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Comment by fuzzfactor | Hacker News Reader

>The problems existing now are not the same as those of two empires from 100 years ago.

I agree.

Not exactly by a long shot.

More like the Reagan era in the US where the pressure to dissolve scientific opportunity was strongest against places that conducted tasks more like Bell Labs most of all.

Eventually "all" was lost as labs that did survive best were not primarily "research", but that was the component which was jettisoned in an attempt to stay afloat.

If the ball was not dropped that badly that far back, Chinese research and especially their military would still be decades behind without any doubts.

NASA would have been on Mars a long time ago.

So you've got a good point, you learn even more when you look directly at the USA and not 100 years back.

Especially if you want to see how it can have a lasting influence on understanding what you're doing wrong right now.

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I lament what is happening with science and research.

But articles consisting of only Hitler and Stalin comparisons persuade just about no one and is not the type of discourse I expect from HN.

I also agree with you. A more recent look is much more relevant and insightful than the linked article.

That's the part that gets me too.

You shouldn't need to bring up those tired regimes even if you're trying to emphasize unrecognized analogies.

Especially when you've got a 92-year-old Soviet with a first-hand account, that speaks for itself without any further name-dropping.

Why wouldn't they persuade no one? Just because we know how their history ended doesn't mean their beginnings can't be repeated, cycles of the same bullshit appear in history and they often rhyme with one another.

Do you think Stalin and Hitler as we know were the same Stalin and Hitler as experienced in the 1920s-1930s? If you shed the baggage, can't parallels be drawn to the modern era?

Authoritarianism of the 2020s looks quite different from the 1920s, the 2020s have the Competitive Authoritarianism flavour of it, it's different, it will attack institutions in different ways than simply shutting them down and imprisoning members, it's more subtle, more disperse, but still has the same underlying traits. Comparisons are apt, even if just as a reminder of how things historically evolved from the pre-authoritarian phase into a full-blown one, remembering to trace that is as convincing now as it was in the 1950s...

Why? Is it bothersome because it's perceived to be an overused comparison? If the comparison works, it works. Lessons can be learned from history, even if adjusted for changes in technology and society.

> articles consisting of only Hitler and Stalin comparisons persuade just about no one

I think the point is we may be past persuasion. The damage is done.

My takeaway from these articles is to pay attention to and invest more in China.

Lysenkoism destroyed the sciences for USSR. Stalin picked the crony himself. If your problem is “I don’t like people using bad men as comparison points” maybe you can point to someone who was a good person but still intentionally went out of their way to stymie or destroy the sciences. It’s pretty hard to do that because I can’t think of one. William Jennings Bryan ? Anthony Comstock ? William Proxmire ? And even those folks are not considered good by most or many

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