Why I Am Leaving the USA | Hacker News Reader

Why I Am Leaving the USA

damemagazine.com

21 pointstastyface7 comments

The part that most applies to me:

"Large-scale protests have failed to materialize. Even if they had, protests rarely have an impact unless they threaten regime survival"

I don't like protests. I attended one, and then skipped the next one. I think there's a broad feeling that it hasn't yet reached the need to threaten the survival of the regime yet -- but the author is correct that her personal survival is indeed under threat. So I am making the choice that her survival does not merit me risking my own life (which would be the consequence of a protest with any chance of working).

The best mechanism for protecting her would be the voting booth. We failed at that in November. We might get another chance in 18 months, but we might not, and even if we do, there's every reason to think we'll fail again. She cannot take that risk.

So I've failed her. I think it's important to take that responsibility. It's not just on me, but there are a lot of people who should have helped, and didn't. They failed her, and I failed to convinced them that they should.

I am sorry that she has to blow up her life to be safe. I hope that people are reading this, and that they see the thing that I see in it. The ones who are persecuting her will not change, but I'd like to think that there are enough people who will make the absolute minimum effort to prevent that.

If not, it will get worse and worse, and eventually it will come for me. And I wish I knew how to get through to people that it will come for them.

This is a good summary of how far gone the US is already. This country is radically different than it was 6 months ago, and it hasn't registered with the majority of the population yet.

An interesting comment from a philosophical perspective. If the country is different from the majority of it's population - what is a "country"?

When a cancer spreads throughout a body, many of the body's cells are drastically altered. Is it still the "same body"?

Ship of Theseus, etc.

Yes and no. Internet "lawyers" will make arguments about how it must be or not be the case. Instead, a group of people together is more like a dynamic living organism that morphs into subsequent zeitgeists. There maybe apolitical structural/demographic reasons, circumstances, and/or infectious ideas that lead to major changes. Some are root causes and some are merely reflections.

Or in this case, a memetic infection on top of sliding value changes (polarity, illiberalism, aggressive patriotism) changing the underlying values causing various symptoms. A country is a collection of people who share some iota of proximity, values, and/or views, although "Network Staters" and "Free Staters" would have you believe differently.

Context: "The author, a trans woman and mother of neurodivergent kids, has been monitoring this nation’s political climate since Trump’s first term. Now that her worst fears are fast becoming a reality, she’s had to make the most difficult decision of her life."

This is slightly nuts:

>...Musk is referring to transgender people here. He is vowing that they will die, and he will lead the charge.

Musk meant no such thing. There is no planned genocide.

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