So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?
I’ve never understood this mentality that people who read and watched handmaids tale, caused some done kind of weird obsession built on a literal fiction story, a made up story… especially since the reality is not only the polar opposite, but in no place on the planet have things ever been better for any people relative to all other places of their time than in the very European societies and cultures that you types are so suicidally fixated on being destructive of.
The irony of the handmaids tale types from my experience is that they/you are, in their/your suicidally manic self-harming obsession, advocates for the spread of Islam in the very western countries that have provided all of humanity all of its freedoms and comforts, which would ironically will lead to an actual handmaids tale type scenario you constantly warn of.
Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did? It makes the handmaids tale sound like a wholesome family dynamic.
> So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?
Who were the other female composers of her generation?
> polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators
to composers. Even the male composers of whom we know the names are few and sparsely attributed. Just look at the Notre Dame school and how little we know except two names with no attached biography and some beautiful music. And even only that by 'lucky accident' since a single, anonymous student wrote them down.
You'll definitely find abbesses like Herrad von Landsberg who did write and educate in her generation.
It's like, a metaphor man. A work of fiction. Not to be taken literally, yet conveys themes and ideas which can become a short hand for conveying these ideas. Tons of folks read Atlas Shrugged and thought "hey this is how the world actually is" too. Or worse, The Fountainhead. Shudder.
It's laughable to paint Islam as the enemy of Western liberty when it is masked agents of a Christian nationalist regime who are terrorizing the streets of my city and cities across the US.
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
Sounds like an autogyro, indeed one of the lightest and cheapest ways to build a plane. They are basically planes with a free-spinning helicopter rotor for lift.
Rapid prototyping works well in engineering, because you can test for faults quickly.
But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.
In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.
This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.
Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets
A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.
A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.
The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.
Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.
This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
It was also not very unique? The social intimidation like arresting family members, public shaming and widespread people spying on people are just the cookie cutter template? China, NK are still cooking this recipe.
The GDR had possibly the highest ratio of secret police (Stasi) employees per # population in world history, it was really ridiculous how paranoid that government was. About 0.5% of the population were Stasi employees and an additional 1% were "inofficial employees", informers.
Its also the measly rewards that they did it for. In a dysfunctional economy, some people sold out there family and friends, cutting them of forever, for as little as a cheeseburger now and then.
Murderous dictatorships are enabled by mass surveillance and personal data collection. Especially East Germany, which was obsessed with data harvesting on every individual and installed as many CCTV cameras as its budget and tech would allow. East Germany would be creaming itself over the panopticon we are walking into.
Yeah but there's lots of surveillance like stuff that goes on without turning into murderous dictatorships. In England where I live we have cctv all over the place and on the internet Google knows most of my stuff but neither really worry me - we haven't really had a dictatorship setup since 1215 or so.
1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line.
The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement).
If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
> Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.
I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.
I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I'm not arguing in favor of a state run economy or a dictatorship or whatever else it is you seem to have concluded. Flawed though our system may be I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But all the same it's important to be able to recognize where we could do better. Optimizing for investor return is frequently not synonymous with optimizing for societal well being. I don't think engagement algorithms that result in negative emotions are really a benefit to anyone other than the company that deploys them.
So too for the online advertising industry. We - ie capitalists - have dedicated some of our best minds to building out something that vaguely resembles a panopticon. When you consider the intangible social and political externalities it seems to me that the place we've arrived at isn't a good one.
Don't forget that in addition to any negative impacts of the things that were built, every day spent in that way was a day not spent pursuing scientific or mathematical breakthroughs.
In my country, there is a barrage of Russian propaganda trying to relativize our shitty experience with the communist regime. They keep flooding the zone with claims about democracy being flawed, weak, bureaucratic, meaningless, and decadent. And it is working. People appreciate democracy a lot less than ten or twenty years ago.
Sure, there is a time for the self-criticism of the flaws of the West. I just think now is not the time. Democracy and freedom are under serious threat worldwide. Now is the time to keep reminding ourselves how great it is what we have built. Now is the time to be absolutely clear that the flaws of democracies are not in the same category as the flaws of authoritarian regimes.
I still remember what it was like living in a totalitarian regime - and I was living in a soft totalitarianism nearing its collapse. I am not old enough to remember the hardcore Stalinist era. And still, it was so bad that whatever you believe is bad about capitalism is like 1% of how bad it was. Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
Look, I am a pessimist. I think there is a very real chance that the US is turning into a Russia-like state. I hope not, but if that happens, very bad things are likely to happen in Europe too. We will all live it once again. If you still don’t understand what I mean, I suggest this: let’s bookmark this discussion and get back in 5 years, if we are still alive. Then, you will tell me what you think about optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. If you still think it is a problem worth mentioning by then, I will be very happy.
> Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding.
Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amount of opportunity available to our society in a general sense, it's more than a bit depressing to think that this is how we (collectively) chose to use it so far.
