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Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

IMO we don’t need to attribute malice to it, which will drag everyone into a debate about what’s going on inside the clearly broken minds of a few rich men.

The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.

In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.

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What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a straightforward way about what is happening.

“Helps no one” except probably winning elections, given the “he’s a fascist” messaging (while true) didn’t seem to resonate.

I disagree. The nameservers still respond to requests on 53/tcp. It seems like someone messed up a firewall configuration or rolled out a bad server configuration. Shit happens - maybe exacerbated by the DOGE insanity. But there is no indication that this was done on purpose.

The insanity that has/will lead to functions no longer being properly staffed is on purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

https://www.ft.com/content/02217acf-ac64-49c2-acd5-ef4f107f0...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fas...

There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.

One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.

I didn’t say there isn’t malice.

You want to downplay the malice to avoid arguments about whether it's really malicious. I want to spotlight the malice because it's really fucking bad and a lot of people are going to get hurt, and that's not an accidental outcome.

And when these websites are back up? What then?

Given the sheer amount of incompetence malice becomes a lot more probable

I’m not saying what’s true, I’m saying what is useful to argue.

The goal is to convince other people, not to rah-rah the already-believers.

Trivially: these websites go back up in a few days, is that more convincingly malice or just “these people don’t know how to operate a government?”

Democratic turnout was a problem in the 2024 election. Rah-rah is important, like it or not.

And do you have evidence to suggest more people would’ve been activated by more “he’s a fascist” messaging?

You open with "IMO" but want evidence from me? Lol.

There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.

Both sides were bad. Biden and Kamala were terrible candidates for the Democrats to run, and their campaign positioning lacked a unifying aspirational message.

What was Kamala's 2024 campaign slogan?

We're not going back?

Exactly.

Which was a horrendously stupid tag line. All people saw was "prices not going back." Everyone in America remembers simpler, better times. 1990s race relations alone were far better than they are now.

I saw that slogan and cringed immediately.

Sorry downvoters, I'm no MAGA cultist, it's just the worst slogan ever.

"IMO" means "in my opinion." You made a statement as a fact, which is why I asked for evidence. Lol.

Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!

Then incompetence as as reason isn’t useful.

If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.

The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.

That is not even close to analogous.

Meh, feel free to disagree. How many MAGA voters do you talk to on a daily basis?

In person? None.

Online? More than enough and they show the same kind of malice like our own type of MAGA: AfD voters

To borrow a phrase, any sufficiently incompetent organization becomes indistinguishable from malice.

Although I agree with others' sentiment that focusing on incompetence can be more persuasive to certain segments of society.

It is not incompetence to put people with no relevant experience into cabinet positions. It's purpose. Destruction with a huge amount of distraction is the purpose.

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