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> We are fortunate not to have to worry about authoritarian nations. But we still have to worry about authoritarians. It is a sad fact that, at the moment, we

> We are fortunate not to have to worry about authoritarian nations. But we still have to worry about authoritarians. It is a sad fact that, at the moment, we see someone with political power exhibiting authoritarian behavior (undermining a free press, undermining or disregarding rule of law, judges, etc, deliberately spreading false information, using the system to attack political enemies) — we see someone in office with authoritarian behavior _embracing_ hate speech, both explicitly and implicitly. This is not to say your point is not also a concern or that we should ignore it. Rather, that right now if you look around the world what you will see is the current crop of leaders with authoritarian tendencies (India, Hungary perhaps, Brazil, The Philippines, US) embrace hate speech as a tool to incite their base and sometimes to incite political violence (Brazil in particular). As this is a sensitive subject because it touches on contemporary politics I want to emphasize that I am doing my best to be thoughtful, specific, factual, and nonjudgmental. Factual support for all the statements I made here can be easily found. There have been many articles written about, for example, Bolsanaro in Brazil and Duarte in the Philippines. Lastly I’d like to point out that the topic of the thread is inherently political and I’ve tried to stay on-topic.

dmix 7y ago
There have been so many checks and balances on the executive branch both in congress but even more so the judicial branch of the US system that most of these claims of authoritarianism, besides a few minor examples that look a whole lot like the behaviour of previous administrations when compared on paper, that this whole shift to authoritarianism that has been so thoroughly FUDly spread in the media is simply not true. It’s most taking a single persons words on Twitter as policy which is not how things work in the real world. Despite efforts by Bush to massively expand the Executive branch’s power - mostly under the guise of counter terrorism, we really haven’t seen anything near comparable. And it practice that power is still significantly capped from any sort of extremism - by design. Yet those in the past who actually made significant strides in allowing the president and his cabinet to bypass these safe guards is now being paraded around among the Democrats as one of the “good guys” and appearing in the media with the former First Lady. The obvious disconnect here between what is said and insessently warned about and Sabre rattled over politically and what exists (in terms of what’s actually different) fuels a lot of the discontent which drives regular, entirely not “far right” or “alt right” people to the right. Meanwhile the worst of the worst redneck supporters on the right, a tiny minority, get paraded around [1] like they are the new base representing the average person on the right... instead of the fringe rural racist nobodies who have always existed but the media largely ignored instead of promoting them line they are powerful. Which is simply not true fod for the average 48% who votes right and only further fuels discontent about mass misrepresentation and villanization (similar to the “despicables” bit that complete backfired) in the media and elsewhere. It’s really not that bad and I’ve never seen a party so self destructive and consistently out of touch as the American democrat party. Most people paying attention on the left are well aware of that. This sort of thing is what results in losing to a person who was probably the least qualified person ever to be president. And nearly every poll shows the average Republican dislikes what Trump writes on Twitter and wished he stopped. Yet this same person who has 24/7 negative media coverage has a very good shot at winning again which will be the greatest embarrassment to the Democrats in modern history. It’s not past due for the left to look themselves in the mirror and ask themselves who they are really fighting against [2]. I can assure you doubling down on identity politics, radical policies, and calling them all Nazis and white supremacist might work on Twitter but it is a terribly flawed strategy for winning this election. The people on the right have long ago seen through that nonsense and the media cherry picking of the baddest guys (aka political nobodies) they can find and presenting them as the typical republican is not working, it's having the opposite effect. And I say this as someone who would be just as happy with Bernie as a sane but honest republican candidate. But both parties have proven they can only offer total mediocrity and blatant attempts for predetermined anointed winners, who are boring, old, and can barely form a coherent sentence. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/politics/trump-2020-trumpstock.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/politics/trump-2020-tr... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/trump-rhetoric-precedents.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/trump-rhetoric-pr...
- adamsea 7y ago
  I don’t disagree with a lot of what you said, and certainly not with your excellent point about past administrations expanding executive power. I do think you underestimate the power of the presidential office as a “bully pulpit” and the concrete legislative and other steps the current administration has taken.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  I think what frustrates me the most about all the anti-Trump rhetoric is that what Bush did is vastly more heinous than anything Trump is accused of, yet I've seen so many people call out Trump as being vastly worse than Bush. I also find it interesting that the people who hate Trump now continue bashing Trump, but very often they do it in a roundabout way in an attempt to appear more balanced than they actually are. Trump has quite literally become he-who-shall-not-be-named on HN, and I find it hilarious. If there were ever an indication that the people on this site are as silly and melodramatic as the rest of the population, that's it right there.
  - dmix 7y ago
    There's an entire population of people on HN who can't talk about this stuff without getting hysterical. Not saying "Trump" is learned behaviour on a site that promotes intellectual debate. I personally much prefer saying executive branch or administration than saying Trump for that very reason. It helps avoid the emotions and political ideological stuff. This article which I've posted here a million times here since 2007, and which used to be popular on HN, but somewhat forgotten with the hyper radicalization of Reddit/Twitter former moderates and the 10000x increase in the many people thinking that "resisting" by parroting the same talking head hyper partisan stuff on the Internet will save the world.... Instead of causing every person who is politically/intellectually mature enough to roll their eyes with "this again?". https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
    - stOneskull 7y ago
      Thank you
Mirioron 7y ago