A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. Like yeah I think the advanced bioengineering is a fantastic accomplishment. I don't think we should get rid of it. Things were definitely worse before we got that figured out. I don't miss amputations and lobotomies. But is it really necessary to so badly misappropriate the opportunity that it affords us?
Given how different your perspective is from my own I can appreciate that my original short and rather flippant comment failed to convey that particular message.
There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good.
> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus
What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.
Nothing more than a fictional hypothetical for use as an analogy. Suppose advanced technology T requires broad societal effort to develop, for which societal mastery of advanced scientific topic S is a prerequisite. The analogy is nothing more than "first society achieves X, then it can achieve Y" where X is desirable but Y is not and both are fairly difficult.
I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.
The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.
Conversion metrics = people find what they want to buy quicker and more efficiently, allowing them to spend time on leisure that would otherwise have been spent on gathering needed goods.
Engagement metrics = making entertainment that's popular rather than what's mandated by the state's culture committees.
Optimizing them is a virtuous and noble profession.
Extensive effort to improve conversion metrics tends to result in dark patterns (and increased revenue).
Extensive effort to improve engagement metrics tends to result in negative emotional states (and increased revenue).
When it comes to entertainment, optimizing return on investment often means maximizing the size of the potential audience. The end result of that process is usually slop.
Dark patterns and slop aren't well defined terms. Engagement resulting in negative emotional states is not obviously a problem. Social studies academics pretend it is, but have no trouble with people consuming state TV news even if it shows them a constant stream of bad news stories.
> Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony
A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
I read a quote somewhere that said democracy does nothing to promote good leadership. The point of democracy isn't to elect a good government, the point is to quickly get rid of a bad government
The multi-year terms still lets bad governments do a lot of damage though, and they have to be pretty bad to actually be removed for good.
Perhaps it would be better to pick the government at random and then have much more frequent votes with the only choice being whether to pick a new random government or not.
If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.
What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
There have been such dictators in the past. Singapore is one example. Arguably the British Empire was libertarian by the standards of its time (and empires).
Perhaps the least recognized example is America. The Constitution imposes libertarianism on the population against majority will. You can't change the constitution with a 50%+1 vote, so it forces freedom of speech and other rights on people who might otherwise easily vote to get rid of them. There's no one man enforcing the constitution, just a general agreement to obey SCOTUS.
>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
Authoritarianism is the oldest form of effective government. Just as curious note, dictatorship was introduced during the Roman epoch and was used as temporary measure during war times. Look for example in Ukraine where the same ruler is avoiding elections since some time due to war, in the root sense of the government-style it is possible to describe it as a dictatorship today, if it hadn't been for the negative connotation of that term in the last 100 years.
The ruler is not "avoiding" elections due to war, he is prohibited by the constitution to hold them during wartime (not to mention the feasibility of letting the inhabitants of occupied regions to exercise their voting rights). So it is not a dictatorship in any sense.
"East Germany" fell apart because the people stuck there quickly realized how "ridiculous" it was. (See the post you replied to.)
There was a lot of contact between West and East Germans due to the awkward nature of the division of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. In contrast, that contact doesn't exist between North and South Korea.
(Remember, West Berlin was an enclave inside of East Germany, and West Germans were allowed to travel through East Germany in order to travel in and out of West Berlin.)
They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.
And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.
But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
Do we? I’d say it’s pretty close, especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’ every time any social programme is proposed.
By "we", I didn't mean Americans, but weaterners. We have the National Health Service where I live and it is a complete mess (I know someone who waited over seven years for a jaw operation, another who has several years to wait for autism screening). I don't want the American system, and the basic principle of the NHS is good but still....
This AI slop is a pretty accurate description of my local medical practice (bar the cheap joke at beginning and everyone having an English accent):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw
We hardly ever hear about East Germany or all the horrors of living in such a place. Very rarely these days. I've known quite a few people who lived under that regime and they told me what it was like. Everyone was being watched, and even school children had to write spy reports on their neighbours. All while the East German state kept proclaiming how it was a place of freedom and equality.
1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
Yes, here in Poland 36 years later people still seriously argue the country would be much better if we hanged the communists off lampposts (like it was done in few other places).
There ws a great cost to a "peaceful transition". The entire judiciary was basically full of extremely corrupt people, half of the political class. Even today when the old judges are almost all gone the horrible culture they had still corrupts many younger ones (although today it is more towards incompetence and indifference rather than corruption).
Would it be better to have half a million (or possibly entire million if you count inevitable victims on the other side) die to avoid it? We are still paying the price.
There is an argument that had we sorted the communist problem successfully back then we wouldn't have politicians later that let themselves be corrupted by Putin into funding his army. And perhaps there would never be an invasion of Ukraine.
Or if we done away with the peaceful transition, the communists in other neighbouring countries would attempt to hold on to power with everything they got. Who knows.
"Should we have put 500,000 people to death?" sounds like pub conversation, to be frank. There are plenty of options between 'no repercussions for the old regime' and Rwanda.
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
You need "a little bit" of politician/judge/enforcer lynching to keep the government in line the same way they make a big show of "a little bit" of kicking in people's doors at 4am to keep the peasants in line.
