Impeachment flatly isn't happening. We're not getting 67 votes for it in the senate. If the fake electors plot and Jan 6th didn't do it, nothing will.
So as shitty as that is we need to operate within that reality.
Also, Trumpism isn't going to end with Trump. Now that his base has had a sold run of "winning" they're not just going to dissipate, even if any potential successor may not be as effective as Trump in creating a personality cult.
There's millions of Americans that want these things.
We'll see about that. The prominent members of his like are all doing their best impressions of him and it's they're not very convincing. Their sycophancy is the best indicator that they lack the spine to do the audacious things he does.
Someone with a completely different demeanor yet still standing above the crowd is what will likely succeed Trump and, as of now, I don't see it.
Regardless of the quality of potential successors, his supporters will still be there after and their core beliefs won't be any different after he's gone.
We have clear examples of authoritarian states successfully suppressing specific topics. It's not so much about killing it as creating a line where consequences start happening.
China is one example, where being too vocal about certain topics online can land you in a police station interview.
I don't think we should be overly confident that similar things can't happen in the US or EU.
And indeed, in the US we're seeing the administration successfully pressure changes at educational institutions for example. We're already uncomfortably far down this road imo.
The right is great at “killing” ideas or atleast the momentum for it. The left has been keeping true to the first amendment rights. It needs to start doing what the right does when it doesn’t like ideas. Somewhat violently shut it down. The right doesn’t care about free speech unless it’s for their specific goals.
> The left has been keeping true to the first amendment rights. It needs to start doing what the right does when it doesn’t like ideas. Somewhat violently shut it down.
What planet have you been on for the last ten years? Have you not been on reddit recently, especially in the aftermath of Kirk's assassination? The left has been collectively, enthusiastically arguing in favor of violent suppression of rightwing speech, with the rallying cries of "punch Nazis," "bash the fash," and similar, for over decade, usually with a misleading, misunderstood appeal to Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance (as though it were the nation's founding principle), and as far back as 2017, a majority of progressives agreed with that: https://www.cato.org/blog/51-strong-liberals-say-its-morally...
This is a distinctly progressive phenomenon, where a majority of them believe they have the right to respond to speech with violence. And as the Kirk assassination shows, they'll readily "Naziwash" you after killing you, even if you aren't one, to post-hoc justify (according to their warped thinking) your murder.
All the left accomplished with its thuggish, authoritarian attempts to intimidate conservatives was to radicalize them further, to the point that rightwing dissenters, who abounded in the G.W. Bush era, are now an endangered species, and your proposal is to antagonize them even more?
Funny. In my five+ decades on this planet, I seem to find the right more apt and eager to employ 'thuggish authoritarian attempts' -- akin to my time growing up in East Germany. But now being in America for over a decade it's really not much different.
This is what I told my progressives friends 4 years ago that Biden's push to extend the definitions of signs of domestic terrorism to "radical traditional Christians groups" was going to backfire and be reciprocated in probably worse and more morally wrong policies to them.
Ignoring what is "morally wrong", is it proper to blame Trump for doing the same thing that his predecessor did, with the only distinction being in the (completely legal) beliefs themselves?
Ah, yes, the old "don't do _that_, then the Republicans will do it too" -- as if this administration has been in any way constrained by the limits of any previous administration.
I'd ask for a citation of what Biden/Biden's admin actually did, but the Trump folks have been so busy disappearing things that the policy that I think you're referring to is now gone from the WhiteHouse.gov site and doesn't seem to be available via Internet Archive either.
Once again, in harmony, and louder for the people in the back: the both-sidesism is utterly misguided, plays into the Trump camp's hands, and just entirely fails to recognize just how not-normal and dangerous things are right now and they are just getting worse by the day.
I spoke too soon, I think that IA is having some intermittent problems, but I was finally able to get to Biden's "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrororism" here:
At least in the broad-strokes PDF I see no mention of "radical Christian" anything. If there's some citation, I'd be curious to see it if it can still be found and if it mentions specific groups.
Nothing changes the underlying asymmetry that one side is fighting to be welcoming of the unfamiliar while the other side is fighting to remain in fear of it. The latter will always spiral downward, giving in to it is a non-starter.
Lots of bad things were done in the name of empathy.