>we see someone in office with authoritarian behavior _embracing_ hate speech, both explicitly and implicitly. Perhaps this should clue you in about how people feel about political correctness. Many of the leaders you mentioned likely got a whole bunch of votes because they didn't toe the political correctness line. This happened in many other countries too, because people generally don't like walking on eggshells. >There have been many articles written about, for example, Bolsanaro in Brazil and Duarte in the Philippines. Imagine this sentence, but instead of you misspelling their names, you misspelled their pronouns. Some people would label that as hate speech. Obviously not when used against the people you mentioned, because they are the enemy and we can't give ammunition to the enemy.
- adamsea 7y ago
  1. “Hate speech” in most countries is a legally defined term, and courts of law are able to determine if something qualifies as hate speech or not. This is what I’m referring to. That is different from “political correctness”, which has no legally defined meaning I’m aware of. [EDIT] Hate speech is not legally defined in the United States. Not sure why I thought it was. My apologies. I would though argue that it’s still a more clearly defined term than “politically correct”, especially since it is legally defined in other countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_St... 2. Thank you for the correction about my spelling. 3. Duterte vocally supports the extrajudicial killing of criminals - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-killings-insight-idUSKCN0YG0EB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-killi... - there are plenty of other sources as well. The wikipedia article about Bolsonaro contains plenty of citations describing behavior of his which fits the definition of authoritarian. When you consider his previous association with and expressed nostalgia for the military dictatorship in Brazil (notorious for torturing its opponents, among other things), this makes his behavior especially disturbing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro Call it whatever you want — authoritarian, fascist, populist, etc, but these guys certainly don’t exhibit the behavior of a of a leader who values small-d democratic government, the rule of law, or equality under the law regardless of religion, sex, skin color, political belief or sexual orientation. Trump is not as extreme and most of all of what he says does not meet the legal definition of hate speech. His habit of perpetually lying (also known as not telling the truth) is very well documented - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#Fact-checking_Trump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Do... Discussion of whether he qualifies as a wannabe-authoritarian leader or not is more complex. There are many verifiable instances where, as President, he has undermined the laws of the country he leads. One example is when he talked about wanting to end birthright citizenship (that you are automatically a citizen if born in the U.S.), which is guaranteed by the 14th amendment of the constitution. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/birthright-citizenship... Please note that regardless of how distressing you may find the information I’m sharing to be, I’m not doing much more than presenting facts. Of course I have a point of view. But my goal here is to illustrate as dispassionately as I can, well-known and verifiable behavior of current world leaders which is along the lines of “demanding total obedience to those in positions of authority”, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/authoritarian https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/authorit... There have been of course other leaders in the past from all sorts of political parties who have exhibited authoritarian behavior; but I’m talking about who is in power now. There are of course plenty of other countries we could talk about as well. India, China, Russia, and Israel come to mind, in addition to the Philippines, Brazil, and the United States. And I don’t claim that list to be comprehensive.
belorn 7y ago
The thread is very political. All the listed authoritarian behavior is also behavior that get associated with political behavior. Deliberately presenting ones own political views in the best light and presenting the opposite view in the worst light get sadly defined as just being politics, regardless of how false it is in an objective light. Undermining and disregarding rule of law is common everywhere, particular with laws that were put in place to restrict those in a position of power. A standard practice in politics is to also have a media policy that in ways favor the press that favors their side and limits the availability of everyone else. It all comes down to what degree one finds the other sides behavior worse. In an objective perspective there is surely people that are worse than others, but we should not talk about it as if one side is above such behavior.
- adamsea 7y ago
  I’m not sure I understand — is there a different way you can say this? I do think I get the gist of what you are saying; in short, I agree that unethical behavior knows no political party. My comment was more about authoritarian behavior exhibited by various world leaders currently in power, since, well, since those are the people currently in power. I certainly do have my own views, and think it’s appropriate in a conversation about authoritarian behavior by governments (which is a political discussion by its very nature) to share my views, as long as I do so in a respectful manner and point to reasonably valid sources for my claims. In this case there’s been so much written about the two leaders I mentioned (and the one I didn’t) that simply encouraging people to google is, I think, sufficient. Any article by any major paper of repute about political violence in the Philippines or Brazil will function as a source, as will any fact-checking site (politifact) or fact-checked article about US politics in the past few years.
  - belorn 7y ago
    I can take examples but I fear the more specific we get the higher the risks becomes that people dig down at the preferred side. As an example of undermining and disregarding rule of law, in the US no party has respected surveillance laws as far as 2001 and likely further back. As an example from here in Sweden, government officials regularly undermine and disregard the law in regard to how open contracts between government and companies. As a global example, we saw on Wikileaks how almost all countries classified information in order to hide political embarrassing facts from going public. All this is authoritarian behavior with varied degree of harm, and the laws they undermine or breaks are laws that got written in order to restrict authoritarian rule. In terms of the free press, political alignment is the tool of authoritarian rule. If the political party in power own the press, get campaign money from the press, and have a captured audience through the press, then the press is not free. The political party will grant interviews, space, time and opportunity to those they favor, and denying the same to the opposing side. Studies from both the US show this pattern to be very real during elections, and popular media often demonstrate this pattern in movies and TV shows. In regard to facts, sources help but its not a panacea. A relative new media trick by authoritarians when faced with investigative journalism is to do double recording of the interview, and then rush to be first to publish a editorialized version that favors ones own side with link to the full version. This way you get to capture the narrative, and the small minority that have time and energy to follow the several hours long interview are at minimum primed to your message.