I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
Because the optimum is a public process which proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt so that every good person supports their punishment and has the confidence (certainty of guilt) to support it publicly.
But if the choice is between no punishment and somebody gunning them down in the street or droning them, i prefer the latter.
Court processes are useful when guilt is uncertain at first look and you want to increase certainty. But dictators and their close supporters, the certainty is often sufficient by nature of many their actions being public. Sometimes they literally go on TV and declare they're going to a foreign country to kill their people and take their land. At that point, it only becomes a matter of making sure you have the right person.
And don't forget the victims. Many authoritarian regimes don't kill opposition outright (for various reasons) but imprison them instead. Such a victim knows many of the people (cops, judges, informants, etc.) responsible for / guilty of falsely imprisoning them. After a regime change, the victims go free and have often more knowledge of the offenses than can be proven to a court by the simply virtue of being there and therefore have more than enough confidence to deliver a just punishment.
>I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
It's a hard one. I can tell you something which doesn't work because the Americans have tried it twice so far. It won't work to say "Well, that was naughty, please don't do it again".
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
> The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later.
The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
+1 to this!
I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
It’s still a thing in some areas from direct experience recently. Hell it’s still a thing with former East Germans I know in the UK. And it’s not about interchange fees - it’s about purchase surveillance.
My ex partner wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos.
> wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos
This should be standard practice, I do it as well. Not East German but East European. We had our own Stasi that would terrorize youths for listening to Western music of Radio Free Europe.
Yeah everyone suffered that side of things for sure. I'd rather have location recorded but not leaked out to whoever sold me the phone personally. I don't sync any files to the cloud already.
Are you german?
Most of my german friends tell me it is because after the experiences of nazism and comunism (in the GDR), most germans value their privacy a lot.
The havoc that finding out your family and friends spied on you for benefits, can not be overstated. How deeply anti social and lonely such a divided and conquered socialist utopian society is can not be expressed in words, and yet it can.
These are two very different things. Significant parts of the German government and many German members of the European Parliament are proponents of Chat Control. The general population, however, still has a strong desire for privacy and a deep fear of surveillance and data collection, shaped by historical experiences with two dictatorships (the Nazi era and the GDR).
That said, there is a substantial disconnect between the substantive preferences of the voting population and the actual policies and decisions of the parties they elect. This is partly because promises like “internal security” gain much more traction in times of growing uncertainty and global instability, while only a relatively small portion of the population fully thinks through, or is willing to think through, the consequences and concrete legislative changes behind those promises.
Nevertheless, looking at both public attitudes and court rulings, it is still fair to say that data protection in Germany, even compared to other EU countries, currently enjoys a particularly high status.
In practice the average German voter is still supporting the coalition against the AfD despite that the coalition is implementing Soviet-like policies. They talk constantly about banning the most popular political party, for example, and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions. Germans who aren't actively supporting the AfD should feel no sense of moral superiority, there simply isn't anything in the historical context to feel proud of there.
> and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions
Do you have any sources to substantiate this claim? In particular, including under which law a prison sentence or fine was imposed for the expression of a constitutionally protected political opinion.
Nice try. The German constitution is a poor document and doesn't protect political opinion, so your "constitutionally protected" political opinion caveat just makes it useless. You'd just defend every example with "our constitution allows that" rather than recognizing that it just means the constitution itself is wrong.
Example: the American author CJ Hopkins has been repeatedly prosecuted in Berlin despite being acquitted the first time, because in Germany there's apparently no constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. His "crime" was criticizing COVID authoritarianism. You're now going to tell me why the German constitution allows this, and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
Any source showing people being imprisoned or fined merely for expressing an anti-left opinion then? Which specific law were they convicted under?
The claim that Germany has "no constitutional protection against double jeopardy" is false. Art. 103(3) of the constitution embodies ne bis in idem. The German criminal procedure allows legal remedies (appeals), including Revision (appeal on points of law), which can be brought by both parties before a judgment becomes final. That’s what happened in this case.
In the CJ Hopkins case, the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB. One can freely say "the government acted authoritarian during COVID"; that kind of political criticism is protected speech under Art. 5 GG.
> and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
I’m not interested in moral justifications. Morality is a matter of opinion, and you’re entitled to yours just as I am to mine. The same applies to your view of the German constitution.
However, backing up claims about concrete cases with sources helps me (and others) understand which cases you’re referring to and whether they actually support your argument in a way that lets me learn something new (preferably) or whether we'll simply end up acknowledging that we have different opinions on the matter ;)
It's only people criticizing the left who get prosecuted under such laws. That's deliberate.
> Which specific law were they convicted under?
Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively. Habek has filed criminal complaints against over 800 people. The German Chancellor has probably filed thousands of such complaints given the numbering of the case files.
From a German court order:
At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.
The public prosecutor's office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.
This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. ...
I'd be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion.
> Of course it was the issue. German media puts swastikas on things without any legal problems when they are government aligned.
