Comment by stinkbeetle
7 hours ago
When you say "HN", do you mean you? Who else was surprised? The place is full of people constantly commenting about how bad the US is, how corrupt the government is, how terrible CEOs (particularly Altman) are, late stage capitalism, etc., etc.
They've been around forever, even before Trump's first administration. But a broken clock is right twice a day.
Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
Clearly, HN doesn't want us to listen to them.
Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
I’m one of those criticasters and I’m getting downvoted constantly. I don’t care about the downvotes. I do care about western countries slipping into fascism just because people are so proud to admit they voted for a stupid clown.
I'm more upset about the large group of people in the startup industry, possibly even a majority, who would be totally happy about countries slipping into fascism if they made a little more money along the way.
Who cares about ethics and morality? Those aren't profitable!
Yes, but it's not just personal moral failings, the system itself is corrupt. Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth. It shouldn't be all-or nothing. This is the result of our debt-based system. This is deeply abnormal. Rich people should be comfortable in every way and should have the surplus to take a moral stance without risking to lose everything. You can see this play out very clearly with OpenAI. Sam has enemies. He may have done some things that he fears would catch up with him if he loses power. It's always like this with the most powerful people; they usually end up making Faustian bargains which put them into extreme all-or-nothing situations and they take the entire world for a ride with them.
That's not to say anyone should be excused but the system's fragility compounds the problem.
I think a lot of voters didn't know what they were getting the country into, or just were too ignorant or misinformed to notice, in voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. There are actual fascists too, of course. I'm just disappointed that they won; the damage has already been immeasurable, and to some extent irreversible, and we're not even halfway into the term.
> I think a lot of voters didn't know what they were getting the country into
You were not around for the 2017-2021 preview? Thisis the second term! Everybody cpuld see exactly what the country would be getting into!
This is too naive. A lot of voters were eager and happy to vote for hurting other people on the premise that it was somehow going to turn into personal benefit. They are only now upset because it turns out they're being hurt too.
An dpeople have short memories when it comes to this stuff. If the USA somehow manages to survive this and Trump and his allies are peacefully voted out and removed from power, I'd bet $250 that a lot of 2024 Trump voters would still happily vote for a platform consisting mostly of Trump's 2024 platform and Project 2025 plans. They're not learning the lesson that the core policy approach is designed to facilitate our decline into corporate feudalism; they're just learning the lesson that Trump himself and a few other specific individuals are bad, for them, personally. Trump Regret is not going to be enough to save us.
You know those people have existed since practically forever, right? You learn to tune it out and then you never notice if they start being less wrong.
I don't want to spoil Marty Supreme (2025), but there's a provocative line delivered by Kevin O’Leary (yes, the Shark Tank guy):
"I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever."
It's the surface details problem: people post nice sounding things on the internet but don't think about them and do the nostradamus thing of predicting everything because caused by everything.
If you predict a corrupt cartel in "the US" will do a thing, then on a long enough timescale you'll eventually be right in general but wrong about every significant detail.
(also the people with this opinion don't seem to do anything with it - it doesn't appear to motivate them to vote, organize, think critically or come up with compromises - they simply turn out to belittle people on the internet while actually acting to normalize new excesses).