Call your Congress critters and let them know how you feel. This is just institutional creep that, like an invasive plant, needs to be pruned back from time to time.
If topics like this make you too emotional to participate, you can just ignore it. Nobody is forcing you to respond to things that make you upset.
Regardless, I already flag articles like this to hide them from my front page. I sometimes comment because I’d prefer a world where I didn’t have to do that.
Like I said, there are already plenty of sources for this kind of content. We don’t really need HN to be yet another Reddit or Bluesky.
The sky isn’t falling, chicken little. However, your emotional disregulation is still being used as a convenient political tool, even after all these years.
Get a grip. You’re not a freedom fighter, this isn’t 1920s Weimar Germany, Trump isn’t Hitler, and everything is going to be fine.
If anything, the greatest risk of destabilization comes from the left, where politicians are more than happy to induce and exploit your mental illness for political gain.
Also, history might not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme. :)
Only one of us is in hysterics here.
And in 3 years, when everything is still just fine, you’ll be all wound up about the next thing.
> The rise of Nazi Germany took roughly 14-16 years, so I'd say we're about right on schedule based on the current timeline.
I appreciate you trying to save face, but this is what you were posting just a few messages up.
Pretending to be reasonable works better when we can’t read the detached-from-reality things you were literally just posting.
If we were really on the cusp of a new post-Weimar NSDAP Germany, almost any form of resistance would be ethically justified. Is that what you’re claiming?
I'm guessing you struggle to keep longterm relationships because you blame all of your issues on other people rather than being able to self-reflect on your own flaws and, because of your own supreme confidence in your own flawed judgement, it drives everyone away that might care about you. Is it hard to be that miserable and unlikeable? I'm sure it is, but the good news is that you can work on yourself and you can improve your relations with your fellow humans. It is possible to change and grow.
Let me repeat. If we were really on the cusp of a new post-Weimar NSDAP Germany, almost any form of resistance would be ethically justified. Is that what you’re claiming?
You’ve used “mentally ill” the way other people use citations: as a substitute for substance. It doesn’t make you the adult in the room, it just makes you look like someone who can’t defend a position without trying to pathologize disagreement.
Here’s one fact you can’t hand-wave away: DHS/USCIS is proposing to expand biometrics collection (including DNA) to people merely “associated with” an immigration benefit request (explicitly including petitioners/sponsors/signatories, i.e., often U.S. citizens) regardless of age.
So, you can either argue why sweeping citizens into government biometric/DNA collection for paperwork is normal and lawful, or you can keep doing the “everyone who disagrees with me is unstable” routine. One of those is an argument; the other is a tell.
They’re just not the ones talking about “boots on the throat” and this being the rise of a new Nazi regime.
You don’t get to claim wild things like that, and then pretend you never did. Nobody buys your uno reverse attempt.
This is governmental overreach and should concern everybody regardless of political affiliation.
I'm cynical enough that I think this is fairly clear evidence that some political affiliations are less sincere than others, but very few people will acknowledge this.
I can guarantee that the people who argue that the second amendment is more important than keeping people from mass-murdering school children would happily cheer on the government if they started confiscating guns from "the enemy".
Something very close already happened. It wasn't confiscation, but rather with the exact scenario of night time home defense they always trot out. Kenneth Walker lawfully exercised his second amendment right to night time home defense and the government jackboots breaking down the door retaliated by using the place as a shooting gallery, resulting in the death of Breonna Taylor. Rather than realizing hey, this could easily happen to us when exercising our cherished second amendment rights, most of the second amendment fundamentalist types then rallied around the government agents who committed the murder.
I think the hypocrisy and lack of reasoning ability is strong to begin with, but I think con artist Grump also has an uncanny knack for making gullible people rationalize anything.
I've had extremely respectful dialog with others who don't embrace my values and I find their reasoning to be specious at best.
I have respect for old school conservatism that advocates for limited government but contemporary conservatives no longer seem to care about that (except if it's programs they don't like).
My initial comment still stands: the governmental action of the OP is intended purely to be oppressive and it will not be wielded with any sense of propriety.
I abhor partisan politics and am more than happy to point out flaws on the Left but we've gone through the looking glass on the Right. It's literally a cult of personality and I take no pleasure in saying that.
While a two party system is not a good thing (George Washington warned us about political parties), having proper debate over policies and ideas is a good thing to have and we no longer have that. I've followed American politics for half a century and can unequivocally state that the situation we have here is not normal.
Which sections in particular should I go re-read?