Are we talking about the use of swastikas or your statement that people are imprisoned or fined for voicing anti-left opinions? I'm happy to do both, but it feels like those are two different things.
The use of swastikas (and other symbolism of banned organizations like the NSDAP) is prohibited in Germany if there is no clear rejection of the NS tied to it or if the rejection cannot unequivocally be derived from the context.
Using swastikas is therefore somewhat risky in any context, since it is a matter for the courts to decide whether a specific case qualifies as allowed use or not. It is far more probable that the use of a swastika in an anti-left statement will not qualify, since it is challenging to add value to an anti-left statement by using a swastika while still clearly rejecting the NS at the same time.
Again, happy to talk about § 86a StGB, but I would first be interested in how you come to the conclusion that this is being used to suppress anti-left opinions. I.e., how is using a swastika necessary or even helpful when voicing an opinion?
CJ Hopkins said he wanted to warn the public of a 'newly rising totalitarianism'. He posted a picture of a corona mask with a visible swastika and the caption 'Masks are symbols of ideological conformity' and a quote from the then minister of health stating 'Masks also always send a signal'.
Pretty much all of that is legal, also when looking at § 188. The only real issue is the use of the swastika. Using common symbolism like 'OBEY' instead would immediately remove any legal doubts.
> Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively.
True, Germany also forbids insulting anyone. This is not restricted to politicians, and there is no difference in which insults are punishable for politicians and non-politicians. This is very different from how things are in the US, where insults are not punishable offenses per se. § 188 mostly refers to the degree of penalty possible when directing an insult towards any politician and what's necessary for a different degree of penalty to apply.
However, this is used by politicians across the whole political spectrum alike, including the far-right. The same reports you mentioned with regard to Robert Habeck exist for Alice Weidel, who filed hundreds of complaints under §§ 185 and 188. This is regardless of ongoing criticism of this paragraph voiced by the far-right, liberals, and others alike.
How is this specifically targeting anti-left opinions?
> You're doing exactly what I said you'd do. Zero shame.
Meta: Reading this, it feels like you don't particularly enjoy this conversation. So let me say this: I'm really happy we are having this discussion. It is something completely different to read about other opinions in the paper versus actually talking to someone with a different perspective. I'm genuinely interested in your opinion, and my questions are serious questions, not rhetorical ones.
I don't feel any animosity towards you, and I hope you can also gain something from this. If you don't share that sentiment, I'm completely fine with leaving this thread as is and accepting that we won't reach any agreement right now.
It's interesting that this is a serious movie by the director Michael 'Bully' Herbig, who is generally known for bad taste comedies, full of clichees about race and sexuality.
For the 80s it was intense yes. Watching it now that same tension feels milder but I guess that's because every single TV show now has to have constant explosions, car crashes etc in it.
There is actually gunfire in it and a teenager dies in the beginning but it still feels less intense due to the 80s pace IMO.
I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.
If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!
I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
It is interesting how dictatorships for resourceless countries needed to keep the people in like east germany or czechoslovakia. But current dictatorships with natural resources like Venezuela or Iran let dissent go. It makes them more stable sadly.
Since West Germany considered East Germany to be occupied territory, East Germans had automatic citizenship in the west. This made it uniquely easy to emigrate into the much wealthier country.
That's not fully correct. The West accepted only a single German citizenship. So everyone from East Germany could immediately be issued a "German" passport by the Western authorities.
For the East there were 2 citizenships. They had no adjectives, they only talked about "citizen of the German Democratic Republic" and "citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany".
The occupation view was not official politics after 1970. The West had recognized the East as a state. But citizens of both states were assumed to have the same citizenship.
Edit: recognized as state should maybe recognized as some kind of state. Like the citizenship there were numerous differences compared to other foreign nation states.
From the reports I'd read and the interviews I'd seen, it's not that Venezuela let people go so much as it couldn't stop them. Many people who fled the country state they had to hide their property and children to prevent it from looking like they were not coming back when crossing the border. This might have been an agreement with Columbia, since Columbia doesn't want mass migration into their country. In some cases it was starve, jail, die or flee which is not the same as "let go".
Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
As a Venezuelan, I think the difference is not the Natural Resources, or at least is not the main difference. In 2017, the shortages and economic crisis generated by 15 years of communist policies has pushed around 4 million people out, and then, the regime "elected" a Constitutional Assembly which has the power to create a new Constitution and to overrid any previously elected organism (as it was at the time the opossition controled National Assembly).
At that point I leaved Venezuela inmediatly with my 2 minor aged kids, because for me it was a NO BRAINER that the first thing they will do was to limit the emigration and the free ciruculation. My train of tought was very simple. As any other Socialist Dictatorship before, this one needs to halt the staggering loss of skilled proffesionals like Medics, Engineers or whatever they deemed of National Security, I mean, you still need Doctors, you still need the Electricity and Water to get into the industries and houses, and specially for Venezuela, you need to keep the Oil flowing off the earth...