Colonialism is an example. Those "uncivilized" people "needed" European civilization and the effort was encourage as charity by the Church.
Bombings and other political violence are already illegal.
Are we going to classify every single variations of the political beliefs of every domestic terrorists even if they are shared by millions of others law abiding citizens?
It's almost always a radicalized individual who does these things. If you want to extend the net to the people who radicalized them, you can but you should be aware that also works to the people who radicalized the Kirk shooter, the the would be Trump assassins (mostly the alive one, the dead one just seems like a nut) and Mangione.
If the victim handed a weapon over to the past perpetrator of offences of the victim's free will, unprompted, is it really victim blaming to attribute the perpetrator's state of being able to reoffend 100% to the perp?
Alternatively, consider the world in which the claim that it is victim blaming is 100% true. Such a world, where large parts of the U.S. are focusing their attention on righting grievances instead of anything else, is a world where the U.S. is too distracted by actual civil war to avoid suffering conquest by foreign powers.
Worth noting the Nazis literally killed the socialist wing of the party to take it over as well. Fascists and authoritarians ultimately have no ideological allies but themselves.
The executive is saying “war” and “portland” in the same sentence.
We the people can invoke treason— the commander in chief said the word and an American city.
Those two things are treason.
This isn’t hard. We just need to STAND UP.
It isn’t like we need to say anything.
Quite literally a mass formation of people to represent, “all of your generals that represent your digital social presence are documented pedophiles, just stop.”
This requires Republicans to hold the administration accountable. They already purged everyone who had the appetite for that. It seems clear that all electable Democrats will have been incarcerated by the midterms.
As someone that stepped outside of the church a decade ago, they’ll be the ones to decide if they are the religion to harbor sexual abuse or if they’ll also just STAND UP— For their own daughters.
At a certain point, they’ll have to admit Peter Thiel’s “political theology” was never “theology” and was only ever “politics”
Tbh, there’s a really easy mantra people outside the church can chant and that is
“Known by fruit, known by fruit!”
And if there’s any hope at all,
it seems people do see “the rot” they’re just afraid to say it.
You said "you could wind up on a terrorist watch list for posting apolitical cartoon frog memes," but you're linking to an article about violent extremists.
Which is it? Is the problem that Biden was putting people on a watchlist for completely innocuous and arbitrary memes or is the problem that he was putting violent extremists on a watchlist who happened to sometimes employ memes?
> My entire point is that the Biden administration was labeling innocuous content as "violent extremism.
No they weren't.
First, white supremacists do use the pepe meme, they intentionally adopted it as a symbol, so there is a correlation between that meme and violent extremism, albeit a weak one. You're pretending not to be perfectly aware of this, so I think you're the one not acting in good faith here.
I read the slides. Nowhere is it stated that using a frog meme makes one a violent extremist, and no one has been put onto a terrorist watch list simply for using that meme.
"no one has been put onto a terrorist watch list simply for using that meme"
Agreed that pepe is not apolitical and comes out of a dark corner
But the linked article says "Flags from the left-wing Antifa movement. Depictions of Pepe the Frog," ... "They are all signs that extremists could be infiltrating the military, according to internal training materials "
So according to that source ... maybe yes, potentially there was one put on a watch list, because he used that frog. But I kind of agree that it is warranted. A watch list. Not a list that gives you automatically problems. But a indicator to take a closer look before trusting that person with critical things. But chances are there is not just the frog. I have never seen a person using that frog who did not also used worse language and behavior.
"Anticapitalists" on the other hand are usually people with a big mouth. The step from not liking the current system towards terrorism is a pretty big one. Also because anticapitalism is super vague. So I don't think it is quite the same thing.
The American government has been like a Jamaican dancehall filled with deejays all riffing off of the same Riddim for some decades. It sounds like everyone decrying these actions as Nazism and Fascism is just coping with being late to the party.
Edit:
Guys, wait, c’mon, I mean you’re not wrong for decrying Nazism and Fascism against the current administration.
All I’m saying is that I think that there’s a hat that’s passed around in American government. It’s red, green, yellow and black, with matted strands of fabric around the edges of it. Sometimes, if you’re cool enough, you get to wear shades with the hat. But if the people already expect illness out of you then you can don it barefaced.
