Schmerika

America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory.

Might have??

America has spent - at the lowest possible estimate - at least 8 trillion dollars on the "war on terror". Probably more like 20-something. Trillion.

That's enough money to have transitioned to entirely clean energy, housed every homeless American, and solved world hunger. With change.

The DOW is over 50 thousand though, I guess, and the Epstein class are richer than ever.

for example, the current regime seeming to throw Israel to the wolves in order to cover its own military blunders.

Uh, what?

Israel threw themselves to the wolves, if 'wolves' are what we're calling the consequences of doing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.

America have been the single greatest force by far holding the 'wolves' at bay. If they stop because the 'wolves' are threatening their own stability, that's not really "throwing Israel" anywhere.

children got killed because their school was used as a ground base to fire rockets from.

I don't really know how to talk to people who think killing children - by the tens of thousands - is ever justified, but maybe this will help you: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t-mMt3c3ngQ

More than 14,500 children were killed by Israel in that period.

14,500 / 154 = more than 94 children per resolution. Seems fair.

How many children did "Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Russia, China combined" kill in this period, I hear you whatabout: Highest reasonable estimates are ~5,000–10,000 children.

... So, no. I don't think it's unfair.

Now let's compare how many sanctions have been inflicted on each country above. If you measure by number of sanctioned individuals/entities, a rough ranking would be:

1: Russia. 2: Iran. 3: North Korea. 4: Sudan. 5: China. 6: Israel.

... So if you're trying to hint that the whole world is only against genocide because they're antisemitic, the facts you're referring to don't really seem to back you up. At all.

Hind Rajab. Sidra Hassouna. Reem and Khaled.

The premie babies at Al-Nasr hospital.

Over a hundred bombed hospitals.

The Irish president's sister kidnapped and abused.

Assassinating negotiation teams and scientists.

Murders of whole families who dared to speak out to the world.

Running over a teenager with their hands zip-tied behind their backs with Caterpillars®.

The paramedic massacre in Rafah.

The hundreds of journalists. The tens of thousands of children. The doctors raped to death.

The people who never get mentioned in these lists of atrocities, buried in mass graves with their children, hands tied.

The people dying from n-order effects, slowly, painfully, barely noticed or counted.

...

And little/no sanctions from our civilized Western democracies. (Except on the people calling it out, who can't use a credit card or bank any more, or even receive donations.)

We are far worse than useless. The stain is set for all time.

A reminder for any Americans reading this: 98.15% of 2024 voters chose a Presidential candidate that supported the above.

There's lots of physical labor jobs that pay more.

More than a billion?

... Let's keep things in perspective here.

Are you saying that with the awareness that this will be used to remove privacy from social media?

To be perfectly honest, I actually do think we should stop all the both sidesing - but only after following it to its logical conclusion.

Have _both sides_ actively collaborated in genocide?

... Yes.

Therefore, _both sides_ have breached any recognizable red line of decency. _Both sides_ have breached hard-won national and international law.

Time for something better than both sides unapologetically arming live-streamed genocide.

"Oh, you're one of those single issue guys" - if the issue is genocide, then yes. Why aren't you? Why aren't 98.15% of 2024 voters?

As pointed out below: it's our culture. And that's not okay.

Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.

I don't see how you can disagree with the simple truth of it tbh. In what way is that not what happened?

And law.

No, we can not stop with the both sidesing.

We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words.

The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc.

The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same.

0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...

There are actually quite a few trillion dollar industries that exist thanks to "side projects".

Apple was Woz's side project, once upon a time. Adsense came from Google's 20% time. Social media started as a side project.

Forests grow from trees. Trees grow from seeds. More potential seeds = more potential forests.

Yes, he thinks his moral stance is the correct one, and lives by it.

... And?

it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance

If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?

It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.

For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.

In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.

That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.

The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:

I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.

Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:

Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?

On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.

Some people care about things beyond their own immediate self interest.

Some don't, and find it hard to believe others really do.

Apologies for reading your comment in an antagonistic way, but, I couldn't find a better way to read it. If you're saying that it was just about adding context, okay, but I think there's a way to do that with out painting this a "smaller story" that will be forgotten about "tomorrow or next week".

