Hacker News Reader

Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

A militarized police state, the state subjugating private businesses according to its needs, state intrusions into the most private spheres of its citizens, executions of US citizens without trial, kidnappings - it all looks like we are moving straight into fascism.

And I'm seeing the same pattern in the EU where I live since it basically copies whatever the US does.

"Fascist governments encouraged the pursuit of private profit and offered many benefits to large businesses, but they demanded in return that all economic activity should serve the national interest."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism

View on HN

Yeah, we've been there for about a decade now, and the mask is slipping off.

The biggest question is what to do, and how to do it. Clearly, we have to fix things, but how do we fix a fascism problem that is deeply ingrained in the roots of power and spans multiple countries economic, social, military, and political structures?

If the US and EU are fascist is there a country that isn't?

The US and Israel now have what the Nazis could only dream about.

Decent jet engines!

Seriously, you typed this statement and thought what? "Now we'll finally have a fruitful discussion on the hacker site"?

Frankly, I am appalled by the LACK of discussion of these topics on this hacker site. Why is there a taboo on politics? Why is it out of reach?

400 innocent children were killed indiscriminately in the span of 6 weeks in Gaza. But your vim configuration is more worthy of discussion here? Idk...

People don't approach politics rationally.

For instance: >400 innocent children were killed indiscriminately in the span of 6 weeks in Gaza

The bias implicit in this suggests that you consider that either someone agrees with your point of view, or else they support the slaughter of innocent children. Which further suggests that what you're looking for is not discussion, but pro-Palestinian advocacy, as there is no room for discussion in your framing. And of course it's impossible for me to suggest the nature of your bias without expressing my own bias.

Which is fine, if that's what you want there are other forums for such things, but that's not what most people come to Hacker News for. One-sided political discussions are not very interesting, and never fruitful.

"The bias implicit in this suggests that you consider that either someone agrees with your point of view, or else they support the slaughter of innocent children."

There is no bias. Either he is lying, or he is not. You can sugar-coat the discussion any way you want to wiggle out of it, but facts and lies are what count.

And yeah, you're right. There is only one side, and that's the side of "the best available truth". Not that people understand any of that jazz with all the "bias" being thrown back and forth in the media. Your post included.

Honestly, I don't even know enough about this recent Gaza/Israel thing. Just commenting on your "bias" retort to the parent's assertion that 400 children were killed.

You are right, I don't understand the situation well enough to have an unbiased or objective opinion about it.

I suspect it's minimised because a) politics is very much a personal thing which b) tends to explode very quickly into name-calling and sniping and c) there's already about 8 jillion political discussion places on the intertents.

Fuck those 8 jillion blabbing places. WE are the only ones who can do something about it! WE, the hackers, the creators of our reality, the readers of this site. Those discussions belong HERE.

Indeed, you'd better get going on your World Peace As A Service startup.

This is not a political discussion forum.

Technical forum is technical.

I do not like how Israel is always portrayed as some thug that is pulling the strings. Israel is a small satellite state of the US in a very important region, therefore Israel is very important to the US in realizing its goals to dominate this region.

Also, the comparison with Nazi Germany is wrong. The US does not have any racial ideology, it wants to dominate economically and militarily, not destroy if it doesn't have to.

A government that is fascist doesn't mean automatically that it has any policies towards certain races. It just means that it gradually removes freedoms of its citizens in every sphere to excert greater control over its population.

The only reason that muslims are victimized on this scale is that mostly muslims live in that region. If the region was mostly habitated by a buddhist or jewish population that isn't compliant with US demands, then buddhists or jews would be the victims.

I don't think he means that Israel is pulling the strings -- but that is debatable (see AIPAC).

I think what he is saying is that the fascist governments and capabilities of Israel and the U.S. would have been envied by Nazi germany.

Maybe he has a point. Just consider the recent round of violence (to put it lightly, some might call it ethnic cleansing) in gaza. Now consider the success of dehumanizing the palestinians to the point where nobody in the world -- not even the arab nations took significant diplomatic action against Israeli aggression. Consider that in context of the scale of destruction of civilian infrastructure and the rate of civilian casualties. Huge propaganda success. All in this day and age of twitter/fb despite near total destruction of Gaza and overwhelming deaths of civilians.

How many countries outside of south america recalled ambassadors? How much divestment? How many canceled contracts gas/weapons/settlement-products? Nothing significant enough to reverse Israeli actions. In the end, Israel only stopped because there was nothing left to destroy.

Oh come on. Do you seriously believe that a modern military attempting genocide or ethnic cleansing would stop after four digits of death toll against a population of millions? That's hardly the limit of their abilities. That would be the least competent genocide in history.

There are a lot of criticisms to be leveled against Israel, but accusing them of genocide doesn't pass the sniff test. That's more an ideological framing and comment on the person leveling said criticisms than it is a reflection of reality.

The Nazis would be jealous of any modern state's computing power, military might, and intelligence capabilities. But so would literally any other empire in history. I mean, how jealous of modern air power would Napoleon be?

Soo the rockets fired by Hamas into Israel are ... imaginary? fabricated? - I'm not there so I haven't seen them with my own eyes, but to classify the conflict as just "Israeli aggression" seems inaccurate given what I see and read in the news.

Update: Agree with smcl, disengaging ;)

It seems pretty obvious to me that "aggression" refers to the the parent's opinion that the Israeli response to the rockets was a little heavy-handed and unwarranted. We're getting really offtopic here however, HN is not the place to spar over the Israel\Palestine conflict. There's plenty of places on the web you can engage in this if you want, but be warned that doing so will end up resolving nothing and will leave you frustrated and angry.

I'l agree that HN isn't the best place to debate it. But if we all agree on that, why does it seem so one-sided on here? Flame-bait assertions that Israel has what the Nazis could only dream about are just fine and highly upvoted, as are vague and unjustified claims that Israel's response is heavy-handed. Meanwhile, just pointing out that the conflict is more complex than that and Israel has reasons for what they're doing too is apparently considered unacceptable off-topic debate. Is this place a Hamas propaganda site or something?

Keeping out of the debate entirely is fine, but if we're doing that, let's downvote and reject posts like the ones in this thread by yamayb and jdimov that are packed with inflammatory rhetoric that has nothing to do with the original topic here.

Not agreeing with the characterization (any simplistic description of the Israel/Palestine conflict is flawed), but the existence of mutual conflict does not preclude the accuracy of the description of one side as the aggressor in a conflict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com