I am of the opinion that the "No politics" rule of HN is just a thin veil attempting to shield the tech industry from criticism for enabling these buffoons.
It really is. Too much of our industry operates on some perverse savior complex where they believe themselves the only capable humans on the planet and everyone else to be inferior in some way (often intellectually, but there’s plenty of -isms too).
These topics are incredibly salient to discuss if we’re going to improve our industry and society. Everything is political, and should be discussed in the context of technology here - which this article is highly relevant for.
Absolutely. It’s even more frustrating that I tried to post this on a few notable subreddits and got auto-flagged for not complying with domain allowlists or other meaningless rules.
What? Discussing thought provoking news in the political world? No, flagging this thread, which is thought provoking is just insulating those who can afford to ignore it.
If HN is about intellectual curiosity, the heated disagreement in this comment section should be proof of how stimulating this topic is. But we’d rather stick our heads in the sand rather than confront what inconveniences us.
This administration is the most anti-American thing I've ever seen. If we don't impeach them soon, our republic may not make it to 2028.
Impeachment flatly isn't happening. We're not getting 67 votes for it in the senate. If the fake electors plot and Jan 6th didn't do it, nothing will.
So as shitty as that is we need to operate within that reality.
Also, Trumpism isn't going to end with Trump. Now that his base has had a sold run of "winning" they're not just going to dissipate, even if any potential successor may not be as effective as Trump in creating a personality cult.
There's millions of Americans that want these things.
> Also, Trumpism isn't going to end with Trump.
It remains to be seen. Trumpism is built directly around his entertaining cult of personality. Once he is out who's going to entertain the masses?
> Also, Trumpism isn't going to end with Trump.
We'll see about that. The prominent members of his like are all doing their best impressions of him and it's they're not very convincing. Their sycophancy is the best indicator that they lack the spine to do the audacious things he does.
Someone with a completely different demeanor yet still standing above the crowd is what will likely succeed Trump and, as of now, I don't see it.
Regardless of the quality of potential successors, his supporters will still be there after and their core beliefs won't be any different after he's gone.
Their core beliefs are whatever Trump says.
No, that was the prior administration for using COVID as an opening for tyranny.
"You cannot kill an idea," was my biggest takeaway from my undergrad civilization course. The maximum has yet to fail.
Usually these things end up bringing more attention to a specific group or cause due to the Streisand Effect.
We have clear examples of authoritarian states successfully suppressing specific topics. It's not so much about killing it as creating a line where consequences start happening.
China is one example, where being too vocal about certain topics online can land you in a police station interview.
I don't think we should be overly confident that similar things can't happen in the US or EU.
And indeed, in the US we're seeing the administration successfully pressure changes at educational institutions for example. We're already uncomfortably far down this road imo.
Tbf we’ve kinda had these taboo topics in the US for a while.
Maxim
No studies on this area, so you have more street cred than me on this but....
You can't kill an idea, but you can severely maim it for a generation or 2.
> The maxim[] has yet to fail.
The Eleusinian Mysteries aren't what they were.
In fact, we don't know what they were.
The right is great at “killing” ideas or atleast the momentum for it. The left has been keeping true to the first amendment rights. It needs to start doing what the right does when it doesn’t like ideas. Somewhat violently shut it down. The right doesn’t care about free speech unless it’s for their specific goals.
> The left has been keeping true to the first amendment rights. It needs to start doing what the right does when it doesn’t like ideas. Somewhat violently shut it down.
What planet have you been on for the last ten years? Have you not been on reddit recently, especially in the aftermath of Kirk's assassination? The left has been collectively, enthusiastically arguing in favor of violent suppression of rightwing speech, with the rallying cries of "punch Nazis," "bash the fash," and similar, for over decade, usually with a misleading, misunderstood appeal to Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance (as though it were the nation's founding principle), and as far back as 2017, a majority of progressives agreed with that: https://www.cato.org/blog/51-strong-liberals-say-its-morally...
This is a distinctly progressive phenomenon, where a majority of them believe they have the right to respond to speech with violence. And as the Kirk assassination shows, they'll readily "Naziwash" you after killing you, even if you aren't one, to post-hoc justify (according to their warped thinking) your murder.
