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Have you actually read "The end of History"?

yodon 5y ago
>Have you actually read "The end of History"? The Hacker News guidelines page[0] is a pretty incredible document. One of the smallest but most central insights in it is "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. 'Did you even read the article? It mentions that' can be shortened to "The article mentions that." Unlike most sites, HN is very intentional about optimizing everything in the site for quality of discussion, not for outrage and conflict and dismissal. Everything about how the Karma system works here and the way audiences react to posts differently here than on Reddit ties back to that goal (HN isn't interested in page views or ad revenues, it wants to be interesting to smart people so they stick around and participate). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- shusaku 5y ago
  Except “the end of history” isn’t the article linked. Maybe you’d know that if you read it.
  - yodon 5y ago
    >Except “the end of history” isn’t the article linked. Maybe you’d know that if you read it. Again, following the advice in the HN guidelines I will "assume the best interpretation" of your comment and say yes, I and others are quite comfortable generalizing from a specific quote that happens to mention how to respond to comments about a post to understand how that recommendation would apply to comments about other articles and topics without needing that to be explicitly spelled out, and yes I've read quite a number of works by Fukuyama though in my opinion "The end of history" is far from his best work. I've personally found "The origins of political order" to be much more thought provoking.
purple_ferret 5y ago
Yes, although about 15 years ago so my memory of it is admittedly hazy.
- FiberBundle 5y ago
  So can you explain what exactly has proven to be highly flawed?
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    In a thread about Russian expansion and the resumption in full flower of the cold war, you're asking which part of The End of History has proven to be flawed?
    - FiberBundle 5y ago
      That's exactly my point. Fukuyama is extremely misunderstood in popular media, he never said that the fall of the soviet union implied continued existence of liberal democracy. If you had actually read the book (and specifically the last chapter) you would know that he wrote that the threat of authoritarianism will always be present and (some) democracies will (at times) fall back into autocratic states from time to time.
      - karaterobot 5y ago
        Honestly, I think you were just waiting for an opportunity to tell someone they hadn't read the book, or had read it incorrectly. It's a service I am happy to provide any time this subject comes up. Nonetheless, the book's thesis is hard to reckon with: > What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. And it is always possible that Putin himself has not read (or, like so many of us, merely misunderstood) Fukuyama's work as well.

>Have you actually read "The end of History"? The Hacker News guidelines page[0] is a pretty incredible document. One of the smallest but most central insights in it is "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. 'Did you even read the article? It mentions that' can be shortened to "The article mentions that." Unlike most sites, HN is very intentional about optimizing everything in the site for quality of discussion, not for outrage and conflict and dismissal. Everything about how the Karma system works here and the way audiences react to posts differently here than on Reddit ties back to that goal (HN isn't interested in page views or ad revenues, it wants to be interesting to smart people so they stick around and participate). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

shusaku 5y ago
Except “the end of history” isn’t the article linked. Maybe you’d know that if you read it.
- yodon 5y ago
  >Except “the end of history” isn’t the article linked. Maybe you’d know that if you read it. Again, following the advice in the HN guidelines I will "assume the best interpretation" of your comment and say yes, I and others are quite comfortable generalizing from a specific quote that happens to mention how to respond to comments about a post to understand how that recommendation would apply to comments about other articles and topics without needing that to be explicitly spelled out, and yes I've read quite a number of works by Fukuyama though in my opinion "The end of history" is far from his best work. I've personally found "The origins of political order" to be much more thought provoking.

purple_ferret 5y ago

Yes, although about 15 years ago so my memory of it is admittedly hazy.

FiberBundle 5y ago
So can you explain what exactly has proven to be highly flawed?
- karaterobot 5y ago
  In a thread about Russian expansion and the resumption in full flower of the cold war, you're asking which part of The End of History has proven to be flawed?
  - FiberBundle 5y ago
    That's exactly my point. Fukuyama is extremely misunderstood in popular media, he never said that the fall of the soviet union implied continued existence of liberal democracy. If you had actually read the book (and specifically the last chapter) you would know that he wrote that the threat of authoritarianism will always be present and (some) democracies will (at times) fall back into autocratic states from time to time.
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      Honestly, I think you were just waiting for an opportunity to tell someone they hadn't read the book, or had read it incorrectly. It's a service I am happy to provide any time this subject comes up. Nonetheless, the book's thesis is hard to reckon with: > What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. And it is always possible that Putin himself has not read (or, like so many of us, merely misunderstood) Fukuyama's work as well.