I always enjoy a well crafted comment like this in which the reader can't tell if the "authoritarianism" you are decrying is the former president trying to circumvent democracy or the censorship of people who are spreading that message. It allows you to collect upvotes from people on both sides thinking you are accusing the other of authoritarianism.

Perhaps he means both? Both of those are examples of behavior that is unusual, particularly because they're done in such a brazen way. That's what makes the world less recognizable.

Agreed, both sides are authoritarian. It's not mutually exclusive.

Confession: I only just realized over the past few years. I had always thought that authoritarians were a right phenomenon.

It depends how you see "left" and "right". I see the left as promoting equality, and generally freedom, and the right justifying or increasing inequality. An authoritarian system by definition gives far more power to some people than others, which is an idea of the right. However, systems of government in practice are generally not strictly left or right, and you get the likes of the Soviet Union which gave some degree of economic equality but little equality in terms of power.

Chaos and order is another scale for left and right.

> freedom

I think this word should be banned from such comparisons. Equal outcome can equal opportunity and different takes on what matters. Right-wing libertarianism tends to be the most "pure technical freedom" for the individual but tends to lead to little practical freedom for those without significant capital.

You could rightfully argue that the far end of either in its pure form is the meaningful flavor of "freedom".

Authoritarianism is orthogonal to that, in either case.

Left to me feels more pro fairness but anti freedom. Either way though in most conceptualizations libertarianism/authoritarianism is usually separated from left/right

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Political_Compass_stand...

It depends what freedoms you are talking about. In a communist system you wouldn't have the freedom to own somebody else's house and charge them rent, for example. It's interesting how we throw around concepts like "left" and "right", or "liberal" and "conservative", either not understanding what they mean, or having many different understandings. I'm puzzled about how we manage to communicate at all, but maybe we don't.

Specifically "liberal" has very different implications in NA vs Europe.

I'm a bit vague about how exactly it's used in different places. In Australia, it's the name of one of the major political parties, and it's considered a moderately "right wing" party. There was the classic 19th century liberalism, and its modern version neoliberalism.

I guess the Liberal Party in Australia has some similarities to the Conservative Party in the UK.

Thank you. The ambiguity really reflects my own feelings though. I feel uncertain and precarious, like many people regardless of where I sit on any issue, and this divisiveness is exacerbating everything which is part of my point.

Either people have and live by principles or they don't. Part of our division is these sides you speak of, instructing their followers what to believe about individual topics.

Most atrocities in the world are committed by principled people. If they didn't have them they wouldn't care enough to commit them.

Everyone quoted this in regards to theocracies. It's clearly a way more abstract principle.

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

I think you're right and I can only assumed you've been downvoted because people didn't like your use of the word "principled" (which we usually reserve for good people) being used to describe idealogical absolutists.

The world is sadly more complicated than that. Often people's principles contradict each other, especially when it comes to bad actors. Consider the person with a principle of non-violence who is still willing to fight to defend their family. Are they a hypocrite?

"Defending" assumes an attacker, which is the one breaking the principle of non-violence. So no, you're not a hypocrite to defend yourself if you believe in non-violence

Said differently, the belief in non-violence can be stated as "I believe in pursuing non-violent means in absolutely every situation except for those in which another actor acts violently toward me"

The GP's point about internal contradiction remains regardless of the contortions you choose to apply to your definition of "non-violence".

Meanwhile, I see no accusation of any side here. It’s correctly observed as a global trend that spans the political spectrum.

I have been seeing this weekly the past few months.

People have found a vulnerability and learned how to hack it.

Why not both? After all, this isn't a case of someone genuinely supportive of Trump's coup attempt being censored, this is an algorithm blindingly censoring journalists reporting on it. Humans not even in the loop. The rise of algorithmic censorship is the world becoming more authoritarian. It's not even a matter of individuals changing their values in this case, it's the system.

Though individuals have been changing their values as well. On the left and the right, and the center as well, there is more support for authoritarian. Part of that is due to COVID, so maybe it will fade. Hopefully it will, but we'll see I guess.

Just wait until GPT3 deep-fake audio. Closely followed by Deep-fake video. And algorithms will amplify this content to the echo chambers that "want" to hear it to increase ad revenue a few percentage points. All this will enter society at a time when trust in institutions is already low; you already hear some people predicting that there may not be an election with uncontested results (in the USA) ever again. If we solve/survive all those problems maybe there will be enough sense-making to actually tackle climate change come 2032. and maybe people will claim that the 20's were the true great filter of civilizations.

