One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:
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House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
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U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
There's that infamous Lee Atwater quote (former RNC chariman who helped Bush I and Reagan win on their 'no taxes, cut social services' rhetoric) that I won't quote here but is foundational to modern conservative dogwhistle politics: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
We live downstream of that where people often parrot the same dogwhistles uncritically 40 years later without understanding how deeply racist they are.
I won't say there aren't myriads of issues with establishment we-must-appeal-to-the-moderates DNC consultation priesthood but historically and in recent times one party has generally been better about civil rights than the other:
If anything, you can thank most of the repeal of things like reproductive rights, the Voting Rights Act, etc and enshrinement of corporate personhood, gerrymandering, etc to the explicitly conservative project of The Federalist Society who now have the ruling majority in the Supreme Court.
Personally I just click on people's usernames and skim a page or two of their comment history. I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as it strips all the surrounding context from what someone is saying. The whole reason I can discuss contentious issues with my friends is that they know I am not a monster, but this luxury just doesn't exist in web forums.
So especially in these times, I think it's important that we do a little work to see where one another might coming from [assuming it's in good faith to begin with], rather than squandering our focus on destructive infighting from slight misunderstandings.
And as the old joke goes - How do you know if someone is a maggot? Don't worry, they'll tell you!
> I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as this strips the surrounding context from what someone is saying.
I get what you mean about quoting something out of context, but I always read the intent of that guideline as the opposite: that a reply should quote enough of the original to provide the context. Really only needed near the top of long/deep threads where the reply might be multiple screens below the nested replies above it. Summarizing also works, which always risks misinterpretation, but it's also good to get that interpretation out in the open (again assuming good faith).
One thing I still can't stand reading is the usenet-era "point-for-point" style that interleaves a sentence or two of quote alternating with response, back and forth for the whole post. It's not only noisy, it tends toward a very snippy tone as well.
No, I wasn't talking about the context of the reply chain... but rather the context of everything else a commenter does/says/believes.
The comment in question - go read a few pages of the poster's comment history and you will understand it was meant as sarcasm. The difficulty is that sarcasm takes social capital to execute, and the comment-in-isolation model eschews even having that type of reputation.
Now in this case it would have been relatively easy to avoid sarcasm (although tiring, and I would say we're worse off for it). But the same difficulty applies to straightforward communication as well - if someone is criticizing the DNC, are they doing it from a place of trying to reform and make it better, or are they trying to drive cynicism and apathy? You don't know unless you know them.
And while you can mitigate the problem by writing comments that appeal to some groupthink (marking you as part of the tribe) before making a nuanced point against some other bit of groupthink, this propagates the first groupthink (which is itself often a problem) as well as bad-faith commenters being able to perform the same pattern.
Surely there must be someway to signal that a comment is sarcastic in an easily identifiable way? A code of some kind like a common signifier indicating an ending state that speaks directly to that cultural tribe along with a shorthand expression denoting irony?
Maybe something like "/s"?
The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you, the writer, are not so dense and uncultured that you don't know extremely common knowledge.
If only there was a method for identifying how common certain kinds of knowledge are!
I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
This doesn't just apply to race. The whole "trans people in women's bathrooms/sports" panic was another example of people being told that a tiny minority of people are a huge threat that we all need to focus on, while we were being screwed over by a kleptocracy. Same with "Antifa."
And it worked. Politicians do this because it works.
There are several other wacky beliefs that get circulated on the left, such as abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, that speech is violence, and so on. These also get pointed to when a politician on the left shows support for these. However the belief that men can become women is next level bizarre, trying to upturn something so fundamental to our existence and understanding of the world - like flat-earthism - and that's why the right have focused so heavily on it as an attack line.
Agreed, and if the position being advocated by many on the left was merely that people should be free to express themselves however they please, I don't think the right would have found it an effective line of attack. Most people on the libertarian branch of the right would likely agree in principle too.
I think that it was very strange how this became such an issue. Like, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, who cares about another's gender expression?
But it's such a tiny proportion of the population, and matters much less than making things better for the populace (which is the whole point of governance).
I'm not a Marxist, but the whole culture war stuff is very very convenient for those who don't want to work on reducing inequality (by taxing the upper earners more). And given how much of the Democratic vote is dependent on these people, I guess it makes political sense in the short term.
To be more charitable: people should really read more and try to understand more about the difference between biological sex and gender. Many people think there is no difference and that's why they have such a reaction: "but they are trying to change something fundamental about biology!".
I used to have trouble with it as well, coming from a more traditional society.
As for the other wacky beliefs: they are mostly exaggerated. When talking about police, most leftist I know don't _literally_ want to just dismantle the whole thing and replace it with nothing. The point is to highlight the absolute lousy state of affairs, more than it is to discontinue the notion of policing.
if I remember correctly, Howard Zinn covers this pretty well in his A People's History of the Unites States: racism was promoted by the wealthy in order to keep the poor divided and weak (the fear of poor whites and blacks uniting was real)
Socialists like to frame everything as a class war, but reality is not so black and white. Rich people aren't a monolith and this was especially not the case with civil rights. The American elite were thoroughly embarrassed by their European counterparts laughing at their countrymen being so boorish as to lynch people for the color of their skin. Civil Rights came from the top down just as much, if not more, than it came from the bottom up. Without the Supreme Court that gave us Brown v Board and LBJ's warm reception of the NAACP, we would not have Civil Rights as we know it. At best, we'd get half measures that the kind we got under Reconstruction.
This seems like an oversimplification and one of your own examples shows it. Aren’t “the Jews” today in power or in very close proximity, not just locally but on the world stage? Are they redirecting the anger to themselves? Or is there more to the reasons people would direct their hate or dislike towards an entire group of people?
Not saying that you’re wrong, but there’s more to it. Even when not directed by those in power, some people need an external reason for their own failures. They need a target for their anger that is not themselves.
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.
States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.
And mainstream conservative justification, including the US Supreme Court, is that because this is not overtly racist in its design, but just coincidentally racist in its impact, it has plausible deniability. Basically an extension of the “racism is over” school of thought.
And an extension of the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness.
Edit: funny, I pre-sniped the sibling responses to your comment.
I appreciate you called out the more fundamental disagreement here: "... the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness."
I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.
That's not "unfortunate". It was a deliberate choice. Any term used to describe the problem is treated as if it meant something bad, and then we're told we can't talk about it because it's "politicized". As if the entire point of the political process was about something other than resolving disagreements.
Your framing is fundamentally illiberal. Refraining from engaging using “well deep in your heart” excuses means you can self-righteously ignore any position you disagree with and never have to face real argument. And it is wonderfully non-falsifiable, so you can always use it!
It is not "illiberal'. It is descriptive and objective. As opposed to pretending I am naive dumbo.
I did not engaged in "well deep down". I said "the motivation is clearly that. Even openly stated again and again and again whenever in front of symphatetic audience"
I highly recommend the video series "The Alt-Right Playbook" (in the sense of an expose, not a how-to) which has an episode dedicated to this, titled "Always a Bigger Fish". [0], which goes into how people might be talking "past" one-another.
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> Your conservative friend is often baffled as to what you're even trying to say when you point out there's not enough high-paying jobs or affordable health plans for everyone.
> There's not supposed to be. The system requires an underclass. Someone's gotta clean the toilets.
> Capitalism, then, is a proving ground: it's how you demonstrate where in the hierarchy you deserve to be. Do you have more than you need, or less?
I'm sure the video goes into more depth, but the "inevitability of hierarchy" explanation has never made sense to me.
If reactionaries place more importance on hierarchy, then shouldn't this mean accepting the hierarchy as it stands and knowing their place in it? Progressive beliefs are often seen as being a product of out of touch affluenza, so [stereotypical] progressives' relative direction in the hierarchy should be clear. Meanwhile the underclass below them with shittier jobs should make them feel content from being above a different group of people - illegal labor especially puts even more people below them!
Rather what they would seem to want is some other hierarchy where they sit higher. And while it's completely understandable to want to improve your position, it's specious to give this credit as some noble abstract belief in hierarchy rather than mere zero-sum scrapping to improve their lot.
So at least to me, reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of an [unfair] hierarchy doesn't seem like anything particularly different than reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of $whatever else to get them riled up and turn off their ability to reason or communicate. It's never actually about the lofty value, but rather emotional appeals to how you've been wronged so let's get revenge.
Progressive thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi believe every single policy issue must be evaluated on the basis of whether it happens to impact different races differently. Essentially turning the state into a gigantic social engineering project.
Unlike conservative agenda of ... massive social engineering? Like, conservatives openly talk about shaping society the way they want it, punishing those who dont conform and try to pass laws to do so.
And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all? Why are we arguing at the extremes? What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses? Have you even heard about something like how nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
I don't actually believe that it disproportionately affected the Navajo nation. I believe that it affected the Navajo nation some because a lot of nuclear tests were done in the remote western deserts which is where the Navajo reservation is. And I believe that some people who claimed they were advocating for Navajo interests claimed this constituted an offense against them in such a way that it justifies some kind of disparate action law. But I don't actually believe that Navajo were more affected than non-Navajo by nuclear testing; and I don't want people to be able to claim that they were in such a way that it creates any kind of legal obligation on non-Navajo.
>And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?
This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:
The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.
>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.
Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?
Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.
> This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
Where does that leave the equal protection clause?
> >And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
> I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
If it affected you directly, you might care.
Because it doesn't, you are in the position to pick and choose what you give your interest and energy to.
It's not, as those policies allow those in power and currently benefiting from the status quo to abuse minorities. It's why rights and equal protections have to be codified.
I hate this line of thinking. It's hard to argue that Republicans are strictly racist when you have people like Tim Scott in respected positions. Literally Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State. If we are going to take racism seriously, race needs to be the causal mechanism... not culture, not politics.
The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.
It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.
The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.
There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)
The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.
Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.
> you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing. You are making the same argument as mid-century racist policymakers that were defeated by the VRA. Back then you would argue that Poll taxes and voter tests aren't illegal, they just prevent the indigent and uneducated from voting. Well those policies were the beating heart of Jim Crow, which the VRA intended to defeat.
You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities". Well we've been there. It's been illegal to make laws directly against racial groups since reconstruction. This is why much of Jim Crow was built on a foundation of targeting adjacent traits rather than race specifically, and why many lament the defanging of the VRA.
>Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing.
You can't say this with a straight face. Before the civil rights act we literally had white's only sections of businesses. Separate-but-unequal was the apartheid of the South. That just doesn't exist anymore in any kind of open and accepted way, thank god.
>You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities".
Again, I'm not saying that at all, the Supreme Court isn't saying that either. You are again conflating minorities as a singular voting bloc with a singular voting interest. The entire point here is that there is plenty of evidence that this is about politics, not about race.
I think gerrymandering is atrocious. I think we should move to a proportional voting system where gerrymandering is no longer achievable. The idea that 25% of a population can dictate government control to the other 75% of the population by drawing arbitrary lines is atrocious. I just think it's quite clear that this isn't happening to suppress the vote along racial lines.
The idea here is that I think it's quite plausible that black republicans are being used along gerrymandering line to help elect republicans. If it were about race... then black republicans would also need to be disenfranchised.
Jim Crow was very obviously terrible... it was also very overt and obvious. I grew up in Texas, and the idea that the right is a secret cabal of racists trying to create some kind of white government is insane. The idea that the general socioeconomic concerns of the black community put most black voters on the political left makes vastly more sense, and it also explains the significantly larger numbers of Hispanic representatives on the Texas right.
It's not one data point. There is plenty of evidence that this is about politics... not about race.
>ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax)
The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
The nature of that ID is essential. If it used to authenticate someone for voting, which is a RIGHT, then every citizen must have a RIGHT to possess that ID. Not only that, but obtaining the ID must not pose any encumbrance beyond the effort to vote.
Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.
Drivers licenses haven't been the only form of state ID across the US for well over a generation now, and as national-level ID usable in any state there is the passport (and at less cost there was the passport card).
The physical Social Security card was never meant to be used as ID (the number on it is, de facto, another story).
Obtaining ID cards in other developed countries requires the same payment of application fees and visits to offices, so those steps being required in the US, too, aren't any refutation of the OP's comment.
>Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
28 USD for a non-driver ID in my state of residence (1) (exceptions: free if you are homeless or are a blind veteran)
65 USD for a passport card (2) (the cheapest passport option).
Both require attending in-person appointments.
For contrast:
Voting is compulsory in Australia. Citizens may register to vote entirely online, and may prove their identity using a Medicare card or citizenship certificate (or driver's license or passport, ofc) (3). (Aside: this page of FAQs explicitly calls out that these two means of proving ID have been added as a response to increasing feedback from young people, disabled people, and people living in remote areas about having less access to driver's license or passport.)
Obtaining an Australian Medicare card is free, and citizens may prove their identity using a birth certificate (no need for it to be certified) and submitting their application + supporting documents by email (or by mail, but that costs postage) (4).
Australia is somewhat unusual here among developed democracies, as a simple web search will show. Elsewhere obtaining an ID typically requires at least some payment and time spent visiting an office.
I think that's immaterial to the present thread. Such countries exist and are regarded as developed democracies by the usual respected rankings, so to argue that "well, they aren't really democracies then" would not be a very productive enterprise.
Are these REAL ID? Are they free? How long does one has to drive to find an office who can deliver those? How much paperwork is needed? How many times does one has to get back in person to that ID office?
Stop. We can all see you argue in bad faith. You are at best incurious and naive, and at worst...
Do you pay taxes? Have you ever applied for a loan/bank account/rent/mortgage/etc? Have you ever enrolled a child in school? Have you ever applied for a job? Have you ever had to fill out paperwork after the loss of a loved one? etc etc etc etc
These are all tasks that a functional adult in the world needs to do regardless of background / race / creed / etc.
It's not bad faith to say hey as a functional adult you should go get a fucking ID.
What is the % of people that honestly do not have one? Pass a law and give people 4 years to go get one.
Like why must you insist on treating people like hopeless children?
I think it is bad faith to implicitly assume a driver's license is required when there are easier options.
I have a state ID, a REAL ID. It was not particularly difficult to get. I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that there are major cross-national differences in difficulty here.
Thank you for reminding us that you aren't working three jobs in the same day to make ends meet, have disposable income and free time to collect the documents and get to the office twice,and live in a district where said office isn't half a day of driving (with the current gas prices) away.
And of course, you are fine with people with less affodances than you not being able to vote. Such moral character on top of your comfortable life.
You make it sound like this would pass into law and within 48 hours everyone would need to go get an ID.
You'd pass this into law and then have it take effect 2-4 years out, and if you can't go and secure yourself an ID after 2-4 years of notice you aren't a functional adult.
It is also funny you have at people not being real adults when the vice president of the United States - himself very worried about election fraud - is saying people in Alaska may be confused between two Sullivans on the ballot because "people are busy. People have lives. People have jobs". Apparently he thinks a large proportion of Alaskans aren't functioning adults. Funny, that.
>Thank you for reminding us that you aren't working three jobs in the same day to make ends meet, have disposable income and free time to collect the documents and get to the office twice,and live in a district where said office isn't half a day of driving (with the current gas prices) away.
Sure, I mean, going to the grocery store is also very oppressive. You need money, time, transport, etc.
>And of course, you are fine with people with less affodances than you not being able to vote. Such moral character on top of your comfortable life.
I have no issue if people want to implement measures to make it easier to get ID. But given the state of US democracy, election security currently seems important enough to me that voter ID laws seem reasonable. That's how policy works--there are tradeoffs. Want me to pearl-clutch about your moral character in allowing the country to descend into fascism through a contested election?
>I have no issue if people want to implement measures to make it easier to get ID.
That's the big "if". That's why the current representatives who pretend to want to secure the elections are only pretending. That's why you are not answering in good faith, because you are ignoring/handwaving that crucial part.
>Sure, I mean, going to the grocery store is also very oppressive. You need money, time, transport, etc.
Going to the grocery store is not a constitutional right. We already went through this vacuous argument when Republicans pretended that "you have to show ID to have unlimited pasta at the Olive Garden" as an excuse for their sudden request to force states to impose ID requirements just before the midterms. Again: bad faith argument.
I live in a country where there is ID requirements to vote. It is also a place where we use paper ballots, and polling places have never queues longer than five minutes, and voting only happens on Sundays. There is no mail voting. There is no gerrymandering. This is all possible because the whole system is made to make voting convenient and always has been. This can't be said of the USA which has an old and present history of massive voter suppression and electoral manipulation. The current push from Republicans to "secure" the elections is a complete bad faith attempt because they are completely open, at all levels, this is only to cancel and contest Democrat votes. That's what you describe as "election security currently seems important enough to me that voter ID laws seem reasonable". You completely ignore that, as well as the lies behind the argument:
"From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle"
ID cards in other developed and democratic countries typically require payment of application fees (sometimes modest fees, sometimes substantial fees) and visits to offices, too.
Does the American left feel the same way about firearms? I've heard for years that there should be registration and licensing on them (which I actually agree with).
Some Americans called left believe the right to firearms is for states not people. Some believe rights can have reasonable restrictions and a weapon and a ballot are different. Some quote Karl Marx who said Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered.
As someone from one of those non-US democracies, the reason why we can mandate IDs for votes is because they're basically trivial to get, whereas from what I've heard of the American hodgepodge of state-level IDs and "this one counts while this one doesn't" shenanigans, that doesn't seem to apply to the US. Now, I know that over there, the several states are responsible for running the elections within their borders -- that being in the US Constitution -- but some states seem to try to (and succeed in) making it unnecessarily difficult, and that may or may not be on purpose. Civil Rights groups certainly seem to think that it is, and that it affects minority populations disproportionately, because of course it does.
For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
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The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.
>You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
>Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
Yep, the US also has early voting and vote by mail.
>their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns
> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.
I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.
In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.
Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.
I've been trying to understand the logic of this comment for the last five minutes, but genuinely the only explanation I can come up with is that it's satire.
They alleged that Michigan makes it difficult to get an ID for voter suppression purposes, but ID is not required to vote in Michigan. Which leads me to suspect that the user in question is making up their talking points out of thin air.
At no point did they imply that Michigan currently requires voter ID. Arainach gave you an example of disparity in ease of voting.
As a separate point, they preemptively mention that a similar disparity exists re/ getting an ID, which is what you're trying to add as a requirement. It's a straightforward argument.
So where do you get "that Michigan makes it difficult to get an ID for voter suppression purposes"?
The US could make IDs free and then make election day a national holiday, in which case the resistance to ID requirements probably wouldn't be as strong. Currently voter ID laws will suppress voting, whereas the goal in a democracy should surely be that everyone has ample opportunity to vote and have their voice heard.
Yearning for a day when conservatives, whether they identify as one or not, recognize that there’s a rich history of human suffering under the yoke of conservative thought leaders that could be easily avoided if they just opened a history book. Or just read the news. Because there’s no interruption between the two. Jerry Jones is in the background of a photo of the Little Rock 9. Donald Trump led a hate campaign against the Central Park 5 in 1989. These are contemporary issues.
When Mississippi Republican lawmakers voted to gerrymander their state in May _2026_, they decided to convene in the old state capitol. The one the Confederate used.
This isn't the past. This is pretty much the present and the future. This, together with the restoration of Confederate names and monuments and the president and vice-president lying about Haitians and Somali is clear, pure, objective racism. It is not six degrees. It is who they are.
I'm asking something that specifically targets black Americans as a group - the VRA doesn't target them (at least as my understanding goes) but rather as you said is allowing gerrymandering which more divides down political lines than racial ones unless you are suggesting that every person of a racial group thinks and votes the same.
I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.
Here's NPR, a notoriously left-wing news source in the US
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."
If you actually read the article, you'll see that the argument is that, since the year 2000, it has (as of 2024) broadly become easier to vote. But:
"The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot."
And it's only gotten worse since. I strongly suggest you do some cursory research in the future before making comments like this.
* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*
The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures
He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.
He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”
That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
Just decades of statistics and a good number of quotes from numerous politicians that validate the efforts. Like this reported from John Ehrlichman, White House legal counsel under Nixon:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
We're literally in a thread about the FBI trying to get Martin Luther King Jr to commit suicide, and you're waltzing in to claim that there's no evidence? There are piles of it! at least pretend to be arguing in good faith.
The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.
Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the midterms, because the current administration, have been going after Hispanics and Asians without hesitation. Maybe those groups will finally learn something. If you’re black or American Indian, you know the score.
