"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and blinding your brain to political/financial realities that are capital H Hard problems?
Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal systems design. People don't know how to have conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education systems), leading to an open and actually progressive culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich countries, we have more than enough resources to be able to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you truly convinced that the world would be a better place? 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the distribution? How?
The resource-distribution problem is only the core problem when the majority of people actually lack resources. My impression is a different one - everyone wants more, regardless of if they have enough. That, according to my model of the world, is our core problem. We're building a culture of material greed and constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just point at billionaires and claim that they are the root problem.
Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But I don't see how someone being able to fund a space company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is the problem when the vast majority of people have food on their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely are, either.
Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of thought will only go away once the virus has incapacitated/killed those who seem to not understand what the word "excess deaths" means.
Willful missing of the point. Also not implying that the outcome is anything approaching a good outcome, just a grim Darwinian one, where thinking responding to covid in any way to improve life expectancies is just some sign of weakness. Our further atomization and slide towards a individualist society will leave us living shorter, less collaborative lives where we will try and treat cancer with a juice fast or some nonsense, instead of transforming our fundamental relationship to healthcare away from a not-for-profit one. But one is something a consumer can do, the other requires collective action, and that's only for the hysterical weaklings to dream of, so instead we will just virtue-signal our way towards dying at 30 on a bowflex machine after taking unregulated gym substances or whatever in a failed attempt to steel ourselves against our lack of societal fabric and collective ability to combat anything.
Feel free to hide under a rock avoiding covid while ignoring all the other risks you take everyday.
Hospitals hit capacity during flu seasons - did you wear a mask everyone, keep your kids home, work from home and cancel all travel plans? I’ll bet you didn’t even know they were at capacity.
Risk mitigation whilst hospitals are at capacity? Nah, gotta live my life! Otherwise they might perceive me as weak-willed, and more important than my continued existence is to ensure I am not perceived as a weakling! Anything else is others being hysterical! Fuck doctors, am I right!
Without access to any privileged information, I would call it a protest that turned (or was instigated to turn, if you prefer to phrase it that way) into a mob, and there’s never any telling what could happen after that. Read Lord of the Flies - mobs do crazy things.
Just look at the summer of 2020. There were many many examples of protests that turned into riots. Some included federal buildings too. Dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars in damages. It's obvious partisanship to frame these events so differently.
Former president Bush called the people involved “insurrectionists”. President Trumps chosen CIA director - someone with decidedly privileged information - said “we are on the way to a right wing coup”.
Whether you find such a perspective compelling, you would probably be wise to open yourself to the possibility that the events of January 6th is more than mere mob behavior.
I’m open (unpartisan but the names you listed would make me apt to distrust what they had to say) and can believe insurrectionists were behind the instigation of the mob. I also like to think for myself and also understand that randos showing up to protest can end up mobbing without having come with a specific agenda (all it takes is someone to throw the first punch, break the first window, whatever - and sure, that someone instigating the crowd (or setting someone else up to do it for them) might have been there with a very clear agenda and should be labeled as an insurrectionist).
I think the first order of business was to protest that their candidate lost. I’m sure they have a long list of grievances to share with you, if you like (especially since you seem to be asking oh so innocuously).
What really blows my mind is "progressives" point at GW Bush as some sort of pariah, nearly saint now. He was hated then, rightfully so. The guy, and his cohorts (Cheney, Rumsfield, Powell et al) lied repeatedly to get us into wars to fund Big Oil.
Please "progressive" from MN, stop pointing to Bush as some sort of ally for your cause.
> If your friends are yelling fire, you might be foolish to deny the smell of smoke.
I’m bothered (not personally but at the state of things) by the fact that you thought if I didn’t share your opinion that meant I held those two in high regard. Why can’t we just think for ourselves and not take direction from one party or the other?
Fair enough. I certainly know nothing about you, and we are both making assumptions about the other. Lacking context, it’s easy to stumble on our tongues.
A protest, or maybe a field trip. They had signs, not weapons. The FBI and capitol police waved the protesters into the building and held the doors open for them -- its on video. Now all the participants are suffering in a gulag without representation, they are literally begging to be transferred to gitmo.
When people have an ideology that has some kind of immorality as one of its fundamentals (like most far-edges political ideologies do), and they attempt to manifest that ideology, calling it "cosplay" can either be a derogatory term (implying "they failed"), or it can be a defensive term (implying "they're just trolling, they don't really feel that way") to draw attention away from the immorality. That ambiguity has made the term less useful.