On the other hand, the world is probably the most united it's been in a while because of Russia so there's that.

Do we see much change with photoshop? Personally I don't recall seeing much, but a "photo" of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time is every bit as damning as a deep-fake video in many circumstances.

Hate to say it, but deepfake audio and video are already pretty convincing (though post processing is needed)

Good looking post processing used to be exclusively reserved for movie studios with render farms. Then it became available to any YouTuber with a PC and a license (or not) of Adobe. Now the average phone can do more impressive special effects for Snapchat filters than big budget movies had not long ago.

I'm convinced that deepfakes will be as easily generated as a Snapchat filter within a few years, substantially less time than society will require to adjust to this reality.

There was a viral video last week of the "Ghost of Kiev" that looked like real war footage. It ended up being from a 2013 video game!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Kyiv#Morale

Post processing or just lowering the resolution?

Filming a deepfake with a DV cam pointed at your screen is very convincing. Sadly.

I hear that cameras that sign video files are coming. It sucks that we have reached this point but it seems like some mitigations against deep fakes will appear.

The novel Fuzzy Nation has cameras like that. Regular cameras are basically inadmissible in court.

The minute fakes are a serious issue we will sign utterances. Exactly the same as DNS or anything actually important. Deepfakes will not be a threat or issue.

Except DNSSEC accomplishes nothing really. It does not make anything more secure. Crypto is not a panacea to the problems of trust.

Meming about and being afraid of WW3 is critical in containing/deescalating it. WW1 happened partly because nobody was afraid of it happenning.

According to Fiona Hill, we’re already in it. She doesn’t really indicate when we crossed the rubicon, but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-...

> but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?

The official start of WWI was a month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, even though it's so heavily identified nowadays as "the start of the war". It's entirely possible that in the future, the instigating event will be identified as something that already happened and it's just taking a while for the shooting to start as alliances solidify, and that people who think we're already in WWIII have the same "the instigating event is the start of the war" association.

Russia's incursion into Ukraine near the end of February could, for example, end up being it.

I agree with Fiona: the clear nuclear threat was over the line. Freezing the assets of the central bank of Russia was also unimaginable a month ago (they are not Venezuela). That's why I used the words containing/deescalating.

According to Fiona Hill that is not the definition of a world war. World Wars have been defined by battles in multiples countries and continents.

The Syrian civil war was over 15 countries and factions. War in Afghanistan over 5 countries, technically much more.

None of these wars were consider WW3, and just because the war between Ukraine and Russia is in Europe doesn’t make it any different.

Can you clarify? Like halfway down the politico interview, the interviewer prompts

> There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.

And Hill responds “we’re already in it”

Maybe you disagree, but I was surprised by that response and found it very thought provoking

History of this era will be interesting.

After 9/11 we had the GWoT mainly in the Middle East after the NYC attack. Global War on Terror, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syrian, Yemen and Africa.

The Eastern European conflicts 2008 Georgia, and the Ukrainian conflict since 2014.

If I learned anything about Tsars history, most of them do not get to have a natural death.

Most?

Source?

Nearly 9% of US presidents have been assassinated. Over a much much smaller timeframe. I would bet you would be less likely to have been assassinated as a Tsar than as a President.

According to Wikipedia, 5 of 14 Tsars (35%) were murdered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_of_all_the_Russias

That seems substantial, at least compared to Presidents, especially considering the threat of assassination was a serious consideration given all the political intrigue. Whereas AFAIU U.S. Presidents didn't take the threat of assassination seriously until the 20th century, exposing themselves to the public in ways that would be unthinkable to Tsars; or monarchs and, later, autocrats generally for that matter.

On the other hand, likelihood of death per year looks more comparable. For Tsars I get 2.1% (5 / (1917 - 1682)). For Presidents I get 2.3% (3 / (1917 - 1789)) or 1.7% (4 / (2022 - 1789)), depending on the range.

These days autocrats don't invest themselves much in establishing national political legitimacy or institutional legitimacy, focusing almost exclusively on building and grooming a power base where everyone in power has a vested interest in keeping the leader alive. So Putin probably doesn't have much to worry about, excepting perhaps some patriot military General.

