hayst4ck

Likewise it is worth reading They Thought They Were Free. It describes the mental states of denial and inevitability, the rationalization of inaction, and of realizing it's "too late." If you want the quick read you can start at "Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse." Here is an excerpt: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm

People who have have made it their lives work to study the worst kinds of history have been setting off alarms because they perceive the fires of fascism to be burning here in America right now. Here you can watch such a video (5m) on NYT of world experts on the atrocities of the past warning us: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010157022/yale-c...

I don't think HN mods operate as conservative or liberal (although curiosity is an extremely liberal cause), but I think they will come to understand the cost of neutrality.

If anything I think they have not fully confronted the paradox of intolerance or realized that the times are different than they were in the last 30 years of internet flame wars. In the past when Godwin's law and flame wars were the rule of every forum, there weren't historians at prestigious universities who studied the holocaust/fascism warning us that fascism is happening here in America right now.

These are mental health preserving and physical health preserving until they are not.

Nobody wants to hear that if you don't do something bad things are going to happen and nobody in power, such as mods, wants to have their power challenged or use it to threaten others in power because it is going to make them uncomfortable or their lives harder.

What you are seeing is how Nazi Germany happened. Not this specific thing, but this behavior scaled over an entire population. People with empathy and others subjected to stress enter a state of grief, and the first stages of grief are shock (disbelief) and denial (not asking questions you know the answer to because the answer is too awful to bear), people tell them they are overreacting or that they are "too political." "Protest somewhere else" is a common sentiment for anyone inconvenienced by those who feel unjustly treated, and only once they personally experience harm do they start to change their mind.

It is flagged because most people want to be comfortable, and hearing uncomfortable things in comfortable spaces is something they don't want to tolerate, even if it threatens the existence of their comfortable spaces in the long term because curiosity is not compatible with authority and authoritarianism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_West_Flight_612

Here is an example where a man got a gun on a plane in 2007, which directly disproves the 'equality' if passengers.

People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.

So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.

To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.

History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.

It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.

This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"

That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.

An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.

As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.

Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.

It's worth a reading about de-naturalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturalization#Human_rights

Any country which did not abuse their citizens or subsidize their businesses became noncompetitive.

And why would you use old school taxis when uber/lyft were offering $5 rides in a 7x7mile area, and how could old taxi companies compete when they are forced to compete with people not bound by market forces?

I am sure it must also be at exactly a 30 degree angle with even a degree off invalidating it as an official nazi salute.

There is definitely no history of deportations, loyalty purges, secret police, cowing of the judiciary and universities, provocations of anti-semitism, big lies, or attacks on institutions that might inform the greater context and there definitely aren't people who have studied fascism at our most respected universities who are warning us that fascism is here: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010157022/yale-c...

Hearing democrats decry Russian foreign influence was also something I was on board with, but much like Nancy Pelosi saying it's not corrupt when she trades on stock with private information, apparently it's not corrupt when the democratic party accepts foreign aid in the form of AIPAC donations, or just as likely threats of the use of Pegasus against them.

It is quite sad to be an American of good conscience right now. It's hard to respect our country in any way when it shows such little moral fiber and such little backbone.

Is the constitution more protected or less protected?

Will trump have a harder time breaking the law or an easier time?

Many in this thread arguing about the legal minutiae of a system that only became problematic in the context of an anti-constitution anti-law president... and I just don't understand. I don't understand what reality you're living in where this is something to defend.

It is precisely the universality and supremacy of the law which gives the lower courts the authority to make universal rulings. Just because something is federally illegal in one federal district doesn't mean it is legal in another.

The lower court doesn't have more authority than the appellate court if the appellate court can overturn the lower court.

No court has the "authority" to make arbitrary unlawful rulings.

Hearing that the executive is less constrained and more able to violate the law should make you emotional, especially when one of the nine highest members of the judiciary are assessing it.

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm)

It seems like it was ruled that instead of 1000, much more local, people able to protect constitutional rule with the force of the judiciary, we now have 9.

If you analyze only based on power changes, now fewer people have more power.

If you accept that framing, you accept many of that frames implications without even consciously processing them. This is one of the ways that consent is manufactured.

This ruling is stating that federal judges cannot rule that the law is blocking Trump. By accepting and adopting the frame that it is Trump vs Judges you implicitly accept that the law itself is a weapon rather than a boundary. It argues that the law is subjective, based on the judge ruling, rather than objective. It argues that there is no objective truth. To say it is judges and not the law that stops trump is to say that judges are agents of themselves and not agents of the law.

Agreeing that it is Judges vs Trump is implicitly agreeing that the law is arbitrary based on the judge ruling. Arbitrary government is authoritarian government.

The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.

This feels about as grim as the Citizens United dissent, which has been proven more and more true every day:

A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.

"The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.”

