Comment by throwaway328 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway328 | Hacker News Reader

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Reading Barrett Brown's "My Glorious Defeats" at the moment, being reminded of that time Anonymous went after Visa, Mastercard, and others, in retaliation for them blocking payments to Wikileaks.

An action the payment companies took extrajudicially at the behest of the US government because the US gov was't happy with Wikileaks. Wikileaks' crime was that they'd been very successful at getting true information to the public about what governments were doing.

This was quite shocking to me (and at least some others, presumably) at the time, in 2011. I guess if we were taking it seriously, we would have been obliged to say: oh, how fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic.

When progressives/democrat/left types shout "fascism!" now on account of something Trump did or said, the cynical part of me says that a lot of them probably just want Obama/Clinton/Biden-flavoured authoritarianism rather than "ugly" lower-middle-class Trumpian authoritarianism.

Very many of us are quite critical of all authoritarianism, and don't feel like we've been represented by any presidential administration for our entire lives. Centrist liberalism isn't flashy or popular, though, and it doesn't spawn many angry rallying cries or outrage that goes viral, so you'd think that we don't exist.

The current flavor of authoritarianism is quite bad, though, and does distastefully wear its hypocrisy on its sleeves.

If "centrist liberal" means being critical of all authoritarianism, from Obama to Trump, where would the democrats lie in this political balance?

I ask sincerely here. That would be a centre which would be ten miles left of where the centre seems to be, from where I'm sitting. Curious to know how you view the political spectrum to arrive at this framework.

For example, Macron might be a good example. How would you classify his politics, based on the above framing?

Blocking payments to wikileaks is on a totally different level than deporting citizens to random countries because they said something mean about you.

I agree, the deporting of citizens is much worse in real terms.

They're both fundamentally anti-democratic, is what I meant. In both cases, the political / business class controlling the state is utilising private and public institutions to further their aims, with little to no care for law, morality, or even common decency.

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