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Comment by dang

5 months ago

We're all complicit.

I'm going to do my job the same way as always. History will come to its own conclusions.

This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call.

I would agree in a lot of cases. But we aren't all complicit at the same level.

I know it's how Trump and Elon work: they make outrage after outrage, crime after crime, so that one shadows the other, we can't keep track, we get exhausted, etc.

But there has to be a tipping point, or we just boil like frogs in the fascism saucepan.

If this is not the tipping point, what will it be? A proud, intense, in-your-face nazi salute, the day of the inauguration. If your tipping point is when they finally come after you, you'll be all alone. It's textbook 1930s Germany.

You seem to be saying there will be no tipping point for you. People wonder how the darkest moments of history happened, and how people let it happen.

This is how.