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Comment by new_stranger | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is that most often, the actual villains trick everyone into thinking it's a different party.

When bad people rise to power, they often do so vilifying one or more other groups. The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.

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Yes, of course, that’s what it’s like for the other side. Those people are all bad. We on the correct side don’t have that problem.

You're being sarcastic, but I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.

You can't reduce politics to a game of pattern-matching where every time someone says something which pattern-matches to "you called someone bad people!" you should react just like the last time someone said it. Sometimes people are bad, sometimes they're not, and there's no shortcut to figuring it out other than by taking the time and effort to actually figure it out, (Which isn't really a shortcut at all.)

Of course, no one is arguing that all sides are equally bad or that when one side says that that the other side is evil they are always wrong… the problem is that it is hard to know if you are being tricked or told the truth.

>I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.

The problem is that if you place yourself in a random time and party, you are more likely to be a Nazi than a Jew, because a crucial element of evil is the power to do it, which is associated with having greater numbers, and that rigs the odds so that your random insertion will be among them rather than their heroic enemies.

In early 30s the Nazis only got 33-37% of the vote not too much unlike the portion of the electorate who support ending democracy in favor of our own would be dictator.

"Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule..."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-r...

If you place yourself at a random time of trouble you will 2 to 1 find yourself behind the eyes of someone indifferent or scared neither victim nor victimizer.

You seem to be arguing in favor of the ability to declare one side entirely bad, while I (using sarcasm) argued against it. I am still not entirely convinced that the ability to completely denounce one side as entirely evil is somehow an important freedom which must be preserved, even if it is sometimes true.

Regarding your examples, I couldn’t possibly comment, for obvious reasons.

> When bad people rise to power, they often do so vilifying one or more other groups.

No. When times get tough, everyone is naturally drawn to their own. Visit any prison.

> The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.

Nobody is tricked. The person who appeals to the masses' self-interest will become leader.

I think that when it becomes culty and reality-denying is where the real problems come in. For example, 47 years ago the city of Phenom Penh was forced at gunpoint to march into the wilderness to farm rice because of how some people interpreted Marx. Those that weren't simply marched off to be killed--often beaten to death to save on bullets--were made to farm rice despite not knowing how and with no plans made to actually feed them. So most of the rest worked 16+ hour days and simply starved, because you could get shot for high crimes like catching a fish to eat when it was swimming between your legs.

> I think that when it becomes culty and reality-denying is where the real problems come in. For example, 47 years ago the city of Phenom Penh was forced at gunpoint to march into the wilderness to farm rice because of how some people interpreted

This! Absolutely. Technological backlash is one of the grave dangers I address in Digital Vegan. Anti-intellectualism lies just beneath the surface in a technological society that is out of touch with itself and has alienated its members through the very technology that could unite it. It grows prone to regressive catastrophes like Mao's brutal projects and of the Khmer Rouge you mention. "Strong Leaders" attach themselves easily to ruralism, "back to basics" and other regressive ideologies. In many ways I think Putin may be one of them. Technological cults beget anti-technological cults.

A problem is that nuanced (but 'inconvenient') tech critique gets labelled as precisely that regressive anti-intellectualism by those who profit from technologically mediated alienation. Simply count the allusions to Luddism in responses to my comments. That "shutting down" and trying to place reasoned technological critique as beyond discussion is mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and is the road to trouble.

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