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Resist Authoritarianism by Refusing to Obey in Advance (2017)
- mjfl 2y ago[flagged]
- tomrod 2y agoWe aren't discussing Israel and Netanyahu in this thread, nor Biden's relatively poor attempt to thread the needle. Whataboutism isn't helpful. This said, Trump wants to bulldoze Gaza, in case you missed his recent statements, for Israel. Dispossessing a people is a definition for genocide. So, much worse than the hyperbolic claims that Biden was bombing Palestinians.
- mjfl 2y ago[flagged]
- tomrod 2y agoWelp. Thanks Biden for drafting and making the cease fire happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire
- mjfl 2y agoComplete nonsense. American media and Israeli media both credited Trump with the ceasefire deal, with the WSJ complaining that "Trump forced Netanyahu to make a deal with the devil" and AIPAC complaining that Trump isn't being blamed more for the action. - https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-forced-netanyahu-to-make-a-deal-with-the-devil-israel-hamas-db48045f https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-forced-netanyahu-to-make-a... - https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64825 https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64825 - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-01-13/ty-article/.premium/trumps-mideast-envoy-forced-netanyahu-to-accept-a-gaza-plan-he-repeatedly-rejected/00000194-615c-d4d0-a1f4-fbfdce850000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-01-13/ty-article/.p... - https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-official-trump-envoy-swayed-netanyahu-more-in-one-meeting-than-biden-did-all-year/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-official-trump-envoy-sway...
- SmirkingRevenge 2y agoWSJ is Diet Fox News, in print form. Murdoch owned. It's completely Trump aligned and untrustworthy on politics. I've heard conflicting accounts of the ceasefire - but many accounts credit Biden while saying Trump's team was mostly merely in the room. This seems much more plausible to me than the reverse.
- mjfl 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoYikes—can you please stop breaking the site guidelines in comments here? You've been doing it repeatedly and very badly, and we've already had to ask you more than once. I don't want to ban you, because some of your comments have been quite good and knowledgeable, although they have been few and far between as of late. Unfortunately you repeatedly cross into personal attack, name-calling, and so on, and we simply can't have that here. It destroys the site for its intended purpose, and that won't do anybody any good. Scorched earth is not interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20scorched%20earth&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- gauntletstricky 2y agoSorry for butting in, but is there a way to flag comments? I'm being called a name in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43029816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43029816
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe "flag" link, if enabled (not available for accounts with <500 karma) appears when you open a comment directly. Otherwise, for this or any other request, email mods at hn@ycombinator.com. "@dang" is a no-op, and replies-to-comments are often overlooked: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39171237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39171237>.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- suraci 2y ago[flagged]
- insane_dreamer 2y agoI vehemently disagree with Biden's actions regarding the Israeli demolition of Gaza. But Trump is even worse -- doubling-down now on clearing Gaza of all its inhabitants, which is what Israel wanted from the beginning. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
- bearjaws 2y agoKind of amazed this was let on the front page of HN. I've seen so many political posts sunk to the abyss the past few weeks.
- bloomingkales 2y agoLong as you censor it appropriately then it won't get flagged. It's 2025 y'all.
- thegrim33 2y ago[flagged]
- JKCalhoun 2y agoThere are 29 other posts on the front page that are not political.
- tomrod 2y agoDang has been a remarkable example of what free speech moderation looks like.
- intended 2y agoI 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 ?)
- steele 2y agopg might be busy on the hub; when he finds this he will make sure to suppress opinions that aren't double plus good
- tomrod 2y agoIt's the only way to resist. That, and vocally and vociferously insisting on the rule of law. Timely post.
- bigdict 2y agoWhy is it timely?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- onetokeoverthe 2y agobecause this is the time
- nickthegreek 2y agoGoogle and Apple just updated the name of an international body of water based on the demand of a single person throwing his weight around. No one asked for this change. It has no backing by locals. It wasn’t even a thing. This wasn’t a culture war issue, it’s a flexing of power by an old delusional man. AP has been the only corporate organization to stand up to this nonsense that I’ve seen. Not to mention the cdc scrubbing and such that judges are now overturning and demanding information returned to the public.