The Republicans lost California because Pete Wilson and the Republican Party in California (late 1980’s) could not shut their mouths up, demonizing Hispanics at every turn, it turned the whole state around to the Democrats, and the same group is slowly but surely turning Texas blue with every year that goes by. And the same is also true of Arizona and New Mexico, just keep demonizing Hispanics. It’s not going work out in the long term.
The next governor of California will be a democrat of Hispanic dissent the Republicans had better be nice/respectful to him because they are losing the Southwest slowly but surely, every year, and being respectful also includes Mexico.
The Republicans just don't want to campaign in urban centers.
Barely any major city in America has a Republican mayor. It's frankly insane for a mainstream party to just basically give up.
You’re being downvoted, but it’s a fair criticism given they seemed to have a response locked and loaded to immediately give after they were given the most obvious response to their question.
There's a reason why the Right was up in arms about Critical Race Theory. They're currently doing everything possible to erase the past and frame the future as a White Christian country. And these people are the ones in power today.
I am much more circumspect on the civil rights movement and the top-down legislative results over the decades. There was good and bad. And the FBI telling MLK to kill yourself was heinous, just the same as to today as the FBI coercing Brian J. Cole Jr. (jan. 6 bomber suspect).
I was watching video the other day, compellingly showing Cole in a location that would completely exonerate him from the charges if verified. Not getting adequate attention.
So go and put them in the ground next to their disgusting traitor ancestors. The abolitionists should've made sure to break the southern slaver class any would miss them for good.
Any reasonable person knows it's wrong to deny an other human their humanity to enrich themselves. They should've retroactively made owning slaves as well as helping someone else keep slaves a crime punishable by a quick death and redistribution of all their worldly possessions among those they enslaved.
The descendants of the slavers still lust for twisted reimagined memory of former stolen wealth and power to this day. We can see it was a mistake to show them mercy. Let those southern trees carry strange white fruits!
This is an incredibly partisan take and I don't think it's appropriate for Hacker News, which is not supposed to include flamebait comments.
Ah yes, white people are oblivious to racism and black people are systemically abused. This is just the standard Democrat narrative. And it's fine to believe that, but again, it's far from an objective non-partisan, non-flame-baity take.
And yet we are so quick to dismiss their own livd experience and/or not believe them. Frankly "this happens almost never, but it happened once to me" is far more real to pretty much every human on this planet. I was routinely beat up by a certain racial group of people growing up. I still cannot feel threatened by their presence, from what I know of the brain it's literally encoded in my body.
The whole "X can't be racist" claim is part of the broader class of intellectual ragebait--subverting the original meaning of a term to elicit reaction and thereby garner views (or in the academic realm, citations), but with more refined language and logic than the usual memes ragebait is found in. I find it frustrating and detracting from actual meaningful social/scientific efforts.
A FACT IS A FACT..I dont care if anyone ignores me. I serve a God who able to do exceedingly abundantly above all I could ask think or imagine.You think im scared of this comment, Im a big girl. I stand by what I said. I am sure you dont know history which is why you are offended and are trying to say whatever you said. Secondly RACISM IS DIFFERENT THAN PREJUDICE...most people confuse the two . YES everyone can have a bias and most people do...that's called PREJUDICE.
There’s two kinds of racism - systemic, or institutional, racism, and colloquial individual racism.
Of course anyone can be individually racist. But institutionally, no. The American institutions and systems have always been white-focused, black people simply do not have the power to be institutionally racist.
I mean, has there ever been any anti-white law ever written in the US? No, because it’s not possible. The institution which makes, and enforces, the law is itself white.
Boohoo. What an ignorant take, a supporter of systemic racism pretending they're a victim of discrimination. Even elementary school children know their history better. You're not fooling anyone but yourself.
Should you've stopped at "everyone can be racist", the comment would've been an excellent, if oversimplified, synthesis of the issue.
E:
> No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms
Some do, and we can give them the space to do that without implying that the effort is automatically deserving of consideration.
> pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books
That's a somewhat silly thing to argue. That's not how it really works, and it's not a "liberal" thing, whatever that may mean. (I assume it's an American term meant to designate something that's not conservative.)
>A person who believes a particular race is superior to others. A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others.
No where does it mention this new-age "prejudice + power" redefinition.
The word is race + -ism, IE literally "doctrine/practice based on race". The word has nothing to do with power. A black dude in America who chooses to beat up a white dude for his race is racist, even under the assumption he is a systematically oppressed minority.
Racism is believing that people can be divided into races (spoiler alert: races don't exist, ask a scientist) and, not only that, but also than some of those made up races are better than others.
Colloquially racist? Sure. Anyone can be, but racism is also a political structure which black people don't have access to in the US. Which is what OP is trying to get at.
My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.
I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
Thanks for the link. I'm a white American who has been lucky enough to visit Sri Lanka! I don't agree with your conclusion that American racism is inescapable, or uniquely so. I believe we can make progress on bigotries - in particular, despite the current and despicable wave against people who are transgender, non-binary, or otherwise queer, I believe we have made significant progress in reducing homophobia over the last 5 decades (the ones I can remember!). On the negative side, I did reach the conclusion (due to what I've seen during the Trump era) that much of what I thought was progress on racism was simply racists learning to code-switch. That part's depressing.
I do not think American racism is inescapable. I do think it is more part of the culture than it is in other places: like caste in India. It makes it more difficult escape because race is treated as an important and immutable characteristic. I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.
The other oddity is a tendency to lump everyone non-white together. Think of phrases such as "global majority".
> I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.
Liberal Americans said race is arbitrary in my experience. And people who said gender identity should be respected believed it was fixed.
I would have thought American liberals (like me) would mostly view race as a social construct and therefore not immutable. However I am not an expert in sociology and my experience must be shaped by not being part of any visible minority.
I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.
For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".
Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.
I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 70s and 80s. My district was one of the last to desegregate schools in the state, fought for years to avoid it. Well, it finally happened in the early-80s, a 'bussing' program was started to bring Black kids from North St. Louis to attend schools in my district. I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I remember all the adults in the neighborhood were furious. There were protests outside my school on the first day. People threw rocks at the bus from North St. Louis when it pulled into the parking lot.
It was a little tense at school for, maybe, a few hours, but mostly it was just confusion - WTF is going on?. But after that, it was cool. All the kids quickly realized we're all basically the same - we all hated homework and were intimidated by girls, the usual adolescent stuff. I didn't know it at the time, but the school deseg program was one of the most impactful events of my childhood.
Because if you want to eat an animal you have to properly remove the bits of it that will make you sick and spoil the meat.
We do it to pigs and chickens and cows too. Its a very early step in the slaughtering and butchering process - usually the first step after the animal has been killed.
I mean... operation paperclip already tells you A LOT of what you need to understand about the USA for most of the 20th century. And I'm being kind because it would otherwise be unfair to most of the users of this site who were not even born then.
We, as Americans have had our “mask off” moment now and are openly declaring ourselves the preeminent empire on the planet. It’s simply that we are withdrawing from our globalist support structures due to a wide variety of forecast reasons along side that, which is confusing to many.
It was our liberal values and performance internally by the Democrats that gave our people as sort of comforting story before. We do it for the good of others we give we topple dictators etc.
I am a deeply “real politik” person and I don’t think you average right leaning American ever thought otherwise. It was somewhat ironically the hope yet no-change left Americans (who i have counted myself among) who tried to give it the thinnest veneer of responsibility.
The greatest thing we provided the world was order, for a time. That seems true of almost any mature empire.
The amazing thing DeepState has done or does properly is it controls the power centers of other countries, no need to deal with people or convincing others. Like using poison and neurotoxins to paralyse the other nation. Other people's trust on American order is weaponized against them.
I can understand your perspective here, and argue that, ultimately a market order was imposed on the world by America (and England) -- even when America interefered, removed, or otherwise altered democratic trajectories still resulted in a sort of networked world order. I'll not argue that they were not done, or even that they were done to benefit those targeted.
Simply that a type of order was enforced to build a global money-ist theory of society and and market + trade platform.
I might, wrongly, argue that many of these regions both would have continued in the chaos and death they otherwise were already participating in, but i'd also accept that the Dutch in Africa, English in the Caribbean and China, etc all introduced net new outside chaotic aspects on purpose. I'd also accept that attempts at order by the American's ultimately resulted in chaos, especially of course in the middle east.
As to south america, this I'll acknowledge of course was an history of interference, one that is hard to argue the contra-positive since communism in almost all regions of the world failed to develope a long term stable order which was both culturally, trade, and fiscally sustainable, with many falling to a worse state after these outcomes.
China and Vietnam, left mostly to their own devices, have maintained a positive trajectory and retain control of the commanding heights of the economy. Vietnam and China successfully repulsed Western occupiers which is what gave them a chance at independent development.
Every other attempt at a different path elsewhere was undercut by military coups, invasions, economic blockades. One would hope that communism/socialism would be robust to destabilization efforts, but it was not the case. Capitalism also took time to develop, such as various attempts in the Italian city states before first taking root in Denmark. Hopefully, a new system of peace and cooperation will replace our brutal empire.
I think you're the type of person that when wrong sorta talks about a bunch of adjacent topics to try to avoid the point of admiting that you were wrong.
The Sino-Soviet bloc and the Warsaw Pact controlled roughly a third of the world's population, an immense percentage of the Earth's landmass, and practically every natural resource required for autarky. They had nuclear parity, massive industrial bases, and their own closed global trading network (COMECON). If a system with that level of geographic, demographic, and military shielding cannot sustain itself, it is not due to a lack of opportunity.
It is prima-facie absurd to claim "it just wasn't given a chance"
>Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
The irony being that the pieces of Western culture one might reasonable feel smug about (government of checks and balances, democracy, high standard of care for the worst off, careful jurisprudence with presumption of innocence, scientific freedom and literacy, free public education, etc.) are precisely the foundations that MAGA and their ilk despise and work so hard to undermine.
Like if you're going to get patriotic about post-enlightenment values and institutions, that's one thing... if you're going to just act like a bigoted, might-makes-right, my-country-right-or-wrong, personality-worshiping, science-denying, uneducated xenophobic dipshit, then you don't have much to be proud of.
> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.
Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)
"I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people"
See, I happen to think that racists get some kind of perverse self-actualization from manifesting degradation of cultures they consider inferior - that there is a real 'buzz' to be had from such fallacious elevation as required to justify bombing another culture into oblivion. The murder is its own reward in such circles.
The "terrorism" tranche of this hate culture is particularly jarring, since the ones claiming moral altitude over 'terrorists' are delivering far, far more terrorism than their supposed enemies. It's just been homogenized.
>said in an 1895 speech in Alanta that despite the civil rights challenges faced by African Americans, that America was the best place in the world for Africans to live and prosper.
Maybe because Americans, whether black like Booker T Washington or white like Donald J. Trump, are notoriously ignorant on living conditions elsewhere, and conditioned to believe their country is the greatest ever place to live, even if it's way behind dozens of life metrics most of the western world.
>Doesn't mean the US, with KKK, Jim Crow, seggregation, and the rest was the best country in the world for blacks to live
just ignoring the person you're talking to and bellowing the same things over and over does not make you anything like "right". Booker T Washington was a bigger expert on race issues concerning Africans and African Americans than you, and he says you are W. R. O. N. G.
It doesn't change or make better the situation for Blacks now or 100 years ago to point that out, but it is wrong to say that the US was the worst. It wasn't. Stop exaggerating like that and stick closer to the truth.
It's a term long used by blacks themselves, as well as black allies, abolitionists, anti-seggregation activists etc, to refer to the "palatable to the whites, makes too many consessions" type.
stick to one topic: was the US the worst place for black people in the world? No it was not. Provide evidence that it was. Then I will point out to you that it was worse in other places.
There is still Black African slavery today in neighboring Arab countries, google it. Focus your attention on fixing things that are wrong and stop distracting yourself with things that are false.
Booker T Washington was in the context of the Jim Crow South and KKK. You really think that it would benefit Black people individually to refuse to accept segregation? In those times?
> stick to one topic: was the US the worst place for black people in the world? No it was not. Provide evidence that it was. Then I will point out to you that it was worse in other places.
Can you link the comment where anybody said it was the worst place? Brother, your claim is that, because some guy said that America is the best place in the world for Africans it must be true, and other people are just pointing out the things that make America bad for Africans. Nobody even said it was the worst!
> stick to one topic: was the US the worst place for black people in the world?
No one said that in this reply chain. They said it was awful for them. You are saying it wasn't bad because of one quote from some uncle tom. How about you provide more proof it was good for them without relating it to the fucking Belgian Congo.
> here is still Black African slavery today in neighboring Arab countries, google it.
First, chattel slavery is not the same as Arabic slavery. Second, yes I know, it is happening in Libya. Why is Libya doing that now? Oh, because we violated their sovereignty and bombed them to oust Gaddafi for geopolitical reasons. So we have a direct hand in that too.
> You really think that it would benefit Black people individually to refuse to accept segregation? In those times?
Yeah, why would people oppose their oppression? Better to bend over and take it because some uncle tom said to. You are clueless.
Your argument is an appeal to authority and "wrong" spelled like initials? What are you, 15?
Yes, Booker T Washington was a bigger expert on race issues concerning African Americans than all of us (nobody doubts that).
Not an expert on global race relations, or the conditions abroad. And obviously those uterrances were an expression of american exceptionalism, and very likely placating white US audiences (as a champion of a contested matter like race relations you never got far if you don't appear patriotic enough. That had to wait until much later with figures like Malcom X, and he didn't have the best of receptions of course).
>but it is wrong to say that the US was the worst. It wasn't.
What terrorist acts have "antifa" done, yet you dont bring up ANY of the right wing terrorism like oh I dont know, the Oklahoma bombing?? Your fly is open and your bias is showing.
I wasn't comparing brutal acts, I was arguing with facts against the literal language employed in the comment I was replying to.
antifa isn't a single organization, but groups under that umbrella do cooperate with, or are coopted front groups for, Marxist groups, and connect with any nationalist or sectarian strife in the world. You need to read up on "the theory of the revolutionary vanguard" and their self perceived role and techniques for fomenting revolution: that's who I'm talking about when I say antifa. Many people who consider themselves part of antifa for muh racism or muh increased minimum wage or muh ACAB might not be intellectual or well read about the history of Marxist revolutionaries, and they might beven be shocked to discover they intellectual Marxists are trying (and succeeding) in controlling their organizations toward a goal that's more likely to get a new Stalinist government.
Not to mention the criminal omission in their argument of the US' support for the willful, daily murder of children every single day for the past few years in Gaza.
on a daily basis, the people of Gaza are more oppressed by their own government. Gaza 60 or 70 years ago was territory claimed by Egypt just as the West Bank was territory claimed by Jordan; and Egypt and Jordan gave up their claims because of the hostility of the terrorist movement there.
If it's a question of ethnic strife, the condition of the West Bank and Gaza are due to strife between the West Bank and Jordan, and Gaza with Egypt as anything else.
Carefully side-stepping the responsibilities of the nation in the region with undeclared nukes, which was literally founded by active terrorist groups, does not help your argument...
The children of Gaza are being murdered by American bombs, dropped by Americas allies, with permission, in full view of the rest of the world. Because Americans and their allies have deemed those children inferior.
Claims of superiority on the issue of civil rights are, therefore, null and void.
You wrote a comment, I critiqued it with facts, and it is YOU who is changing the topic and carefully side-stepping that I showed you were wrong. (I replied to someone else about Gaza.)
I have to jump in some cabs now, so you now have time to contemplate the error of your ways rather than hoping I'll see what you write further.
>Most terrorism in the last 60ish years is associated with some Arabs and also some Islamists, and with or in cooperation with, anarcho-Marxists like Bader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades, antifa, etc.
That is blatantly false and you are indeed manifesting the very example of the ideology I find utterly contemptible.
37 million refugees from America's heinously vile wars, this century alone, beg to differ. The two million dead Iraqi's - and the children born to their descendants, daily, with congenital birth defects as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium, certainly have had their human rights utterly abrogated from a distance by America's overtly racist ruling class, also.
And then, there's Gaza.
I have no respect for a nation that justifies the constant, daily murder of children. A nation that has dropped one bomb, on average, every 15 minutes for the past 25 years - on mostly innocent people - deserves a lot less respect than you seem to imply. It is certainly no shining example of civil rights.
Your in-group is not my out-group, but it's not my in-group, either. I prefer to participate in cultures which protect human rights - at the level of children - above all else. America is not one of them.
If your state has to murder children - or supports states willfully murdering children - in "self defense", then it is a failed state.
Period.
As for Booker T Washington, that was over a century ago. His work nevertheless had to be continued via Martin Luther King and company.
Try to keep up to present time. The US is the worlds #1 funder and supporter of terrorism this century, bar none.
Loudly agreeing with this statement - for anyone who believes that the US and NATO countries were not actively supporting right wing terror groups in Europe (and beyond), read up on Operation Gladio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
I know you're going for the joke, but it's really not funny. There are a thousand things I could be labelled inferior for - terrorism is really not one of them.
Do you think that subsistence-working at Only Fans, or the local strip club is a better alternative?
For every 'women in sacks' argument that can be made, there is a street downtown where women put themselves in immense danger just to be able to feed their kids, pay their medical bill debts, get themselves some kind of safety net...
In America women can go to jail for their husbands' crimes, men are allowed to marry ten-year-olds, and abortions in some states are illegal, even in cases of rape.
I think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty good framework by which to assess the longterm viability of a nation/state/group. States which violate the principles of the UDHR tend to be dreadful places to live in many ways - and this is as true of Western states as it is the non-Western ones.
I couldn't live in a state which allows its police forces to murder with impunity, for example.
The point is that the moral authority we claim over other states is a fallacy. Until we are actually protecting civil rights to the extent we expect of other nations, we are hypocritically justifying our own states heinous track record.
Alas, this seems to be understood pretty well by the ruling classes, who have subjugated human rights to mean "this gives us a right to justify the destruction of sovereign states and their peoples' we have deemed inferior".
"I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm."
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
I remember reading the online news about those primaries as they happened. Bernie wins this state in a landslide. Bernie wins that state in a landslide. Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states. At the end he doesn't have enough votes, oh dear too bad so sad. Some sort of investigation happened, but concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to.
HRC was also given the power to effectively run the DNC (while a candidate in the primaries!) in exchange for some funraising. There were bunches of other shenanigans.
To me, it all seems to boil down to the notion that Bernie would credibly have "drained the swamp," which would have effectively tanked the careers of a lot of long-serving Democratic folks who were not aligned with his populist/progressive agenda. Simply by hiring people that would have aligned with his vision, this was such a threat to existing power, it had to be stopped. Yes, the Rs are worse (in my opinion), but this gives me plenty of distrust for the Ds. Institutions eventually become more about institutional survival than about their "core mission."
Remember also that it turned out that the chair of the DNC (Donna Brazile) was able to let Hillary (or at least Hilary's campaign) have access to the CNN debate questions in advance
At some point during that primary season I was driving in my car listening to my local NPR station and they had a story about these two candidates. I shit you not: they were introduced as "Hillary Clinton" and "the socialist senator from Vermont".
For some reason I remember that moment as vividly as I remember pulling out in the car with my mom on the way to school and hearing that a plane had hit the WTC.
Yes, that was the Clinton-controlled ('wealthy donors') DNC that excluded Bernie from a fair competition to become the Democrat's Candidate - which by all metrics and polling from the party's base and non-party members he would have won.
So, the Clinton-controlled DNC from 2016 put Trump in the White House.
The positive message is that since then the Democrats have been infused by Sanders-like independent Democrats that want to do the right thing, but we must keep on pushing to rid and guard the DNC and party administration off the corrupt billionaire influences.
At a certain point you realize both parties ultimately serve the super rich. The DNC would rather have Republicans in office over electing real progressives.
If you look outside the US Bernie is actually a moderate. We're not talking about abolishing money or seizing the means of production. Just maybe, somewhere between minting a new trillionaire every year and pregnant women sleeping outside we can find a compromise.
Unlimited money for wars all over the planet, but if you lose your job and have a chronic illness you're screwed most of the time.
Sometimes your screwed even if you have a job and good health insurance. It's a magic game of musical chairs to see what's covered or not. What's out of pocket , etc.