dmix 7y ago

There have been so many checks and balances on the executive branch both in congress but even more so the judicial branch of the US system that most of these claims of authoritarianism, besides a few minor examples that look a whole lot like the behaviour of previous administrations when compared on paper, that this whole shift to authoritarianism that has been so thoroughly FUDly spread in the media is simply not true. It’s most taking a single persons words on Twitter as policy which is not how things work in the real world. Despite efforts by Bush to massively expand the Executive branch’s power - mostly under the guise of counter terrorism, we really haven’t seen anything near comparable. And it practice that power is still significantly capped from any sort of extremism - by design. Yet those in the past who actually made significant strides in allowing the president and his cabinet to bypass these safe guards is now being paraded around among the Democrats as one of the “good guys” and appearing in the media with the former First Lady. The obvious disconnect here between what is said and insessently warned about and Sabre rattled over politically and what exists (in terms of what’s actually different) fuels a lot of the discontent which drives regular, entirely not “far right” or “alt right” people to the right. Meanwhile the worst of the worst redneck supporters on the right, a tiny minority, get paraded around [1] like they are the new base representing the average person on the right... instead of the fringe rural racist nobodies who have always existed but the media largely ignored instead of promoting them line they are powerful. Which is simply not true fod for the average 48% who votes right and only further fuels discontent about mass misrepresentation and villanization (similar to the “despicables” bit that complete backfired) in the media and elsewhere. It’s really not that bad and I’ve never seen a party so self destructive and consistently out of touch as the American democrat party. Most people paying attention on the left are well aware of that. This sort of thing is what results in losing to a person who was probably the least qualified person ever to be president. And nearly every poll shows the average Republican dislikes what Trump writes on Twitter and wished he stopped. Yet this same person who has 24/7 negative media coverage has a very good shot at winning again which will be the greatest embarrassment to the Democrats in modern history. It’s not past due for the left to look themselves in the mirror and ask themselves who they are really fighting against [2]. I can assure you doubling down on identity politics, radical policies, and calling them all Nazis and white supremacist might work on Twitter but it is a terribly flawed strategy for winning this election. The people on the right have long ago seen through that nonsense and the media cherry picking of the baddest guys (aka political nobodies) they can find and presenting them as the typical republican is not working, it's having the opposite effect. And I say this as someone who would be just as happy with Bernie as a sane but honest republican candidate. But both parties have proven they can only offer total mediocrity and blatant attempts for predetermined anointed winners, who are boring, old, and can barely form a coherent sentence. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/politics/trump-2020-trumpstock.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/politics/trump-2020-tr... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/trump-rhetoric-precedents.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/trump-rhetoric-pr...

