"Ooh you should be concerned" made sense in October 2024. Since January 2020 when Americans accepted "OK, we're making the fascist leader the head of our army" there's no value in "consternation" the thing you want is a plan to leave.
At first this can be quite structured and casual like, I should look for life opportunities abroad. Ooh, I quite like France and this outfit in Brittany are hiring in my field, I will apply and see what happens.
Gradually leaving becomes more urgent, and eventually you should focus just on getting over the border even if you don't have specific plans for where you'll go or what you'll do after that. Countries immediately bordering a fascist state often don't have a lot of patience for refugees, but, hey, at least you're out.
Fleeing makes sense for people at most risk of persecution (e.g. trans people, Jews, those who speak out), but many people are prevented from fleeing by their consciences. They have to stay and fight. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resistance#Factions
I certainly don't want to condemn the choice to stay and fight. What I can tell you is that many people aren't brave enough to fight, but fleeing is much more possible. If you feel you must fight, you should absolutely do that, but if you can't summon that bravery you should flee, don't allow yourself to become a victim.
If your home is on fire, some people will bravely stay and fight the fire, but the instruction we give everybody is to flee, you can get another home, but if you die there's nothing to be done about it, so better flee.
I have kids. When it’s time to flee, we’ll flee, and I could give two dry fucks what some rando thinks about whether I’m going to “contribute to the culture” of whatever country will have us.
Not to mention... why don't they want to bring him back? It took awhile for them to come out with a reason so is that the real reason, or is that an excuse because he's no longer alive? Very scary either way.
~30-35% of people like this sort of thing because it makes them feel powerful by proxy.
~20% are fatalists who think there's nothing you can do about it and just want to keep their head down and out of trouble.
Maybe 20% are naive people who don't get it and another 20% are hand-wringers who don't know what to do about it.
Fewer than 20% are able to comprehend, speak out, and organize against it and it's hard for them to make their voices heard enough to build a coalition that outnumbers the first group.
If people don't think that their voices will be heard, then surely action is required instead.
From the outside, it looks like there's a few protests, but nothing particularly decisive. To my mind, the next step is rioting, although that will likely lead to martial law being imposed. However, it looks to me like ICE agents are pretty much acting like martial law has been declared.
Specific, targeted sabotage seems more effective than rioting. You could track ICE agents to their homes, and put lentils in the valve caps of their tyres, so they can't get to work: enough people make "deflate that one neighbour's tyres" part of their morning routine, and ICE ceases to exist as an organisation.
Violence, especially undirected violence, is a credible threat. If you can't trust those in power to respond sensibly to that threat, they escalate and escalate and then you've got a civil war on your hands. Nah: minimal, surgical, de-escalating force is the way to go. (Unless you deem things bad enough for a revolution, in which case… I'm still not sure riots should be in your playbook.)
I guess a riot would be useful if you need to distract the enemy's forces, while a small party sneaks into Mordor to destroy the One Ring. But the real world rarely has single-target objectives like that.
Ok. I don't say it very often that is some ridiculously bad advice. Technically, it is also a call to vandalism. I urge those reading this and considering parent's words in good faith to think thrice before engaging in summer of love 2.
There is widespread concern. It's just not reported, because that's not a news story. If you're in the US, get together with your local community and do something about this (e.g. establish / repurpose a neighbourhood watch), before it's too late.
Then the press is not doing its job. It is the job of all of us to tell them that. Then again, everyone wants someone else to speak up because they think their voice can make no difference.
When I cancelled my Washington Post subscription I wrote a letter to the editor. The important part of that letter was under what set of circumstances I might start trusting the Washington Post again. I never got a response. Not that I expected one. I’m sure they were inundated with angry letters at the time.
From time to time I write letters. To journalists, to leaders, I even wrote our prime minister once - and got a reply. Sometimes they are letters of support when someone has stuck their neck out and deserves a pat on the back. Or when someone has done good work. Too often they are letters telling people to do their job properly or to behave like adults. A lot of politicians and members of the press need a reminder to behave like adults and do their job these days. To do the demanding part of their job. Not just the part that is easy or that brings in campaign contributions or easy sales.