Absolutely agree, Bernie is seen as politically 'normal' by most (western) countries. Only Amercians having become gradually skewed by Reagonomics (or better his puppet masters) that are so (ab)used by predatory capitalism would think of him as outer left, whereas most of the world sees in him a centrist (as would 1950s golden-era American voters).
I don’t think theirs any possible way Social Security or other New Deal programs could be enacted today.
Although it can be argued this should be handled state by state instead. Unemployment pays about 1k per week in Washington , but only 400$ a week in Illinois.
My big fear is a right leaning federal government will eventually dismantle the social safety net entirely. If not that expect rent seeking, ie paying fees to private companies to get your social security checks
Never said they stopped: industry 'leaders', authoritarians, will always try to keep and expand their abusive grip over others and claw as much power from the common people as possible. The methods are always the same: distraction, disinformation, abuse. The common people's only defense is transparent institutions and limiting power/wealth in general.
See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military dictatorship.
The democrats participate in this export strongly too. Biden shut down a really important union strike. They are less overt about it, but go watch Malcolm X talk about foxes and wolves.
Really all the comments about "white moderates/liberals." The exact sort of people who forgot the Civil Rights movement, Labor Rights movement, and Women's Suffrage, and really every movement by a marginalized group to gain power from the mainstream were packed full of organized political violence.
Non-violent protests have a place. On occasion though, you need to hit the system where it hurts in order for it to take you seriously.
The Democratic Party too had problematic 'wealthy supporters' that influenced them away from a people's real needs. However, Biden's initiatives were probably the most 'socialistic' since FDR. And if the DSA and Bernie Sanders' aligned forces are finally able to force the Democratic Party back to their roots of FDR, then there is good chance we might still make it.
the DNC sabotaged Bernie in 2016 with all their might.
Even if Biden's strategy was serve the super rich, while minimally "throwing the dog a bone" (the average person), not much changed. Sure, he appointed Lina Kahn, but per usual she was also sabotaged within the FTC and outside of it had no support.
The comparison to FDR, who was supremely hated by Wall street, who banned any bankers from attending Bretton Woods, who oversaw the New Deal, etc, etc is laughable.
Then explain the existence and extension of ranked-choice voting.
Also explain why only one side of the "uniparty" is very, very vocal against ranked-choice voting. Like, to the point of banning it by law. All of them Republicans.
Weird, uh? But please tell us again how much Democrats and Republicans are the same and what is your solution.
You're linking an article showing how everybody in modern times who uses the term "uniparty" is using it to further their own political interests...
Beyond just that, if there is a uniparty, then why is Elon spending half a billion dollars in electoral races?
It's not that there's a uniparty, it's that as a result of Citizen's United, parties don't need to represent you anymore. They represent their money donors instead. Money is speech now, and as the wealth disparity grows it becomes a bigger megaphone and drowns out the voices of hundreds of millions.
Yep, Dems are just the good cop to the bad cop. And their only purpose is to placate the country into thinking we’re not 100% owned by billionaires and corporate interests.
The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.
It is though? Like, every single election, someone runs on the platform of abolishing democracy. Every single election, it's important that person doesn't win, or there won't be a democracy any more.
By all rights there shouldn't be one already, but we're lucky the democracy abolitionists are fairly incompetent.
Well it's important to you. It's evidently not important to the people you vote for, the people who fundraise off of this hostage situation, the people who have had trifectas multiple times during this era and have not even used them to permanently secure the "democracy", let alone the overwhelmingly popular policies with their base that would guarantee they win ever election but piss off their donors.
We are very substantially less democratic than we were in 2024. The admin has broken laws regarding impoundment and war powers, just to name two. The executive has no legal power to determine funding allocations, or to commit to wars long-term. Yet both have happened and are still happening.
Using the DOJ to interfere in state elections they have no jurisdiction in, and having masked men abduct people and ignore court orders regarding their disposition is just about as authoritarian as it gets.
Those are all new things that have substantially eroded - or removed all together the idea of democracy in less than two years.
On the other hand, it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening. It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election, and it would become irreversibly undemocratic if a president actually stayed in office after losing an election.
If one side shuts the other out of power, that's when we'll finally get the civil war many have been predicting for a long time.
Hopefully the framework to limit power can stay in place, in spite of all the calls to change it, abolish the senate, pack the court, make sure to punish/"hold accountable" red voters, etc.
> it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening
It's possible, but not very credible, to argue that in a situation where direct democracy doesn't exist.
The closest we have to voted for these things rather than voted for these people is polls, which overwhelmingly illustrate that most people oppose those things.
We'll know more after the election, if people supported those things.
> It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election
Yes, the current president tried exactly that, in a violent insurrection, and has interfered in national elections since regaining power.
> People keep polling against the things that are happening, but in elections that actually matter they keep voting for them, so...
Since the usa isn't a direct democracy, this isn't actually true. People vote for representatives, not things.
As for what happens to the representatives which have, since the last election, done things people oppose? We'll find out in a week or so! Looks like most people won't be voting for them.
No one voted for what is happening now, because crimes like these were not on the ballot and were not promised in advance. If you vote for a president in a system with three equal branches and then they liquidate the other two - no one voted for THAT.
Was voting for a narcissistic treason weasel predictably going to lead to this? I would say - and did say - yes, without question. He already incited a violent insurrection once, rather than admit he lost an election. But people voted for cheaper groceries and deporting violent criminals.
As difficult as it is to believe, there are many tens of millions of people who think that Trump is a smart business man because he was portrayed that way on The Apprentice. They think the promises of this known huckster and flim-flam man were worth the bandwidth spent delivering them to televisions. They think that FOX News opinion show personalities are qualified to administer the country's government. They didn't vote for fascism, because they don't know what that word means. Many could not even reliably number the branches of government or describe them accurately.
Well, you'll see after the midterms... You know, the one where the DOJ is looking to cancel the election in Alaska, where Texas GOP officials are trying to stop the election, where Homeland Security Investigation officers are sent to a sitting Representative's home at dawn and the president is boasting she has forfeited her seat...
Totally normal stuff in a democracy, don't we agree?
Just imagine the shittiest country that you can think of. Now imagine everything I described above happening in that country. Now imagine how you would react to that, and how it would be covered in the news and punditry.
I mean Karen Bass just said there's no need for an Election for the governor, it's Xavier Baccera. He's the governor already according to her. "You don't need an election on November 3. A Republican cannot win in this state."
In Alaska the GOP has filed a lawsuit saying the election was rigged but only if they lose (since it hasn't happened yet). I wish I was making this up.
Personally, and this is just my opinion, but many people are aware of the reporting on CA laws and how it's actually impossible to prove voting irregularities because they separate the voter from the vote. And to have people with the attitude she has, it only makes me lean towards - they know the irregularities are real.
I guess I have less faith than you in the ability of the CA state government to coordinate a vast, sophisticated conspiracy without letting slip any evidence or having any participants whistle-blow.
I suppose you're a bigger believer in government competence than I.
>every single election, someone runs on the platform of abolishing democracy
So was this person Romney in 2012? McCain in 2008? Kerry in 2004? Gore in 2000?
Any one of those presidents would've abolished democracy?
Somehow we picked the right candidate every time?
The average constitution lasts about 18 years. The US constitution has lasted almost 250. Statistically, that's quite unlikely if a candidate ran on a platform of abolishing democracy in every election.
Yeah, it is not as if Trump was planning (more) massive war crimes, against Iran in particular, right now. (I mean , on top of the ongoing war crimes in the Caribbean Sea.) I am completely exaggerating here, right? It is not as if the secretary of war had fired another top ranking military officer without offering any explanation:
No need to think anything important is going to happen with an insane president (did you know that "dumb" ends with a "b"? Did you know that?) surrounded by incompetent sycophants.
We can all see the equivalence here: some people said that Obama was the antichrist, some people say now that Trump is senile, violent, racist and unhinged. Clearly they are both wrong. Both sides. Clearly. It is obvious that both are decent, educated men who just carry their elected duties.
> The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
There's a very easy method to tell if someone making that claim is a liar: ask "what major ideological compromise are they making to save democracy?" if the answer is "none" or close to it, they're full of shit.
'Cause if fascism is really our doorstep, you'd think they'd be gunning for the broadest, most indefatigable anti-fascist coalition possible; instead of the narrowest, most pure one they think they can get away with.
I mean...I think people who oppose GMOs, permitting reform, hydroelectric, and nuclear power do care about the environment, despite actively working against it. People who oppose developers building more houses do want more affordable housing, despite actively working against it.
People, including individuals, aren't single-minded, rational, or scientifically literate.
In the case of anti-fascism, many on the left earnestly believe that a far-left candidate is the solution because their bubble tells them that their views are dominant. After all, they and many of their friends aren't excited to vote for the moderates, but would vote for someone more left.
I'll sacrifice a lot of things I care about for leadership that would shore up democracy (I'm not sure how, though fixing redistricting is a big one), but it's seen as normal and admirable to refuse to compromise.
You raise good points, and I think there are actually at least two phenomena here:
1. The liars: people cynically playing up fears of "losing democracy" as a political tactic to support some other political programs. I think this is especially obvious from candidates, activists, political operatives, etc. -- people sophisticated enough and engaged enough to know and think about what they're doing in a serious way.
2. The un-serious people: those you describe. Basically irrational people who believe a jumble of things without exercising the ability to prioritize or disengage the contradictions.
I don't think the boundaries between these phenomena are hard ones (e.g. you can often push un-serious people into liar territory by challenging them to prioritize).
Oh, yeah, Bush wasn't that bad, right? Just hundreds of thousands of deaths and crippled veterans, and the complete destruction of global order that opened the door to Russia invading Ukraine. "Just worth a shrug", you say while you pass by a crack addicted veteran while on you way to pay 30% more for gas and food. "It wasn't worth getting worried about."
What a level-headed, reasonable know-nothing you are, sitting above all this unreasonable jockeying.
I am not surprised though, you live in a culture where people can lecture others that the Bible told them Obama was Satan. You don't know what actual politics is anymore.
I’d add the so-called “Patriot Act” to the list of damages from the GW Bush era. Massive consequences that can’t be shrugged off with some both-sides nonsense.
You can vote for someone who won't go out of their way to alienate your allies, start wars on a whim, defund science, whitewash history, pardon his loyal militia men, engage in blatant insider trading, etc etc etc
A slight challenge here. November is a sizable opportunity to move towards that aim. Every day after is another opportunity to live it out in your life, community, neighborhood, finances, religion, and family...
>Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.
The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?
And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".
There's another country that has infiltrated the whole American government, and a third country that is often said to have infiltrated American academia and civil society, but we don't seem to worry about them. Why the distinction?
I'm not sure what your question is. Did someone draw a distinction? If you transplanted the 1960s FBI to modern times and told them to look for influence in favour of Russia or Israel or whoever you mean but for some reason don't name, and told them to use the same tactics, they probably would try.
The USS Liberty happened in the 1960s. It's downright silly to pretend the American state would ever have had a similar orientation towards a rival superpower vs its own unsinkable aircraft carrier.
You're now the second person doing this. I won't try to keep up with the conspiracies, and multiple levels of unstated implications based on the assumptions about those conspiracies being facts. Israel has never been, nor will likely ever be a superpower or anything akin to a near-peer adversary of the United States, so I'm not too sure what there is to talk about. Still waiting for anyone to propose a topic.
It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to attack black civil rights movements. They also used it to attack things that were associated with the Soviet Union, including associating black civil rights with communism and socialism, like you're doing here.
Maybe this was not about everybody and not about you?
It's the excuse Communists used. It's also the same excuse Fascists used. Need I remind you: national socialist German worker's party.
There seems to be great demand for a party that actually makes life better for people, so great that you can just name your party that, win an election and do anything you want to. For some reason there's very little supply of parties that actually make life better and don't just pretend they want to.
It doesn't all hinge on this November. It hinges on all the moments where people do work to avoid fascism. Some of that happens at the polls. Some of that happens at home. Some of that happens online.
Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.
Interesting, true citizen action only revealed the FBI was the author of the blackmailing of MLK.
> On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.
Some might call this lawlessness, but in a society where the government is keeping secrets from its own constituents, this sort of actions are the only ones a citizen can realistically do to return from a lawless and corrupt government, sadly.
Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.
COINTELPRO was the physical intimidation and enforcement operation when Operation Mockingbird's total information control of corporate media failed to convince people that democracy was real. Even when both got exposed, the corporate media basically ignored Mockingbird because they were complicit.
Fast forward to today, and the only difference is they now own all the Social Media and A.I. If you want truth in journalism, support small local journalists, and ignore corporate news.
Ironically this is quite common on 4chan, although so are many other much more childish things, but there is an occasional flash of someone with real knowledge using it to be a clever asshole.
I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.
They explicitly say they proactively work with LEOs to report any and all things illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if they had members of staff directly employed by some agencies, they wouldn't be opposed to it. They do not wait for a court order or subpoena, they will happily give them data and will not wait to be asked.
Their range of acceptable content is wider than other cleaner platforms which gives an impression of anarchy and freedom and anonymity, but actually those other more censored and speech restricted platforms may actually be more safer, private and free from government and legal interference!
The only strictness I have noticed is that captchas are way more annoying now, and they blanket ban entire residential IP networks (in addition to every possible datacenter/VPS/VPN/tor IP block on Earth). But somehow tons of people (not me) keep getting through.
But, they now allow NSFW content in regular boards like technology, and for the first time in 20 years I actually saw someone post cheese pizza... plus I regularly see more and more leaked data posted there first, so I wouldn't call it less lawless at all.
I have a black friend who I once referred to an HN post for more information on a topic we were discussing. Hs informed me that he doesn't go to HN, "That place is a Klan rally", were his words IIRC. At any rate, I said that a lot of it is 4chan, but there's some quality there, afterall, I use HN.
He looked at me and smiled. Went back to his coding.
I just want to put it out there that just because you happen to be in a place with a lot of unsavory people doesn't mean you, yourself are unsavory. We shouldn't paint everyone with so Catholic a brush. You have to go to the grocery store, but so do pedophiles, drug lords, and wife abusers. That's kind of how I see HN.
Yes. It's a crap hole.
But some neighborhoods just have crap hole grocery stores. Tech is kind of one of those "neighborhoods", and HN is a grocery store. You don't have to socialize with the other customers, and you can restrict yourself to only buying the decent foods on offer.
I think the desire to keep this place so pleasant and not moderate dressed-up views rooted in racism / hate ("we're not political" being a political stance, more or less) lets some really reprehensible threads live / get defended.
To the point someone brought up elsewhere, you can't really 'fight' back either. Everything remains 'polite' despite viewing you as less of a human being for being a person of color, poor, etc.
I think it's typically quite obvious, or maybe I haven't seen the psycopaths. However, SWEs can be real dick heads. Just made me think of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_5uVdy5YmA
Uploaded 16 years ago... I can't believe that a video I thought was so hilarious back then is dating me so hard.
> it's one of the most pleasurable places on public internet to be
I think we have different definitions of pleasure.
This is a relatively dry place for any kind of conversation other than hyper logic conversation devoid of empathy or humour.
On certain tech topics, it can be very informative. On anything where there is a conflict between the topic and how the base makes money, there's a lot of down voting and sad rhetoric. As a result, you rarely get to discuss the harms of AI or certain oligarchs, e.g. musk, zuck, bezos, Russia, Israel.
This is a place mostly for reinforcing your own beliefs, rather than finding new ones, unless it's around a very mild topic.
I understand. As you said, it's a rather dry, mostly technical place, and that's exactly what I like about it. I appreciate that it's largely free from the suffering, injustices, and ridiculous political debates that dominate so much of the world around us.
I despise these people as much as any other decent human being should, but unfortunately, they're everywhere. Just not so much here.
They're here, too. Just quiet about their beliefs so they can talk about their passions. I'm mixed on this because we're giving a subset of bad people a safe space to talk about their not-bad parts, which is adjacent to giving them a pass. I don't know how to reconcile this because I'm also not the thought police.
In some ways, I wish everyone wore the basic foundations of their heart on their sleeve so I could at least filter out the evil from my life more readily and try to make space for some people with bad ideas, but a willingness to change.
Try to criticize the US' war machine as it relates to the US' tech industry, for example. You will incur the wrath of a thousand HN fascists.
Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.
Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.
This works the same way irl too. The US is one of the most heavily propagandized populations in history. You have to be talking to a very progressive, very politically savvy group to not constantly run into the usual knee jerk canned responses the second you bring up any criticism of military spending, foreign policy, or the panopticon. Probing of those responses in family or social settings for actual justification shows there’s no first principle reasoning behind them, just a vague unease about discussing the topics, like they’re sacrilege.
Yes, the frothy-mouthed ideation of the US cultural identity is just as frustrating to have to contend with as any other ideology. I've met great Iranian folks and great American folks, and great Russians too - and what they all have in common is the ability to reflect on the limits of their own cultures.
>The US is one of the most heavily propagandized populations in history.
I see this statement repeated often with no supporting evidence. Seems a little ironic!
Is this claim falsifiable?
Would you be able to name the 2nd or 3rd most propagandized populations, in your view? Do you know anything about propaganda in e.g. the USSR or North Korea?
"Historian Sergo Mikoyan claimed that decades prior to the early 1960s, offices and stores had to submit papers with examples of their typewriters' typeface to local KGB branches so that any printed text could be traced back to the source, to prosecute those who had used the typewriter to produce material deemed illegal. With the introduction of photocopying machines, the KGB's Fifth Directorate and Agitprop Department required individuals to get authorization to use printing office photocopiers to prevent the mass production of unapproved material, though restrictions could be bypassed by bribing employees."
That's what an actual heavily-propagandized population looks like. Meanwhile, I can open up any social media app and be greeted by a sea of anti-American slop.
Just because you get “anti-American slop” doesn’t mean your “pro-American slop” is accurate, nor productive in the context of world affairs.
Americans are among the most propagandized because they are taught theirs is the greatest among all nations from birth, even though it really, really isn’t.
>Americans are among the most propagandized because they are taught theirs is the greatest among all nations from birth, even though it really, really isn’t.
That's not what it means to be the "most propagandized".
In any case, as an American, I wasn't taught that the US is the "greatest among all nations" from birth.
Usually the anti-US argument depends on implicitly assuming that:
* All the good things which have happened, would've happened without the US. (Example: The global abolitionist movement started in the US. We'll just assume that would've happened somewhere else.)
* All the bad things which have happened are the direct fault of the US. Other actors are deemed irrelevant/not morally culpable/etc. (The US gets blamed for the actions of people in other countries even if it has a weak to nonexistent relationship with them. Other countries are not generally blamed for the actions of their partners/allies.)
* Bad things that the US successfully prevented or interrupted would somehow have been prevented or interrupted via other means. (Example: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. We'll just implicitly assume other nation(s) would've taken a lead role in enforcing territorial integrity norms.)
* If the US could've done something, but did not, they are also morally culpable for that omission. (Example: Rwanda genocide.)
It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of game. We aren't being judged based on whether our presence makes the world a better place. Rather, if there's any delta between the US and a hypothetical perfect nation, that makes us evil.
Observe how things work: Listen to Europeans complain about the US "playing world police", and also insist that the US should do more to police Eastern Europe. They'll claim the US bears responsibility for the Ukraine War by expanding NATO, and also insist that Ukraine should be armed to the teeth. Naturally, e.g. Poland's push to join NATO is left out: only the US is morally culpable (see second bullet point above).
Who else, apart from Russians and their puppets, is pushing this ridiculous claim that the US is responsible for NATO expansion? That sentiment simply isn't there at all. It's straight-up Russian propaganda.
Not really, because a generic observation cannot be expressed specifically.
So that's a weird question to begin with.
It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.
As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.
It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting.
Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.
What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.
There must be some logical fallacy here where, reduced down to human existence, all toxicity is hidden under layers. This is both an ultimately true statement of any suspiciously viewed human interaction and it kind of makes the argument moot.
Reminds me of the recent thread about LLMs controversial take on humanity: we are all terribly cynical, hallucinate importance, and we are all bad/good deep down inside.
I guess they are saying people argue/comment in bad faith. That they don't really mean what they say, and at least, they say it not to discuss it but for some hidden agenda.
The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.
I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).
If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
> If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
Are we going to play "prove me right" here? :D
Come on, this is just a direct personal attack. Go play better. Hide it with a more elaborate construct.
So I think I understand what hypfer's getting at, but I personally would never classify this sort of thing even remotely as "trolling".