EDIT: It's 27% of Tsars and 1.6% likelihood of death per year if starting from 1613, the start of the Romanov Dynasty. (Refreshing my Russian history as I go.) Numbers don't really change if we go back to 1547, Ivan the Terrible and first self-styled Tsar of Russia, as we add another intervening murder. And that's being charitable on the first metric given rapid succession and overlap during the Time of Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_monarchs

I think it's hard to divine trends from such small numbers. 14 Tsars, 45 presidents. It's not even enough to determine if the odds of one outcome or the other is better than a coin toss. This is before getting into confounding variables like availability and quality of medical care. How would the numbers change if they all had access to emergency care available to the next person to face an assassination attempt? Or if they all had the Secret Service looking out for them. The President flies around with a world class hospital with some of the world's best staff.

My guess is both attempts and successes are fewer over time and will approach 0 until some structural change shocks increasingly complacent protections.

WWII happened despite people being afraid of it happening. Could you elaborate on your point?

The factors in World War 2 were much different, public sentiment didn’t matter. Nazis would have taken Poland in 1939 and pursue the Soviet Union sooner, it was inevitably a World War. World War 1 was editable.

World War 1 was very much avoidable. Time and time again World War 1 has been called unnecessary because the original dispute that triggered the conflict was limited.

World War Two didn’t happen in isolation and was a direct result of unresolved and newly created issues at the end of the First World War.

There were people who foresaw, if not perfectly, how bad WWI would be, and tried to stop it. Many of them were socialists - Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Jean Jaurès in France for example - and their final hope was that the proletariat of the European nations would not fight against one another, but we know how that turned out.

The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.

There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.

> WW1 happened partly because nobody was afraid of it happenning.

That is an interesting take on it. It may not be wrong, but I hadn't heard that before.

There is a thought provoking book about how terrible the repercussions of WWI really were. The author claims the world was on the verge of a renaissance in technology, medicine, energy, music, trade, etc. The thought of a world war was incomprehensible at the time—no one believed it could happen. Who knows how the world would look today without WWI.

(If any one is interested in the book I will hunt it down as I don’t remember the name).

This was discussed shortly in: A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee

Another anecdote that speaks to the sentiment of the beginning of the war is Britain’s initial deployment of troops. The troops were literally marching towards Germany with music and percussionists that was supposed to motivate the troops and strike fear into the enemy. I imagine an army like you would see in Game of thrones (walking from point A to point B and making camp in between). Germany used their planes and promptly dispatched the British troops which suffered devastating losses. After this event Britain changed their tactics and took the war seriously.

(This event may have been WW2 which would make the story even more ridiculous).

I'm curious ^

Please do.

I think the point is that WWI was precipitated by a chain of events that could have, in theory, easily been interrupted if the belligerents had been sufficiently fearful of conflict.

The "August Madness" is sometimes how this gets summed up. Novels/movies like All's Quiet on the Western Front make this point, too.

I agree in a sense. But my point is that the memes don’t carry purpose or urgency because the possibility of a catastrophic world war feels remote. Just like the possibility that our democracy might vanish in an instant.

I’d say joining the army or building a factory that can crank out precision guided munitions is better to contain the threat of war than cooking up some spicy memes.

Not when the meming calls for escalation by sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions.

Ukrainians using anti-tank weapons to fight on their own land against a different nation trying to take ownership of the country is the definition of defence.

Escalation is what Russia is doing: cluster munitions, rolling elite troops in, and shelling apartment buildings. Sending weapons to the people who live there to fend off invaders, and imposing sanctions is a fairly tepid response.

I think what's changed is that the ability of a few outlets to control the narrative is diminished. The interstate always cut through poor communities. The bridges were always designed to keep buses from carrying people out of the cities to the suburbs. Certain demographics were always over-represented among the poor, and the policies responsible were always there. (US examples, but systems keep some people down for the benefit of others everywhere.)

But now you hear about it. The world you planned for was always an illusion. It never existed outside a narrow slice of time in post-WW2 peace and prosperity, and only for the thin slice of humanity that got to enjoy it. Now the hard part is: what do you do about it now that you know you were fed pleasing lies?

I would recommend reading about people that have gone through revolutions/war conflicts. Especially worker-led movements that have toppled Tsars, Kings, and Militaries. I'd also recommend this for non-violent weapons against dictatorships(https://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FDTD.pd...)

The world is certainly dark but I find comfort in knowing that the majority of us simply want to live peaceful lives, and watch our families prosper.

Is it thought, or is it just an actual threat of fascism require a hardline on the "tolerance of intolerance"

If course mistakes happen when you stop blindly accepting everything S valuation.

