it's red alert time.
and they say it's a coincidence.
You must be joking.
By any measure, and in every poly sci department, Nixon is viewed as moderate or even slightly left wing.
He created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, created OHSA, signed NEPA, monkeyed with wage and price controls, signed a breath-taking number of anti-discrimination and affirmative-action orders, pushed school desegregation in the South...Nixon would be called a "progressive" today.
I know. Your baby boomer grandparents thought anyone who wasn't McGovern must be Hitler, but...Nixon was pretty liberal. Regan ran against him in the 1968 primaries just for this reason.
Orwell warned about this sort of thing already: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
At least the crackpots now get to see what a real deep state (concentrated power behind public facade) looks like.
Alas, the prototypical tech "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" has become the "temporarily embarrassed lord."
It's better than previous "fascist" states in some ways, worse in others. Please remember everybody, many past "authoritarian" states have been character assassinated relentelessly, and the world you inhabit may not be nearly as free as the illusion our very based media boys have presented to you.
The very terminology provided to you to describe these power structures is a form of warfare in and of themselves.
The result is sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments. The people that you need to convince will see the word "Fascist" and tune it out as more left wing noise.
The threats are real, however this framing is doing more harm than good.
If you think this is the result it's probably just because you're not used to discussing political theory. Within academic spaces these discussions are very well developed and nuanced. HN people like yourself aren't very used to being left behind but there are experts that understand what you don't.
When fascism loses its meaning it's when reactionaries describe leftist opposition to fascism as fascism. When they call antifa fascist for opposing fascism violently. That's when the meaning gets muddled.
Peasants would lose half their crops to taxes, in a world where there was not a single state provided service. There wasn’t even a state really.
There has never been a world where the average person doesn’t get shafted.
Good references to use!
I used to enjoy the All In Podcast a lot, but since two of the 'besties' joined Team Trump, it has become clear to me just how self serving they are.
The top 5% already pay 40% of all taxes in the US. For the the top 1% that number is still 25%. [1]
At the same time over 50% (!) of the budget goes towards social security, medicare and other health services [2]. That's a much higher percentage vs. socialist-leaning nations such as Sweden [3].
Despite its reputation of being an individualist, capitalist nation, for all intents and purposes, the US has already implemented socialism.
The problem, as is typical with countries where public sector spending is a large %age of the economy, is that such spending is not subject to healthy corrective market forces that would curb waste. More dollars can always be printed and taxed, so high-level corruption, bureaucracy and an ever-growing thicket of regulation is the consequence.
The author calls out the corruption and nepotism, and rightfully so. However what he fails to understand is that it is born in an ever-growing government "economy", not curbed by it.
[1] https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
[3] https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-f...
Social Security is more than 90% funded by payroll taxes collected exclusively for that purpose. Combining that budget item with HHS and other departments funded by more general income taxes is quite misleading. Defense is the largest single expenditure in the US budget -- even more so when factoring in the VA.
Finally, more dollars can always be printed because the US dollar holds the highly privileged position of being the "world's currency", and exploiting the benefits from that, such as printing a near-endless supply of USD without causing a gallon of milk to cost $1500 (yet).
Numbers aside, you seem to suggest that The Free Market could correct our path to fascism, and that pesky human services and wanton over-regulation are what are really preventing us from reaching our final enlightened form... We are all much closer to being destitute than we are to being next in line for billionaire-dom. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."
The US can get away with what it's doing because we just have that much more productive economic activity going on here.
So if people are still not convinced it might be a good time to reconsider, maybe read a history book or two.
Though who knows what, if any, resemblance the theatrics bear to either the meat of the dispute or its eventual substantive outcome…
I’m kind of surprised TFA made it through without a nod to Karp’s book [0]. The guy’s not shy about how hard he wants to make the power.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760945/the-technolo...
Rights, when universal and natural are inalienable, while rights when derived from the state are alienable. The ability of a state to make anyone a non-person is, and should continue to be, a horrific thought to entertain.
What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
Let's say that there are twelve doughnuts in the box. You see someone eat one, and there are 11, 10, 9... and when there are six, you make a prediction: we're going to run out of doughnuts.
A few minutes later, after a late burst of doughnut-grabbing (putting the exhaustion of the box ahead of schedule), it happens. What's the best way to understand this experience?
A) People were removing doughnuts from the box without knowing what would happen. You were the only one who understood how to count in reverse (a skill not ordinarily taught in public schools), and revealed a truth they might not have even understood - until it occurred before their eyes.
B) You revealed a consistent desire to eat doughnuts and a social norm that permitted it, which held true minute after minute, both before and after you published. That's excellent science. They knew they were eating doughnuts, and they wanted them. Their knowledge of the running-out effect, possibly discovered earlier in internal studies, drove them to accelerate the process at the end, rushing to grab the last one before the competition did.
I would suggest, (B).
We've seen responses ranging from "You're overreacting. That won't happen," to "It's not going to get worse." Somehow it does and yet they continue the same lines.
There's obviously something else going on, perspective-wise or psychologically. I've always wanted to follow with them and understand what exactly the dynamic is.
But what precedent does that set? A very dangerous one imo
They couldn't even pull it off when they had a mandate and some people with actual talent in the first admin.
Act accordingly.
As incompetent and stupid as they are, the dunking just never seems to stop. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares, and nobody who cares has any power.
Yikes.
A favorite target is Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale who was recently discussing regime change in Iran with Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah.
The HN of my day wouldn't have boosted a site pushing XR's brand of horseshit and mostly eschewed fringe political fever dream type posting in general. I say mostly because I'm aware of the notable counterexamples, but they were relatively contained.
Social media today has little value beyond an engine to deliver dopamine hits, increasingly more of this content is just AI slop. I don’t think this will ever be palatable for most users.
I think 10 years from now, it is plausible that major social media platforms will have been completely abandoned by “real” users, in favor of private decentralized chat groups and small anti-viral platforms, where most members have only 1 or 2 degrees of separation to each other, and where the content posted is of interest, but not addicting, and not infinitely scrollable.
This would do a lot of damage to the techno-fascist state, as it takes away one of the pillars upon which their control stands.
One can argue that a thoughtful irony which gets downvoted might be more interesting than thoughtful irony which gets upvoted because of the points you mention.
Irony shouldn't be in a bubble of all upvotes. Funnily enough I had searched up some irony quote websites a few days back and going back on them was fun to find a relevant quote:
Irony is just the honesty with the volume cracked up
- George Saunders.
In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey.
This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
We all get to choose whether or not we put party before country. Some people choose poorly.
In other words, the centrism of taking risks is very different from the centrism of avoiding them.