I never expect people to respond. But sometimes they do. This means I’ve reached people.
I think we (people who care, that is) should look at organizing our own news. Rich people do it, must be something to it.
The purpose of most news companies is to make money by selling ads. Real news would have to come from something that doesn't run ads and makes their money another way
> There is widespread concern. It's just not reported, because that's not a news story.
No, it is annews story, and widepsread concerns are often reported on; its not widely reported on because the media is a mix of institutiins which tend to be either in support of the Administration doing it or in fear of being targeted in retaliation for reporting on topics like that.
> Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. […] Despite these encouraging statistics, we document that the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act.
The situation is similar in the US: the majority of people don't think the government should be kidnapping citizens from their homes and shipping them off to foreign prisons without trial, but they also think everyone else is okay with it.
"It's a widespread concern" is not a news story, unless and until someone does the research and confirms it. Otherwise, how do the journalists know it's the case? And investigative journalists aren't usually running large-scale population studies.
It could be argued that the corruption of news media is the reason that the masses who support, and have always supported, climate action believe that it's not a widespread belief.
I'd argue it's fairly directly responsible for the small number who don't support climate action too.
And I think the same applies to governments kidnapping people and ignoring courts who tell them it's illegal.
> its not widely reported on because the media is a mix of institutiins which tend to be either in support of the Administration doing it or in fear of being targeted in retaliation for reporting on topics like that.
Here is a list of major news media outlets from Wikipedia[1].
Which of the following do you think either supports the current administration or fears being targeted by it?
ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Bloomberg, Vice News, HBO, HuffPost, TMZ, CNET, NPR, The Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Time , U.S. News & World Report
Fox News supports and many of the others fear being targeted by it, some are a bit in between like Washington Post and LA Times (billionaire owners sucking up to the dictator, as is tradition when such regimes rise to power)
Unless you think threats of DOJ investigation, pulling broadcast licenses, or extremely expensive lawsuits don't produce fear? In that case you should let authoritarians know their playbook is out of date. Of course it's not, which is why authoritarians follow such a distinct pattern.
No no, for WaPo one need only know that Bezos spiked the Editorial Board's endorsement of Harris and then Blue Origin executives met with the Trump campaign literally hours later.
Oh yeah and that they wouldn't publish a cartoon poking fun at the kleptocracy. The artist resigned in protest and went on to win a Pulitzer, which WaPo had no problem taking credit for.
Is it fair to say that Navalny didn't fear Putin because he was actually quite vocal against Putin?
So the Washington Post is extremely anti-Trump but once or twice the owner stepped in and forced them to remain neutral _maybe_ so as not to jeopardize government contracts for one of his other companies. But also there was a big backlash, and he probably could never do this again or the very least extremely infrequently?
Those are almost all sanewashing headlines for truly terrible acts.
Literally things that you'd expect to find in an Alan Moore dystopian graphic novel, or as world building background TV headlines in a gritty Robocop described in peppy business as usual terms.
The top one is an alcoholic Fox News host being appointed as an Attorney General to replace a disastrous one that couldn't even get Republican support to be confirmed, a brief summary of his 120 days:
> He represented Jan. 6 defendants before getting the job, punished and demoted their prosecutors when he got it, and launched a series of ideological investigations (wokeness in medical journals, a five-year old Chuck Schumer gaffe) that went nowhere.
Our system works because it doesn't have friction. I wouldn't think it would take too much to make things prohibitively expensive for the government by the people adding legal, simple friction at every possible pain point.
The government has forgotten it can only do what it does with the consent of the people, and that a small minority could really frustrate things if they truly wanted to.
> This can happen to anyone. Why is there no widespread concern or consternation
I don't actually think the majority of the population believes this could happen to them. Furthermore, a huge portion of the population is very deliberately tuning out what they find to be depressing news. Though I'm not sure you're correct about the lack of widespread concern regardless.
