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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

They boy who cried wolf. We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.

Saying the former when the reality is the latter means your message will simply becomes ever more ignored the closer to a dictatorship we get and thus makes a dictatorship more likely.

> I’ll say the same is true for those that hold your point of view.

I aways find it so interesting that having a view that aims to be based on reality and not overly exaggerated fear mongering is seen as so negatively by both sides. I can't see that ending well for the US to be honest. Fear mongering is how you get dictators, left or right, and not how you get a stable democracy.

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> We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.

While there is truth in that, it is also important to note that there is no such thing as a clear-cut line where we go, ok this is it, now it's a dictatorship.

Which in turn means that it becomes easy to rationalize and say that because they aren't doing this or that yet, it can't be a dictatorship yet. And those goalposts keep moving.

So perhaps one analogy is like a recession. We never really know the economy is in a recession until it's already been in one for a while but it wasn't obvious yet, only in hindsight.

Likewise, I find active complacency to be fascinating in a democratic institution.

To paraphrase Ben Franklin: We have a republic, if we can keep it.

Being vigilant and on guard is a feature of the US and demanded of its citizens.

Of course, my family escaped a dictatorship and made our home in the US. So we have a better sense of these things.

The methods like ignoring the rule of law to grab people off the streets is a huge red flag.

I find it fascinating that saying "we're not yet an actual dictatorship" is seen as complacency.

> Of course, my family escaped a dictatorship and made our home in the US. So we have a better sense of these things.

Fascinating what people assume about others and then use that to discount the views of others if those views disagree with them.

Clearly you've got a lot of trauma but panic and excess anxiety are not healthy responses to that as they make your decisions irrationally biased. That's how you get lots of immigrants who escaped communist dictatorships voting for a right wing dictatorships in the US. Their trauma biases their world view so much that they panic and then cause an equally bad outcome.

You’re shifting goalposts and constantly inserting “outs” in your wording, which are all indications of bad faith.

Also, strawman. We’re pretty much done here.

> bad faith > So we have a better sense of these things.

Classic "bad faith, I'm done" when pressed into a corner after your No True Scotsman didn't land.

> constantly inserting “outs” in your wording,

So only your extrapolation of what I meant is correct irrespective of both the wording and what I meant?

This is like talking to someone with a red hat. So surreal how both sides are just as bad.

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