BOY WAS I WRONG, they never put a formal limit to the emigration and at least another 5 million people leaved Venezuela (so far). It did not matter at all that the already in shambles Public Health system collapsed, they doctors that stayed were private and they attended only the capacity that could pay for the scarse services, the basic services did not matter that much either, as people got use to get them once or twice per week, and even a country wide blackout of 3 weeks was not the end of the regime, and the Oil, well, does not matter either because what was once 3.5 million barrels per day went to be as low as 300.000 bpd.
So, what was the difference? well, for all its downfalls, it seems to me that the XX century Communist/Socialist dictatorships were guided by Ideology, they really thought theirs ideas were for the better of their people, so having no Healthcare was a REAL PROBLEM, having no public services was a REAL PROBLEM. Of course, their recipes were doomed as their political ideals, but at least they tried.
The Venezuelan Regime has no Ideology (it has some in form of propaganda, but that is different that actions) as the latest news can attest, They couldn't care less about the people and the wellness. They did not use any "Natural Resouces" to keep any level of living conditions, they just let loose the ruins of the economy they had messed so badly to let the most savage neoliberalism to correct the course while they stayed in power to keep leaching two sources of income, whatever oil they could produce and the drugs operations revenue, alongside their cut on any business their allies (AKA "Enchufados) could come up in the "liberalized" economy.
All the people that leaved the country (including me) just made them easier to keep control of whatever was left. Ever decreasing political or social opposition, less pressure of the shambles public services and so on and on...
The Natural Resources is just a part of their Income, it does not affects the hability to control or to even extract richness from the system.
I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism.
I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange for the regime stability.
Would that be possibly because while Venezuela and Iran have oil to extract and sell on the international market to enrich the coffers of the oligarchs in power, the only resources Czechoslovakia had was labour. The oligarchs could only enrich themselves by exporting manufactured goods like shoes and buses, mostly made from imported materials, extracting the excess wealth from the labour of others the way Venezuela and Iran extract oil from the ground?
First, of course I am talking about Socialist Dictatorships of the XX Century in an academic way, from what I have read, So I really don't know as much as what I have lived through in Venezuela.
When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems
No communist ideology? What was the regime demanding compliance with, do you think? The normalization era was a return to Marxism-Leninism, not a departure from it.
Czechoslovakia in that period had one party politics, justified because multiparty democracy was "bourgeois deviation". It was a state run centrally planned economy, because the left wing don't believe in capitalism or free markets. Officially unemployment didn't exist, because only imperialist capitalist right wing economies had unemployment. Party membership and associated ideological compliance was required for any important role. Culture was censored, people were imprisoned by ideology police.
It is bizarre to claim that the USSR was not ideological. It collapsed because it was pure ideology in defiance of reality.
The reason the USSR kept people behind a wall is because they were able to mentally justify it to themselves within the framework of their far left ideology. They viewed the west as corrupt and, more importantly, full of corrupting ideas. They were just much more committed to winning the propaganda war than a place like Venezuela is because their worldview was formed at the end of the Victorian era when travel and communication was much more easily restricted. Maduro's socialist worldview was formed much later, when the idea of preventing Venezuelans having access to capitalist ideas would have seemed much more ridiculous.
Of course there was a state ideology. Just the majority of the society and even the party did not actually believe it. There was a saying that there was more communists at a western university than in the whole Czechoslovakia
Are you Czech or Slovak to be able to speak with this much confidence?
I have spent 13 years in Czech Republic, admittedly after the curtain fell, and I can tell you for a fact that they were “communist” because otherwise tanks.
You can see the relationship they had with the ideology in pretty much any sliver of cultural material from the period and after.
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
I mean, their escape was quite complex and did actually "work", it's just they didn't get very far beyond that. Any dramatization would clearly need some comedic element
You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting
There were many "escapes", some weren't so romantic. E.g. for some escapees the drive to what they viewed as freedom was so intense that they did not hesitate to kill someone, e.g. a stewardess on a hijacked plane.
To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
Now calculate the necessary rate of fuel burn and fuel requirement for a given trip; tensile and tear strength needed for the balloon material and seams.
Tbf they probably didn't do all these calculations, but should have. They risked their lives by getting some of these things wrong.
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Read a memoir by a KGB agent who arrested a man in Moscow who was passing info to the CIA. Had been doing so for years. The CIA had the typical western attitude towards money so they kept giving him stacks of rubles. Thinking they were being generous. The man (a professor, I think) had nothing to spend it on so he stacked cash up in a closet. Had around 1 million stored when he was caught. He probably would have been better off just burning it as the money was used as evidence in his trial.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
Yes the movie Night Crossing also shows very well that there was a lot of suspicion, for example they had to buy the fabric from lots of different places and this a slipup actually caused them to be ratted out (not sure if this particular part of the story happened to these people in real life too but it was really a thing)
Yes, was noticing the same. It was easy for them to sell the car and get a new one, so this meant a lot of connections and underground "jobs" for the extra revenue.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources show higher figures for earlier years).
Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
Bahrain: Around 55%.
Singapore not far behind (~40% from memory), a one party state but with voting, sometimes described as essentially an elected recallable monarchy. Also note most of those countries have relatively low emigration rates of native citizens.