- tomrod 2y agoA great example of the many system abuses over the past several weeks. People did not vote for the Dark Enlightenment nor the Butterfly Revolution. Want to gut USAID? Work with Congress and pass a law. Want to strip Social Security? Samesies. That is the rule of law. If you are a representative of the people, you follow the law.
- throw0101d 2y ago> Want to gut USAID? Work with Congress and pass a law. Want to strip Social Security? Samesies. Heck, want to get rid of the useless penny (like we Canadians did years ago)? Change the law: * https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- epistasis 2y agoI highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. It's an absolutely brutal book that made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats, even in our current world. Even if they don't quite match the suffering of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine under the power of autocrats. When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.
- chemeril 2y agoThirded, it fundamentally changed the way I understand government. Would also recommended The Road to Unfreedom for some context around current geopolitics.
- ModernMech 2y agoCan you expand? What was your understanding before, and how did the book change it?
- epistasis 2y agoI'm not the person you asked, so I can only answer for myself. Previously, I had viewed Nazism as more of an aberration that overtook one society, and was the sole cause of the brutality of the Holocaust. Learning about the other forms of brutality that played out over the exact same geographic area, from a political direction that claims to be the arch-enemy of Nazism, points out that people's political representations are often quite distinct from the material effects they enact on people's lives. The Holodomor was not widely reported, and in fact covered up by the few Western journalists that witnessed it, and in the informational blackhole caused by Stalinism and the abduction, imprisonment, torture, and frequent death of anybody who stood out, much less spoke of the massive damage caused by Stalin, well, the full nature of what happened was not visible to the world until the fall of the USSR. The eyewitnesses to the starvation were often silent to their own natural death a decade after the fall of the USSR, due to the depth and depravity of the oppression of expression that happened in the USSR. Basically the book points out the same lessons that Hannah Arendt and others have been pointing out for a long time, that such mass death of innocent people is quite possible even outside the strange ideologies of Nazis. The conditions for evil are quite endemic to the human condition, especially in those that abandon truth in pursuit of political strength.
- gotoeleven 2y ago[flagged]
- readthenotes1 2y agoMilgrim found that, but that's because it's what he wanted to find. Other people have found different things from that experiment, E.G., https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-milgram-wrong https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo... And https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-shocking-truth-of-... And https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/famous-milgram-electric-shocks-experiment-drew-wrong-conclusions-about-evil-say-psychologists-9712600.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/famous-milgram-el...
- kmoser 2y agoThe conclusion I draw from these analyses of Milgram is that fewer people obeyed to the degree originally stated. But the fact that even one of them was willing to obey at all speaks volumes. Also consider that these were studies in which the the participants volunteered, and had nothing to lose by refusing orders or simply walking away. In the real world, these people would be agents of the state, or employees of a company, whose jobs, physical safety, and even lives (not to mention that of their family members) would be dependent on following orders. It's reasonable to assume in those situations, there would be a much higher rate of obedience than in the relatively safe environment of an experiment. Conclusion: people are easily manipulable by authority.
- readthenotes1 2y agoRather, the study shows that people are easily manipulated by a belief in Science with a capital S. To quote one of the articles, "he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent… ...Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order." I don't recall in the study whether the shockers knew the shockeys or volunteers but I bet they thought they were and thus they thought they were trying to help advance science. Since so many people dropped out after hearing pain in the shockees, I'm guessing that if we were to try to replicate the study scientifically and without looking for confirmation bias, we would find entirely different results.