@hypfer I'm curious, can you understand / identify with at least some of what I'm sharing below?:
A lot of people (likely near 100% of people) have their own internal beliefs about the world and they are largely commenting primarily to validate that belief (I am literally doing it with this comment). Like you often can see both what the person objectively wrote but then also get a feeling for some internal belief that motivated this specific comment.
And naturally, people are emotionally attached to their internal beliefs. And so sometimes comments are less a sharing of ideas and more a factually coded emotional rationalization of their internal beliefs. And when you read a comment like this that goes against one of your own beliefs, it may feel like an attack.
To me the distinction though is the motivation of the person on the other side. My interpretation is that true trolls have a motivation to incite emotions whereas most other people simply are trying to validate their own beliefs, despite potentially doing it in a way that is not emotionally palatable to all perspectives.
Separately, for you (hypfer), do you agree that there could be some amount of "hostile attribution bias" here? I saw this term while searching about this topic and to me it would explain both your perspective of feeling personally attacked and others perspective of feeling like that's actually not at all what's happening.
It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.
> It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.
I'm not sure if can truly let this pass as a more sophisticated construct, but I do appreciate the opener that already invalidates dismissal.
This is completely crazy. How could someone point out that assuming evil intentions is not a good way to interact with people without being accused of doing the same thing as the FBI telling MLK to kill himself?
> This is completely crazy. How could someone point out that assuming evil intentions is not a good way to interact with people without being accused of doing the same thing as the FBI telling MLK to kill himself?
I was genuinely wondering if we would see the end of it, but of course, no.
But I like this, because it's such an obvious strawman and bad faith reinterpration by an account consisting of random jumbled letters.
Thank you. This is background radiation one can live with. Thanks for making things normal again.
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone is a troll "just asking questions" or actually just asking that question. More so on HN than in most of the world, I mean.
An interesting realisation there which I believe will shape the upcoming years of discussion spaces is that one can shift the burden of proof there.
Instead of leaving it with the moderation to prove without a doubt that someone is trolling, one can default to assume trolling and demand prove that it is not the case.
As it is impossible to bring up proof for either of those things, the house wins and people make damn sure to quintuple-check if their messaging is decent.
I don't think that that is a good solution, but the status quo was horrible, so maybe the pendulum swinging in another direction for a while might help us discover saner solutions.
Meanwhile, as said, well-meaning people get essentially harassed and silenced for allegedly being trolls if they are not aware of all the intricacies and differences in how people may view some words. Or they just make a mistake. That may push them away, but there will likely be room for different kinds of spaces and different kinds of cultures, just like today.
It doesn't scale exponentially. Another user already gave the example of someone persistently using "he/she", talking about gay marriages as "partners" while straight ones are "husbands" and "wives", etc. How much effort do you think it takes to perform that versus to moderate it?
I meant nothing personal, but you took it personally. To me, someone saying "hey, maybe you're bringing your baggage to this and interpreting this differently than the speaker meant" is not at all a personal attack.
To you, I guess it is.
So, yeah, HN is full of conversations where people politely suggest you may be wrong. It's never bothered me.
Unlikely. Plenty of anti LGBTQ rhetoric is permissible here by mods, for example.
However, it often uses queer lingo - words that folks might think aren't notable, but queer folks will instantly recognize as an attack.
Refusing to call a gay man's husband a husband, but subsisting in friend or partner. Calling someone biologically male. Etc.
These get deployed quite subtly here, and because none of the words are slurs, they don't get moderated. (Though HN also permits overt slur usage -- search for the r-slur and you'll find plenty of cases.)
FWIW, it may just be a colossal misconception of my own, but I’d been of the mind that “partner” was in some cases more polite to use because it doesn’t make assumptions about the individuals in question or about the dynamics of the relationship between them. I am not part of the LGBTQ world, however, and am happy to be corrected.
There's a difference between the polite use and the impolite use. If someone makes a point to always introduce and discuss their husband, some anti LGBTQ folks will make a point to never say husband. Like, "you don't get to have that word." It's a way of suggesting people aren't married.
The difficulty is that partner is also acceptable and polite, especially when gender or marital status is unknown.
It's subtle, which is exactly the sort of thing this thread is about -- ways to subtly exclude someone while appearing polite to outsiders.
Jeeze, ya know. I don't get exposed to phobes sufficiently to know this. Typical dog whistle: Folks who are in the group know it, folks antagonized by the group know it, everyone else looks on with a question mark on their face.
It can be used both ways, I suppose. I use it for my partner because legal marital status isn't important to me, but for those that had to fight to obtain the basic right to get married I can see why it would be hurtful.
I wonder how much of it is generational? I see something similar in the way second wave feminists rightly hated being called girls, whereas it's not as much of an issue for the younger generations because they didn't have those experiences.
I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.
I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.
So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.
the modern internet has given everyone a higher level of immunity to this kind of thing now that it's in the background everywhere at all times; the FBI would need to step up their game today
Or different tactics entirely. I've been getting ads recently saying "it's Qatar's fault". I don't understand at all what is supposed to be Qatar's fault, and I'm sure they can't say it in the ads because then it would be a lie and they could get sued, but I'm sure their target audience knows exactly what Qatar supposedly did.
I'm sure it helps, but there's definitely still way too many people [on social media] that have zero problems with publicly telling people to jump off a bridge while signing their full name with the message. Which is technically illegal in California now.
What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true. He caused a great change to take place in the nation, but he was not an upstanding individual outside of that.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).
I'm not aware of any good evidence that MLK was in a open marriage. He was just cheating on his wife.
His wife stood by him as wives were often expected to do back in the day, but that doesn't mean she was a willing participant in a nonmonogamous relationship.
As much as I actually really love MLK's speeches, sermons, movement. I am afraid there appears to be some unfortunate truths about the man. None are perfect except God. That doesn't make the positives he did any less great, it just reminds us of the nature of humanity.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
He was a Christian minister though, and many of us value him not just for his contributions to civil rights, but to the conversation of how God wants us to treat one another.
He was brave and an incredible orator. But not exactly a paragon of virtue, someone who can lead by example, which we really need at the highest rungs of power.
Elsewhere in the comments here, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr (David Garrow), according to this article [1]:
"The most damaging memos describe King witnessing a rape in a hotel room. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file say he encouraged the attacker to continue."
Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.
Apparently most of these huge spam waves originate from just one or two people which is why they're so similar. If a certain type of spam stops arriving it means that specific person got bored.
It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.
I read it as regular spam message with slight laugh and without any anxiety, but if that was linked with or in response to some real payment or subscription then it would not be funny.
Gmail's spam filter has gotten noticeably worse in the last two months. I'm half-convinced they threw away whatever they used to be doing and just put Gemini in the loop.
I love my country but omg do we have so many shameful episodes. These things need to be brought out to the light of day so we can confront, admit and heal. The letter is the 2nd crime. The first crime is the tolerance of the hate behind the letter. The 3rd crime is concealing the facts till those responsible are out of the reach of justice.
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
Interesting angle of posing as a black man so Martin is being attacked by the in group. This is usually very effective and is essentially exactly what you see on racist forums/boards like 4chan and other more explicit supremacist boards.
I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
The very funny “presidents discuss anime” video opened my eyes and that was like 3 years ago. Audio is going to have to require some kind of proof of authenticity going forward.
There was nothing normal about the whole movement that MLK Jr led. He presented himself as a holy man while participating in rape.
His close advisors included major organizers of the Communist Party. And this was at the height of the Cold War. The steelman argument for the FBI's decision is that it faced an extraordinary threat to national security in the person of MLK and resorted to extraordinary measures to try to neutralize that threat. And as far as the FBI went there were certainly lines that the FBI wouldn't cross.
There are also, of course, very strong arguments against the FBI's covert action against King, and those are well-known.
MLK Jr watched a woman get raped, and encouraged the rapists while they were doing it.
"By bugging the room, they were able to listen in on King and at least 11 others participated in what the FBI memos describe as “an orgy” on Jan. 6, 1964.
The microphones also picked up activities from the night before, when Kearse, who died in 1991, allegedly sexually assaulted one of his parishioners. According to the memos, King was in the room. The handwritten note indicates that King didn’t just observe the assault – he laughed.
Worse, instead of trying to stop the incident, the memos say King apparently offered advice to the perpetrator, encouraging the abuse."
Being paywalled is not an issue (better than ad-ridden), but not being able to have micro transaction in a browser with one click still is mind boggling. As a creator of a browser, taking some blame for that.
I can do that. I can click on my credit card autofill and then "pay", so two clicks.
But sites won't let me do that, they want me to make an account first and they want to verify my email address and phone number which means leaving my browser and restarting the process each time I do because the browser got unloaded and the website doesn't save state. Almost all of the friction here is the fault of the website, not the payment process.
Usually I just can't make an account on a mobile device because of the browser unloading, so if it's important I do it later with my PC and if it's not important I give up entirely.
Well, a micro-transaction on your credit card isn't a great solution, since the base fee is something like $0.10 per transaction. You'll want a system to fill a low-transaction-fee wallet and then distribute from there.
Youtube Premium is a pretty good system. I pay $16/mo, and 55% of that gets distributed to creators based on my watch time.
There are lots of ways to do the tech without a $0.10 fee. I think the issue is more the websites don't ask for that, probably because $10 a month in one easy annualised payment of $120 pays better.
I'm not sure if there's an actual website that did it? I've made micropayments for other things like PAYG phones and speculating on crypto.
There were attempts to bring micro-transactions to the browser via W3C standards - but guess who obstructed it? Yes, the big G that's running the browser with most market-share (Chrome) and who's entire business-model it having your data so only they can be the middle man between you and ads. Imagine if people could just support what they like with one click, instead of getting dumped on with paid propaganda and disinformation so that the middle men fill their pocket.
MLK's entire organization was largely created and run by Stanley Levison, who was a big player in the CPUSA. He was a major financier of communist efforts in America before switching his focus to the civil rights movement.
But you won't find Levison's name on the SCLC Wikipedia page even though his personal wiki page mentions he was "instrumental in founding" it.
yep, they changed from the archived article I linked from vox.com to a NY Times article link. (I only posted the archive link I did because it was a wall on vox and I couldn't read article otherwise)
To invite you to ponder on this poster's goals rather than mine.
--
Whoever has had the opportunity of studying the concealed feelings of persons by means of psychoanalysis can also tell something new concerning the quality of unconscious motives, which express themselves in superstition. Nervous persons afflicted with compulsive thinking and compulsive states, who are often very intelligent, show very plainly that superstition originates from repressed hostile and cruel impulses. The greater part of superstition signifies fear of impending evil, and he who has frequently wished evil to others, but because of a good bringing- up has repressed the same into the unconscious, will be particularly apt to expect punishment for such unconscious evil in the form of a misfortune threatening him from without.
He probably just keeps it to remind himself what can happen when the facts about the ${TLA} spying on ${citizens} come out, i.e. make sure to keep it hush-hush this time or you'll end up in ${a_bad_place}.
One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:
-------------------------------------------
House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
-------------------------------------------
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
There's that infamous Lee Atwater quote (former RNC chariman who helped Bush I and Reagan win on their 'no taxes, cut social services' rhetoric) that I won't quote here but is foundational to modern conservative dogwhistle politics: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
We live downstream of that where people often parrot the same dogwhistles uncritically 40 years later without understanding how deeply racist they are.
But both sides are the same and 'it doesn't matter' if these sorts come in to power and restack the FBI/courts with people with this mindset.
I won't say there aren't myriads of issues with establishment we-must-appeal-to-the-moderates DNC consultation priesthood but historically and in recent times one party has generally been better about civil rights than the other:
https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/raci...
If anything, you can thank most of the repeal of things like reproductive rights, the Voting Rights Act, etc and enshrinement of corporate personhood, gerrymandering, etc to the explicitly conservative project of The Federalist Society who now have the ruling majority in the Supreme Court.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/27/federalis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_leanings_of_United...
Please stop with the "both sides are the same". They are very much not.
The only similarity in that regard is party leadership which is owned by the corporations and the rich.
And that only similarity is unfortunately the only thing that matters. Uniparty stays undefeated because people keep thinking in terms of parties.
The "But" and the quotes suggest that the GP reply might be sarcastic?
Poe's Law in action I guess.
Good point. Hard to know -- there's plenty of people in this forum who are just fine with the way things are, politically that is.
Personally I just click on people's usernames and skim a page or two of their comment history. I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as it strips all the surrounding context from what someone is saying. The whole reason I can discuss contentious issues with my friends is that they know I am not a monster, but this luxury just doesn't exist in web forums.
So especially in these times, I think it's important that we do a little work to see where one another might coming from [assuming it's in good faith to begin with], rather than squandering our focus on destructive infighting from slight misunderstandings.
And as the old joke goes - How do you know if someone is a maggot? Don't worry, they'll tell you!
> I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as this strips the surrounding context from what someone is saying.
I get what you mean about quoting something out of context, but I always read the intent of that guideline as the opposite: that a reply should quote enough of the original to provide the context. Really only needed near the top of long/deep threads where the reply might be multiple screens below the nested replies above it. Summarizing also works, which always risks misinterpretation, but it's also good to get that interpretation out in the open (again assuming good faith).
One thing I still can't stand reading is the usenet-era "point-for-point" style that interleaves a sentence or two of quote alternating with response, back and forth for the whole post. It's not only noisy, it tends toward a very snippy tone as well.
No, I wasn't talking about the context of the reply chain... but rather the context of everything else a commenter does/says/believes.
The comment in question - go read a few pages of the poster's comment history and you will understand it was meant as sarcasm. The difficulty is that sarcasm takes social capital to execute, and the comment-in-isolation model eschews even having that type of reputation.
Now in this case it would have been relatively easy to avoid sarcasm (although tiring, and I would say we're worse off for it). But the same difficulty applies to straightforward communication as well - if someone is criticizing the DNC, are they doing it from a place of trying to reform and make it better, or are they trying to drive cynicism and apathy? You don't know unless you know them.
And while you can mitigate the problem by writing comments that appeal to some groupthink (marking you as part of the tribe) before making a nuanced point against some other bit of groupthink, this propagates the first groupthink (which is itself often a problem) as well as bad-faith commenters being able to perform the same pattern.
Surely there must be someway to signal that a comment is sarcastic in an easily identifiable way? A code of some kind like a common signifier indicating an ending state that speaks directly to that cultural tribe along with a shorthand expression denoting irony?
Maybe something like "/s"?
The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you, the writer, are not so dense and uncultured that you don't know extremely common knowledge.
If only there was a method for identifying how common certain kinds of knowledge are!
Is there a similar tag for dismissing the bulk of a comment while narrowly responding to a single part of it? </s>
> The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you
I had described why this does not work in general.
<legacyTags:s xmlns:legacyTags="http://example.org/schemas/interaction-styles/biologic/prima...">
(PS the first paragraph was me introducing my new tag "<s>" which means sardonic)
</legacyTags:s>
This is such a pathetic cliche. The differences are clear. If you don’t see them it’s because you’re trying not to.
I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
This doesn't just apply to race. The whole "trans people in women's bathrooms/sports" panic was another example of people being told that a tiny minority of people are a huge threat that we all need to focus on, while we were being screwed over by a kleptocracy. Same with "Antifa."
And it worked. Politicians do this because it works.
[flagged]
> the aspect of males in female sport, highlights a set of absurd beliefs that are unfortunately quite common on the left
You're playing right into the hands of the kleptocracy by trying to start this dumb-ass discussion up again.
There are several other wacky beliefs that get circulated on the left, such as abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, that speech is violence, and so on. These also get pointed to when a politician on the left shows support for these. However the belief that men can become women is next level bizarre, trying to upturn something so fundamental to our existence and understanding of the world - like flat-earthism - and that's why the right have focused so heavily on it as an attack line.
Dunno while I'm replying to a random anon, but anyways.
People can not (mostly) change their sex (AFAB etc).
However, there are a vast proportion of potential gender expressions, and it should be entirely uncontroversial that people can choose from them.
And now, given that I have disagreed with both partisan (US) positions on this, I'll withdraw.
Agreed, and if the position being advocated by many on the left was merely that people should be free to express themselves however they please, I don't think the right would have found it an effective line of attack. Most people on the libertarian branch of the right would likely agree in principle too.
I think that it was very strange how this became such an issue. Like, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, who cares about another's gender expression?
But it's such a tiny proportion of the population, and matters much less than making things better for the populace (which is the whole point of governance).
I'm not a Marxist, but the whole culture war stuff is very very convenient for those who don't want to work on reducing inequality (by taxing the upper earners more). And given how much of the Democratic vote is dependent on these people, I guess it makes political sense in the short term.
> the belief that men can become women
To be more charitable: people should really read more and try to understand more about the difference between biological sex and gender. Many people think there is no difference and that's why they have such a reaction: "but they are trying to change something fundamental about biology!".
I used to have trouble with it as well, coming from a more traditional society.
As for the other wacky beliefs: they are mostly exaggerated. When talking about police, most leftist I know don't _literally_ want to just dismantle the whole thing and replace it with nothing. The point is to highlight the absolute lousy state of affairs, more than it is to discontinue the notion of policing.
if I remember correctly, Howard Zinn covers this pretty well in his A People's History of the Unites States: racism was promoted by the wealthy in order to keep the poor divided and weak (the fear of poor whites and blacks uniting was real)
Ed Glaeser is a Harvard economist and has a paper about how racism was promoted by those making money from it. That seems more believable to me.
https://glaeser.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/political-...
Socialists like to frame everything as a class war, but reality is not so black and white. Rich people aren't a monolith and this was especially not the case with civil rights. The American elite were thoroughly embarrassed by their European counterparts laughing at their countrymen being so boorish as to lynch people for the color of their skin. Civil Rights came from the top down just as much, if not more, than it came from the bottom up. Without the Supreme Court that gave us Brown v Board and LBJ's warm reception of the NAACP, we would not have Civil Rights as we know it. At best, we'd get half measures that the kind we got under Reconstruction.
This seems like an oversimplification and one of your own examples shows it. Aren’t “the Jews” today in power or in very close proximity, not just locally but on the world stage? Are they redirecting the anger to themselves? Or is there more to the reasons people would direct their hate or dislike towards an entire group of people?
Not saying that you’re wrong, but there’s more to it. Even when not directed by those in power, some people need an external reason for their own failures. They need a target for their anger that is not themselves.
Honest question as I'm not American and may be missing context but what Civil Rights are black Americans having rolled back on them?
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.
States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.
And mainstream conservative justification, including the US Supreme Court, is that because this is not overtly racist in its design, but just coincidentally racist in its impact, it has plausible deniability. Basically an extension of the “racism is over” school of thought.
And an extension of the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness.
Edit: funny, I pre-sniped the sibling responses to your comment.
I appreciate you called out the more fundamental disagreement here: "... the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness."
I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.
It’s called disparate impact more specifically, but that term is unfortunately increasingly politicized as it’s inconvenient.
That's not "unfortunate". It was a deliberate choice. Any term used to describe the problem is treated as if it meant something bad, and then we're told we can't talk about it because it's "politicized". As if the entire point of the political process was about something other than resolving disagreements.
Conservative position is the old school racism, just with a dishonest excuse on top of it.
Those systems are not having disparate impats randomly. They were deaigned that way on purpose.
Your framing is fundamentally illiberal. Refraining from engaging using “well deep in your heart” excuses means you can self-righteously ignore any position you disagree with and never have to face real argument. And it is wonderfully non-falsifiable, so you can always use it!
This isn't a "deep in your heart" excuse. It's a documented conservative strategy for decades.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
https://adams.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/supreme-cou...
It is not "illiberal'. It is descriptive and objective. As opposed to pretending I am naive dumbo.
I did not engaged in "well deep down". I said "the motivation is clearly that. Even openly stated again and again and again whenever in front of symphatetic audience"
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1.) I did not stated hatred. You cant read.
2.) It is OK to dislike or hate people who intentionally cause harm to others.
3.) It is OK to dislike or hate people due to their opinions, including the kind of opinions discussed here.
4.) Yes I have higher moral ground here. It does not take much to have higher moral ground then them, it is rather one very low bar.
Looks more like they're stating hatred towards people that espouse hateful opinions.
I highly recommend the video series "The Alt-Right Playbook" (in the sense of an expose, not a how-to) which has an episode dedicated to this, titled "Always a Bigger Fish". [0], which goes into how people might be talking "past" one-another.
______
> Your conservative friend is often baffled as to what you're even trying to say when you point out there's not enough high-paying jobs or affordable health plans for everyone.