I think "immigrants" is the wrong statistic here, since it includes workers with no path to citizenship. (In some cases, they can't leave because their employer stole their passport.)
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
> > it includes workers with no path to citizenship
> You're still an immigrant even if you can't become a citizen.
Yes, like I said. My point is that these two scenarios are very different:
1. "I am +1 to the immigrant count because this is a great place for me and my family to live and I wish for us to move here permanently."
2. "I am +1 to the immigrant count temporarily because the wages here are so much more than I could earn at home, and I'm remitting that money back to my family who live somewhere else. As much as this is an opportunity for me, we could never move here because same wages would have my family homeless and starving, making this a terrible place to move permanently."
Both people are happily adding to the "immigrants inside" count, but they are very different judgements about the country.
I'm not sure it is wrong. I'd have no path to UAE citizenship, nor do I particularly want one, I'd likely have lower wages. And I'd still like to live there more than most places.
That's a good point. Perhaps a better statistic would be people who want to emigrate or immigrate. We're introducing a bias by measuring only those who actually do.
For me, this is the maxim that governs speaking with someone defending a totalitarian regime.
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
The Wikipedia page references Günter Wetzel's website. Reading https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/missverstaendnis.html , he's written down more information - apparently they came to a disagreement about the story, and on that page there's more detail, from his point of view: for the first attempt they did everything in Wetzel's house (whose oldest kid was 4), because of concerns the Strelzyks' children (who were 10 and 14) could blurt something out. After some disagreements (Strelzyks told some relatives about the balloon, Wetzel thinks the balloon was too small) Wetzel gave Strelzyks all they've built (he was also worried about getting caught with the stuff, especially since now the relatives have heard about it) and decided to follow the concept of a ultralight airplane.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
After they found the remains of the balloon from the first escape attempt, the Stasi put out a reward for information, I think everyone would take the story seriously at that point. It was why they decided they had to go through with the second attempt, because they were convinced the Stasi was going to catch them soon. But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt.
> But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt
The repressive state apparatus was moving too slow. Maybe they hoped there won't be a second attempt after the first one failed, maybe it wasn't promptly reported to the appartchikhs and handled internally by the Stasi to avoid backlash.
I would assume they did not tell them anything at all, until the time was there. And after the first failed attempt, they were probably shocked enough for real to understand the situation and keep their mouths shut.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
Wouldn't "registration" as used in the article mean the purchase details were sent to the authorities, so they could investigate/stop a potential escape attempt?
Even if the devices were registered, you might be up and away before they figure it out. But if another family flew away, that registration list would be handy door to door.
I read about them in RD long before I saw the film, I think. It is an amazing achievement and I doubt most people could have pulled it off. Thinking about it now... You would have to wait until the wind was going in the right direction, and wouldn't change, and also be well away from the border to avoid patrols. They had luck on their side.
I think I saw the film in the late eighties/early nineties round about the time the Eastern Bloc was falling apart so it had less impact.
The autobiographical graphic novel "Time Zones" by Sven Diekmann describes an attempted balloon escape from the GDR in 1977, but it was thwarted at the last minute [1].
It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.
I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.
Fascinating. Always enjoyed the near-history one can feel in east germany.
Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.
Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).
What is just awesome, to a tinkerer, is the great can-do spirit people had then. You couldn't buy it, so you made it yourself. They were going to do a helicopter, but for the lack of a suitable engine. As if the rest was just a solved problem, and may well have been, given the background of one of them.
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
I feel like hard situations force people to adapt. This was not a unique time in history, it continues today in warzones and places like Ukraine. It is only a few comfortable western countires who have such comfort of everything being a click and 1 days delivery away.
I recently read a book of interviews with people who escaped from North Korea, and what shocked me was the discovery that the relatives of those who escaped are often executed (publicly) and that even children are executed in North Korea. We live in a terrible world. I mean... you expect a book from North Korea to contain terrible things, but somehow it was even worse than I expected.
Left wing thought doesn't contain any philosophy of limitations on state power, so under a left wing regime there is no limit to what it might do. No matter how terrible something is, if it can be imagined they will consider implementing it. To avoid that outcome there has to be an understanding of the flawed nature of government, and from that an ideological commitment to a state limited in power and role.
We're talking about North Korea executing children because their family members escaped. Doesn't get more left wing than North Korea. Not a good look to deploy a stock reply without thinking.
The engineering ingenuity and determination required to pull this off is truly mind blowing. Building a homemade balloon under such surveillance is an amazing feat.
I spoke with the people working at a German resort in Tunisia. I was there for a short stint as sound tech. The only way out of the country is smuggling. You don’t get permission to leave if you’re of working age and can contribute to the economy.
The USA doesn't literally prevent you from leaving, but it uses its unique control of the global banking system to still tax you when you move to another country.
That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
I think a lot of that programming and political action was because at the time there was genuine fear of communism taking over in the US and other western nations (like it already had in Eastern Europe).
