Lets say that a ton of us got a leaky look at what the likes of thiel datamimed from the humanity dataset. The last mile of the enlightenment wrecks all those romantic ideas of eternal progress by technology, self actualizationa and retardation repair by education pretty thoroughly. Those that are not in the know mimic those that are or just develop a amoral stance to whether and survive the times which are a changing. It turns out the civil liberty lessons do not survive the contact with the lovecraftian reality beneath. This whole 10 year ride since 2016 was not foreseen, predicted, effectively countered and not even mitigated by protecting cultural artifacts and institutions against the decay. The science whose prediction power is zero, who has no eclipse to show, is not one.

Never stop speaking out, and if they come for you do not go peacefully. That's about all an individual in an authoritarian society can control.

Dictatorships tend to do worse economically, the biggest example was the Soviet bloc which fell for economic reasons mostly.

You can accelerate this effect by doing sabotage. The WW2 CIA sabotage manual contains a lot of ideas that have pretty good ratio of problems created to personal risk.

Fuck Donald Trump and his gross, weird, pathetic mafia.

This regime is a rogue autocracy strangling anything good about this once great country.

I hope every single person responsible for the many crimes they have committed (and they have committed crimes) faces justice, if not in this life, then the next one.

Oh, that feels good to get off my chest.

There is no next life. This is all we got. Let’s make the most of it.

That has been the case for years:

IME the authoritarian politics had much more support here; I'd say it was the majority of voices heard. It diminished considerably when Trump was elected and then took office.

But the silence has been a long-standing problem: HN has long been largely silent on the social and political dangers of IT - really an outrage; here are the people most responsible, and the outcomes are predictable. That would include especially disinformation and misinformation, and propaganda more generally; and also the power of social media. Those are what makes it impossible to do anything.

When things became so polarized, years ago, shutting down discourse everywhere, HN didn't work to solve the problem - they stopped talking too. Again, a big failure of the people with the knowledge, skill, and power. But shutting down discourse is not politically neutral - it's a great help to the corrupt and evil to hide what they do and prevent people from responding to it. Democracy dies in darkness, I've heard.

There's this macrocycle of fatigue related to Godwins law for, what, 30 years of online discourse.

The undeniable long term trend during this period has been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process, legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and majority minority slowly building a core base of manipulatable populism.

Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil on national television with no pushback or consequences beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot) was a crystallizing moment.

This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins law style hyperbole.

The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But the fact that the only functional political bulwark against trump is the second by second ticker of financial health of the oligarchs is really depressing.

The saving grace is you, and what you do. It's each person here.