTP is terrible, but the reason the UK system isn't as broken as the US one is because the correct functioning of the Legislature is much more vital to the overall system - i.e. 3 viable parties can exist because they're fighting over hundreds of seats, and then it's by the Legislature that the Prime Minister is chosen - rather then by direct vote.

The French system, with its two rounds system has a built-in protection against extremism and to encourage compromise.

The UK is also a FPTP system, but has strong parties outside of the two main, for instance in the last general election over 42% of people voted for a party other than Labour or the Conservatives.

[admittedly that’s an outlier, but looking over the last few elections at least around 20% went to parties outside of the big two]

Intentional false dichotomy serves many purposes, yes

No country that I know of adopted US election system. Its beyond obscure, unfair and set to be rigged for anybody looking from outside, with no normal way out. Its just not resilient enough to everchanging society. I know the historical reasons, but only fools get stuck in the past ways at all costs 'because, you know, in the past, XYZ so we are where we are so suck it up' when its clearly not beneficial to general population.

One reasons out of ocean of reasons - number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.

But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.

> As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.

I don't think that the American election system holds any relevance to the problem.

The problem is fueling divisiveness to manipulate people with a "us vs them" mentality.

How else can you force working class people to vote against their best interests, such as taxing the rich fairly, ensuring access to affordable health care, uphold basic workers rights, without resorting to blatant fearmongering and moral outrage with bullshit like "they want post-birth abortions, impose sexual abuse in schools, import scary criminal gangs from distant foreign lands, etc"?

Not to mention the industrial level of propaganda dumped by foreign actors to destabilize democratic nations.

My wife is a nationally recognized expert in elections in the US. The combination of FPTP and politically controlled district geometry (gerrymandering) explicitly creates a brittle system that engenders extremism. It's well understood to be both the cause and a reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism we have now was left in place in the early 19th c. explicitly to allow a small minority to be able to control their individual states. The main change since then has been cross-state unification of the party system. To give an example: here, in Texas, the most volatile Federal district was won by a representative who received only 10% of the votes in his district. Some districts were won by reps with as few as 1% of the total votes (that's total turnout). (This is due to the primary mechanism and gerrymandering.) If you can win by harnessing just 10% of the electorate, you're shopping around for the ironclad voters, and they tend to have weird views (left or right).

I quite like charter cities, at least in theory, and I'm a little annoyed that everyone sees them as an attempt at world domination. They could let us A/B test legal frameworks, and I think that's neat.

Hopefully someone who isn't a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don't get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.

> So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.

The problem is that there seems to be a large overlap between that enemy⁰ and certain arguments on the right side of left/right political debates, so it is very difficult to separate the two even on those matters where that overlap isn't actually present.

The matter is made worse because right-leaning political groups are less ideologically opposed to being influenced by that enemy's main power: being able to buy stuff/opinions/people.

----

[0] I assume you are meaning the arsehole rich¹ here

[1] There are some nice hyper-rich out there, but they aren't as vocal as the others so we don't hear much from/about them – much like the more moderate people with right-leaning views, who aren't heard over the yelling of others.

You got to be kidding me... Prospera / Honduras is nothing. It doesn't register. Libertarians, sadly I'd add, shall never ever have an ounce of success: all the powers that be in this world are out there to crush liberties, everywhere, worldwide.

Meanwhile The New York Times is titling an article: "The constitution is scared, but is it dangerous?"

There's nothing more belonging to the rich than the mainstream media, including the NYT. They were the people selling you the FTX scam and explaining you SBF was the second coming of Christ.

Now that Harris wants to "force congress to ban guns in her 100 days, or take executive orders if congress doesn't do it", of course that the NYT is publishing about the constitution being potentially dangerous.

And the problem is... Prospera in Honduras?

As long as you keep reading The NYT, you're fighting the wrong enemy.

I'm not an American but

> congress to ban guns

This sounds desperately needed and like an exceptionally great idea to most people that don't live inside the US bubble.

Maybe broaden your horizons a bit?

Free speech is all that matters. Musk is not perfect by any means here but he is better than the rest. He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms. Which is what Twitter should have been doing, instead of kowtowing to the likes of the German and Saudi govts among others...

Twitter has demonstrably kowtowed more to authoritarian governments under Musk.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-censors-twitter-in...

And he regularly bans journalists who don’t lick his boots.

https://newrepublic.com/post/177936/twitter-suspends-account...

Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.

> He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms.

This is particularly absurd. “The first amendment” isn’t a paragon of freedom unique to the US. And it only applies to government censorship. You can’t “export it” to other countries by means of a social network.

>Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.

I am paying attention to what he does. I use Twitter for hours every day.

The point is less about "free speech", because of course you're right, this is Musk's version of free speech.