adamsea 7y ago
I don’t disagree with a lot of what you said, and certainly not with your excellent point about past administrations expanding executive power. I do think you underestimate the power of the presidential office as a “bully pulpit” and the concrete legislative and other steps the current administration has taken.
celticmusic 7y ago
I think what frustrates me the most about all the anti-Trump rhetoric is that what Bush did is vastly more heinous than anything Trump is accused of, yet I've seen so many people call out Trump as being vastly worse than Bush. I also find it interesting that the people who hate Trump now continue bashing Trump, but very often they do it in a roundabout way in an attempt to appear more balanced than they actually are. Trump has quite literally become he-who-shall-not-be-named on HN, and I find it hilarious. If there were ever an indication that the people on this site are as silly and melodramatic as the rest of the population, that's it right there.
- dmix 7y ago
  There's an entire population of people on HN who can't talk about this stuff without getting hysterical. Not saying "Trump" is learned behaviour on a site that promotes intellectual debate. I personally much prefer saying executive branch or administration than saying Trump for that very reason. It helps avoid the emotions and political ideological stuff. This article which I've posted here a million times here since 2007, and which used to be popular on HN, but somewhat forgotten with the hyper radicalization of Reddit/Twitter former moderates and the 10000x increase in the many people thinking that "resisting" by parroting the same talking head hyper partisan stuff on the Internet will save the world.... Instead of causing every person who is politically/intellectually mature enough to roll their eyes with "this again?". https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
  - stOneskull 7y ago
    Thank you

Mirioron 7y ago

>we see someone in office with authoritarian behavior _embracing_ hate speech, both explicitly and implicitly. Perhaps this should clue you in about how people feel about political correctness. Many of the leaders you mentioned likely got a whole bunch of votes because they didn't toe the political correctness line. This happened in many other countries too, because people generally don't like walking on eggshells. >There have been many articles written about, for example, Bolsanaro in Brazil and Duarte in the Philippines. Imagine this sentence, but instead of you misspelling their names, you misspelled their pronouns. Some people would label that as hate speech. Obviously not when used against the people you mentioned, because they are the enemy and we can't give ammunition to the enemy.

