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Comment by jhrmnn | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting to read the discussion here through the lens of obligations vs rights. It would seem the rights are definitely winning.

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At the moment, the German state is reneging on its obligations. The current workforce is expected to work harder and harder while retirement is pushed back and social benefits are threatened. A third or a fifth of the population is considering emigration already. Why would they fight for a country that is giving up on them?

Are you surprised that a forum full of people all-in hustle culture and the whole VC-startup grift is extremely selfish?

This is not to say that the government should get blind faith, but some notions that the collective good has any value is alien to many people here.

Libertarianism is a societal disease. "Fuck you got mine".

over and over again, we see that governments are pretty bad at doing their job. over and over again, they prove to us that they cant handle money, that they are corrupt, that they put the interest of their political class above that of the people.

so are you surprised?

id rather be left alone as much as possible in my pursuit of happiness. On my own terms!

Forget the government, what about your fellow humans? Is defending your country an obligation towards your government or towards your neighbor?

My country and my neighbors I would defend, my government not so much.

How is refusing to kill your fellow men selfishness? For one organization over one other?

In Bucha members of the Russian army systematically raped and murdered the towns occupants after it was occupied.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre

"Fuck you got mine" is the attitude of the boomers expecting young people to die for a country that the boomers left economically and demographically ruined. Young Germans have the worst life prospects of any generation in the past fifty years.

But if you look at serious polls then not many young people will actually fight for this. I remember reading a number of around 15%... And those probably don't have a high IQ.

That's a generation of people who had to never suffer the prospect of invasion and occupation of German soil by hostile armed forces. Even so, this number of willing recruits would already be much more than the Bundeswehr can possibly arm, and are unneeded as long as there is no military altercation actively involving Germany.

You're discussing boomers in the context of an awful lot of history.

Collective good doesn’t necessarily mean the State, and not trusting the State doesn’t mean being an American-style right libertarian either.

It’s a common fallacy of performative US leftism that believes the world can be divided neatly into blue vs red.

Unsurprisingly when people here engage in serious politics beyond a desire to enrich themselves, those politics tend to take on a distinctly libertarian bent. I’m not sure what else people expect though, this is a very sheltered group with relatively limited skills outside of specific technical areas.

To put it another way this forum skews selfish.

I miss the days when hackerdom reliably skewed selfish instead of fascist.

Those ideas tend to go hand in hand.

So I am slowly learning!

I miss the days when such people lacked the power to turn their half-baked fantasies into a broken reality for the rest of us. Alas.

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