A guy is dying from cancer and unable to get treated because a $400m company stole his unique $200k life-long Lego collection ... That is a smaller story than America's murderous healthcare system - but until the guy's situation is corrected, no amount of media coverage is too little.

America's media failures also are a critical piece of the picture, but as written your comment reads as if painting this as a forgettable little story about Star Wars lego:

This headline about star wars lego? Less so.

... I'm glad to hear that wasn't how you meant it.

a smaller story

Sure. Any one person's story will be smaller than the whole picture - is that your whole point? What are you proposing - that we ignore stories like this until we fix healthcare?

Because if that's not what you're saying, why bring it up as if one cancer patient's life and property rights aren't important (even beyond tomorrow and next week)?

'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system' is a headline that will be relevant again, with new participants, tomorrow, or next week.

And so will corporate theft, and bureaucratic Kafkaesque nightmares, and police corruption, etc. There's no lack of overlapping evil to look at here.

Individual stories are still important and relevant, and ignoring them to look at the bigger picture is like ignoring water to look at the ocean.

If we weren't heavily complicit in rapidly accelerating fascism, as a direct and immediate outcome of those stories and others like them, then I might agree.

But we are, and I don't. Ignoring those stories as deliberate policy so HNers like yourself can remain impervious to the consequences of our actions is dangerously short sighted.

people will just assume the whole chain is bad.

The whole chain is bad.

We're far past the point where the company bigwigs should have fixed this. It's not like they don't know.

The bigger story is an elderly man needing to sell his toys to pay for cancer treatment.

Idk. Straight up corporate theft of $200k, backed up by the cops, is a more visceral story than 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system'.

We could give all people free cancer treatment, but defense contractors need money.

Yes, and that's important - but there are unique aspects to this story which shouldn't be overshadowed by the higher priority problem for the nation. The immediate problem for this elderly cancer patient isn't going to be solved by Americans suddenly realising that they have people power - but getting his Legos back might save his life.

any competent criminal defense attorney

I don't think 'going to town on illegally obtained evidence' works as often as you believe it does [0, 1].

And think back - how many people went to jail for national and/or international scale warrantless wiretapping? How did we, as a nation, respond to Snowden's revelations?

I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.

There are people on death row in the US even after being proven innocent and ordered to go free. Dignity in Ink [2] present similar cases every day - they're never going to run out of material.

0 - A major DOJ/GAO-era federal study found that illegal search/seizure issues accounted for about 0.4% of declined federal prosecutions and roughly 0.7% of dismissed cases after prosecution began. - https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/84544NCJRS.pdf

1 - Another study across seven jurisdictions found motions to suppress succeeded in under 1% of warrant cases, and only 1.5% of defendants went free because of successful suppression motions. - https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/search-warrants-mot...

2 - https://www.instagram.com/dignityinink

Supposing that to be true... Does justice depend on what every other country is doing?

"anyone with an opinion different from mine must be a paid shill"

Not remotely what I said. One of the better HN guidelines here is to try and interpret comments you read in the best possible light. I recommend it.

What I actually said is simply correct - there are tech billionaires who do have strong reasons to flag certain topics on HN.

And there's no way to stop them from doing so. We rely solely on 100% opaque moderation to unflag stories.

There's no shortage of people who have complained about how often threads concerning Musk, DOGE, the Lawnmower guy, Thiel, certain genocidal countries etc get wiped from here...

Do you see those threads? Unless you have [showdead] on, and browse /active, almost certainly not... Because they get flagged, and they're not put back. Discussion of how HN's flagging system works - or doesn't - is explicitly banned at the post level. You can only talk about it in comments.

So, no, that isn't just my opinion, or paranoia. And the fact that you don't know how often those stories are unfairly flagged and never put back is actually evidence of the tightness of the blinkers here. It's been crazy this past year - just try looking at my favorites.

Sure.

You obviously disagree, and the fact that you do proves the point that it can get a lot worse.

Are people being thrown in camps for what they say? Are they being gunned down in broad daylight in the street for peaceful protest? ... If so, maybe my disagreement is backed up by facts. And maybe "it can get worse" isn't pulling much weight here.

Right now we have a ~100% pro genocide party, and a roughly 90% pro genocide party. That's... not a good sign bro.

