HN has always had a certain respect for people and articles that seem particularly prescient. I suspect that the 2017 in the title does a lot to boost the upvotes and reduce the flags.

It's from eight years ago almost exactly (a couple months off). Saying it references today's current events isn't prescient, it's "second verse, same as the first".

Amusingly, the post is now flagged. So much for hacker spirit here.

Always remember the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" refers to Silicon Valley startups "hacking" capitalism and regulations, rather the anti-establishment hacker culture of the pre-web era. The resistance isn't here, and it's never going to be here.

That's quite wrong—pg, rtm, and tlb came out of the MIT/Cambridge hacker scene and used the word the same way everybody else there did.

(which is the original sense of the word and which, as everyone here hopefully knows, predates computers, and btw didn't originally have to do with breaking into closed systems)

Dang has been a remarkable example of what free speech moderation looks like.

I was a mod, and by the definition used to pillory content moderation, there is no free speech compatible moderation anywhere.

This is the same thing done by everyone from radio jockeys dealing with callers, to TV shows.

The fundamental tool is the ban, because the only real power for site owners is silence.

Any principled stand will be riddled with exceptions in under a few days of operation. I’ve seen this repeated in multiple free speech communities, like clockwork.

Id very much like to see a principled stand which isn’t reducible to “free speech = speech exceptions I can tolerate.”

Most people can’t and don’t want to live in 4chan (8chan ?)

i was gonna say the same - as my post got sunk into oblivion after hitting second page

Long as you censor it appropriately then it won't get flagged. It's 2025 y'all.

It's telling that the Overton window has shifted far enough that the very idea of resisting authoritarianism is 'political'...

It's the implication that the current government is authoritarian which is political

"Left" and "Right" are luxuries of democratic societies.

Pro-democracy and anti-democracy is another axis entirely.

Both are political comparisons, but they are not the same thing.

The implication of the article is that we will only discover whether the current government is authoritarian based on how it handles social resistance.

Everything is political once everyone is a broadcaster.

Note the (2017) in the title.

Oh? Did someone say that somewhere? Should I start assuming that my feelings about things are what makes them political?

What is authoritarianism but politics?

How could resisting a political system ever have not been political? I'm endlessly confused by how people use the term "political" these days. Is there some new definition I'm not familiar with?

There are 29 other posts on the front page that are not political.

pg might be busy on the hub; when he finds this he will make sure to suppress opinions that aren't double plus good

The article is about Nazis. It says a lot about the state of things that this would be considered political and not historical.

That's a hazard of apocalyptic rhetoric.

If you're constantly comparing people to some group, you can't talk about that group without being suspected of dogwhistles. Which forecloses discussions that otherwise could have been interesting.

Sometimes the other group is neo nazis and are the dominant power.

Sometimes they are close enough but different that the similarities strike normal people. Except when they bring it up, the defense is “no actually the Nazis we’re specifically doing XYZ. This isn’t the same. Which shuts down conversation about both - the actions being similar or identical.

But this is the value of rhetoric.

Ok I'll bite. What's another example? I don't think a post about Soviet Russia or really any other similar thing would get the same treatment.

I think you could invoke Godwin's law but it was seen as childish, not political.

It's also the insidiousness of Nazis. People always look at the holocaust and wonder how it could ever happen, and the answer as far as I can tell is Nazis weaponize the benefit of the doubt.

When you look back at how the world received Hitler before he became the Hitler we know, you see publications like the NYT musing that Hitler really doesn't mean anything he's saying about the Jews, and when he comes to power he will temper himself [1]:

  So violent are Hitler’s fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew’s night.

  But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.

Same thing is happening today. Trump is telling us he is going to genocide Gaza, he's going to create a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, annex Canada, invade Greenland, invade Mexico, cut out Congress, defy the Judiciary, serve past his constitutional term limit, and be dictator "for a day"... maybe let's just take him at his word instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt?

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8016017/ny-times-hitler

maybe if a certain government wasn't implementing Nazi-like loyalty purges (and making Nazi-like salutes) no one would be drawing comparisons with Nazi-like behavior, would they?

Well, that didn't last long.

Now flagged and nowhere near the front page.