Hard times and war change people. Many changes are negative: poorer, less secure, less trusting, more fearful, devastating losses.

But other changes are for the better. And you don't need war to make these changes. If you make them before hard times come, you'll be better prepared for them: becoming more stoic (less emotional, less offended at everything), becoming more serious, more resourceful, more self-reliant, lowering your expectations, being more humble, being more careful with your words and who you speak openly with, knowing your place instead of speaking for the whole of humanity, being better able to negotiate, being better able to compromise, being more tolerant of other opinions, appreciating the wisdom of our ancestors more, and focusing more on what really matters.

All of the things you wrote as good things are (mostly) good things, glittering generalities that have no bearing on whether hard times are good or bad.

To connect the two, you'd have to complete the scurrilous reference made that we are currently in a time of "weak men". You may or may not be aware that the "Hard times..." meme is widely used among not just stoics, but also fascist groups to suggest that the current generation is soft and weak, and that only by adversity can men become strong again.

One can do almost everything good you listed, and indeed aspire to it, without becoming stoic and emotionless. To have feelings isn't weak.

I think you misunderstood what the commenter was trying to say. He didn't mention anything about becoming emotionless, but becoming less emotional. I think we can all agree that new first world generations are on the extreme side of the spectre of emotions and would benefit from leaning to the opposite side a bit.

> I think we can all agree that new first world generations are on the extreme side of the spectre of emotions and would benefit from leaning to the opposite side a bit.

"We all" find our opinions are unwelcome on the internet when we say things like that.

> that new first world generations

What do you mean by this?

What's the deal with using guilt by association as a way to disparage or dismiss ideas? Seeing that a lot lately.

The "hard times create..." meme was originally shared by actual ethno-nationalists who have since been banned from most platforms.

I don't know if the person I replied to knows that - I think there are a lot of people who don't. It's worth pointing out though there's a disconnect from the first sentence to the second. Why is it that we have to have hard times for us to be better? Well, the argument from the meme - which many people take seriously even if you or I don't - is that recent times have been easy and this has created weak (and other pejoratively described) men.

No, it was originally shared with us by Greek philosophers, over 2 millennia ago.

Ironically it’s an outgrowth of the very weakness in mindset that GP is talking about.

That makes sense and would explain why it's become more common.

The GP did point out that war was not needed to make the changes suggested, and they are good in times of peace and plenty as well. We understand that striving to be less offensive is good, but we hesitate to advocate that people become less easily offended because it can sound like we are blaming the victim. But it is good for everyone's emotional health to be able to be unaffected by the intentional or unintentional offenses of others. And the benefits of stoicism aren't about being emotionless, but not letting those emotions you let yourself be open to, be the guiding total of who you are. Anger and joy can be like other instinctual needs like defecation or hunger, just signals to cue your intelllect. Eastern traditions would say something like embracing the moment and how you feel, but not becoming attached to it or it's source.

I’ll be more blunt about it: cultivating emotionality is a disservice, especially to the most disadvantaged. Being offended doesn’t serve you at all; it’s a merely feeling that makes you easier to exploit.

We do not live in the time of weak men; we live in a time which has not made men strong in the way other times have. endurance through hardship is what makes strength. Being strong in the way that many hardships make you comes with its own complexity.

> To have feelings isn't weak.

I compare it to kids having allergic reactions. If you grow up in a sterile environment your immune system reacts to minor environmental irritants. And that is maladaptive.

My parents were in their 20s during the Bangladesh independence war, when Pakistan engaged in genocide of Bangladeshis: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-reme.... Even leaving aside the violence—when they were growing up, 1 out of 4 kids didn’t make it to age 5. They can talk about the war in, if not neutral, objective and unemotional terms. They would never suggest they’ve encountered any adversity in their life. But certainly nothing that happens in America gets them all that worked up.

And I can’t help but feel that this really does make them better, more capable, and more effective people. They’re able to grapple with reality in all its messiness in a detached unemotional way.

Which is to say Mujib’s famine killed as many Bangladeshis as the Pakistanis did (as per the excellent book The Black Coat)

This going from zero to fascism in ten seconds flat is exactly the type of mindset OP is rightly criticizing.

I fear a people that make their life and policy decision based on Internet memes.

Being stoic doesn't mean you lack feelings.

Stoics in fact embraced emotions and feelings. It is a common misconception that Stoicism means to blunt your feelings. It’s a long explanation, but it basically encourages you to live in the moment and leave every day fulfilled.