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
I think people do tend to forget the meanings of the important words over time though. For example:
Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice. (Some people reapply that definition to the word "populism". No, it's real democracy to elect the people's choice.)
Censorship = intentionally suppress certain ideas and messages
Propaganda = choosing what to publish (or even publishing lies) to intentionally create or support a particular worldview or narrative, especially one that favors certain political people or groups (as opposed to simply publishing truth to keep those in power accountable)
Fascism = the state tells you what to do, not the other way around
Liberty = the people choose what to say and do with their own lives, without interference by the state (besides enforcement of laws written by democratically elected legislators)
Justice = everyone is equally accountable to the law regardless of who they are. This especially includes legislators and rich/powerful people.
> Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice.
That rather rules out what happens in, say, the USofA, where entrenched party politics limits the choice of the wider population to those few candidates that are backed.
> Some people reapply that definition to the word "populism". No, it's real democracy to elect the people's choice.
Populism isn't democracy, democracy isn't populism; it's generally used to describe a cynical political strategy of appeal to the broadest, lowest common denominator instincts, to gain support from a base who at best get little more than lip service toward addressing their real needs. Frequently associated with strawmen and strawissues as a focus of common manufacted enemy, etc.
> > Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice.
That rather rules out what happens in, say, the USofA, where entrenched party politics limits the choice of the wider population to those few candidates that are backed.
It’s also weird in that the candidate with the most votes might not win. The electoral system is weird.
In the EU, European Union, member countries are voting on EU positions .. whether it's weighted or unweighted, it's a collection of N countries voting, not a collection of N millions of people voting.
Similarly in the USofA, formed as a union of states to have a common government for those things that are agreed to superseded individual state interests.
I live in a country with mandatory voting - everybody (of age, save for those convicted of _serious_ crime) votes, and ranked proportional voting.
Compulsory voting offends the sensibilities of a number of USofA citizens, but there is a strong case to be made for it, ranked voting does a lot to avoid two party Hotelling's law quagmires where major parties barely represent anybody and yet MySportingTeam divisions dominate.
That's not weird at all. Democracy as the word is commonly used does not require direct popular vote, let alone at the highest tier of government. Every "democratic" country I'm aware of uses a more complicated scheme.
Then you've got the part where the US was never billed as a "democracy" to begin with but rather a "democratic republic".
What's weird to me is how quickly a group with an advantage will attempt to discard compromises and other agreements once they have what they wanted.
Agreed on all points. The USofA is very far from true democracy. For starters, the NGO networks and a lot of unelected bureaucracy are the real government authority by quite a margin -- all of whom are directly opposed to and working against the US Constitution.
> NGO networks and a lot of unelected bureaucracy are the real government authority by quite a margin
In a well structured government for the people by the people such groups are as essential as military, as law enforcement, as health professionals, etc.
Politicians debate policy and advocate on behalf of representatives.
Unelected civil servants put policy into practice and need to be immune from the cycle of elected officials, just as the military needs to be.
All these groups, military, judges, civil service need to be held to high standards and subject to scrutiny with respect to professional conduct.
The USofA looks a bit off to outsiders in many respects, not simply tipping. So many elected positions that aren't merit based and seemingly immune to standards and termination for misconduct.
Downvoters: The story is about the terrible politics, and should be a cautionary tale that's immediately very relevant. Unless you were only interested in the ballooning "maker" angle?
From the second sentence, "over a year and a half of preparations". The third paragraph gives a starting agreement date of 7 March 1978, and the successful flight was 16 September 1979.
The fascists were everywhere in the DDR: just called members of the party or as part of the Stasi.
And I take the definition of fascists as anyone who prioritizes their political system, State or political view to a point of depriving any other citizen of their basic freedom.
Some ways, yes, some ways no. Communism and Fascism in practice had mutual influences on one another although they would be loathe to admit it. (By Communism here, I mean Communist party rule, not the future utopia which none of these countries ever achieved.)
If you want to take a more Trotskyite view, many post-revolutionary states enter a so called "Bonapartist" phase, where militarism, ultranationalism and symbology combine to produce something which looks a lot like Fascism. Mao and Stalin were not above using ultranationalism and chauvinism to push their rule. North Korea has gone all the way with this with Juche which contains mystical, ultranationalist and even racial supremacist features.
Not officially although in reality the Stasi quite happily reused Gestapo files, and there were numerous National Socialists who ended up east of the border.
The GDR had a series of fake political parties, besides the Communist, in order to pretend they were a democracy. I believe they did have one that pretended to appeal to such people.
"There are fascists in the former DDR today."
Much more so than the west which did not have years of Communist rule.
That was certainly the party line of the DDR at the time. Do you honestly believe it?
It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who served in East Germany, claims that his war in Ukraine is justified in the name of denazification. It’s an easy rhetorical trick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
I believe this about as much as the Chinese Communist official who claimed that there were no homosexuals in the PRC.