All the left accomplished with its thuggish, authoritarian attempts to intimidate conservatives was to radicalize them further, to the point that rightwing dissenters, who abounded in the G.W. Bush era, are now an endangered species, and your proposal is to antagonize them even more?
Funny. In my five+ decades on this planet, I seem to find the right more apt and eager to employ 'thuggish authoritarian attempts' -- akin to my time growing up in East Germany. But now being in America for over a decade it's really not much different.
Same tune. Same song. Different cast and scenery.
The Cato institute is _hardly_ an unbiased source. Regardless, even if we take your premise to be true, does that at _all_ justify what’s in TFA?
Are we just doing Richard Nixon, but stupider and more shameless?
You can go back a little further for even more direct analogs.
Perhaps we should finally get rid of the Patriot Act now?
It sounds to me like a great time to get into crime, in the USA
With the law enforcement apperartus distracted chasing anarchists, queers and anitifa it must be boom times for organised crime
This is what I told my progressives friends 4 years ago that Biden's push to extend the definitions of signs of domestic terrorism to "radical traditional Christians groups" was going to backfire and be reciprocated in probably worse and more morally wrong policies to them.
Ignoring what is "morally wrong", is it proper to blame Trump for doing the same thing that his predecessor did, with the only distinction being in the (completely legal) beliefs themselves?
Yes.
One may argue that tit-for-tat is appropriate, but generous-tit-for-tat is better.
Ah, yes, the old "don't do _that_, then the Republicans will do it too" -- as if this administration has been in any way constrained by the limits of any previous administration.
I'd ask for a citation of what Biden/Biden's admin actually did, but the Trump folks have been so busy disappearing things that the policy that I think you're referring to is now gone from the WhiteHouse.gov site and doesn't seem to be available via Internet Archive either.
Once again, in harmony, and louder for the people in the back: the both-sidesism is utterly misguided, plays into the Trump camp's hands, and just entirely fails to recognize just how not-normal and dangerous things are right now and they are just getting worse by the day.
I spoke too soon, I think that IA is having some intermittent problems, but I was finally able to get to Biden's "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrororism" here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210617103741/https://www.white...
At least in the broad-strokes PDF I see no mention of "radical Christian" anything. If there's some citation, I'd be curious to see it if it can still be found and if it mentions specific groups.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-internal-memo-warns-against-2...
Nothing changes the underlying asymmetry that one side is fighting to be welcoming of the unfamiliar while the other side is fighting to remain in fear of it. The latter will always spiral downward, giving in to it is a non-starter.
Lots of bad things were done in the name of empathy. Colonialism is an example. Those "uncivilized" people "needed" European civilization and the effort was encourage as charity by the Church.
An American hospital today will test delivering mothers for drugs without their consent and, if they test positive, confiscate the baby.
Does "radical traditional Christian groups" include the ones bombing abortion clinics and killing doctors?
Bombings and other political violence are already illegal.
Are we going to classify every single variations of the political beliefs of every domestic terrorists even if they are shared by millions of others law abiding citizens?
It's almost always a radicalized individual who does these things. If you want to extend the net to the people who radicalized them, you can but you should be aware that also works to the people who radicalized the Kirk shooter, the the would be Trump assassins (mostly the alive one, the dead one just seems like a nut) and Mangione.
This is pure victim blaming.
If the victim handed a weapon over to the past perpetrator of offences of the victim's free will, unprompted, is it really victim blaming to attribute the perpetrator's state of being able to reoffend 100% to the perp?
Alternatively, consider the world in which the claim that it is victim blaming is 100% true. Such a world, where large parts of the U.S. are focusing their attention on righting grievances instead of anything else, is a world where the U.S. is too distracted by actual civil war to avoid suffering conquest by foreign powers.
This is a mirror image of the Nazi rise to power. Criminalization and persecution of any left-wing beliefs.
Rise up now, before it's too late!
Worth noting the Nazis literally killed the socialist wing of the party to take it over as well. Fascists and authoritarians ultimately have no ideological allies but themselves.
It is already too late. There is no stopping this train, we are in for the ride to the end.
It isn’t too late.
The word “war” has meaning.
The executive is saying “war” and “portland” in the same sentence.
We the people can invoke treason— the commander in chief said the word and an American city.
Those two things are treason.
This isn’t hard. We just need to STAND UP.
It isn’t like we need to say anything.