Sicknick died of a stroke the next day, apparently of natural causes. There are claims (originally presented by all media channels as foregone conclusions) that he was beat in the head with an extinguisher the day before, but the medical examiner’s report doesn’t corroborate that.
> Five people died either shortly before, during, or following the event: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three succumbed to natural causes
Please cite your sources, in particularly for the "a cop was murdered", or please stop spreading lies and misinformation.
People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.
Don't worry. There will be mass migrations of people as oceans and deserts encroach upon inhabited areas. There will be wars over access to fresh water and agricultural land. Yet once mother nature has gotten humanity's behaviour in check, the hairless ape will persist.
(This response is not intended to taken literally. My point is that we will survive, though the process of adaptation may be painful and we may not like what we may not enjoy what we are adapting to.)
It also doesn't even mean "Americans" as a collective - whom the pandemic shows are not that concerned about dead Americans citizens when their isn't a country to bomb in response.
Enjoy the crime wave seems similarly inflammatory and impolite, but I find HN moderation frequently falls on a certain "if you say something rude/inflammatory but phrase it a certain way it's okay" which drives me up the wall.
If by "HN moderation" you mean what the HN moderators do, that's not an accurate description either of our intentions or our practice. It's good to be careful with such perceptions as they are notoriously subject to sample bias. Lots of past explanation if anyone cares:
Yeah, as a meta comment, I've seen personal insults thrown around (including at me) that don't get flagged, but what does get flagged sometimes leaves me baffled.
There's inevitably a lot of randomness, given the quantity of things that get posted here. That is probably enough to explain what you're seeing. Flags are mostly by users; moderators don't see most of what gets posted here. We try to review all the flags but that doesn't help if a post doesn't get flagged in the first place.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. If it's something egregious, you can help by flagging it and/or letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud. I think the police are asked to handle too many edge case situations, e.g. managing mentally ill populations, but are also grossly overpaid compared to other civil institutions, that if budgets were appropriately distributed, would lead to less of the issues police are required to intervene in. Also, among police put-maneuvering pregnant women, beating elderly bystanders just standing in Buffalo, or the myriad other documented instances of unnecessary police violence, there is a serious "bad apples spoil the bunch" issue in US policing due to the culture of other "innocent" officers backing their bad apples instead of weeding them out.
In any business, a department/team that isn't serving clients is usually re-evaluated, and budgets/resources re-allocated if they don't meet some performance plan. I don't see why bringing some business-world reasoning to policing in the US is so controversial, but I suspect that's more a framing thing of "defund the police" enflaming peoples emotions, as they get mad before reasoning.
Yeah. The only time I've "needed" police was because my insurance required a police report. It's not like the police did anything except file "yep, burglary at (address)".
The number of times I've seen police in situations they were clearly unequipped for is insane though. It's a not-infrequent occurrence near where I live to see them standing around and talking to a homeless person. Regardless of the motivation (are they trying to help or hassle the person), they don't have the training or incentives to be the right people for that.
I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud
Right. I don't like how the article conflates a rise of crime with cops retiring/resigning. Cops generally don't prevent crime, but respond after the fact to sort things out.
There's also no reason a cop, as understood today, needs to show up for some paperwork stuff, like credit card fraud. Any type of civilian government representative should be trusted by the credit card company to file that away.
There's a concentrated corporate media propaganda effort in effect right now to conflate the rise in crime with the outright rejection of US police powers by the general populace.
And yet despite this, there's still a bunch of people, even in an adjacent thread on this site about the US' low trust in media [0], complaining about the "leftist bias", "left-wing bias in the media", "left-wing slant", etc.
No one in these situations ever talks about political capital. These shame based tactics arise from our powerlessness, as whether consciously or not, people who care about the environment realise that neither party, nor any private industry, will ultimately enact any true change on this front, so the only tool they have left is shaming. We are mired in plastic straws and twitter arguments purely because that is the only avenue left by those that actually hold the ability to change anything.
> These shame based tactics arise from our powerlessness
Or they are sand in our eyes! There is a vested group who does not want to status quo to change. They make money on pollution, CO2eq-heavy stuff. We need to rearrange the system and the best avenue for this is a very heavy tax on pollution (so big we can lower the tax on wholesome behaviours, like, say, income from labour or housing).
Those in lower socioeconomic classes are the ones I've known who've gotten it, mostly because they were forced to work in offices or some public facing role where they had to interact with a lot of people. There is a terror of small business owners who act like despotic lords of a fiefdom, that I find to be some of the worst actors in general.
Firing whistle-blowers is pretty egregious. If we can't try to fight for a better world after all this is over, what are we even doing besides just idly watching hundreds of thousands die?