A list of minor legal frictions that the average person can introduce to slow down the system/increase expenses to the point the government has to go back to caring about larger social consensus on policies.
Unfortunately, it is. Kalief Browder was kept largely in solitary for more than two years for allegedly stealing a backpack.
If you want to help with the fight to get these sorts of egregious treatments (especially pre-trial) recognized as violations of the 6th and 8th amendments, join to the fight to win back the courts from conservatives.
This is categorically untrue, even on a quick reading.
Take "Fear of difference" -- socialists tend to be (perhaps even annoyingly) anti-racist and "woke" types who are largely cool with everyone being different.
Or "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" ... the number of non-violent socialists I know is really high. (Though Karl Marx was pro gun, and many leftists are as well.)
"Everybody is educated to become a hero" -- socialism tends to oppose the idea of a "great man", favoring instead a collective drive towards improvement.
So no, I don't think all of these are commonalities of socialism in any way. (And besides, what type of socialism? Communism? Anarchism? Democratic socialism? Syndicalism? Socialism encompases a MUCH wider space than Fascism does...)
> socialists tend to be (perhaps even annoyingly) anti-racist and "woke" types who are largely cool with everyone being different.
That's why close to 100% of the POC walking away from these communities describe them as racist hell holes full of backstabbing and enjoy the "don't tell, don't care" approach of the opposition.
And good luck to you if the diversity you enjoy isn't genetic in nature, but a matter of non-approved opinion.
> the number of non-violent socialists I know is really high.
The problem is the number of violent ones being high, too. E.g. I don't see cars made by Jack Dorsey burning in the streets.
Also where is all the praise for Trump for being the only President since the 70s to not have started any new armed conflicts during his first term?
> And besides, what type of socialism? Communism? Anarchism? Democratic socialism? Syndicalism? Socialism encompases a MUCH wider space than Fascism does
Fun fact: Fascism is just Syndicalism combined with Engel's nationalist approach to Socialism. This includes Italian Fascism, Francoist Spain and Nazi Germany (who also slapped novel occultism on top).
I'd say "Socialism" are all of the ideologies spawned from the first two Internationals. Comintern didn't really allow for any divers thinking.
Also Anarchism isn't Socialism or left wing at all. Enforcing a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is impossible without a functioning state. Many of the self-declared "Anarchists" are but confused lazy Communists thinking they're going to be part of the Intelligenzia class.
Genuine Anarchism is the right most end of right wing extremism: A complete collapse of any organized society.
> Take "Fear of difference" -- socialists tend to be (perhaps even annoyingly) anti-racist and "woke" types who are largely cool with everyone being different.
Socialists tend to be big on class warfare and killing people by the millions in the name of levelling the playing field.
> Or "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" ... the number of non-violent socialists I know is really high. (Though Karl Marx was pro gun, and many leftists are as well.)
Almost all of the most violent things happening in the 20th Century were in Socialist regimes. USSR / China under Communism / the Khmer Rouge.
And "pro gun" isn't "pro violence".
> "Everybody is educated to become a hero" -- socialism tends to oppose the idea of a "great man", favoring instead a collective drive towards improvement.
There's endless Soviet propaganda showing strong, heroic depictions of comrades.
Socialism gave us Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and a wall splitting the country. The 5 days working week was introduced in the West in 1965 under a conservative government. It took 2 years longer for the socialist East to do the same. A 40 hours week was never achieved by Socialism but was only introduced after reunification.
The word Socialism might not mean the same for everyone.
Edit: Before you downvote read Webster's definition I posted further down. To be clear, I don't believe the conservative government of Ludwig Erhard would have introduced the 40 hours week out of their own good will. You can read about the union's campaign here: https://www.planet-wissen.de/geschichte/deutsche_geschichte/...
> The 5 days working week was introduced in the West in 1965 under a conservative government.
And the government just decided to do that out of the kindness of their hearts?
There was years/decades of agitation and pressure by labour to bring the idea to the forefront of people's thought.
