Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

This kind of seems to be a combined strategy. I mean this is not old; many of us may still remember Abu Ghraib and so forth. We now have a somewhat comparable situation: build up of enemies. See ICE raids and videos manhunting people. There always are people susceptible to do so (e. g. inflict pain onto others). The strange thing is how some "democracies" do that. Where is the net difference to a dictatorship? This is also blurred. You have a similar problem in Israel - again, tons of examples that can be given, but it seems as if this is a combined strategy originating from the top (of command chains).

The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding. I see a repeat of older patterns here. I wonder what those who torture other people think.

View on HN

Waterboarders follow a mind-breaking formation in a dedicated military base where they are desensitized to torture by subjugating themselves to it first!

Anyway I don't like the article's take. It seems to blame this on an institutional drift into sadism. I don't think it's the full story, there must be a strategy behind it.

Inducing trauma so that migrants don't ever think about coming back? Maybe coupled with Palantir machine learning insights to identify those who need/respond to this treatment?

>Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…

Simplistic. These guys are part of a hierarchy.

>"EVERYTHING WE SAY, they can see." The end result of mass surveillance is mass murder.

Well no it's meant for targeted murder.

>You should not oppose this simply because it is coming, at some point in the future, for you. You should oppose this because it is happening to anyone. But it is coming for you.

Is it coming or not?

Your last quote clearly says it is.

Maybe this is just a predictable outcome to encouraging the belief that some people are subhuman.

Looks like sadism is the strategy in operation.

> The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding.

I read an account of a fifteenth-century woman (IIRC) who had essentially been waterboarded, among other tortures. She testified that the waterboarding was by far the worst thing she endured, and would rather die than experience it again.

> strange thing is how some "democracies" do that

the US is not a democracy.

Also, it is not a "repeat of old patterns" but continuation of things that have never been solved.

> the US is not a democracy.

Since when? You probably think that it has been a democracy at some point. And I'm sure the US did use torture at the time you deemed it a democracy.

Hence I don't get your point.

I never claimed it was a democracy, either today or in the past. I actually said the opposite.

I see. I thought you meant "under Trump the US is not a democracy". Which I think is a pretty common opinion. But now I understand you meant "the US has never been a democracy".

Is this a “technically it’s a presidential republic” sort of thing?

All republics are democracies. Not all democracies are republics. Some people seem to get confused about this and think that "democracy" means "direct democracy" only, and not any of the various sorts of indirect democracy.

To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is something poli sci departments break their freshmen of every single year.

The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.

> To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is ...

it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.

but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".

To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.

On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).

I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.

Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.

Even the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com