They're not hard to find. It's happening; it's not as widespread as it could be if it's allowed to continue. Put this into google: "federal agents intimidating people for posting social media comments".
The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview. I asked for facts - which HN is generally a fact based environment instead of broad hand wavy fear based statements.
As an aside - thank you for the isolated cases that you sent as evidence which I haven't clearly been following as closely. I know it is a significant problem in the UK but kind of on the other end of the political spectrum.
> The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview.
Like I've stated, there are an unusual amount of authoritarian sympathizers in this forum - though it's possible they are bots. When I first heard of the forum and signed up, it was noticeable and I almost did not stick around, but ultimately decided it was better to know what is going on around the world and the posts here are far better quality than somewhere like reddit. Nothing to do with my worldview, just an observation from being around here for 10+ years. It's nothing personal against you.
If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.
Sure, it's fine to complain, but calling it a "police state" just discredits you at this stage.
I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.
Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.
This account (GP) often comes to these stories to make comments like this. Flag them and move on, avoid giving them the attention they crave like King Trump
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I'm arguing that it is better for HN to not engage with people who break this rule. Not surprised you throw out the censorship line, typical of the people who share your ideas. Bad speech and lies should be spoken out against.
Seems like you are constructing a very specific situation that should mark some sort of regime change to dictatorship. The reality is, complex things have their own momentum and US society is a big thing.
Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.
> If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.
By your standards you should have started worrying a long, long time ago.
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
"Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore."
Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.
It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.
We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.
"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.
For Dudley Dursley it's the worst getting only 36 presents for his birthday. It's good to maintain a sense of proportionality. If you call everything hell, the word hell looses meaning and it's also an insult to people actually living in hell.
An important characteristic of autocracy and fascism is there is no bottom: the government is targeting activists but you can still talk about it online; professors in Texas must submit their syllabus to AI censorship software to screen for discussions of sexuality, but they aren't being sent to the gulag; ...; people are free to go about their lives as long as they are "apolitical"; ...; Suharto's death squads have killed half a million "communists" but at least it's not 5 million, and it's mostly in the villages...
Another important concept is the Dual State; there will always be some people who remain within the Normative State even as it shrinks and shrinks, and while the horrors of the Prerogative State become more and more extreme.
I would urge you to attempt to define fascism in a way that does not reflect the behaviour of the current admin, and its a pretty fungible political theory so there are multiple valid definitions, and I would still think you would fail
If only it would be possible to "close your doors to AI agents". It's not I'm afraid. Where do you draw the line? What browser is allowed?
For example, I now have to `pacman -S chromium` to buy tickets from Deutche Bahn. They accuse me of being a bot when I use firefox on linux. It's a known problem, and I think stuff like this will only get worse the longer this cat and mouse goes on.
The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.
Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.
It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.
Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.
The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.
So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.
Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.
No, it's categorically different. Your point about not being able to judge based on "news feeds" is valid though.
Societal collapse has happened before, many times actually (but usually with great spans of time between them). Western culture doesn't particularly like to speak about it, lest people get the idea, such cataclysm might repeat.
A society doesn't exist after it collapses, so "reporting" on it is usually rather scant and framed from the view of those left to talk about it (often not many).
Consequently, historians struggle with pinpointing the reasons for those collapses. People often had no clue themselves and didn't see it coming. Complexity theory is a rather new development.
Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.
To be fair, depending on when these things were written, there was a lot of shit going on in Greece and Rome that merited such a take, including invasions, plagues, civil war. And the '20s[1], '30s[1], and '40s[2], and '50s[3].
But what kind of doom did they anticipate in the roaring 20s? I guess Upton Sinclair wasn't very happy, but that's not the same as crises everywhere you turn.
That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.
I have a few more times around the sun, and you are not the only person with that perspective.
I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.
I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.
I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.
I wonder why you don't add 9-11 to your list of multi year persistent events. Covid and 2008 are repeats of older crises. Meanwhile, 9-11 caused the political course of the main world power to completely change direction. Even if the event itself only caused about 3000 victim's, I'd still rate it on the same scale as Napoleon or the world wars. Trump is just the latest continuation of it.
The previous commenter had mentioned it already, and I don't think 9/11 had the same psychic shock and persistence as COVID and 2008. But I'm sure you have had a different experience behind your feeling of 9/11 as a more persistent traumatic event.
Trump is a continuation of a multi-tentacled, longer-timeline octopus that encompasses all of our collective traumatic events.
So we pay Apple for friction. And the state pays for Graykey to remove it. Whoever wins that arm race this quarter determines what our rights are worth in practice.
Well, that's assuming you are ever able to claim your phone back. From what I understand police might just keep it indefinitely until they are able to access it, unless you get some kind of court order that it he returned to you
Looking at the absolute dog shit Ai menus and posters I see everywhere I can guarantee you a good 70% of the population is physically unable to produce good things no matter the tools they have access to. They can't even be bothered to add "make it look good" to their prompt
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