But the real issue to the left is that he's allowing speech that, in recent history, has been considered "dissenting" or restricted. The fact that in the past week we have had Zuck come out and say Facebook was pressured to censor COVID19 materials and that we have mainstream politicians and bureaucrats calling to THROW MUSK IN JAIL is insane. Utterly insane.

The people behind this are getting found out, and there will be political consequences.

According to its own statistics, Musk's Twitter complied with 83% of government takedown requests compared with 50% in the year before it was taken over, and he's found plenty of novel grounds for kicking people off Twitter for things which annoy him.

Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because "you can't go beyond the laws of a country", Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn't have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.

> Musk is not perfect by any means

Musk is not perfect by any means wrt free speech.

His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.

> His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.

So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?

He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.

(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)

Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.

> So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction

> He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.

I'd say not. I don't think twitter itself wasn't aimed directly in any direction before Musk, other than “away from where firing may cause twitter problems”. They operated from a position of cowardice rather than political bias.

Sometimes this was towards the right because there was a fairly centrist or centre-left¹ bias online, but it often very much wasn't. For a clear case of them not aiming at the right, look at them leaving Trump and many like him alone at a time when they were flagrantly going against twitter policies, but slapping them for that would have caused too much grief back at them. It may be a complete coincidence², but Musk first started getting really serious about taking over around the time twitter started cracking down on that group (having joked about it prior to that IIRC, though it did take over a full year for his first actual takeover bid to happen).

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[1] These definitions are difficult. Often what America seems to see as centre-left or even actually moderate left, is things that many over this side of the big pond would see as more centrist.

[2] Though I strongly suspect not.

You must have been on the good, non political side of Twitter. Or maybe you don't realize because you're weren't the target of Twitters unfair tactics

Those unfair tactics, assuming I accept they existed⁰, were not twitter's by my understanding, but reactions to the whims (or perceived possible whims) of advertisers, or the bulk of users that advertisers were there to claim the eyeballs of.

I'll caveat this by saying I've never had a twitter account or any desire for one¹ meaning my views are those of an outsider and occasionally a passive reader – but from what I can see twitter acted from a position of cowardice² rather than any political machinations.

----

[0] One man's fair slapping of an arsehole, is another man's unfair restriction of speech.

[1] At first it was a daft novelty, then a novelty that had perhaps outstayed its welcome, then just a place far too full of people who thought twitter was a good idea, then the famous got hold of it and it became a tribal shit-show & soon after a political shit-show – all before Musk jumped in with both feet and a lot of other people's money.

[2] Hence not kicking Trump (and a few others close to him or relevant rhetoric) despite flagrant breaches of their stated policies, until such time as he was a lesser threat due to not getting a second term, and before that kicking people not because of any internal moral code but because of what advertisers might think.

But Musk doesn't care about free speech, he is actively and eagerly suppressing it as well, just for the other team.

That man will say anything, I don't know why anyone would pay attention to it.

Yes, no one is truly "unbiased" or without opinions. This is not new.

But giving the "other team" a voice (my team, in some ways) is valuable, and we aren't going to give it up easily.

And please, don't point to the fact that there are right-wing loons on Twitter, because there are crazies from all sides all over the internet.

>we aren't going to give it up easily.

Sure, I get that. Just stop pretending that it's about principle, then!

Not sure X posture against censure is to be taken seriously though. From Al Jazeera:

> In India, he agreed with an order imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take down accounts and posts related to a farmers’ protest that swept through the country in February, their demands including guaranteed prices for their produce and debt waivers.

(https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/31/brazil-moves-to-blo...)

Not sure Al Jazeera is to be taken seriously.

Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term (just like we can't have pure democracy) because it would erode public confidence and destroy our democratic nations in the process.

And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).

Ah yes, free speech: the final death knoll of western democracy.

The Soviet Union supported anti war, peace protests and free speech in leftist groups, but most of it was organic.

Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.

Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.

It is sad that free speech became a dog whistle. Post WW2 up to at least 2000 free speech was a strong position of the left, Noam Chomsky being one of the most prominent examples.

Musk isn't hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.

I can't understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.

Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.

> Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.

It's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.

In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn't on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn't exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.

Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we're headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.

> Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been.

No. There are very few things that 'need to be censored' by the government (or corporations with almost government-level power), and it's hard to think of any beyond CSAM or legitimate threats to national security.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things that children should be protected from. But we're failing miserably at that. They're watching extreme porn and gore while the censors are focusing on silencing adults with the wrong political views.

Because they are old and have families now. Metoo and toxic behaviours did the rest. And, it is just not that important.

For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.

> Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term

If you are in the U.S I am sorry you have this take on free speech, because it is distorted.

Free speech is defined by law and the law is clear. Freedom of speech means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government.

That is untrue and a very frustrating error (because it's so common). Freedom of speech is an ideal that one should be able to speak their mind without retaliation. The First Amendment is the law which guarantees freedom of speech with respect to the government. The two are not the same, and private actors can (and often do) violate freedom of speech.

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