Reacting to a (female) judge assessing that there is an existential threat to the rule of law, in an administration that has done everything to break through the boundaries of law and openly violates it is hardly "hysteria", especially when there is a track record of robbing people of due process, which is literally and precisely the executive asserting its supremacy over the judiciary by robbing it of the opportunity to make a ruling.

This is a ruling which chooses order over law. Order without justice is tyranny.

My point was that guns can be used for murder, in the same way that AI can be used to influence or surveil, but guns are also what you use to arrest people, fight oppressors and tyrants, and protect your property. Fists, knives, bows and arrows, poison, bombs, tanks, fighter jets, and drones are all forms of weapons. The march of technology is inevitable, and it's important not to be on the losing side of it.

What the technology is capable of us less interesting then who has access to it and the power disparity that it creates.

The authors argument is that AI is a (1) high leverage technology (2) in the hands of oligarchs.

My argument is that the fact that it is a high leverage technology is not as interesting, meaningful, or important as the existence of oligarchs who do not answer to any regulatory body because they have bought and paid for it.

The author is arguing that a particular weapon is bad, but failing to argue that we are in a class war that we are losing badly. The author is focusing on one weapon being used to wage our class war, instead of arguing about the cost of losing the classwar.

It is not AI de-humanizing us, but wealth disparity that is de-humanizing us, because there is nothing forcing the extremely wealthy to treat others with dignity. AI is not robbing people of dignity, ultra wealthy people are robbing people of dignity using AI. AI is not dehumanizing people. Ultra wealthy people are using AI to dehumanize people. Those are different arguments with different implications and prescriptions on how to act or what to do.

AI is bad is a different argument than oligarchs are bad.

There is obviously truth to that, but guns are also used for self defense and protecting your dignity. Guns are a technology, and technology can be used for good or evil. Guns have been used to colonially enslave people, but also been used to gain independence.

I disagree with the assessment that AI is intrinsically dehumanizing. AI is a tool, a very powerful tool, and because the very rich in America doesn't see the people they rule as humans of equal dignity, the technology itself betrays their feelings.

Attacking the technology is wrong, the problem is not the technology but that every company has a tyrant king at it's helm who answers to no one because they have purchased the regulators that might have bound their behavior, meaning that their are no consequences for a CEO/King of a company's misdeeds. So every company's king ends up using their company/fiefdom to further their own personal ambitions of power and nobody is there to stop them. If the technology is powerful, then failure to invest in it, while other even more oppressive regimes do invest in it, potentially gives them the ability to dominate you. Imagine you argue nuclear weapons are a bad technology, while your neighbor is busy developing them. Are you better off if your neighbor has nuclear weapons and you don't?

The argument that AI is a dehumanization technology is ultimately an anarchist argument. Anarchy's core belief is that no one should have power to dominate anyone else, which inevitably means that no one is able to provide consequences for anyone who ambitiously betrays that belief system. Reality does not work that way. The only way to provide consequences to a corrupt institution is an even more powerful institution based on collective bargaining (founded by the threat of consequences for failing to reach a compromise, such as striking). There is no way around realpolitik, you must confront pragmatic power relationships to have a cogent philosophy.

The author is mistaking AI for wealth disparity. Wealth is power and power is wealth, and when it is so concentrated, it puts bad actors above consequences and turns tools that could be used for the public good into tools of oppression.

We do not primarily have an AI problem, but a wealth concentration problem and this is one of many manifestation of it.

Metrics are gamed as marketing tools rather than assessment tools. There's a clear conflict of interest in the government presenting the metrics that it says to judge them by.

Unemployment is another gamed metric. If you want to get a sense of unemployment, a graph of % employed tells you more than some gamed number like "unemployment" since "unemployment" is a direct measure of political success.

Consumer spending/GDP are also directly used to measure political success, and a metric like "aggregate Visa/Mastercard purchases" is going to give a much better sense of how much people are spending.

During COVID, all cause mortality is a superior metric than COVID attributed deaths because any death attributed to COVID represented a failure of public health policy. We even saw direct attacks on public health monitoring in Florida.

It seems like the only ways to combat this are either states presenting their own metrics to imply national trends based on their own. I definitely wonder what kind of information we could get that is accurate and not gamed to create our own dashboards. Geohot's use of national energy consumption to estimate national productivity was sharp and the type of thing I wish journalists would do.

No where does it say "on US soil" or "for US Citizens," and that is absolutely 100% by design based on the founding fathers philosophy which can be read in the declaration of independence.

It states plainly and unqualified "make no law abridging the freedom of speech." This both asserts that there is a freedom of speech that exists outside of the government and that congress shall make no law abridging it.

In their philosophy, the government purposefully doesn't grant the right to freedom of speech, because the founding fathers argument was that their, and all people's, natural god given (literally) rights are why they were justified in rebelling against the British government -- that rights exist outside of, and above, the government.