Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

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This is an administration that openly is talking about annexing Canada, as well as invading panama and Greenland. It's an administration that has literally said "we want government workers in trauma."

Historians are actively comparing us to Nazi Germany. https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-to-expect-when-youre-expe...

The holocaust started as a deportation effort. Trump reportedly said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...

3-4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in public, including Bannon who did not put his hand on his heart first.

You are confusing hyperbole for actually shocking news, and it's so shocking it's easily mistaken for hyperbole because if you don't bury your head in the ground it's too much to bear. Accepting the truth of whats happening means you must act, and so people are opting not to accept it to protect their mental health.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5276898/rfk-drugs-addic...

"I'm going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions," Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. "We're going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America's soil."

That's the kernel of truth, but when you bring in the historical context of authoritarian regimes, and the absolute lack of rule of law, you start to get very very afraid.

In the 1965 book Night of Camp David the president's cabinet realized he was insane because of his fixation on annexing Canada.

In 2025 Americans are so anesthetized even the "opposition party" can't say the obvious out loud in public. Let alone the president's cabinet.

People voting for a dictator isn't equivalent to 3/4 of the legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.

If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully. Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.

For all the flaws of the founding fathers they definitely understood power. How it gets consolidated. And how to fragment it. Their advice is polyarchy.

What we're witnessing is autogolpe to establish a CEO-dictator, the consolidation of power. In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history. And they will fail.

> If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully.

No, they don't.

They just need to obey a government that ignores its Constitutional bounda.

> Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.

It's always settled that way. Legality isn't a substitute for might makes right, it is, a social mechanism for guiding where the “might” ends up. But if the people—who ultimately, are the muscles of the might—decide not to care about legality, than it doesn't matter any more. Words written on paper are not self enforcing.

> If the People want to set aside the Constitution

No, the constitution has a maintenance cost. The constitution is already set aside if people are not willing to pay that maintenance cost. Solidarity is the price of freedom.

Despotism is the default state you will get when you don't pay upkeep to your institutions.

> The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.

Inaction is largely indistinguishable from consent.

> autogolpe

No. We are experience Russian backed regime change in the same way we have instituted regime change in other countries, amplified by tried and true propaganda techniques used to propel other authoritarian regimes to power.

> CEO-dictator

This is a deliberate new age propaganda technique using conceptual metaphors (see George Lakoff).

"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."

By getting someone to accept the metaphor of CEO, it manifests consent for executive overreach without having directly assessed how accurate "president as CEO" is as a metaphor.

> In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history.

Complete darwinism/social darwinism is a cogent and consistent moral system. It doesn't produce a world anyone should want to live in, but it is a consistent ideology. Social darwinism was the philosophical core of nazi ideology. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/

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