> There's not supposed to be. The system requires an underclass. Someone's gotta clean the toilets.
> Capitalism, then, is a proving ground: it's how you demonstrate where in the hierarchy you deserve to be. Do you have more than you need, or less?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
I'm sure the video goes into more depth, but the "inevitability of hierarchy" explanation has never made sense to me.
If reactionaries place more importance on hierarchy, then shouldn't this mean accepting the hierarchy as it stands and knowing their place in it? Progressive beliefs are often seen as being a product of out of touch affluenza, so [stereotypical] progressives' relative direction in the hierarchy should be clear. Meanwhile the underclass below them with shittier jobs should make them feel content from being above a different group of people - illegal labor especially puts even more people below them!
Rather what they would seem to want is some other hierarchy where they sit higher. And while it's completely understandable to want to improve your position, it's specious to give this credit as some noble abstract belief in hierarchy rather than mere zero-sum scrapping to improve their lot.
So at least to me, reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of an [unfair] hierarchy doesn't seem like anything particularly different than reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of $whatever else to get them riled up and turn off their ability to reason or communicate. It's never actually about the lofty value, but rather emotional appeals to how you've been wronged so let's get revenge.
Progressive thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi believe every single policy issue must be evaluated on the basis of whether it happens to impact different races differently. Essentially turning the state into a gigantic social engineering project.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-racial-crossroads/
Unlike conservative agenda of ... massive social engineering? Like, conservatives openly talk about shaping society the way they want it, punishing those who dont conform and try to pass laws to do so.
And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all? Why are we arguing at the extremes? What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses? Have you even heard about something like how nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
I don't actually believe that it disproportionately affected the Navajo nation. I believe that it affected the Navajo nation some because a lot of nuclear tests were done in the remote western deserts which is where the Navajo reservation is. And I believe that some people who claimed they were advocating for Navajo interests claimed this constituted an offense against them in such a way that it justifies some kind of disparate action law. But I don't actually believe that Navajo were more affected than non-Navajo by nuclear testing; and I don't want people to be able to claim that they were in such a way that it creates any kind of legal obligation on non-Navajo.
I think we can start with just ignoring skin color and just be people, just be Americans.
>And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?
This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.
>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.
Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?
Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.
> This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
Where does that leave the equal protection clause?
> every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently
What if a large portion of laws systematically impacts one group negatively?
Sometimes it happens. Taxation can systematically impact rich people negatively, for instance.
Right. So we shouldn't take the effects of taxation into account when making tax laws?
Yes, but just because a law disproportionately hurts a particular group is not necessarily a problem.
Correct, not necessarily. But if it is, that should be considered.
> >And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
> I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
If it affected you directly, you might care.
Because it doesn't, you are in the position to pick and choose what you give your interest and energy to.
In a democracy, voters are free to petition their elected officials regarding policies which affect them. I think that should usually be enough.
It's not, as those policies allow those in power and currently benefiting from the status quo to abuse minorities. It's why rights and equal protections have to be codified.
> turning the state into a gigantic social engineering project
What do you think the state is but a gigantic social engineering project?
I hate this line of thinking. It's hard to argue that Republicans are strictly racist when you have people like Tim Scott in respected positions. Literally Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State. If we are going to take racism seriously, race needs to be the causal mechanism... not culture, not politics.
The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.
It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.
I say this as a lefty.
The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.
There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)
The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.
Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.
> you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing. You are making the same argument as mid-century racist policymakers that were defeated by the VRA. Back then you would argue that Poll taxes and voter tests aren't illegal, they just prevent the indigent and uneducated from voting. Well those policies were the beating heart of Jim Crow, which the VRA intended to defeat.
You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities". Well we've been there. It's been illegal to make laws directly against racial groups since reconstruction. This is why much of Jim Crow was built on a foundation of targeting adjacent traits rather than race specifically, and why many lament the defanging of the VRA.
>Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing.
You can't say this with a straight face. Before the civil rights act we literally had white's only sections of businesses. Separate-but-unequal was the apartheid of the South. That just doesn't exist anymore in any kind of open and accepted way, thank god.
>You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities".
Again, I'm not saying that at all, the Supreme Court isn't saying that either. You are again conflating minorities as a singular voting bloc with a singular voting interest. The entire point here is that there is plenty of evidence that this is about politics, not about race.
I think gerrymandering is atrocious. I think we should move to a proportional voting system where gerrymandering is no longer achievable. The idea that 25% of a population can dictate government control to the other 75% of the population by drawing arbitrary lines is atrocious. I just think it's quite clear that this isn't happening to suppress the vote along racial lines.
The idea here is that I think it's quite plausible that black republicans are being used along gerrymandering line to help elect republicans. If it were about race... then black republicans would also need to be disenfranchised.
Jim Crow was very obviously terrible... it was also very overt and obvious. I grew up in Texas, and the idea that the right is a secret cabal of racists trying to create some kind of white government is insane. The idea that the general socioeconomic concerns of the black community put most black voters on the political left makes vastly more sense, and it also explains the significantly larger numbers of Hispanic representatives on the Texas right.
It's not one data point. There is plenty of evidence that this is about politics... not about race.
>ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax)
The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
The nature of that ID is essential. If it used to authenticate someone for voting, which is a RIGHT, then every citizen must have a RIGHT to possess that ID. Not only that, but obtaining the ID must not pose any encumbrance beyond the effort to vote.
Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.
Drivers licenses haven't been the only form of state ID across the US for well over a generation now, and as national-level ID usable in any state there is the passport (and at less cost there was the passport card).
The physical Social Security card was never meant to be used as ID (the number on it is, de facto, another story).
Obtaining ID cards in other developed countries requires the same payment of application fees and visits to offices, so those steps being required in the US, too, aren't any refutation of the OP's comment.
>Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
Just get a state ID or passport then.
28 USD for a non-driver ID in my state of residence (1) (exceptions: free if you are homeless or are a blind veteran)
65 USD for a passport card (2) (the cheapest passport option).
Both require attending in-person appointments.
For contrast:
Voting is compulsory in Australia. Citizens may register to vote entirely online, and may prove their identity using a Medicare card or citizenship certificate (or driver's license or passport, ofc) (3). (Aside: this page of FAQs explicitly calls out that these two means of proving ID have been added as a response to increasing feedback from young people, disabled people, and people living in remote areas about having less access to driver's license or passport.)
Obtaining an Australian Medicare card is free, and citizens may prove their identity using a birth certificate (no need for it to be certified) and submitting their application + supporting documents by email (or by mail, but that costs postage) (4).
Free, and no in-person appointment.
1. https://portal.ct.gov/dmv/licenses-permits-ids/get-non-drive...
2. https://travel.state.gov/en/passports/apply/adults.html#acco...
3. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/enrolment.htm
4. https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/enrolling-medicare-if-y...
Australia is somewhat unusual here among developed democracies, as a simple web search will show. Elsewhere obtaining an ID typically requires at least some payment and time spent visiting an office.
Were other developed democracies incapable to follow Australia?
I think that's immaterial to the present thread. Such countries exist and are regarded as developed democracies by the usual respected rankings, so to argue that "well, they aren't really democracies then" would not be a very productive enterprise.
Are these REAL ID? Are they free? How long does one has to drive to find an office who can deliver those? How much paperwork is needed? How many times does one has to get back in person to that ID office?
Stop. We can all see you argue in bad faith. You are at best incurious and naive, and at worst...
Do you pay taxes? Have you ever applied for a loan/bank account/rent/mortgage/etc? Have you ever enrolled a child in school? Have you ever applied for a job? Have you ever had to fill out paperwork after the loss of a loved one? etc etc etc etc
These are all tasks that a functional adult in the world needs to do regardless of background / race / creed / etc.
It's not bad faith to say hey as a functional adult you should go get a fucking ID.
What is the % of people that honestly do not have one? Pass a law and give people 4 years to go get one.
Like why must you insist on treating people like hopeless children?
I think it is bad faith to implicitly assume a driver's license is required when there are easier options.
I have a state ID, a REAL ID. It was not particularly difficult to get. I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that there are major cross-national differences in difficulty here.
>It was not particularly difficult to get.
Thank you for reminding us that you aren't working three jobs in the same day to make ends meet, have disposable income and free time to collect the documents and get to the office twice,and live in a district where said office isn't half a day of driving (with the current gas prices) away.
And of course, you are fine with people with less affodances than you not being able to vote. Such moral character on top of your comfortable life.
You make it sound like this would pass into law and within 48 hours everyone would need to go get an ID.
You'd pass this into law and then have it take effect 2-4 years out, and if you can't go and secure yourself an ID after 2-4 years of notice you aren't a functional adult.
You aren't a functional country.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/05/1140778386/real-id-enforcemen...
https://www.votebeat.org/2025/06/09/proof-of-citizenship-doc...
It is also funny you have at people not being real adults when the vice president of the United States - himself very worried about election fraud - is saying people in Alaska may be confused between two Sullivans on the ballot because "people are busy. People have lives. People have jobs". Apparently he thinks a large proportion of Alaskans aren't functioning adults. Funny, that.
>Thank you for reminding us that you aren't working three jobs in the same day to make ends meet, have disposable income and free time to collect the documents and get to the office twice,and live in a district where said office isn't half a day of driving (with the current gas prices) away.
Sure, I mean, going to the grocery store is also very oppressive. You need money, time, transport, etc.
>And of course, you are fine with people with less affodances than you not being able to vote. Such moral character on top of your comfortable life.
I have no issue if people want to implement measures to make it easier to get ID. But given the state of US democracy, election security currently seems important enough to me that voter ID laws seem reasonable. That's how policy works--there are tradeoffs. Want me to pearl-clutch about your moral character in allowing the country to descend into fascism through a contested election?
>I have no issue if people want to implement measures to make it easier to get ID.
That's the big "if". That's why the current representatives who pretend to want to secure the elections are only pretending. That's why you are not answering in good faith, because you are ignoring/handwaving that crucial part.
>Sure, I mean, going to the grocery store is also very oppressive. You need money, time, transport, etc.
Going to the grocery store is not a constitutional right. We already went through this vacuous argument when Republicans pretended that "you have to show ID to have unlimited pasta at the Olive Garden" as an excuse for their sudden request to force states to impose ID requirements just before the midterms. Again: bad faith argument.
I live in a country where there is ID requirements to vote. It is also a place where we use paper ballots, and polling places have never queues longer than five minutes, and voting only happens on Sundays. There is no mail voting. There is no gerrymandering. This is all possible because the whole system is made to make voting convenient and always has been. This can't be said of the USA which has an old and present history of massive voter suppression and electoral manipulation. The current push from Republicans to "secure" the elections is a complete bad faith attempt because they are completely open, at all levels, this is only to cancel and contest Democrat votes. That's what you describe as "election security currently seems important enough to me that voter ID laws seem reasonable". You completely ignore that, as well as the lies behind the argument:
"From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle"
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters...
https://archive.is/20260924155025/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
16000 lies.
ID cards in other developed and democratic countries typically require payment of application fees (sometimes modest fees, sometimes substantial fees) and visits to offices, too.
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Does the American left feel the same way about firearms? I've heard for years that there should be registration and licensing on them (which I actually agree with).
Some Americans called left believe the right to firearms is for states not people. Some believe rights can have reasonable restrictions and a weapon and a ballot are different. Some quote Karl Marx who said Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered.
As someone from one of those non-US democracies, the reason why we can mandate IDs for votes is because they're basically trivial to get, whereas from what I've heard of the American hodgepodge of state-level IDs and "this one counts while this one doesn't" shenanigans, that doesn't seem to apply to the US. Now, I know that over there, the several states are responsible for running the elections within their borders -- that being in the US Constitution -- but some states seem to try to (and succeed in) making it unnecessarily difficult, and that may or may not be on purpose. Civil Rights groups certainly seem to think that it is, and that it affects minority populations disproportionately, because of course it does.
For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
---
The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.
>You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
>Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
Yep, the US also has early voting and vote by mail.
>their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns
Gallup says 80% of people of color in the US favor a voter ID requirement: https://news.gallup.com/poll/652523/americans-endorse-early-...
> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.
I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.
In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.
Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.
>Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.
Interesting. Michigan doesn't even require ID to vote.
https://www.michigan.gov/sos/elections/voting/vote-on-electi...
There goes your credibility.
I've been trying to understand the logic of this comment for the last five minutes, but genuinely the only explanation I can come up with is that it's satire.
They alleged that Michigan makes it difficult to get an ID for voter suppression purposes, but ID is not required to vote in Michigan. Which leads me to suspect that the user in question is making up their talking points out of thin air.
At no point did they imply that Michigan currently requires voter ID. Arainach gave you an example of disparity in ease of voting.
As a separate point, they preemptively mention that a similar disparity exists re/ getting an ID, which is what you're trying to add as a requirement. It's a straightforward argument.
So where do you get "that Michigan makes it difficult to get an ID for voter suppression purposes"?
The US could make IDs free and then make election day a national holiday, in which case the resistance to ID requirements probably wouldn't be as strong. Currently voter ID laws will suppress voting, whereas the goal in a democracy should surely be that everyone has ample opportunity to vote and have their voice heard.
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I don't think mumbling something about "historical baggage" justifies bad policy.
I appreciate you illustrating my point about the role "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
Yearning for a day when self-identified "progressives" look to the future instead of obsessing about the past.
Yearning for a day when conservatives, whether they identify as one or not, recognize that there’s a rich history of human suffering under the yoke of conservative thought leaders that could be easily avoided if they just opened a history book. Or just read the news. Because there’s no interruption between the two. Jerry Jones is in the background of a photo of the Little Rock 9. Donald Trump led a hate campaign against the Central Park 5 in 1989. These are contemporary issues.
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When Mississippi Republican lawmakers voted to gerrymander their state in May _2026_, they decided to convene in the old state capitol. The one the Confederate used.
This isn't the past. This is pretty much the present and the future. This, together with the restoration of Confederate names and monuments and the president and vice-president lying about Haitians and Somali is clear, pure, objective racism. It is not six degrees. It is who they are.
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I'm asking something that specifically targets black Americans as a group - the VRA doesn't target them (at least as my understanding goes) but rather as you said is allowing gerrymandering which more divides down political lines than racial ones unless you are suggesting that every person of a racial group thinks and votes the same.
I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.
One example would be a black neighborhood having 1 voting machine so that the line is so long there isn’t time for everyone to vote.
Meanwhile a white neighborhood has dozens of polling places, each with many machines.
Here's NPR, a notoriously left-wing news source in the US
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1238646047/voting-options-ear...
Your own source disagrees with you.
If you actually read the article, you'll see that the argument is that, since the year 2000, it has (as of 2024) broadly become easier to vote. But:
"The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot."
And it's only gotten worse since. I strongly suggest you do some cursory research in the future before making comments like this.
(Also from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/05/1235521824/voter-turnout-race... )
Did you read the rest of the article?
* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*
The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures
He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.
He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.
Let's hope no one starts an ill informed and hypocritical conspiracy theory about the mail-in voting that has made it so much easier to vote.
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This DOES intentionally target black people. It's an intentional strategy to have "plausible" deniability dating back decades:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”
That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
And yet… there have been lawsuits that surfaced memos and audio clips where GOP strategists were blatant about developing proxies for “is black”.
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Just decades of statistics and a good number of quotes from numerous politicians that validate the efforts. Like this reported from John Ehrlichman, White House legal counsel under Nixon:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
We're literally in a thread about the FBI trying to get Martin Luther King Jr to commit suicide, and you're waltzing in to claim that there's no evidence? There are piles of it! at least pretend to be arguing in good faith.
The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.
Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the midterms, because the current administration, have been going after Hispanics and Asians without hesitation. Maybe those groups will finally learn something. If you’re black or American Indian, you know the score.
The Republicans lost California because Pete Wilson and the Republican Party in California (late 1980’s) could not shut their mouths up, demonizing Hispanics at every turn, it turned the whole state around to the Democrats, and the same group is slowly but surely turning Texas blue with every year that goes by. And the same is also true of Arizona and New Mexico, just keep demonizing Hispanics. It’s not going work out in the long term.
The next governor of California will be a democrat of Hispanic dissent the Republicans had better be nice/respectful to him because they are losing the Southwest slowly but surely, every year, and being respectful also includes Mexico.
The Republicans just don't want to campaign in urban centers. Barely any major city in America has a Republican mayor. It's frankly insane for a mainstream party to just basically give up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_v._Callais
Narrator: it was not an honest question.
Agree, and it has diverted the whole thread.
You’re being downvoted, but it’s a fair criticism given they seemed to have a response locked and loaded to immediately give after they were given the most obvious response to their question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
There's a reason why the Right was up in arms about Critical Race Theory. They're currently doing everything possible to erase the past and frame the future as a White Christian country. And these people are the ones in power today.
I am much more circumspect on the civil rights movement and the top-down legislative results over the decades. There was good and bad. And the FBI telling MLK to kill yourself was heinous, just the same as to today as the FBI coercing Brian J. Cole Jr. (jan. 6 bomber suspect).
I was watching video the other day, compellingly showing Cole in a location that would completely exonerate him from the charges if verified. Not getting adequate attention.
Are you talking about Title VII in Universities?
My first guess would be this year's Supreme Court decision about the Voting Rights Act.
Almost immediately after the ruling, a number of Republican states immediately put forth redrawn maps breaking up majority black districts.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/14/southern-sta...
Another candidate would be the DOJ ending attempts at school desegregation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/justice-depar...
<rant>
So go and put them in the ground next to their disgusting traitor ancestors. The abolitionists should've made sure to break the southern slaver class any would miss them for good.
Any reasonable person knows it's wrong to deny an other human their humanity to enrich themselves. They should've retroactively made owning slaves as well as helping someone else keep slaves a crime punishable by a quick death and redistribution of all their worldly possessions among those they enslaved.
The descendants of the slavers still lust for twisted reimagined memory of former stolen wealth and power to this day. We can see it was a mistake to show them mercy. Let those southern trees carry strange white fruits!
</rant>
This is an incredibly partisan take and I don't think it's appropriate for Hacker News, which is not supposed to include flamebait comments.
Ah yes, white people are oblivious to racism and black people are systemically abused. This is just the standard Democrat narrative. And it's fine to believe that, but again, it's far from an objective non-partisan, non-flame-baity take.
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The turn from your initial comment to this was about as abrupt as Hulk Hogan's in 1996.
Your experience is sadly very parochial, and simply anecdata.
Meaningful systemic racism is far more problematic than your experience with a few rural black males.
And yet we are so quick to dismiss their own livd experience and/or not believe them. Frankly "this happens almost never, but it happened once to me" is far more real to pretty much every human on this planet. I was routinely beat up by a certain racial group of people growing up. I still cannot feel threatened by their presence, from what I know of the brain it's literally encoded in my body.
Your experience is valid, and the emotional response probably serves a survival goal, but it still is not data.
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Ranting about “Black people cant be racist” is a great way to get most people to ignore everything you say after.
Everyone can be racist. No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books.
The whole "X can't be racist" claim is part of the broader class of intellectual ragebait--subverting the original meaning of a term to elicit reaction and thereby garner views (or in the academic realm, citations), but with more refined language and logic than the usual memes ragebait is found in. I find it frustrating and detracting from actual meaningful social/scientific efforts.
A FACT IS A FACT..I dont care if anyone ignores me. I serve a God who able to do exceedingly abundantly above all I could ask think or imagine.You think im scared of this comment, Im a big girl. I stand by what I said. I am sure you dont know history which is why you are offended and are trying to say whatever you said. Secondly RACISM IS DIFFERENT THAN PREJUDICE...most people confuse the two . YES everyone can have a bias and most people do...that's called PREJUDICE.
There’s two kinds of racism - systemic, or institutional, racism, and colloquial individual racism.
Of course anyone can be individually racist. But institutionally, no. The American institutions and systems have always been white-focused, black people simply do not have the power to be institutionally racist.
I mean, has there ever been any anti-white law ever written in the US? No, because it’s not possible. The institution which makes, and enforces, the law is itself white.
We really don't care any more. Nobody's buying what you're selling
Uhh Goldman Sachs came to my campus in 2010 and said they were only there to interview women and minorities. That is systemic racism.
Boohoo. What an ignorant take, a supporter of systemic racism pretending they're a victim of discrimination. Even elementary school children know their history better. You're not fooling anyone but yourself.