> The rallying cry of the 19th-century labor movement was “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” a phrase first coined by Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer turned labor reformer.
[…]
> The next big push came on May 1, 1886, when Chicago unions and political activists called for a nationwide “May Day” strike for the 8-hour day. More than 10,000 people gathered in Chicago for what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration. Tensions escalated between strikers and police, resulting in the death of four demonstrators. In response, rioters and anarchists took to the streets on May 4, a violent clash that ended with a deadly bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.
In the US, Labor Day is in September, but for the rest of the world it is called May Day and celebrated on May 1, which was decided at the Second International socialist conference:
Again, socialism might not mean what you think it means, especially in other parts of the world.
Let me give you an example in English.
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary from 1981 [1] gives the following definition of socialism:
"1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a: asystem of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done"
That is the entire entry. Only later other meanings have been added to it.
The word has been abused, especially in the US, as a label for anything that protects worker's rights or tries to keep the social chasm between rich and poor at bay. Even entire countries that are actually very capitalist like Sweden have been mislabelled "socialist", either because of ignorance or some weird political agitation.
So no, Socialism is not what gave us a 40 hour workweek, but the political engagement of unions and of those who believe that unchecked capitalism is not a good idea. If you believe those people are socialists, you might want to ask yourself whether you have fallen for some kind of propaganda that tries to paint those ideas in a bad and dangerous light.
These 14 points are ridiculous. For some reason I always expect to see things like:
- Restricting freedom of assembly
- Restricting freedom of speech
- Depriving people of political representation
- Disarming the citizens
But I get:
- 1. People like Christmas
- 2. Not adopting the radical ideology of a self-declared intelligenzia
- 5. Not celebrating an entrenched political elite mass importing people sharing their ideology
- 6. Being upset when politicians actively work on making people's live a living hell
- 7. Paying attention to the fact that it's a big club and you're not part of it
- 8. Stop mentioning the people ruining your lives also have weaknesses
- 9. Stop resisting, you barely staying alive is perfectly normal. Expecting success in return for your efforts is absurd.
- 10. Weakness is strength. How dare you support people seeking to improve themselves?
- 12. How dare you trying to figure out what is happening on our private islands? All of you hate women! And having sex. And not having sex. And those having sex, but not with you.
- 13. Do not question our narrative of who is the only valid Voice of the People. Those voicing their concerns in spaces escaping our control so far are just a few selected Russian trolls.
- 14. Stop expressing your thoughts in ways people actually understand. Using words with definitions older than 2 weeks is strictly forbidden
But what the list gives are the particularities of fascism.
Your first list is way too broad and does not capture the particularities that makes fascism different from other kinds of dictatorship.
The second list is obviously a ridiculous take, and it is also a good illustration of the hypocrisy that we find too often in these discussion. "Nowadays, all the wokes are saying that everything is racist" followed that "someone pointed that usually in fascist movements, we find appeals to a cult of tradition, so this person is a bad person that says that everyone who like Christmas is a fascist". There is a big big spectrum of possibilities between "liking Christmas" and "appeal to a cult of tradition". Plenty of people like Christmas and yet it is impossible to find in their ideology an appeal to a cult of tradition.
> Your first list is way too broad and does not capture the particularities that makes fascism different from other kinds of dictatorship.
Fair, but tbh, I'd categorize fascism mostly by the combination of Syndicalism and the nationalist approach to overthrowing capitalism.
> The second list is obviously a ridiculous take
Yes, because this author's points were ridiculous, cut up beyond recognition to fit the author's political agenda. SmolLM-135M would have done a more decent job summing up the original 14 points speech. And even some of the points in the original speech were ridiculous. Like:
"Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons, doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."
> Fair, but tbh, I'd categorize fascism mostly by the combination of Syndicalism and the nationalist approach to overthrowing capitalism.
Oh, so your two first points are 1. people don't like to work, 2. not adopting the radical ideology of self-declared chiefs of industry.
