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Comment by comrade1 | Hacker News Reader

Puts our current comfortable lives in perspective, the chemist and others destroying a Nobel medal to keep people alive.

I guess the equivalent of risk these days is leaking information on illegal activities by your government.

I suspect many HN readers would have turned them in.

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This is a bit of a Godwin's switcheroo - where in a historical discussion about Nazis someone will inevitably try to use it to win points in a modern political argument.

I suspect you're getting downvoted for the last third of your comment. The first two thirds alone might have had the opposite effect.

Thanks for the explanation. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why he was getting bad imaginary internet points!

Yeah, the "if you're reading this, you probably would have collaborated with the Nazis" bit was a little jarring.

Yup, it came off as an insulting the audience, negative and paranoid.

It makes no sense and there's no logic to it, either. The Third Reich very likely would have identified the HN audience as a threat and acted accordingly, because information is extremely powerful and damaging to such a regime. There's a school of thought that suggests the exact same situation with Nazi Germany would not be possible today, due to the wide dissemination of information. (I don't know if that's true, but I've heard it said.)

With strong cryptography, the private intelligence many of our databases contain (imagine what could be learned from Facebook's databases), and the abilities to both be dangerous from any location with Internet access and to trivially conceal that very same location, a totalitarian regime would very likely not be friendly or collaborative with the typical HN reader. Few realize just what kind of power this skill set provides because they've never had to leverage it in such a situation and it hasn't crossed their minds.

I know that sounds silly and self-aggrandizing, but think about it for a few minutes.

Given the proportion of the populations of the occupied countries that ended up collaborating, I'd say that while it was an unnecessary statement, it's probably correct in a "given a sufficiently large set of people...." sense.

I also think it was correct. People don't like when you say them that they probably would have been a Nazi, too, if they had lived as a german in Germany at that time. Nevertheless, I think it's true and makes one thinking.

It was a worthy comment because it was correct and controversial. Those are often the best.

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