- throw0101d 2y agoMore information on the author, Timothy Snyder: > Timothy David Snyder (born 1969)[2] is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[3][4] > He has written several books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), The Road to Unfreedom (2018), and Our Malady (2020). Several of them have been described as best-sellers.[5][6] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder "Do Not Obey In Advance" is the first chapter to his book On Tyranny: * https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny/ https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny/
- psb 2y agoImpressive that this made it to number 1 on hacker news. The politics of the readers here is pretty interesting
- moobsen 2y agoThis is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism. If that surprises you, I recommend reading the hacker howto. "Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers." There is a difference between a hacker and a cracker, which might these days be called "tech-bro". Even if it might not be obvious to everyone. https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
- mmastrac 2y agoIronically ESR seems to be siding with the authoritarians, though that was never really going to be a surprise for a lot of people. He stopped echoing the hacker ethos in the 2000s, IMO. One quote from him in the last week on Twitter (I was curious): > We (the majority that voted for Donald Trump, and many others) are now past caring about accusations of racism. Even when they're true. From a few days back, in re: dismantling of the gov't: > Wrong. I voted for this, and more. Not thinking I would actually get it, mind you. ESR is not a hacker, just a run-of-the-mill libertarian.
- aeternum 2y agoThis sounds good an all but you're incredibly unlikely to be asked to murder someone. Instead, suppose you're the government bureaucrat who must decide whether this vaccine hesitant individual gets medical care or keeps their job which is their family's sole income. Are you really going to oppose the state or is this an acceptable level of authoritarianism for the greater good? What if the state requires you to report any known illegal immigrant or face jail time and steep fines. You know some illegal immigrants, are you going to refuse to obey in advance? What if the state requires you to put pronouns in your linkedin and HN profile, are you going to refuse in advance? Where do you draw the line on rule of law vs. authoritarianism?
- skulk 2y agoAt that point, if there is a credible threat of those decrees being enforced, it's already over. The point is that obedience in advance empowers authoritarians to start ratcheting up the abuse. edit: also but sorry, complying with vaccine mandates isn't the best start for the slope you're trying to slick up.
- aeternum 2y agoAre you saying that authoritarianism happens without threat of decrees being enforced? That's an uncommon perspective. In any case, what lines would you draw, what specifically would you refuse to prevent authoritarianism?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoYour first example is confusing. They're an anti-vaxxer but worried about not having access to a doctor to administer it?
- gruez 2y agoI think he's referring to vaccine mandates.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoYou don’t remember them talking about hospital care for the unvaccinated?
- quacked 2y agoThere's a difference between "obedience to a authority as a guiding instinct" and "agreeing with the political goals of authoritarians, and then finding that they've taken over and are doing what you want". One thing I find very frustrating about articles and books like these, and about governance in the US, is the lack of awareness by the Professional-Managerial Class that there are factions within the population that reliably support any form of government you can think of, no matter how "backwards" or violent it is. It is only through the federal and state partnership in law enforcement that multiple regions of the country don't devolve into various flavors of revolutionary communism, theocracy, monarchy, petty-warlord-ism, etc. The educated person's obsession with "democracy" as a guiding light becomes increasingly naive as the pool of voters expands to capture every individual, as "democracy" in the case of the US actually means "a very strict limit on what the People are allowed to vote for". The constant shock by ostensibly intelligent people that huge groups of Americans broadly support policies the PMC has labelled as "fascist" or "archaic" makes me more convinced that they don't realize that the US is kept in line at gunpoint, not by some voluntarily and consensually held allegiance to internal pacifism and democracy. An example: what form of government do you think street gangs prefer? What about white collar criminals? What about cops?
- eightysixfour 2y agoMost people, logically, would prefer some sort of authoritarian that agreed with them on everything, that’s not really surprising or interesting. What is interesting is this urge is usually held in check by people realizing they don’t want the “other side” to have that kind of power. The information environment has conspired to convince everyone the other side does have that kind of power and uses it. That makes the game escalatory.
- tomrod 2y agoAnarchy, kleptocracy, and, in the US, representative democracy, and in Germany, a democratic republic, and in the UK, a constitutional monarchy, and in.... Respectively.