Explain how GP benefits from Goldman Sachs and similarly large companies refusing to hire them based on their immutable characteristics.
"How would men benefit from women having equal rights?"
It's not about you, and you would know that if you've been paying attention to the progress of history and human rights in the past century.
Yes some people think racist policies are okay if they help minorities and women.
Should you've stopped at "everyone can be racist", the comment would've been an excellent, if oversimplified, synthesis of the issue.
E:
> No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms
Some do, and we can give them the space to do that without implying that the effort is automatically deserving of consideration.
> pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books
That's a somewhat silly thing to argue. That's not how it really works, and it's not a "liberal" thing, whatever that may mean. (I assume it's an American term meant to designate something that's not conservative.)
Otherwise, what you say is correct.
The person you responded to never said it was a liberal thing, but liberal arts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
That's fair. Thanks for pointing it out. My point should be corrected in this case, but it still stands: that's not how it works.
>racist [noun]
>A person who believes a particular race is superior to others. A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others.
No where does it mention this new-age "prejudice + power" redefinition.
The word is race + -ism, IE literally "doctrine/practice based on race". The word has nothing to do with power. A black dude in America who chooses to beat up a white dude for his race is racist, even under the assumption he is a systematically oppressed minority.
Just stop seeing skin color - We've lost so much progress since Fresh Prince and Family Matters. Race baiters are ruining this country.
I believe you're conflating systematic racism with racism more broadly. Anyone can be racist.
Racism is believing that people can be divided into races (spoiler alert: races don't exist, ask a scientist) and, not only that, but also than some of those made up races are better than others.
> Black people cant be racist
You are clearly misinformed.
Colloquially racist? Sure. Anyone can be, but racism is also a political structure which black people don't have access to in the US. Which is what OP is trying to get at.
Agreed, but let’s not make such wild statements. Racism and xenophobia does not look at the colour of the perpetrator’s skin.
No just racist
My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.
1: https://www.wlky.com/article/forced-busing-anniversary-50-lo...
2: https://www.louisville.com/redlining-louisville-dividing-lin...
I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.
St. Louis has the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmar_Divide.
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
Her other book, Caste, was what made me understand American racism, and how it differed from racism in societies I knew. I strongly recommend it.
i have a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different/
Thanks for the link. I'm a white American who has been lucky enough to visit Sri Lanka! I don't agree with your conclusion that American racism is inescapable, or uniquely so. I believe we can make progress on bigotries - in particular, despite the current and despicable wave against people who are transgender, non-binary, or otherwise queer, I believe we have made significant progress in reducing homophobia over the last 5 decades (the ones I can remember!). On the negative side, I did reach the conclusion (due to what I've seen during the Trump era) that much of what I thought was progress on racism was simply racists learning to code-switch. That part's depressing.
I do not think American racism is inescapable. I do think it is more part of the culture than it is in other places: like caste in India. It makes it more difficult escape because race is treated as an important and immutable characteristic. I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.
The other oddity is a tendency to lump everyone non-white together. Think of phrases such as "global majority".
> I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.
Liberal Americans said race is arbitrary in my experience. And people who said gender identity should be respected believed it was fixed.
I answered to the sibling comment. Saying it is one thing. Being consistent with that position is what seems to be missing.
I would have thought American liberals (like me) would mostly view race as a social construct and therefore not immutable. However I am not an expert in sociology and my experience must be shaped by not being part of any visible minority.
I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.
For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".
Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.
To me the ideal is that the colour of someone's skin is a minor and unimportant physical attribute - like the colour of their hair or their eyes.
A lot of liberal Americans argue against this.
I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 70s and 80s. My district was one of the last to desegregate schools in the state, fought for years to avoid it. Well, it finally happened in the early-80s, a 'bussing' program was started to bring Black kids from North St. Louis to attend schools in my district. I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I remember all the adults in the neighborhood were furious. There were protests outside my school on the first day. People threw rocks at the bus from North St. Louis when it pulled into the parking lot.
It was a little tense at school for, maybe, a few hours, but mostly it was just confusion - WTF is going on?. But after that, it was cool. All the kids quickly realized we're all basically the same - we all hated homework and were intimidated by girls, the usual adolescent stuff. I didn't know it at the time, but the school deseg program was one of the most impactful events of my childhood.
Redlining in Omaha's history too.
(You can kind of blame real-estate agents to a degree. There was an interesting indie documentary on it that played last year.)
> Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
When you are used to privilege, equality looks like oppression.
How's that 'integration' working out for your children today?
> I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave
Why gut squirrels
Because if you want to eat an animal you have to properly remove the bits of it that will make you sick and spoil the meat.
We do it to pigs and chickens and cows too. Its a very early step in the slaughtering and butchering process - usually the first step after the animal has been killed.
Because you're poor and need to hunt squirrels to get protein into your diet?
Or because you have a history of being in that position and feel like it is important to pass the knowledge on?
That isn't what was written on the letter, that was the commenter's own writing.
I mean... operation paperclip already tells you A LOT of what you need to understand about the USA for most of the 20th century. And I'm being kind because it would otherwise be unfair to most of the users of this site who were not even born then.
I don’t think you need to be so gentle with us.
We, as Americans have had our “mask off” moment now and are openly declaring ourselves the preeminent empire on the planet. It’s simply that we are withdrawing from our globalist support structures due to a wide variety of forecast reasons along side that, which is confusing to many.
It was our liberal values and performance internally by the Democrats that gave our people as sort of comforting story before. We do it for the good of others we give we topple dictators etc.
I am a deeply “real politik” person and I don’t think you average right leaning American ever thought otherwise. It was somewhat ironically the hope yet no-change left Americans (who i have counted myself among) who tried to give it the thinnest veneer of responsibility.
The greatest thing we provided the world was order, for a time. That seems true of almost any mature empire.
The amazing thing DeepState has done or does properly is it controls the power centers of other countries, no need to deal with people or convincing others. Like using poison and neurotoxins to paralyse the other nation. Other people's trust on American order is weaponized against them.
Order for the West, chaos and death for south america and southeast asia and the middle east and parts of africa.
I can understand your perspective here, and argue that, ultimately a market order was imposed on the world by America (and England) -- even when America interefered, removed, or otherwise altered democratic trajectories still resulted in a sort of networked world order. I'll not argue that they were not done, or even that they were done to benefit those targeted.
Simply that a type of order was enforced to build a global money-ist theory of society and and market + trade platform.
I might, wrongly, argue that many of these regions both would have continued in the chaos and death they otherwise were already participating in, but i'd also accept that the Dutch in Africa, English in the Caribbean and China, etc all introduced net new outside chaotic aspects on purpose. I'd also accept that attempts at order by the American's ultimately resulted in chaos, especially of course in the middle east.
As to south america, this I'll acknowledge of course was an history of interference, one that is hard to argue the contra-positive since communism in almost all regions of the world failed to develope a long term stable order which was both culturally, trade, and fiscally sustainable, with many falling to a worse state after these outcomes.
China and Vietnam, left mostly to their own devices, have maintained a positive trajectory and retain control of the commanding heights of the economy. Vietnam and China successfully repulsed Western occupiers which is what gave them a chance at independent development.
Every other attempt at a different path elsewhere was undercut by military coups, invasions, economic blockades. One would hope that communism/socialism would be robust to destabilization efforts, but it was not the case. Capitalism also took time to develop, such as various attempts in the Italian city states before first taking root in Denmark. Hopefully, a new system of peace and cooperation will replace our brutal empire.
So you are saying an order was established...
I think you're the type of person that when wrong sorta talks about a bunch of adjacent topics to try to avoid the point of admiting that you were wrong.
The Sino-Soviet bloc and the Warsaw Pact controlled roughly a third of the world's population, an immense percentage of the Earth's landmass, and practically every natural resource required for autarky. They had nuclear parity, massive industrial bases, and their own closed global trading network (COMECON). If a system with that level of geographic, demographic, and military shielding cannot sustain itself, it is not due to a lack of opportunity.
It is prima-facie absurd to claim "it just wasn't given a chance"
>Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
The irony being that the pieces of Western culture one might reasonable feel smug about (government of checks and balances, democracy, high standard of care for the worst off, careful jurisprudence with presumption of innocence, scientific freedom and literacy, free public education, etc.) are precisely the foundations that MAGA and their ilk despise and work so hard to undermine.
Like if you're going to get patriotic about post-enlightenment values and institutions, that's one thing... if you're going to just act like a bigoted, might-makes-right, my-country-right-or-wrong, personality-worshiping, science-denying, uneducated xenophobic dipshit, then you don't have much to be proud of.
> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.
Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)
The Big Short (2015) | American Taxpayers Bailout The Banks | Steve Carell, Jeremy Strong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQGiEbj_GR0
"I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people"
See, I happen to think that racists get some kind of perverse self-actualization from manifesting degradation of cultures they consider inferior - that there is a real 'buzz' to be had from such fallacious elevation as required to justify bombing another culture into oblivion. The murder is its own reward in such circles.
The "terrorism" tranche of this hate culture is particularly jarring, since the ones claiming moral altitude over 'terrorists' are delivering far, far more terrorism than their supposed enemies. It's just been homogenized.
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>said in an 1895 speech in Alanta that despite the civil rights challenges faced by African Americans, that America was the best place in the world for Africans to live and prosper.
Maybe because Americans, whether black like Booker T Washington or white like Donald J. Trump, are notoriously ignorant on living conditions elsewhere, and conditioned to believe their country is the greatest ever place to live, even if it's way behind dozens of life metrics most of the western world.
or maybe because Africa was under brutal European colonization at the time, look up Belgium
Don't have to look up Belgium, I know of it (and Belgium was in the Congo and Ruanda basically, not Africa in general).
Doesn't mean the US, with KKK, Jim Crow, seggregation, and the rest was the best country in the world for blacks to live.
>Doesn't mean the US, with KKK, Jim Crow, seggregation, and the rest was the best country in the world for blacks to live
just ignoring the person you're talking to and bellowing the same things over and over does not make you anything like "right". Booker T Washington was a bigger expert on race issues concerning Africans and African Americans than you, and he says you are W. R. O. N. G.
It doesn't change or make better the situation for Blacks now or 100 years ago to point that out, but it is wrong to say that the US was the worst. It wasn't. Stop exaggerating like that and stick closer to the truth.
He was advocating for blacks to accept segregation, during Jim Crow. The guy was an idiot and many other black intellectuals disagreed with him.
Pretending he is the sole authority on race relations because he was an uncle tom trying to appease southern whites is hilarious.
Saying "uncle tom" is straight up racist by the way.
It's straight the exact opposite of racist.
It's a term long used by blacks themselves, as well as black allies, abolitionists, anti-seggregation activists etc, to refer to the "palatable to the whites, makes too many consessions" type.
stick to one topic: was the US the worst place for black people in the world? No it was not. Provide evidence that it was. Then I will point out to you that it was worse in other places.
There is still Black African slavery today in neighboring Arab countries, google it. Focus your attention on fixing things that are wrong and stop distracting yourself with things that are false.
Booker T Washington was in the context of the Jim Crow South and KKK. You really think that it would benefit Black people individually to refuse to accept segregation? In those times?
Stop changing the subject.
> stick to one topic: was the US the worst place for black people in the world? No it was not. Provide evidence that it was. Then I will point out to you that it was worse in other places.
Can you link the comment where anybody said it was the worst place? Brother, your claim is that, because some guy said that America is the best place in the world for Africans it must be true, and other people are just pointing out the things that make America bad for Africans. Nobody even said it was the worst!
Stop changing the subject.
> stick to one topic: was the US the worst place for black people in the world?
No one said that in this reply chain. They said it was awful for them. You are saying it wasn't bad because of one quote from some uncle tom. How about you provide more proof it was good for them without relating it to the fucking Belgian Congo.
> here is still Black African slavery today in neighboring Arab countries, google it.
First, chattel slavery is not the same as Arabic slavery. Second, yes I know, it is happening in Libya. Why is Libya doing that now? Oh, because we violated their sovereignty and bombed them to oust Gaddafi for geopolitical reasons. So we have a direct hand in that too.
> You really think that it would benefit Black people individually to refuse to accept segregation? In those times?
Yeah, why would people oppose their oppression? Better to bend over and take it because some uncle tom said to. You are clueless.
> Stop changing the subject.
Bless your heart.
>and he says you are W. R. O. N. G.
Your argument is an appeal to authority and "wrong" spelled like initials? What are you, 15?
Yes, Booker T Washington was a bigger expert on race issues concerning African Americans than all of us (nobody doubts that).
Not an expert on global race relations, or the conditions abroad. And obviously those uterrances were an expression of american exceptionalism, and very likely placating white US audiences (as a champion of a contested matter like race relations you never got far if you don't appear patriotic enough. That had to wait until much later with figures like Malcom X, and he didn't have the best of receptions of course).
>but it is wrong to say that the US was the worst. It wasn't.
Nobody said it was the worse.
What terrorist acts have "antifa" done, yet you dont bring up ANY of the right wing terrorism like oh I dont know, the Oklahoma bombing?? Your fly is open and your bias is showing.
I wasn't comparing brutal acts, I was arguing with facts against the literal language employed in the comment I was replying to.
antifa isn't a single organization, but groups under that umbrella do cooperate with, or are coopted front groups for, Marxist groups, and connect with any nationalist or sectarian strife in the world. You need to read up on "the theory of the revolutionary vanguard" and their self perceived role and techniques for fomenting revolution: that's who I'm talking about when I say antifa. Many people who consider themselves part of antifa for muh racism or muh increased minimum wage or muh ACAB might not be intellectual or well read about the history of Marxist revolutionaries, and they might beven be shocked to discover they intellectual Marxists are trying (and succeeding) in controlling their organizations toward a goal that's more likely to get a new Stalinist government.
Cool. Now do extremist Likud party members and their frothy-mouthed children-hating warmonger allies in the US Congress.
Think they give a shit about civil rights?
Not to mention the criminal omission in their argument of the US' support for the willful, daily murder of children every single day for the past few years in Gaza.
Contemptible.
on a daily basis, the people of Gaza are more oppressed by their own government. Gaza 60 or 70 years ago was territory claimed by Egypt just as the West Bank was territory claimed by Jordan; and Egypt and Jordan gave up their claims because of the hostility of the terrorist movement there.
If it's a question of ethnic strife, the condition of the West Bank and Gaza are due to strife between the West Bank and Jordan, and Gaza with Egypt as anything else.
Carefully side-stepping the responsibilities of the nation in the region with undeclared nukes, which was literally founded by active terrorist groups, does not help your argument...
The children of Gaza are being murdered by American bombs, dropped by Americas allies, with permission, in full view of the rest of the world. Because Americans and their allies have deemed those children inferior.
Claims of superiority on the issue of civil rights are, therefore, null and void.
>Carefully side-stepping...
You wrote a comment, I critiqued it with facts, and it is YOU who is changing the topic and carefully side-stepping that I showed you were wrong. (I replied to someone else about Gaza.)
I have to jump in some cabs now, so you now have time to contemplate the error of your ways rather than hoping I'll see what you write further.
You issued nothing but falsehoods about the cause of the suffering of the children of Gaza, actually. Apropos errors of ones ways…
>Most terrorism in the last 60ish years is associated with some Arabs and also some Islamists, and with or in cooperation with, anarcho-Marxists like Bader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades, antifa, etc.
That is blatantly false and you are indeed manifesting the very example of the ideology I find utterly contemptible.
37 million refugees from America's heinously vile wars, this century alone, beg to differ. The two million dead Iraqi's - and the children born to their descendants, daily, with congenital birth defects as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium, certainly have had their human rights utterly abrogated from a distance by America's overtly racist ruling class, also.
And then, there's Gaza.
I have no respect for a nation that justifies the constant, daily murder of children. A nation that has dropped one bomb, on average, every 15 minutes for the past 25 years - on mostly innocent people - deserves a lot less respect than you seem to imply. It is certainly no shining example of civil rights.
Your in-group is not my out-group, but it's not my in-group, either. I prefer to participate in cultures which protect human rights - at the level of children - above all else. America is not one of them.
If your state has to murder children - or supports states willfully murdering children - in "self defense", then it is a failed state.
Period.
As for Booker T Washington, that was over a century ago. His work nevertheless had to be continued via Martin Luther King and company.
Try to keep up to present time. The US is the worlds #1 funder and supporter of terrorism this century, bar none.
Loudly agreeing with this statement - for anyone who believes that the US and NATO countries were not actively supporting right wing terror groups in Europe (and beyond), read up on Operation Gladio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
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Nope, this is what the world thinks of America.
It literally happened.
Lee Atwater, Republican party strategist, 1981:
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
He predates the war on terror though.
Yep, the southern strategy. Make the lowest white man feel superior to the best minority.
It's truly amazing how well it works.
"The US is an evil warmongering empire... wait why aren't they doing more to support Ukraine's war? They only sent 14x as much aid as France!"
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Are you racist? Or a bot yourself? I genuinely cannot tell.
I am someone with common sense
No, that's demonstrably false. You might believe you have common sense, but this is another sign your judgement is, in fact, rather poor.
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I know you're going for the joke, but it's really not funny. There are a thousand things I could be labelled inferior for - terrorism is really not one of them.
> What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
Or where they'd still like to take us. The only problem they have with Ayatollahs is that they call God by the wrong name.
Well, that, and the rapeing and the murdering. And sticking their women in sacks isn't a good look for the theocracy.
The fundamentalist 'christian' groups are not much better from my vantage point.
It's hard to discern detail with your eyes closed.
Are you talking about American religious conservatives in power, or Iranian ones?
See, there you go, doing it.
Do you think that subsistence-working at Only Fans, or the local strip club is a better alternative?
For every 'women in sacks' argument that can be made, there is a street downtown where women put themselves in immense danger just to be able to feed their kids, pay their medical bill debts, get themselves some kind of safety net...
Same shit, different social flavor.
In America women can go to jail for their husbands' crimes, men are allowed to marry ten-year-olds, and abortions in some states are illegal, even in cases of rape.
https://letterboxd.com/film/americas-war-against-women/watch...
I think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty good framework by which to assess the longterm viability of a nation/state/group. States which violate the principles of the UDHR tend to be dreadful places to live in many ways - and this is as true of Western states as it is the non-Western ones.
I couldn't live in a state which allows its police forces to murder with impunity, for example.
The point is that the moral authority we claim over other states is a fallacy. Until we are actually protecting civil rights to the extent we expect of other nations, we are hypocritically justifying our own states heinous track record.
Alas, this seems to be understood pretty well by the ruling classes, who have subjugated human rights to mean "this gives us a right to justify the destruction of sovereign states and their peoples' we have deemed inferior".
"I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm."
Sounds bucolic.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
What makes you think they've stopped?
Well, "they" did their best to stop Bernie running.
They succeeded.
I remember reading the online news about those primaries as they happened. Bernie wins this state in a landslide. Bernie wins that state in a landslide. Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states. At the end he doesn't have enough votes, oh dear too bad so sad. Some sort of investigation happened, but concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to.
HRC was also given the power to effectively run the DNC (while a candidate in the primaries!) in exchange for some funraising. There were bunches of other shenanigans.
To me, it all seems to boil down to the notion that Bernie would credibly have "drained the swamp," which would have effectively tanked the careers of a lot of long-serving Democratic folks who were not aligned with his populist/progressive agenda. Simply by hiring people that would have aligned with his vision, this was such a threat to existing power, it had to be stopped. Yes, the Rs are worse (in my opinion), but this gives me plenty of distrust for the Ds. Institutions eventually become more about institutional survival than about their "core mission."
Remember also that it turned out that the chair of the DNC (Donna Brazile) was able to let Hillary (or at least Hilary's campaign) have access to the CNN debate questions in advance
Yeah, that was part of the other shenanigans I was referring to!
> Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic...
Why are you just completely making things up?
At some point during that primary season I was driving in my car listening to my local NPR station and they had a story about these two candidates. I shit you not: they were introduced as "Hillary Clinton" and "the socialist senator from Vermont".
For some reason I remember that moment as vividly as I remember pulling out in the car with my mom on the way to school and hearing that a plane had hit the WTC.
NPR has been capital-endorsed garbage for a long time now. NYT is no better.
The Sanders campaigns just made it painfully obvious to anybody paying attention.
Remember when Hillary won all those coin tosses?
https://www.npr.org/2016/02/02/465268206/coin-toss-fact-chec...