Everything you said I agree with, but I'm very pessimistic that the average person has either the intellect or the will to change their outlook (and thus behaviour) voluntarily, at least over the general population. I do think it's an interesting hypothesis (and I'll claim it for the moment) that the current world, with its facile TikTok morons and the litany of other issues that I think the Romans, Greeks, and even people from the early 20th century would chalk up to stupidity, ignorance, and naïveté, is the result of TOO MUCH peace and prosperity. The overwhelming majority (more than 99%) of the Western world has no idea what proper existential struggles look like, and they haven't for 80 years now. I recall Jefferson's prognostications about the need for repeated revolutions.

I think we need catastrophe and suffering to bring out the best in ourselves, because without them society writ large trends inexorably in a direction that nobody would argue represents the best of our species.

There is no easy answer: on one side you have censorship but on the other you have noise. Decentralized solutions produce a lot of noise and there is no existing protocol to automatically separate noise from signal.

It's all because of ads. Everything is done in the name of getting more advertisers, and more ad-clicks. So everything must be sanitised, and strictly regulated lest you upset the advertisers

Is the word "plan" intentional, or a translation for some other concept?

what were you planning?

Just my 2 cent crystal ball.

Perhaps people want a more authoritarian world (without realizing it). The ratio of static to noise has been increasing year by year. People don't want to take (nor have) the time to balance alternate view points and spend the time to independently determine fact from opinion. I think the current lack of direction creates turmoil--there are too many options, too many sources of information, and the quality of all of them have gone down while they compete to pull at our amygdalas for seconds of our time. Maybe there is a higher percentage of people who just want answers from someone they trust so they can get on with their lives.

I think I've been on HN long enough to know that (re)implementing limitations on the control of information would make most of you scream. But maybe its for the best. It's already been proven many times over that people aren't going to research facts themselves. So having fewer organizations spoon feed choice bits of information can't be worse. Note that I am not suggesting to deliberately block information, but rather have organizations that are more selective (i.e. exactly like it was during the newspaper era).

I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship. We have too many checks and balances, and the decision making is cordoned off into many compartments, and the country is split 50/50 on who they vote for. An authoritarian-bent president would have to fight three branches of government, 50 governors (all of whom have their own state-level army, by the way), 100 senators, hundreds of congressmen, thousands of judges and lawyers, 150 million citizens, and so on and so forth. And on top of that, manage the country on a national and international level. I just dont see it happening. Trump did not bring us any where closer to that reality by the way (name one legislative/judicial change that moved the needle closer in that direction).

All this to say, there's nothing to be scared about. The internet has been a fun experiment but it's given a microphone to too many people, and has crumpled the gatekeepers who had the job of filtering out the diamonds from the mud (and did that job extraordinarily well, by the way, because they had to, or die). It feels like our culture has been dying. The influence artists had up until the 90s was comparatively huge. If resources were pooled to support the most talented (be it artists, journalists, architects, musicians, corporate / government leaders, etc), I think we would experience another golden era of culture.

The US will become authoritarian precisely because of thinking and assumptions such as yours.

1. Authoritarianism is not a good thing, hard stop.

2. The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.

Making consessions like you suggest is precisely how we slip into authoritarianism.

> Authoritarianism is not a good thing, hard stop.

On a spectrum, where e.g. anarchy is on the other end, it is a good thing. Where to place the pin however is a challenge. Binary decisions such as that ("this thing can only be good or bad") is an extremely restricted way at seeing the world.

>The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.

I'd love to here why you think that.

Authoritarianism and anarchy are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Furthermore, there are many that reasonably believe that certain forms of structured anarchy are a good thing, and not just teenage punks, but also intellectuals and academics.

Regarding the US falling to authoritarianism, there are at least two factors: 1. Most people are in a state of conditioned helplessness where they don't feel there is anything they can do to affect change. 2. Most people don't have minds of their own but just parrot what they hear in the media that aligns with their party. These two in conjunction leave an opening for someone to execute a soft coup. In fact a draft Trump executive order to discard the election results was released recently. He had convinced his base that the election was fraudulent. Seeing how far Trump got at eroding democracy, imagine someone like Trump but competent in the same situation. Every democracy that has gone authoritarian had plenty of branches and politicians and checks and balances in place.

> I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship.

Yes but only until a violent event that strikes fear in the minds of the people. Then the government may convince people to give up their freedoms in the name of security.

I think the question is how dedicated are we to our values, not in good times, but in uncertain times.