- colanderman 2y ago[flagged]
- grg0 2y ago[dead]
- anonfordays 2y agoThat's not obeying in advance. The change already happened, it's the official name according to the United States. GNIS has published the change, and Google is just reflecting that change.
- mmastrac 2y agoCould have dragged their feet on it, slow-walked it, made excuses, etc. They didn't.
- anonfordays 2y agoNot doing that isn't "obeying in advance" either. We should be glad they're following proper protocols here.
- colanderman 2y agoAs @mmastrac points out in a related comment, Google has chosen, at the behest of no law, to place the US on its "sensitive countries" list, which is the mechanism it uses to show users from certain countries incorrect names which it is legally obliged to. But, Google is not legally obliged to in this case. Google is obeying in advance.
- anonfordays 2y ago>As @mmastrac points out in a related comment His comments are incorrect. >Google has chosen, at the behest of no law, to place the US on its "sensitive countries" list, which is the mechanism it uses to show users from certain countries incorrect names which it is legally obliged to. That is not what happened, you got fooled by fake news. From Google directly: "This report is misleading. “Sensitive” is simply used in our internal systems for countries that see different official names in Maps (like a different name for a body of water) — that’s all there is to it. This is common & includes dozens of countries. Adding the U.S. & Mexico to that list means nothing more than that."[0] "Gulf of America" is not an incorrect name, that is the current offical name of that body of water according to the GNIS, which is the authoritative source in the US. >But, Google is not legally obliged to in this case. Google is obeying in advance. Google is just following the protocol they've always followed, one that predates Trump. They're not doing anything in advance. This is by definition not "obeying in advance." QED. [0] https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/1884450853136073002?mx=2 https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/1884450853136073002?mx=2
- cobbzilla 2y ago[flagged]
- tomrod 2y agoWhy do you think Covid, a public health emergency, was fascism, an inchoate merger of corporate interests that overthrow the rule of law? Edit: cobbzilla, your comment disappeared on me, but to respond: > Got it. Would-be authoritarians should definitely go to the public health playbook. Covid responses were certain targeted towards incentives that they could be to push for responses believed to be the best for society, especially in domains were personal action may strongly deviate from social good. We should never accept these actions as a normal operating procedure. In times of real emergency, such as Covid, natural disasters, and if the alleged events on the border were happening as claimed by right-wing propaganda news sources, the use of force is the purview of the government. We select them for this job during non-emergency times. For example, vaccine approval by the FDA is horrible slow. The time to change those standards isn't during an active disaster, but rather before or, less good, after. Emergencies by definition need to be immediately addressed above all other priorities. A state of emergency is not indefinite. If someone claims it is, that is an exercise in authoritarianism all the same.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoThe word "fascism" appears nowhere in the source article.
- tomrod 2y agoTitle and subtitle: > Resist Authoritarianism by Refusing to Obey in Advance: From Nazism in Austria to the Milgram Experiment The Nazis were Fascist, I judged that this does not need to be specifically cited especially given the context of both article and parent comment.
- cobbzilla 2y agoI’m curious your understanding of what the essence of fascism is. To me an essential part is mega corporations colluding with the government to force the people to do something they want. Public health concerns, valid as they may be, ought to be accomplished without this kind of coercion, yet I sensed a very strong “obey in advance” mentality permeating from mainstream media. apparently, it’s anathema to even talk about this.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwccp 2y ago[dead]
- pabs3 2y agoInteresting, this post now appears to be shadow banned? For me it shows up mid-way through the front page, but for logged-out it doesn't show up at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dhdjruf 2y ago[dead]
- anal_reactor 2y agoPeople are highly hierarchical, and the idea of a democracy where everyone is equal before the law is inherently incompatible with that.
- zfg 2y agoTwenty lessons on tyranny from Timothy Snyder: https://snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-lessons-on-tyranny https://snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-lessons-on-tyranny