Yes, that was the Clinton-controlled ('wealthy donors') DNC that excluded Bernie from a fair competition to become the Democrat's Candidate - which by all metrics and polling from the party's base and non-party members he would have won.
So, the Clinton-controlled DNC from 2016 put Trump in the White House.
The positive message is that since then the Democrats have been infused by Sanders-like independent Democrats that want to do the right thing, but we must keep on pushing to rid and guard the DNC and party administration off the corrupt billionaire influences.
At a certain point you realize both parties ultimately serve the super rich. The DNC would rather have Republicans in office over electing real progressives.
If you look outside the US Bernie is actually a moderate. We're not talking about abolishing money or seizing the means of production. Just maybe, somewhere between minting a new trillionaire every year and pregnant women sleeping outside we can find a compromise.
Unlimited money for wars all over the planet, but if you lose your job and have a chronic illness you're screwed most of the time.
Sometimes your screwed even if you have a job and good health insurance. It's a magic game of musical chairs to see what's covered or not. What's out of pocket , etc.
Absolutely agree, Bernie is seen as politically 'normal' by most (western) countries. Only Amercians having become gradually skewed by Reagonomics (or better his puppet masters) that are so (ab)used by predatory capitalism would think of him as outer left, whereas most of the world sees in him a centrist (as would 1950s golden-era American voters).
I don’t think theirs any possible way Social Security or other New Deal programs could be enacted today.
Although it can be argued this should be handled state by state instead. Unemployment pays about 1k per week in Washington , but only 400$ a week in Illinois.
My big fear is a right leaning federal government will eventually dismantle the social safety net entirely. If not that expect rent seeking, ie paying fees to private companies to get your social security checks
Edit: Illinois actually goes up to around 850 if you have children and starts at 628$, my mistake
For the sake of discussion, can you clarify who you refer to by "puppet masters"?
Can you explain why you shouldn't rely on media memories as truth?
> Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states
Can you list these states? This should be easy to verify.
> concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to
Can you cite a law that tells private parties who they must support?
So did Dems
I don't think the Dems are still the party of the working class.
There is no party of the working class. Hasn't been since Clinton in the 90s moved to the right.
Pretty much this. Voting in this election will give me no peace of mind.
And won.
The truth is that Americans hate the working class. They idolize the super rich.
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By voting against him?
If by "they", you are referencing specifically the DNC establishment then you are correct.
Never said they stopped: industry 'leaders', authoritarians, will always try to keep and expand their abusive grip over others and claw as much power from the common people as possible. The methods are always the same: distraction, disinformation, abuse. The common people's only defense is transparent institutions and limiting power/wealth in general.
See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military dictatorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
The democrats participate in this export strongly too. Biden shut down a really important union strike. They are less overt about it, but go watch Malcolm X talk about foxes and wolves.
Really all the comments about "white moderates/liberals." The exact sort of people who forgot the Civil Rights movement, Labor Rights movement, and Women's Suffrage, and really every movement by a marginalized group to gain power from the mainstream were packed full of organized political violence.
Non-violent protests have a place. On occasion though, you need to hit the system where it hurts in order for it to take you seriously.
The Democratic Party too had problematic 'wealthy supporters' that influenced them away from a people's real needs. However, Biden's initiatives were probably the most 'socialistic' since FDR. And if the DSA and Bernie Sanders' aligned forces are finally able to force the Democratic Party back to their roots of FDR, then there is good chance we might still make it.
Biden was a center-right candidate who largely continued trump's policies.
the DNC sabotaged Bernie in 2016 with all their might.
Even if Biden's strategy was serve the super rich, while minimally "throwing the dog a bone" (the average person), not much changed. Sure, he appointed Lina Kahn, but per usual she was also sabotaged within the FTC and outside of it had no support.
The comparison to FDR, who was supremely hated by Wall street, who banned any bankers from attending Bretton Woods, who oversaw the New Deal, etc, etc is laughable.
It's the most important election of our lifetime... For the fourth time in a row!
Thats what happens when you live in increasingly interesting times
Anything to prop up the illusion of democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
Then explain the existence and extension of ranked-choice voting.
Also explain why only one side of the "uniparty" is very, very vocal against ranked-choice voting. Like, to the point of banning it by law. All of them Republicans.
Weird, uh? But please tell us again how much Democrats and Republicans are the same and what is your solution.
Sounds like you need to re-read the article.
You're linking an article showing how everybody in modern times who uses the term "uniparty" is using it to further their own political interests...
Beyond just that, if there is a uniparty, then why is Elon spending half a billion dollars in electoral races?
It's not that there's a uniparty, it's that as a result of Citizen's United, parties don't need to represent you anymore. They represent their money donors instead. Money is speech now, and as the wealth disparity grows it becomes a bigger megaphone and drowns out the voices of hundreds of millions.
Sounds like you need to re-read the article.
Yep, Dems are just the good cop to the bad cop. And their only purpose is to placate the country into thinking we’re not 100% owned by billionaires and corporate interests.
The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.
It is though? Like, every single election, someone runs on the platform of abolishing democracy. Every single election, it's important that person doesn't win, or there won't be a democracy any more.
By all rights there shouldn't be one already, but we're lucky the democracy abolitionists are fairly incompetent.
Well it's important to you. It's evidently not important to the people you vote for, the people who fundraise off of this hostage situation, the people who have had trifectas multiple times during this era and have not even used them to permanently secure the "democracy", let alone the overwhelmingly popular policies with their base that would guarantee they win ever election but piss off their donors.
So last election, Kamala Harris was the platform of abolishing democracy?
Or, alternatively, did we cease to have a democracy?
We are very substantially less democratic than we were in 2024. The admin has broken laws regarding impoundment and war powers, just to name two. The executive has no legal power to determine funding allocations, or to commit to wars long-term. Yet both have happened and are still happening.
Using the DOJ to interfere in state elections they have no jurisdiction in, and having masked men abduct people and ignore court orders regarding their disposition is just about as authoritarian as it gets.
Those are all new things that have substantially eroded - or removed all together the idea of democracy in less than two years.
On the other hand, it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening. It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election, and it would become irreversibly undemocratic if a president actually stayed in office after losing an election.
>It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election,
Jan 6, fake electors scheme, etc. This time it will be a lot worse.
That's not gonna happen.
If one side shuts the other out of power, that's when we'll finally get the civil war many have been predicting for a long time.
Hopefully the framework to limit power can stay in place, in spite of all the calls to change it, abolish the senate, pack the court, make sure to punish/"hold accountable" red voters, etc.
> it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening
It's possible, but not very credible, to argue that in a situation where direct democracy doesn't exist.
The closest we have to voted for these things rather than voted for these people is polls, which overwhelmingly illustrate that most people oppose those things.
We'll know more after the election, if people supported those things.
> It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election
Yes, the current president tried exactly that, in a violent insurrection, and has interfered in national elections since regaining power.
People keep polling against the things that are happening, but in elections that actually matter they keep voting for them, so...
and it's probably not just election tampering, because polls close to elections also show support.
> People keep polling against the things that are happening, but in elections that actually matter they keep voting for them, so...
Since the usa isn't a direct democracy, this isn't actually true. People vote for representatives, not things.
As for what happens to the representatives which have, since the last election, done things people oppose? We'll find out in a week or so! Looks like most people won't be voting for them.
They'll be back in the election after.
No one voted for what is happening now, because crimes like these were not on the ballot and were not promised in advance. If you vote for a president in a system with three equal branches and then they liquidate the other two - no one voted for THAT.
Was voting for a narcissistic treason weasel predictably going to lead to this? I would say - and did say - yes, without question. He already incited a violent insurrection once, rather than admit he lost an election. But people voted for cheaper groceries and deporting violent criminals.
As difficult as it is to believe, there are many tens of millions of people who think that Trump is a smart business man because he was portrayed that way on The Apprentice. They think the promises of this known huckster and flim-flam man were worth the bandwidth spent delivering them to televisions. They think that FOX News opinion show personalities are qualified to administer the country's government. They didn't vote for fascism, because they don't know what that word means. Many could not even reliably number the branches of government or describe them accurately.
Well, you'll see after the midterms... You know, the one where the DOJ is looking to cancel the election in Alaska, where Texas GOP officials are trying to stop the election, where Homeland Security Investigation officers are sent to a sitting Representative's home at dawn and the president is boasting she has forfeited her seat...
Totally normal stuff in a democracy, don't we agree?
Just imagine the shittiest country that you can think of. Now imagine everything I described above happening in that country. Now imagine how you would react to that, and how it would be covered in the news and punditry.
I mean Karen Bass just said there's no need for an Election for the governor, it's Xavier Baccera. He's the governor already according to her. "You don't need an election on November 3. A Republican cannot win in this state."
In Alaska the GOP has filed a lawsuit saying the election was rigged but only if they lose (since it hasn't happened yet). I wish I was making this up.
Do you think she meant there shouldn't be an election, or was simply alluding to the incredibly predictable result we all know to expect?
Personally, and this is just my opinion, but many people are aware of the reporting on CA laws and how it's actually impossible to prove voting irregularities because they separate the voter from the vote. And to have people with the attitude she has, it only makes me lean towards - they know the irregularities are real.
Every time voters have been audited they've found less than 100 false votes across the whole country.
They can't audit the votes!
I guess I have less faith than you in the ability of the CA state government to coordinate a vast, sophisticated conspiracy without letting slip any evidence or having any participants whistle-blow.
I suppose you're a bigger believer in government competence than I.
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How did she do in the primaries?
>every single election, someone runs on the platform of abolishing democracy
So was this person Romney in 2012? McCain in 2008? Kerry in 2004? Gore in 2000?
Any one of those presidents would've abolished democracy?
Somehow we picked the right candidate every time?
The average constitution lasts about 18 years. The US constitution has lasted almost 250. Statistically, that's quite unlikely if a candidate ran on a platform of abolishing democracy in every election.
>The average constitution lasts about 18 years
What
"By our estimate, national constitutions have lasted an average of only seventeen years since 1789"
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...
Most countries are not as politically stable as the US. We're very privileged in that way.
It would be interesting to see how that number changes if we excluded governments overthrown by the US.
How many of them openly attacked and rejected to democratic process itself? How many of them did not accept the result of an election?
Yeah, it is not as if Trump was planning (more) massive war crimes, against Iran in particular, right now. (I mean , on top of the ongoing war crimes in the Caribbean Sea.) I am completely exaggerating here, right? It is not as if the secretary of war had fired another top ranking military officer without offering any explanation:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/hegseth-fires-the-pent...
Or it isn't as if top oil executives are changing their business trip plans to the United Arab Emirates:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-chevron-cancel...
No need to think anything important is going to happen with an insane president (did you know that "dumb" ends with a "b"? Did you know that?) surrounded by incompetent sycophants.
We can all see the equivalence here: some people said that Obama was the antichrist, some people say now that Trump is senile, violent, racist and unhinged. Clearly they are both wrong. Both sides. Clearly. It is obvious that both are decent, educated men who just carry their elected duties.
> The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
There's a very easy method to tell if someone making that claim is a liar: ask "what major ideological compromise are they making to save democracy?" if the answer is "none" or close to it, they're full of shit.
'Cause if fascism is really our doorstep, you'd think they'd be gunning for the broadest, most indefatigable anti-fascist coalition possible; instead of the narrowest, most pure one they think they can get away with.
I mean...I think people who oppose GMOs, permitting reform, hydroelectric, and nuclear power do care about the environment, despite actively working against it. People who oppose developers building more houses do want more affordable housing, despite actively working against it.
People, including individuals, aren't single-minded, rational, or scientifically literate.
In the case of anti-fascism, many on the left earnestly believe that a far-left candidate is the solution because their bubble tells them that their views are dominant. After all, they and many of their friends aren't excited to vote for the moderates, but would vote for someone more left.
I'll sacrifice a lot of things I care about for leadership that would shore up democracy (I'm not sure how, though fixing redistricting is a big one), but it's seen as normal and admirable to refuse to compromise.
You raise good points, and I think there are actually at least two phenomena here:
1. The liars: people cynically playing up fears of "losing democracy" as a political tactic to support some other political programs. I think this is especially obvious from candidates, activists, political operatives, etc. -- people sophisticated enough and engaged enough to know and think about what they're doing in a serious way.
2. The un-serious people: those you describe. Basically irrational people who believe a jumble of things without exercising the ability to prioritize or disengage the contradictions.
I don't think the boundaries between these phenomena are hard ones (e.g. you can often push un-serious people into liar territory by challenging them to prioritize).
Oh, yeah, Bush wasn't that bad, right? Just hundreds of thousands of deaths and crippled veterans, and the complete destruction of global order that opened the door to Russia invading Ukraine. "Just worth a shrug", you say while you pass by a crack addicted veteran while on you way to pay 30% more for gas and food. "It wasn't worth getting worried about."
What a level-headed, reasonable know-nothing you are, sitting above all this unreasonable jockeying.
I am not surprised though, you live in a culture where people can lecture others that the Bible told them Obama was Satan. You don't know what actual politics is anymore.
I’d add the so-called “Patriot Act” to the list of damages from the GW Bush era. Massive consequences that can’t be shrugged off with some both-sides nonsense.
As long as people keep electing fascist billionaires to loot the country, the fight continues
Continuing to believe in democracy when you seem to know how the country (all countries) actually works in practice is surely just illogical.
You can't vote for anyone who'll abolish the FBI, CIA and the rest of the elite groups that actually run things
You can vote for someone who won't go out of their way to alienate your allies, start wars on a whim, defund science, whitewash history, pardon his loyal militia men, engage in blatant insider trading, etc etc etc
> but it hinges all on this November
A slight challenge here. November is a sizable opportunity to move towards that aim. Every day after is another opportunity to live it out in your life, community, neighborhood, finances, religion, and family...
>Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.
The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?
And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".
There's another country that has infiltrated the whole American government, and a third country that is often said to have infiltrated American academia and civil society, but we don't seem to worry about them. Why the distinction?
I'm not sure what your question is. Did someone draw a distinction? If you transplanted the 1960s FBI to modern times and told them to look for influence in favour of Russia or Israel or whoever you mean but for some reason don't name, and told them to use the same tactics, they probably would try.
The USS Liberty happened in the 1960s. It's downright silly to pretend the American state would ever have had a similar orientation towards a rival superpower vs its own unsinkable aircraft carrier.
You're now the second person doing this. I won't try to keep up with the conspiracies, and multiple levels of unstated implications based on the assumptions about those conspiracies being facts. Israel has never been, nor will likely ever be a superpower or anything akin to a near-peer adversary of the United States, so I'm not too sure what there is to talk about. Still waiting for anyone to propose a topic.
The USSR is the superpower I was referring to. You are illiterate.
But you don’t understand it’s okay when Mossad and Shin Bet do it.
It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.
(well, the Russian Federation, not the USSR)
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to attack black civil rights movements. They also used it to attack things that were associated with the Soviet Union, including associating black civil rights with communism and socialism, like you're doing here.
Maybe this was not about everybody and not about you?
>multi-coalition, working class movement
That is how Communists get their cultural revolution, you know.
It's the excuse Communists used. It's also the same excuse Fascists used. Need I remind you: national socialist German worker's party.
There seems to be great demand for a party that actually makes life better for people, so great that you can just name your party that, win an election and do anything you want to. For some reason there's very little supply of parties that actually make life better and don't just pretend they want to.
>That is how Communists get tbeir cultural revokution, you know
That is how blowhards get Red-Scares and Cold Wars, you know. And exactly the abuses OP posting is decrying.
It doesn't all hinge on this November. It hinges on all the moments where people do work to avoid fascism. Some of that happens at the polls. Some of that happens at home. Some of that happens online.
Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter
Interesting, true citizen action only revealed the FBI was the author of the blackmailing of MLK.
> On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.
Some might call this lawlessness, but in a society where the government is keeping secrets from its own constituents, this sort of actions are the only ones a citizen can realistically do to return from a lawless and corrupt government, sadly.
Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.
The corruption of government begins with its secrets. A truly free people keep no secrets.
COINTELPRO was the physical intimidation and enforcement operation when Operation Mockingbird's total information control of corporate media failed to convince people that democracy was real. Even when both got exposed, the corporate media basically ignored Mockingbird because they were complicit.
Fast forward to today, and the only difference is they now own all the Social Media and A.I. If you want truth in journalism, support small local journalists, and ignore corporate news.
That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments. Wild. I guess the tactics have always been the same then.
At least now we have LLMs that can produce this kind of stuff at human-overwhelming rates, so that is progress.
> That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments
the corners of the internet that you frequent have much more eloquent haters than the ones I'm used to
Ironically this is quite common on 4chan, although so are many other much more childish things, but there is an occasional flash of someone with real knowledge using it to be a clever asshole.
I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.
>honeypot
They explicitly say they proactively work with LEOs to report any and all things illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if they had members of staff directly employed by some agencies, they wouldn't be opposed to it. They do not wait for a court order or subpoena, they will happily give them data and will not wait to be asked.
Their range of acceptable content is wider than other cleaner platforms which gives an impression of anarchy and freedom and anonymity, but actually those other more censored and speech restricted platforms may actually be more safer, private and free from government and legal interference!
They've gotten some strict rules. It's not the lawless wasteland it's portrayed as any more.
The only strictness I have noticed is that captchas are way more annoying now, and they blanket ban entire residential IP networks (in addition to every possible datacenter/VPS/VPN/tor IP block on Earth). But somehow tons of people (not me) keep getting through.
But, they now allow NSFW content in regular boards like technology, and for the first time in 20 years I actually saw someone post cheese pizza... plus I regularly see more and more leaked data posted there first, so I wouldn't call it less lawless at all.
> for the first time in 20 years I actually saw someone post cheese pizza
Don't know what this means, gonna keep it that way.
"cheese pizza" is internet slang for "child pornography"
HN is one of those places, actually.
There are quite a few covert psychopaths on here that happily twist knives and hurt people.
It's just hidden under layers and layers of indirection, jargon and plausible deniability. Not unlike your standard boardroom I guess.
Techno-feudalism is an Ayn-Rand objectivists wet dream, after all. There's profit in oppression.
I have a black friend who I once referred to an HN post for more information on a topic we were discussing. Hs informed me that he doesn't go to HN, "That place is a Klan rally", were his words IIRC. At any rate, I said that a lot of it is 4chan, but there's some quality there, afterall, I use HN.
He looked at me and smiled. Went back to his coding.
I just want to put it out there that just because you happen to be in a place with a lot of unsavory people doesn't mean you, yourself are unsavory. We shouldn't paint everyone with so Catholic a brush. You have to go to the grocery store, but so do pedophiles, drug lords, and wife abusers. That's kind of how I see HN.
Yes. It's a crap hole.
But some neighborhoods just have crap hole grocery stores. Tech is kind of one of those "neighborhoods", and HN is a grocery store. You don't have to socialize with the other customers, and you can restrict yourself to only buying the decent foods on offer.
I think the desire to keep this place so pleasant and not moderate dressed-up views rooted in racism / hate ("we're not political" being a political stance, more or less) lets some really reprehensible threads live / get defended.
To the point someone brought up elsewhere, you can't really 'fight' back either. Everything remains 'polite' despite viewing you as less of a human being for being a person of color, poor, etc.
I think it's typically quite obvious, or maybe I haven't seen the psycopaths. However, SWEs can be real dick heads. Just made me think of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_5uVdy5YmA
Uploaded 16 years ago... I can't believe that a video I thought was so hilarious back then is dating me so hard.
came expecting a rick roll, got an unexpected banger. thanks!
US “Project Meridian” — A Symptom of American Decline, Not a Solution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wpjWVRSoQM
Gold pot of a channel.
Can you be more specific? This is heavy moderated environment and I would say it's one of the most pleasurable places on public internet to be.
It’s not heavily moderated. This is the usual link dang/tomhow give when they explain why their moderation is necessarily inconsistent:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.
It's largely self-moderating
> it's one of the most pleasurable places on public internet to be
I think we have different definitions of pleasure.
This is a relatively dry place for any kind of conversation other than hyper logic conversation devoid of empathy or humour.
On certain tech topics, it can be very informative. On anything where there is a conflict between the topic and how the base makes money, there's a lot of down voting and sad rhetoric. As a result, you rarely get to discuss the harms of AI or certain oligarchs, e.g. musk, zuck, bezos, Russia, Israel.
This is a place mostly for reinforcing your own beliefs, rather than finding new ones, unless it's around a very mild topic.