Did you know Germany has really fascist laws on regarding displaying Nazi symbols even more than the US? You can get deported for it!

Did you know every day there's a new video of German police brutalizing peaceful protesters? Or that they're a major arms supplier to Israel; second only to the US?

In China you can disappear talking about Taiwan

Citation needed. Let's compare people disappearing per capita too. Let's talk about the Epstein files, lots of people disappearing there.

In the UAE you can by saying something anti Islam.

If your argument is that we're not the UAE, then buddy... What?

There is a long way to go until you reach real bad places...

Oh America can fall very far from where it is, for sure. That's not what we're talking about though.

You obviously do not like the USA

It's not about me, or my likes (freedom, truth, liberty, equality - the things the US says it's all about) and dislikes (genocide, forever wars, deportations, coups, extortion, blackmail, people getting shot in the back in the street - the things the US is actually doing).

This conversation is about fascism, and how the US is ticking every single box for it. You are claiming the US isn't fascist, as if that were just my opinion; but you're not engaging with any of the actual facts in the article, or any particular points about fascism, just claiming that people are free to critisize therefore we can't possiblybe fascist. Which is manifestly untrue from any number of angles.

If you like, we can also discuss how this community, the tech bros and venture capitalists, the DOGE cheerleaders and the Thielites, are deeply complicit in that fascism, and profiting from it.

its just clearly not perfect and free enough for you to be able to point it out.

"Sure, we arm and enable genocide, but you're free to point that out as long as you don't mind the possibility of being thrown in a camp, shot, treated as a terrorist, deported, etc - because we're not the UAE"... I'm not sure those arguments are as strong as you seem to think they are.

Just to be clear: Are you twisting the fact that America hits every metric for fascism into saying it must therefore be a healthy vibrant democracy full of free speech - because someone pointed that out? In a flagged story, that isn't anywhere near mainstream news?

... You know we have people getting thrown in camps and deported for saying maybe genocide is bad, right? And like, students and faculty in Ivy league schools getting beaten and/or fired for saying maybe we shouldn't be complicit in the mass murder of children?

Apologies if I've misread your remarks - deep and biting sarcasm doesn't always play well in text.

America does have basically every characteristic of fascism on every important list of fascism characteristics ever made.

That's actually kind of important to the tech community, considering we are wildly complicit in this.

So, maybe consider that more than "politics junkies" might be interested in this, and that the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged (very easily done).

Seems like the relative privation fallacy is more and more a key component of an accelerating race to the bottom, across wide swathes of society.

Sure would be cool if more people could recognise it.

I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now

Pretty certain I said nothing of the sort.

Given that both major parties in the US are now fully complicit in arming and enabling live-streamed genocide, there's a pretty strong case to be made that anti Arab and Islamophobic racism is reaching new heights.

And while most actual Americans are very much against the arming and enabling of said genocide, that hasn't motivated them to move on from the two party system.

There's a widespread notion that "agitating" against two genocidal parties is idealism, or perfectionism. It's really just doing your duty as a person, and the fact that so many Americans don't care/understand that points to... Massive widespread racism, ding ding ding.

24 was extreme racist pro-torture fear porn propaganda.

So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.

Not a doctor but I know that some foods, in some guts, at some times can trigger a 'quick-release valve' of sorts. You're not digesting properly when that happens.

If humans only work so that they can live, and wouldn't ever work if they didn't have to - then why do so many of our best inventions and advances come from people who didn't give a toss about profit?

If we have the technological means and capability to reduce employment to 10% - why wouldn't we?

Is it so impossible to imagine a world where people only work when they want to? Where the jobs that "no one would do if they weren't desperate" just pay very well instead?

Also, if you really think every UBI study is fundamentally flawed, feel free to design and run your own. Until then, maybe you could do better than waving a hand and invoking a hypothesis to try and invalidate literally every study that speaks against your claim, lol.

The psyop is perfectly okay.

Is it?

You really don't mind if everything that gets put in front of you is controlled?

What if the people who talk about class war, the people who speak up about US and Israeli terror and torture and atrocities, the people who speak up for the voiceless are never/very rarely permitted to surface by the 'tastemaker' algorithm's controller?

Because it sure seems like that's at least partly the case today, and rapidly getting worse.