adamsea 7y ago
1. “Hate speech” in most countries is a legally defined term, and courts of law are able to determine if something qualifies as hate speech or not. This is what I’m referring to. That is different from “political correctness”, which has no legally defined meaning I’m aware of. [EDIT] Hate speech is not legally defined in the United States. Not sure why I thought it was. My apologies. I would though argue that it’s still a more clearly defined term than “politically correct”, especially since it is legally defined in other countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_St... 2. Thank you for the correction about my spelling. 3. Duterte vocally supports the extrajudicial killing of criminals - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-killings-insight-idUSKCN0YG0EB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-killi... - there are plenty of other sources as well. The wikipedia article about Bolsonaro contains plenty of citations describing behavior of his which fits the definition of authoritarian. When you consider his previous association with and expressed nostalgia for the military dictatorship in Brazil (notorious for torturing its opponents, among other things), this makes his behavior especially disturbing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro Call it whatever you want — authoritarian, fascist, populist, etc, but these guys certainly don’t exhibit the behavior of a of a leader who values small-d democratic government, the rule of law, or equality under the law regardless of religion, sex, skin color, political belief or sexual orientation. Trump is not as extreme and most of all of what he says does not meet the legal definition of hate speech. His habit of perpetually lying (also known as not telling the truth) is very well documented - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#Fact-checking_Trump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Do... Discussion of whether he qualifies as a wannabe-authoritarian leader or not is more complex. There are many verifiable instances where, as President, he has undermined the laws of the country he leads. One example is when he talked about wanting to end birthright citizenship (that you are automatically a citizen if born in the U.S.), which is guaranteed by the 14th amendment of the constitution. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/birthright-citizenship... Please note that regardless of how distressing you may find the information I’m sharing to be, I’m not doing much more than presenting facts. Of course I have a point of view. But my goal here is to illustrate as dispassionately as I can, well-known and verifiable behavior of current world leaders which is along the lines of “demanding total obedience to those in positions of authority”, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/authoritarian https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/authorit... There have been of course other leaders in the past from all sorts of political parties who have exhibited authoritarian behavior; but I’m talking about who is in power now. There are of course plenty of other countries we could talk about as well. India, China, Russia, and Israel come to mind, in addition to the Philippines, Brazil, and the United States. And I don’t claim that list to be comprehensive.

belorn 7y ago

The thread is very political. All the listed authoritarian behavior is also behavior that get associated with political behavior. Deliberately presenting ones own political views in the best light and presenting the opposite view in the worst light get sadly defined as just being politics, regardless of how false it is in an objective light. Undermining and disregarding rule of law is common everywhere, particular with laws that were put in place to restrict those in a position of power. A standard practice in politics is to also have a media policy that in ways favor the press that favors their side and limits the availability of everyone else. It all comes down to what degree one finds the other sides behavior worse. In an objective perspective there is surely people that are worse than others, but we should not talk about it as if one side is above such behavior.

adamsea 7y ago
I’m not sure I understand — is there a different way you can say this? I do think I get the gist of what you are saying; in short, I agree that unethical behavior knows no political party. My comment was more about authoritarian behavior exhibited by various world leaders currently in power, since, well, since those are the people currently in power. I certainly do have my own views, and think it’s appropriate in a conversation about authoritarian behavior by governments (which is a political discussion by its very nature) to share my views, as long as I do so in a respectful manner and point to reasonably valid sources for my claims. In this case there’s been so much written about the two leaders I mentioned (and the one I didn’t) that simply encouraging people to google is, I think, sufficient. Any article by any major paper of repute about political violence in the Philippines or Brazil will function as a source, as will any fact-checking site (politifact) or fact-checked article about US politics in the past few years.
- belorn 7y ago
  I can take examples but I fear the more specific we get the higher the risks becomes that people dig down at the preferred side. As an example of undermining and disregarding rule of law, in the US no party has respected surveillance laws as far as 2001 and likely further back. As an example from here in Sweden, government officials regularly undermine and disregard the law in regard to how open contracts between government and companies. As a global example, we saw on Wikileaks how almost all countries classified information in order to hide political embarrassing facts from going public. All this is authoritarian behavior with varied degree of harm, and the laws they undermine or breaks are laws that got written in order to restrict authoritarian rule. In terms of the free press, political alignment is the tool of authoritarian rule. If the political party in power own the press, get campaign money from the press, and have a captured audience through the press, then the press is not free. The political party will grant interviews, space, time and opportunity to those they favor, and denying the same to the opposing side. Studies from both the US show this pattern to be very real during elections, and popular media often demonstrate this pattern in movies and TV shows. In regard to facts, sources help but its not a panacea. A relative new media trick by authoritarians when faced with investigative journalism is to do double recording of the interview, and then rush to be first to publish a editorialized version that favors ones own side with link to the full version. This way you get to capture the narrative, and the small minority that have time and energy to follow the several hours long interview are at minimum primed to your message.