I understand. As you said, it's a rather dry, mostly technical place, and that's exactly what I like about it. I appreciate that it's largely free from the suffering, injustices, and ridiculous political debates that dominate so much of the world around us.
I despise these people as much as any other decent human being should, but unfortunately, they're everywhere. Just not so much here.
> Just not so much here.
They're here, too. Just quiet about their beliefs so they can talk about their passions. I'm mixed on this because we're giving a subset of bad people a safe space to talk about their not-bad parts, which is adjacent to giving them a pass. I don't know how to reconcile this because I'm also not the thought police.
In some ways, I wish everyone wore the basic foundations of their heart on their sleeve so I could at least filter out the evil from my life more readily and try to make space for some people with bad ideas, but a willingness to change.
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Try to criticize the US' war machine as it relates to the US' tech industry, for example. You will incur the wrath of a thousand HN fascists.
Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.
Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.
This works the same way irl too. The US is one of the most heavily propagandized populations in history. You have to be talking to a very progressive, very politically savvy group to not constantly run into the usual knee jerk canned responses the second you bring up any criticism of military spending, foreign policy, or the panopticon. Probing of those responses in family or social settings for actual justification shows there’s no first principle reasoning behind them, just a vague unease about discussing the topics, like they’re sacrilege.
Yes, the frothy-mouthed ideation of the US cultural identity is just as frustrating to have to contend with as any other ideology. I've met great Iranian folks and great American folks, and great Russians too - and what they all have in common is the ability to reflect on the limits of their own cultures.
>The US is one of the most heavily propagandized populations in history.
I see this statement repeated often with no supporting evidence. Seems a little ironic!
Is this claim falsifiable?
Would you be able to name the 2nd or 3rd most propagandized populations, in your view? Do you know anything about propaganda in e.g. the USSR or North Korea?
"Historian Sergo Mikoyan claimed that decades prior to the early 1960s, offices and stores had to submit papers with examples of their typewriters' typeface to local KGB branches so that any printed text could be traced back to the source, to prosecute those who had used the typewriter to produce material deemed illegal. With the introduction of photocopying machines, the KGB's Fifth Directorate and Agitprop Department required individuals to get authorization to use printing office photocopiers to prevent the mass production of unapproved material, though restrictions could be bypassed by bribing employees."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
That's what an actual heavily-propagandized population looks like. Meanwhile, I can open up any social media app and be greeted by a sea of anti-American slop.
Just because you get “anti-American slop” doesn’t mean your “pro-American slop” is accurate, nor productive in the context of world affairs.
Americans are among the most propagandized because they are taught theirs is the greatest among all nations from birth, even though it really, really isn’t.
>Americans are among the most propagandized because they are taught theirs is the greatest among all nations from birth, even though it really, really isn’t.
That's not what it means to be the "most propagandized".
In any case, as an American, I wasn't taught that the US is the "greatest among all nations" from birth.
But I think there are some quite good arguments for this claim nonetheless. Here's a nice detailed article from a historian which lays out the evidence: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/08/collections-is-the-united-stat...
The world has gotten much better while under US hegemony by the way. This has generally been a peaceful and prosperous era by historical standards. https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/The...
Usually the anti-US argument depends on implicitly assuming that:
* All the good things which have happened, would've happened without the US. (Example: The global abolitionist movement started in the US. We'll just assume that would've happened somewhere else.)
* All the bad things which have happened are the direct fault of the US. Other actors are deemed irrelevant/not morally culpable/etc. (The US gets blamed for the actions of people in other countries even if it has a weak to nonexistent relationship with them. Other countries are not generally blamed for the actions of their partners/allies.)
* Bad things that the US successfully prevented or interrupted would somehow have been prevented or interrupted via other means. (Example: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. We'll just implicitly assume other nation(s) would've taken a lead role in enforcing territorial integrity norms.)
* If the US could've done something, but did not, they are also morally culpable for that omission. (Example: Rwanda genocide.)
It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of game. We aren't being judged based on whether our presence makes the world a better place. Rather, if there's any delta between the US and a hypothetical perfect nation, that makes us evil.
Observe how things work: Listen to Europeans complain about the US "playing world police", and also insist that the US should do more to police Eastern Europe. They'll claim the US bears responsibility for the Ukraine War by expanding NATO, and also insist that Ukraine should be armed to the teeth. Naturally, e.g. Poland's push to join NATO is left out: only the US is morally culpable (see second bullet point above).
Who else, apart from Russians and their puppets, is pushing this ridiculous claim that the US is responsible for NATO expansion? That sentiment simply isn't there at all. It's straight-up Russian propaganda.
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Not really, because a generic observation cannot be expressed specifically. So that's a weird question to begin with.
It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.
As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.
It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting. Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.
What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.
There must be some logical fallacy here where, reduced down to human existence, all toxicity is hidden under layers. This is both an ultimately true statement of any suspiciously viewed human interaction and it kind of makes the argument moot.
Reminds me of the recent thread about LLMs controversial take on humanity: we are all terribly cynical, hallucinate importance, and we are all bad/good deep down inside.
I guess they are saying people argue/comment in bad faith. That they don't really mean what they say, and at least, they say it not to discuss it but for some hidden agenda.
The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.
I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).
If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
> If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
Are we going to play "prove me right" here? :D
Come on, this is just a direct personal attack. Go play better. Hide it with a more elaborate construct.
So I think I understand what hypfer's getting at, but I personally would never classify this sort of thing even remotely as "trolling".
@hypfer I'm curious, can you understand / identify with at least some of what I'm sharing below?:
A lot of people (likely near 100% of people) have their own internal beliefs about the world and they are largely commenting primarily to validate that belief (I am literally doing it with this comment). Like you often can see both what the person objectively wrote but then also get a feeling for some internal belief that motivated this specific comment.
And naturally, people are emotionally attached to their internal beliefs. And so sometimes comments are less a sharing of ideas and more a factually coded emotional rationalization of their internal beliefs. And when you read a comment like this that goes against one of your own beliefs, it may feel like an attack.
To me the distinction though is the motivation of the person on the other side. My interpretation is that true trolls have a motivation to incite emotions whereas most other people simply are trying to validate their own beliefs, despite potentially doing it in a way that is not emotionally palatable to all perspectives.
Separately, for you (hypfer), do you agree that there could be some amount of "hostile attribution bias" here? I saw this term while searching about this topic and to me it would explain both your perspective of feeling personally attacked and others perspective of feeling like that's actually not at all what's happening.
It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.
> It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.
I'm not sure if can truly let this pass as a more sophisticated construct, but I do appreciate the opener that already invalidates dismissal.
That's a good tactic. Thank you for playing.
I feel great btw :) Thank you for your concern.
This is completely crazy. How could someone point out that assuming evil intentions is not a good way to interact with people without being accused of doing the same thing as the FBI telling MLK to kill himself?
> This is completely crazy. How could someone point out that assuming evil intentions is not a good way to interact with people without being accused of doing the same thing as the FBI telling MLK to kill himself?
I was genuinely wondering if we would see the end of it, but of course, no.
But I like this, because it's such an obvious strawman and bad faith reinterpration by an account consisting of random jumbled letters.
Thank you. This is background radiation one can live with. Thanks for making things normal again.
Now you are just trolling
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone is a troll "just asking questions" or actually just asking that question. More so on HN than in most of the world, I mean.
Yep that's why the trolls lick that strategy
An interesting realisation there which I believe will shape the upcoming years of discussion spaces is that one can shift the burden of proof there.
Instead of leaving it with the moderation to prove without a doubt that someone is trolling, one can default to assume trolling and demand prove that it is not the case.
As it is impossible to bring up proof for either of those things, the house wins and people make damn sure to quintuple-check if their messaging is decent.
I don't think that that is a good solution, but the status quo was horrible, so maybe the pendulum swinging in another direction for a while might help us discover saner solutions.
It works until trolls figure out how to prove they are not trolls, even though they are trolls, while non-trolls have difficulty proving it.
I suspect that the energy required scales exponentially though, and, eventually, it might just become less of a hassle to just behave.
That and the fact that each increase in difficulty filters out people that do not have the capability to pass it. So the pool shrinks every time.
Though, valid counterpoint: Eventually prefabs emerge and get shared.
But then we innovate once more. We always did. We always will
Meanwhile, as said, well-meaning people get essentially harassed and silenced for allegedly being trolls if they are not aware of all the intricacies and differences in how people may view some words. Or they just make a mistake. That may push them away, but there will likely be room for different kinds of spaces and different kinds of cultures, just like today.
It doesn't scale exponentially. Another user already gave the example of someone persistently using "he/she", talking about gay marriages as "partners" while straight ones are "husbands" and "wives", etc. How much effort do you think it takes to perform that versus to moderate it?
And that ambiguity is precisely something that trolls hide behind.
Funny, I guess we proved each other right.
I meant nothing personal, but you took it personally. To me, someone saying "hey, maybe you're bringing your baggage to this and interpreting this differently than the speaker meant" is not at all a personal attack.
To you, I guess it is.
So, yeah, HN is full of conversations where people politely suggest you may be wrong. It's never bothered me.
Unlikely. Plenty of anti LGBTQ rhetoric is permissible here by mods, for example.
However, it often uses queer lingo - words that folks might think aren't notable, but queer folks will instantly recognize as an attack.
Refusing to call a gay man's husband a husband, but subsisting in friend or partner. Calling someone biologically male. Etc.
These get deployed quite subtly here, and because none of the words are slurs, they don't get moderated. (Though HN also permits overt slur usage -- search for the r-slur and you'll find plenty of cases.)
FWIW, it may just be a colossal misconception of my own, but I’d been of the mind that “partner” was in some cases more polite to use because it doesn’t make assumptions about the individuals in question or about the dynamics of the relationship between them. I am not part of the LGBTQ world, however, and am happy to be corrected.
There's a difference between the polite use and the impolite use. If someone makes a point to always introduce and discuss their husband, some anti LGBTQ folks will make a point to never say husband. Like, "you don't get to have that word." It's a way of suggesting people aren't married.
The difficulty is that partner is also acceptable and polite, especially when gender or marital status is unknown.
It's subtle, which is exactly the sort of thing this thread is about -- ways to subtly exclude someone while appearing polite to outsiders.
Jeeze, ya know. I don't get exposed to phobes sufficiently to know this. Typical dog whistle: Folks who are in the group know it, folks antagonized by the group know it, everyone else looks on with a question mark on their face.
It can be used both ways, I suppose. I use it for my partner because legal marital status isn't important to me, but for those that had to fight to obtain the basic right to get married I can see why it would be hurtful.
I wonder how much of it is generational? I see something similar in the way second wave feminists rightly hated being called girls, whereas it's not as much of an issue for the younger generations because they didn't have those experiences.
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Ain't nobody got time for an essay just to say KYS.
What do you mean? you’re on HN.
I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.
I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.
So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.
In modern times that would qualify you for high office...
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the modern internet has given everyone a higher level of immunity to this kind of thing now that it's in the background everywhere at all times; the FBI would need to step up their game today
Or different tactics entirely. I've been getting ads recently saying "it's Qatar's fault". I don't understand at all what is supposed to be Qatar's fault, and I'm sure they can't say it in the ads because then it would be a lie and they could get sued, but I'm sure their target audience knows exactly what Qatar supposedly did.
One commonality is the lack of restraint that anonymity can produce.
I'm sure it helps, but there's definitely still way too many people [on social media] that have zero problems with publicly telling people to jump off a bridge while signing their full name with the message. Which is technically illegal in California now.
EG Chrissy Teigen: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-57478066
What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true. He caused a great change to take place in the nation, but he was not an upstanding individual outside of that.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
>What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true.
To be fair, it's also true that we need more people like him and fewer people like the ones on the other side.
The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).
What is inherently immoral about having an open marriage? Did MLK go around preaching about the sanctity of monogamous marriages? No.
How were his orgies any different in moral character than the orgies the effective altruists throw?
I'm not aware of any good evidence that MLK was in a open marriage. He was just cheating on his wife.
His wife stood by him as wives were often expected to do back in the day, but that doesn't mean she was a willing participant in a nonmonogamous relationship.
>Did MLK go around preaching about the sanctity of monogamous marriages?
yes. he was a baptist minister. monogamy in marriage is a fundamental principle of the baptist faith.
As much as I actually really love MLK's speeches, sermons, movement. I am afraid there appears to be some unfortunate truths about the man. None are perfect except God. That doesn't make the positives he did any less great, it just reminds us of the nature of humanity.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
I’ve never really consider sexual impropriety problematic in someone I look up to unless it’s pedophilia or rape.
He was a Christian minister though, and many of us value him not just for his contributions to civil rights, but to the conversation of how God wants us to treat one another.
Well said.
He was brave and an incredible orator. But not exactly a paragon of virtue, someone who can lead by example, which we really need at the highest rungs of power.
Biblically though the only person who can hold that title is Jesus. (ie who perfect? Jesus... who is good? only god ... )
If you just meant very high percentile, then yes I agree. :)
Elsewhere in the comments here, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr (David Garrow), according to this article [1]:
"The most damaging memos describe King witnessing a rape in a hotel room. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file say he encouraged the attacker to continue."
1 - https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-...
I wouldn't trust anything from the FBI at that time. Period.
What will we do with the new materials in 2027 then? Will you just dismiss them?
Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.
Apparently most of these huge spam waves originate from just one or two people which is why they're so similar. If a certain type of spam stops arriving it means that specific person got bored.
It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.
I read it as regular spam message with slight laugh and without any anxiety, but if that was linked with or in response to some real payment or subscription then it would not be funny.
lol I actually got a spam email the other day saying more or less exactly this!
so weird that it somehow got through the spam filter
Gmail's spam filter has gotten noticeably worse in the last two months. I'm half-convinced they threw away whatever they used to be doing and just put Gemini in the loop.
Okay, we all know now what you are doing there.
What is even more crazy is that people believe we are now more "civilized" than this. That nobody would do such a thing in our time.
I love my country but omg do we have so many shameful episodes. These things need to be brought out to the light of day so we can confront, admit and heal. The letter is the 2nd crime. The first crime is the tolerance of the hate behind the letter. The 3rd crime is concealing the facts till those responsible are out of the reach of justice.
> I repeat - no person can argue successfully against facts.
In some aspects, times have changed..
I think they mean it will tarnish your legacy. Obviously lying works short term.
And failing that the government assassinated him.
This is very similar to Suchir Balaji and passive surveillance counterterrorism technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterterrorism
"Kill Yourself" is very similar in verse to "You Are Done."
Or the case where OpenAI wouldn't tell about 17 person list. Or Anthropic wont tell about CEO's wife
The article title seems to have changed from the earlier version, which importantly emphasised that the FBI pressured King to commit suicide.
It’s a very silly poorly written letter.
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
Interesting angle of posing as a black man so Martin is being attacked by the in group. This is usually very effective and is essentially exactly what you see on racist forums/boards like 4chan and other more explicit supremacist boards.
I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
He was more evil than you have imagined. Par for the course for a closer inspection of him.
Almost every adjective in that letter is a projection by the author. He/they must have been a real piece of work.
Well, there was that rape incident that MLK allegedly encouraged: https://www.standpointmag.co.uk/the-troubling-legacy-of-mart...
Apparently the audio tapes get released in 2027 so we may find out for sure then.
With 20 seconds of audio, I can make MLK Jr. say whatever you want.
The very funny “presidents discuss anime” video opened my eyes and that was like 3 years ago. Audio is going to have to require some kind of proof of authenticity going forward.
not just audio unfortunately.
They're tapes from the time. I think the check is to see if the 40-50 year old tapes match the 40-50 year old transcripts.
And that's going to take another year?
No he really did all that stuff.
The adjectives I mentioned are not facts, they're characterizations.
I think it's because the FBI had tapes proving that King was involved in rape.
You think it's normal for the FBI to send blackmail letters to alleged rapists? I think it's more because they were trying to kill MLK.
There was nothing normal about the whole movement that MLK Jr led. He presented himself as a holy man while participating in rape.
His close advisors included major organizers of the Communist Party. And this was at the height of the Cold War. The steelman argument for the FBI's decision is that it faced an extraordinary threat to national security in the person of MLK and resorted to extraordinary measures to try to neutralize that threat. And as far as the FBI went there were certainly lines that the FBI wouldn't cross.
There are also, of course, very strong arguments against the FBI's covert action against King, and those are well-known.
I feel that how Epstein was suicided; they convinced him his life from now will be nightmare then just left him an opening to do it
There would be camera footage of it if that was the case. But that was "accidentally" turned off.
If you look at the forensic evidence it seems more throttled with a wire by some other person.
https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-...
I mean...
What do you mean?
Nothing in the FBI's letter was untrue.
MLK Jr watched a woman get raped, and encouraged the rapists while they were doing it.
"By bugging the room, they were able to listen in on King and at least 11 others participated in what the FBI memos describe as “an orgy” on Jan. 6, 1964.
The microphones also picked up activities from the night before, when Kearse, who died in 1991, allegedly sexually assaulted one of his parishioners. According to the memos, King was in the room. The handwritten note indicates that King didn’t just observe the assault – he laughed.
Worse, instead of trying to stop the incident, the memos say King apparently offered advice to the perpetrator, encouraging the abuse."
Guess we’ll find out next year?
Vox is paywalled too?
Dunno. There's this https://wallhop.io/https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/720...
it doesn't paywall for me
Being paywalled is not an issue (better than ad-ridden), but not being able to have micro transaction in a browser with one click still is mind boggling. As a creator of a browser, taking some blame for that.
I can do that. I can click on my credit card autofill and then "pay", so two clicks.
But sites won't let me do that, they want me to make an account first and they want to verify my email address and phone number which means leaving my browser and restarting the process each time I do because the browser got unloaded and the website doesn't save state. Almost all of the friction here is the fault of the website, not the payment process.
Usually I just can't make an account on a mobile device because of the browser unloading, so if it's important I do it later with my PC and if it's not important I give up entirely.
Well, a micro-transaction on your credit card isn't a great solution, since the base fee is something like $0.10 per transaction. You'll want a system to fill a low-transaction-fee wallet and then distribute from there.
Youtube Premium is a pretty good system. I pay $16/mo, and 55% of that gets distributed to creators based on my watch time.
There are lots of ways to do the tech without a $0.10 fee. I think the issue is more the websites don't ask for that, probably because $10 a month in one easy annualised payment of $120 pays better.
I'm not sure if there's an actual website that did it? I've made micropayments for other things like PAYG phones and speculating on crypto.
There were attempts to bring micro-transactions to the browser via W3C standards - but guess who obstructed it? Yes, the big G that's running the browser with most market-share (Chrome) and who's entire business-model it having your data so only they can be the middle man between you and ads. Imagine if people could just support what they like with one click, instead of getting dumped on with paid propaganda and disinformation so that the middle men fill their pocket.
Was there any hard proof he was a communist sympathizer or was the CIA painting him that way because he didn't support the Vietnam war?
MLK's entire organization was largely created and run by Stanley Levison, who was a big player in the CPUSA. He was a major financier of communist efforts in America before switching his focus to the civil rights movement.
But you won't find Levison's name on the SCLC Wikipedia page even though his personal wiki page mentions he was "instrumental in founding" it.
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https://archive.ph/yGBOu
This was the linked article in original post earlier, and it got changed, right? I'm not going crazy?
yep, they changed from the archived article I linked from vox.com to a NY Times article link. (I only posted the archive link I did because it was a wall on vox and I couldn't read article otherwise)
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What is your goal with posting these links?
To invite you to ponder on this poster's goals rather than mine.
--
Whoever has had the opportunity of studying the concealed feelings of persons by means of psychoanalysis can also tell something new concerning the quality of unconscious motives, which express themselves in superstition. Nervous persons afflicted with compulsive thinking and compulsive states, who are often very intelligent, show very plainly that superstition originates from repressed hostile and cruel impulses. The greater part of superstition signifies fear of impending evil, and he who has frequently wished evil to others, but because of a good bringing- up has repressed the same into the unconscious, will be particularly apt to expect punishment for such unconscious evil in the form of a misfortune threatening him from without.
Sigmund Freud – Premonitions and Chance
Comey can't see the irony of his own doing:
>>> The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong.
He probably just keeps it to remind himself what can happen when the facts about the ${TLA} spying on ${citizens} come out, i.e. make sure to keep it hush-hush this time or you'll end up in ${a_bad_place}.