(Don't take it seriously, it is just to show that everyone can do the same lame argumentation than you have done with everything, and that therefore it has no weight at all)
> Yes, because this author's points were ridiculous
Not sure who you are referring to as "author". Eco? The author of the OpenCulture article? Someone in HN comments? 404media?
But it does not really matter, does it?
Imagine someone says "all the dogs are purple". Then I say "what they said is ridiculous because the fact that people like Christmas is obvious and not particular". We are BOTH stupid. The first person has said something ridiculous. And me, instead of just using a non-stupid argument to point that it is ridiculous, I made uselessly a fool of myself by talking about people who like Christmas as if I'm too stupid to notice that this argument does not have any grip on the initial sentence. Either I thought it had grip, and in this case I'm an idiot, or I know it had no grip, and in this case I'm an idiot for uselessly choosing to look like one instead of saying the hundreds of other things that could have been constructive.
Ok, well historically when people have been disappeared by governments, it's considered "bad". Stalin painting out pictures of Trotsky is generally frowned upon.
Anyone who spent an hour reading US history learns about the racism, xenophobia and jingoism that has been part of American society since the first pilgrims got off the ship.
The only difference is that the American elite is now in on it too. For whatever reasons I do not know.
It is impossible to reconcile black opps, courts and prisons, with any notion of law.
And in cases like these ,it should by rights be the exact oposite. IE: a foriegn national with criminal behavior, should be then have all of there info made public, and loose there right to privacy, the whole case is public. There will be little chance of bad actors finding an advocate or
a sponsor, and on the other hand, inocently accused can quickly be cleared by willing agencys and advocates, be exonerated and likely then find sponsors.
But building a black court and prison system, that is run by private for proffit companys is a nightmare scenario that will be abused wholesale.
Quite litteraly a capitalist version of the sibearean prison camps, where exile was a death scentence, and anyone could be "denounced" and sent there, some tiny minority "rehabilitated" and
brought back.
My take is bleak, but where exactly are the lines and grey zones, guardrails, etc?
Maybe they don't because any further detail is irrelevant. Those opposed to this, such as myself, believe he doesn't deserve this at the hands of a supposedly free country, whoever he is. The ones who support it need nothing more than the fact this Administration did it to believe he deserves it.
"Ricardo Prada Vásquez was not on a government list of people sent to a mega prison in El Salvador. But hacked data shows he was booked on a flight to the country.
Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan man whose family says he was “disappeared” and who wasn’t included on a previously leaked government list of people sent to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador, was included on a private airline’s flight manifest to the country, according to hacked airline data obtained and analyzed by 404 Media."
Those are the first two paragraphs of the story, what do you think is missing that would help your comprehension of the situation?
The problem is that he hasn’t had an opportunity to plead his case.
Good law enforcement officers regularly make honest mistakes. Courts are a safeguard against this.
Imagine that you get caught up in an immigration raid. Maybe you were at a Mexican restaurant. ICE shows up and half the staff quickly sit at tables pretending to be customers. ICE arrests everyone, including you.
Will ICE let you go home to go look for your birth certificate? If your wife hires a lawyer what process will your lawyer use to present your birth certificate to ICE?
Due process and the rule of law protects you from the arbitrary power of the state.
Agree. I've been trying to be more proactive in supporting companies and institutions that are doing important work. That includes news organizations that I was previously using archive.ph to read.
Vote with your dollars (and of course vote with your vote!).
I subscribed the day they launched and haven’t regretted it. They have the best tech reporting and your subscription directly supports the journalists.
Meh…I trust nothing. Not the government, not the media, and definitely not activist hackers.
If you are unscrupulous enough to hack someone else’s data, you are not trustworthy enough for me to trust that you haven’t manipulated the data you claim you have hacked.
Just what exactly is “good”? People on both sides of this think they are doing good by their actions (even justifying the bad they do because of their “virtues”). Also, both sides have lots of people agreeing with them so I really don’t think there is some underlying universal common human “good” that establishes one side as right and another wrong excusing the bad actions of one side in the fight of the other on this topic.
> Now this he understood. It wasn’t damn politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as “bad.”