Quite literally a mass formation of people to represent, “all of your generals that represent your digital social presence are documented pedophiles, just stop.”
This requires Republicans to hold the administration accountable. They already purged everyone who had the appetite for that. It seems clear that all electable Democrats will have been incarcerated by the midterms.
The government has already failed, objectively.
As someone that stepped outside of the church a decade ago, they’ll be the ones to decide if they are the religion to harbor sexual abuse or if they’ll also just STAND UP— For their own daughters.
At a certain point, they’ll have to admit Peter Thiel’s “political theology” was never “theology” and was only ever “politics”
Tbh, there’s a really easy mantra people outside the church can chant and that is
“Known by fruit, known by fruit!”
And if there’s any hope at all, it seems people do see “the rot” they’re just afraid to say it.
[flagged]
No you couldn't.
[flagged]
I don't remember the Biden admin deploying the army on US cities, authorizing the use of force.
You said "you could wind up on a terrorist watch list for posting apolitical cartoon frog memes," but you're linking to an article about violent extremists.
Which is it? Is the problem that Biden was putting people on a watchlist for completely innocuous and arbitrary memes or is the problem that he was putting violent extremists on a watchlist who happened to sometimes employ memes?
[flagged]
> My entire point is that the Biden administration was labeling innocuous content as "violent extremism.
No they weren't.
First, white supremacists do use the pepe meme, they intentionally adopted it as a symbol, so there is a correlation between that meme and violent extremism, albeit a weak one. You're pretending not to be perfectly aware of this, so I think you're the one not acting in good faith here.
I read the slides. Nowhere is it stated that using a frog meme makes one a violent extremist, and no one has been put onto a terrorist watch list simply for using that meme.
Good night, random green account.
"no one has been put onto a terrorist watch list simply for using that meme"
Agreed that pepe is not apolitical and comes out of a dark corner
But the linked article says "Flags from the left-wing Antifa movement. Depictions of Pepe the Frog," ... "They are all signs that extremists could be infiltrating the military, according to internal training materials "
So according to that source ... maybe yes, potentially there was one put on a watch list, because he used that frog. But I kind of agree that it is warranted. A watch list. Not a list that gives you automatically problems. But a indicator to take a closer look before trusting that person with critical things. But chances are there is not just the frog. I have never seen a person using that frog who did not also used worse language and behavior.
"Anticapitalists" on the other hand are usually people with a big mouth. The step from not liking the current system towards terrorism is a pretty big one. Also because anticapitalism is super vague. So I don't think it is quite the same thing.
The Trump admin literally declared antifascism as terrorism.
Accusation is confession
The American government has been like a Jamaican dancehall filled with deejays all riffing off of the same Riddim for some decades. It sounds like everyone decrying these actions as Nazism and Fascism is just coping with being late to the party.
Edit:
Guys, wait, c’mon, I mean you’re not wrong for decrying Nazism and Fascism against the current administration.
All I’m saying is that I think that there’s a hat that’s passed around in American government. It’s red, green, yellow and black, with matted strands of fabric around the edges of it. Sometimes, if you’re cool enough, you get to wear shades with the hat. But if the people already expect illness out of you then you can don it barefaced.
Trump dem a mash up di country baldfaced.
Annnd it's flagged. The digital brownshirts have beaten undesired speech into submission once again.
I am of the opinion that the "No politics" rule of HN is just a thin veil attempting to shield the tech industry from criticism for enabling these buffoons.
It really is. Too much of our industry operates on some perverse savior complex where they believe themselves the only capable humans on the planet and everyone else to be inferior in some way (often intellectually, but there’s plenty of -isms too).
These topics are incredibly salient to discuss if we’re going to improve our industry and society. Everything is political, and should be discussed in the context of technology here - which this article is highly relevant for.
Absolutely. It’s even more frustrating that I tried to post this on a few notable subreddits and got auto-flagged for not complying with domain allowlists or other meaningless rules.
Not every site has to be another Reddit
What? Discussing thought provoking news in the political world? No, flagging this thread, which is thought provoking is just insulating those who can afford to ignore it.
If HN is about intellectual curiosity, the heated disagreement in this comment section should be proof of how stimulating this topic is. But we’d rather stick our heads in the sand rather than confront what inconveniences us.