The only way this sort of rhetoric can be fought is at the level of moderation. This site has user-driven moderation, which in theory means that you can fight the tide this way, but in practice the authoritarians and fascists have access to these tools as well, and bad faith use is rarely punished, so these tools are less of a panacea and more of a race to who can down-vote who first.
The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them. The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you decide you still want to engage, I recommend viewing the interaction through the lens of an attention economy; spend less time on a rebuttle than they did on their post, and only in places where you think it will actually be seen.
Unless one verifies every single user by ID, there needs to be at least a platform-level detection of user jurisdiction and the application of appropriate penalties and limits to their activity.
It's the old way that social spaces on the internet used to work, and you don't need ID verification for that, you just need spaces that are conducive to that style of community-building. Think Discord, not Instagram. Think (invite-only) Mastodon, not Twitter. Think lobsters, not HN. Think Tildes, not Reddit.
Yes, that's why I need others to help. There are actually less of them (bots) than us. There is one pretty strange "tiktok-like" site, that has the worst kind of people and memes out there showing up regularly, something like 4chan but for images, but somehow most trolls (there are trolls from many different groups operating there) still can't hold on and every such trolling post is pretty fast met with a big wave of downvotes and counter-comments.
> The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them
The owners of that site can't manage such a big firehose of hate and most users say that they are racist degenerates (and they say they don't care if you are black or white racist, if you are racist they like you).
> The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
They DO care and a lot of users here also care. Every stupid comment that I've seen could be from troll was very quickly downvoted and counter-commented. We didn't see a lot of them, because they are deleted pretty fast and often and trolls just can't get easy foothold here.
They pose as citizens of European, African, Asian or American countries online and try to steer discussion to subvert the local society. The Twitter location reveal showcases that it has an immense scale.
There are many examples such as Scottish independence movement going offline when iran goes offline.
On websites like HN and reddit you cannot even see where someone is originating from. But you can ALWAYS detect them by the cognitive biases they're using to drive their propaganda: false equivalency biase, false choice dilemmas, and so on.
Yes, and there are more Russians than Ukrainians, yet somehow they can't overcome a smaller country in 4 years. Trolls want you to give up in countering them. Their work is about pushing propaganda AND demoralising people so that they give up fighting. When you think "why bother", they won.
This is fantasy thinking, projection of a subjective wish.
The dollar is the global reserve currency and is under no serious threat to be displaced (and no, the dollar dropping back to where it was a couple of years ago vs the Euro, is not a meaningful event).
The US economy is by far the world's largest and now dwarfs the Eurozone.
To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years. Please provide a comparison to any other economy that has lasted so long and done so well. You'll be able to name two or three examples maximum.
In the moment people tend to get hyper emotional, hyperbolic. They think something fundamental is changing. That's almost always nothing more than personal subjective projection of what they want to have happen, rather than an objective assessment of reality. Back in reality the US has survived and thrived through drastically worse than anything going on in the present. The Vietnam era was far worse both socially/culturally and economically. WW2 was drastically worse. The Civil War was drastically worse. The Great Depression was drastically worse. But oh yeah sure, the US superpower is about to end any day now.
The geographical land mass of Europe will of course survive anything bar a collision with another planet, if this is what you're referring to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett
> To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years.
How old is the US?
> The dollar is the global reserve currency and is under no serious threat to be displaced
Everybody leavs the dollar since a while.
Also, I’m not sure the US economy was even great for most of the periods you mentioned. The question of if the US survives to have the same economic standing that it did in the 1800s is not that compelling
Nominal, Eurozone, yes.
But, being the reserve currency boosts the exchange rate all by itself. I'd argue that this acts as hysteresis, that it adds strength that keeps it a reserve currency longer than it would if there was no memory in the system. Therefore, if anything does induce a shock, the PPP rate is more relevant when considering who might displace it; this other currency (or currencies) would then also get the same hysteresis benefit.
The EU, PPP, is about the same as the US (30 T), and I'd argue that "the EU" is important measure for near-future stuff rather than the current Eurozone, because the EU has the no-specific-time-constraint preference to become all Eurozone… except for the bits that opted out. But also some more neighbours who opted in without being in the EU. It's weird.
China, PPP, it is bigger than the US, 40 T by PPP. Not quite as big as the gap between the US and India, but close enough I had to get the calculator out I can't eyeball the ratio on a linear graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/jfgbd60rb...
> To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years. Please provide a comparison to any other economy that has lasted so long and done so well. You'll be able to name two or three examples maximum.
You didn't do well for all of those hundreds of years, if you squint hard enough to ignore the great depression you get to about 150 years, which basically means about the same as every other industrial economy that didn't have a war in the middle split it apart. If you don't do that (because the great depression really sucked), the half of Europe whose national boundaries explosively reorganised, and also the Soviet Union, wave hello.
The USSR is an important reference, because basically nobody saw the collapse coming until a year or two before it happened. It was unthinkable.
> In the moment people tend to get hyper emotional, hyperbolic. They think something fundamental is changing. That's almost always nothing more than personal subjective projection of what they want to have happen, rather than an objective assessment of reality.
All true.
> Back in reality the US has survived and thrived through drastically worse than anything going on in the present. The Vietnam era was far worse both socially/culturally and economically. WW2 was drastically worse. The Civil War was drastically worse. The Great Depression was drastically worse. But oh yeah sure, the US superpower is about to end any day now.
How many of those occasions did the US refuse to rule out military force with its primary set of allies in order to seize land supposedly to keep it safe from a nation that's now 33% richer than it is? The Civil War was not a time when y'all were a big player on the world stage, it was when Europe was busy carving everything up into colonies.
What is not fundamental about the end of NATO? What is not fundamental about the US actively working to give up its role as global hegemon? The US may survive but that doesn't mean it's not fundamental.
I swear you yanks playing down every single thing that Trump does, as if history has ended, are insane.
The USA will reap what it is currently sowing and it frankly will deserve it.