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points by ngruhn 1 day ago | 0 comments

If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.

ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.

[–] pixl97 1 day ago

>Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore

I fireproof my house before it catches on fire.

[–] 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

Sure, it's fine to complain, but calling it a "police state" just discredits you at this stage.

I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.

Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.

[–] pixl97 1 day ago

This is silly.

"If you ignore everything that's happening the problem will just go away. So easy, I don't have to do anything at all".

>By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable

If I just close my eyes the fire will magically go out by myself.

Have you ever stopped to think that the opposite of what you're thinking may actually be closer to the truth.

[–] 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

I didn't say to ignore everything. I said "it's fine to complain". Describe it accurately.

[–] verdverm 1 day ago

This account (GP) often comes to these stories to make comments like this. Flag them and move on, avoid giving them the attention they crave like King Trump

[–] 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

Arguing for an unpopular position is not a violation of the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please stop flagging comments simply because they go against your ideology.

There is serious irony in you advocating for this type of knee-jerk censorship of views you oppose, in a thread about authoritarianism.

"The current government is an evil, oppressive police state. Anyone who suggests otherwise must be silenced!!"

[–] djeastm 1 day ago

>Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore.

By then it's too late

[–] MSFT_Edging 1 day ago

> If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.

This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.

[–] xxs 1 day ago

>North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference

Most of the East side of the Wall was like that, it's just less known.

[–] scarecrowbob 1 day ago

By your standards you should have started worrying a long, long time ago.

The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.

If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.

[–] kakacik 1 day ago

Seems like you are constructing a very specific situation that should mark some sort of regime change to dictatorship. The reality is, complex things have their own momentum and US society is a big thing.

Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.

[–] jzb 1 day ago

"Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore."

Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.

It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.

We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.

"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.