kthxbye123

To his mind, the greatest possible evil is that someone, somewhere, might be held accountable for their actions.

That's his point. There's no comparison between entering the public part of an office during business hours and what happened yesterday.

I really doubt the inevitable failure of all of these predictions will be the "end of the line." Messianic cults and movements are surprisingly resilient to unmet expectations. "When Prophecy Fails", etc.

The (very reasonable) comment this reply was originally threaded with is now dead, so I’ll post it here:

Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel

Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel

Man, you think that's bad, just wait until you hear about how Americans treated the legacy of a gang of violent slave-owning traitors who tried to destroy the country and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the process

He's only 50. How 'few good work years' do you think he has left?

I don't understand how they could miss on 'interest'. Isn't this literally just based on what you 'like'? That shouldn't require advanced ML, just a simple JOIN!

The whole game for the social sociopaths is to pretend that the federal government had no obligation to provide for people's livelihoods during lockdown - which they absolutely did, obviously. This was wholly intentional, to sabotage health-and-safety conscious Democratic local governments, and force them into the Sophie's choice of mass unemployment or mass death among their constituents (local GOP leaders, for the most part, of course didn't actually care about mass death OR mass employment, since their constituency is the handful of billionaires who fund the whole party and right-wing ideological apparatus; so they were able to further sabotage the health-and-safety efforts by simply refusing to implement any).

The state and local governments that shutdown did the right thing - they put the health and safety of their populations first. The federal government failed them by defaulting on its obligations. It did this intentionally.

I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it is that, as the power of the tech industry has grown, journalists have become more active in exposing how it abuses that power to make the country, and the world, a worse and more degrading place to live in, and people on HN don't like being reminded of how they contribute to that.

There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.

There are a lot of half-wits, especially in tech, who think reflexive contrarianism is a sure sign of intelligence and wisdom.

Am I allowed to come into your house and scream into your ear without limit? Can you expect to go into a synagogue and hang a nazi flag from the rafters without them being able to ban you from the premise?

I think that much of this kind of stupid discourse on HN is driven by thiel-worshipping reactionaries who believe weird theories about why their genes make them better than black people, but another huge part of it seems to be literally fourteen year old libertarians. Which are you?

> Look at what Democrats said just this year. Nadler asserted that if he wasn’t impeached, Trump would “rig the 2020 election.”

How can you possibly say this is mere paranoia in the face of an active, ongoing attempt by both the President and a huge portion of the institutional GOP to do exactly that?

106 House Republicans have just joined in a lawsuit by 18 Republican AGs to overturn the results of the election. The Trump administration of course followed eight years of ferociously racist conspiracy-mongering about Obama's illegitimate birth. The GOP is a minority party that simply rejects the legitimacy of their political opponents to hold office. Why do you persist in these ridiculous false equivalences? They're not even 10% different, they're 100% different.