In reality, a lot of careerists shifted their loyalties from the National Socialist government to the Communist one. There were several years in which the Communists, much like their western counterparts, tried to weed out all the Nazis, before realising many of them were experienced in administering things. (The Eastern Bloc had its own smaller version of Operation Paperclip, although the scientists tended to be less willing.)
I don't need to go to Wikipedia to read about Robeson. Guy became a Stalin fan and crumbled mentally when he realised the USSR was not what it claimed. Great singer though.
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
Communism is the idea of "can't we all just get along?" which is obviously not something you can actually implement, but is easily used as a buzzword by evil regimes. Remember, H-tl-r called his regime "socialist", much the same way N-rth K-rea calls itself "democratic"
Every day you make comments that are downvoted (and probably flagged) by several people... I think it's quite possible that the real issue is not "other people."
Usually people who feel (or are) targeted are not 100% innocent.
There's a clear pattern where comments containing certain words are flagged much more often than comments containing mildly cens-red versions of those words. Could be HN itself but if we assume HN isn't lying about how its algorithm works (a big assumption) then it must be user flag bots.
It's not just my comments - you see something similar with headlines on the front page that contain certain names like El-n M-sk. They will accumulate hundreds of points and comments and then be cens-red.
That’s actually the point of libertarianism, anarchism: do what you want, but you will only do well if you get along with the rest of the society by providing something helpful to them, as no one is forced to help you. And that’s why free market capitalism works. Even the most selfish individuals have needed to cooperate, work for others or open businesses with useful products for society in order to be able to accumulate wealth.
So much havoc caused by having a fascist/communist government in Russia, from partnering with Hitler to start WW2, through this stuff to Ukraine and it seems about half the evil in the world. I hope they fall one day and turn to something normal.
He was mentally disturbed, which kinda proves the point. After returning to Germany, he stabbed a woman for rejecting his advances. Later, he was convicted of shoplifting, and a few years after that he was convicted again of selling stolen goods.
Definitely a "character", even if medically sound enough to stand trial.
I'm not sure any countries really shoot down light aircraft unless it's an active war zone. They are not much of a threat and it's also hard to tell if they are there legally or not.
This was the soviet union in a very tense time. If he hadn't been shot down he would have been forced down. But yes that would have been a more likely outcome, true.
PS: Don't forget the Soviets knowingly shot and killed an entire airliner full of people. I saw an interview with the fighter pilot later and he didn't even have remorse for what he was doing, "just following orders". What a monster. But that was pretty typical there. Anyone with a backbone questioning orders was already dying in a gulag.
If I were in the US I would certainly leave to a more socialist country. I could not live there. Even before Trump.
However there is a spectrum between it. I don't think either extreme is great, neither American unrestricted capitalism nor full-on communism. A balance of both is needed. I was a lot happier in the 80s when Holland was a lot more socialist. Less things to worry about, a safety net, cheap housing and schooling, still the ability to run your own business if you really wanted to. We had a great combination.
However the VVD neoliberals (who idolize America) have destroyed it over the last decades and there are so many huge problems now because they always went for the quick fix.
With full-on capitalism you get lots of disenfranchised people angry at not having any upward mobility, corporations just dump all over the citizens, and differences in wealth get insanely high. With full-on communism you end up with a surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes. The secret sauce is in between IMO.
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.
The Soviet Union had almost no legal emigration prior to the 1970s, and limited, targed emigration quotas after. The US, by contrast, prior to 1965, had strict quotas limiting immigration (based on national origins).
Communism and socialism have always looked good when compared to the principles of other economic and political doctrines:
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality.
- it needs to suppress any other political alternative
- it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
Morally there are also a boatload of problematic assumptions behind communism. Start with its defacto assumptions that the state is entitled to the labor of everyone. It doesn't treat people as having any sort of agency whatsoever, just a commodity for the ruler. Their 'virtue' only goes as far as how they serve. That they denominate the unit of value as the toil of its subjects as something it has in abundance for granted, and thus as near worthless, and problem solving as a matter of throwing bodies into the breech. Meaning little need to improve efficiency. The produced goods are expensive and scarce. All the same problems as slavery.
In the end there is an awkward question. What separates Communism from a bronze age god-king's palace economy where everyone is a slave of the ruler?
Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better. Utopia - no, but better than capitalism. Without an example of a communist state shielded from constant attacks, sabotage and sanctions from the dominant capitalist we will never know how good it could get. We just know the imperfect as it was, it was still better.
> Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better.
Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).
Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
there's a wikipedia link above (showing indeed Czechia amongst the least "nostalgic" - only 25% in 2021). As for elections results, how many ppl don't bother to vote (31% absenteeism vs 36% best electoral score, ANO)? how many tv stations do communists have, how many lavishly funded NGOs? how many instances proving the "communist" party to be no more that a pale imitation if not straight up controlled opposition...
As for the "flawed methodology":
66.2% of Romanians regret Nicolae Ceausescu in a study..."commissioned by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile" - I'd say if the "institute" of bad-mouthing communism had to admit that number... well it seems the russian bots are extremely efficient, maybe we should listen to them instead of useless Ursula bots ;)
Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.
> That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
This true story moves us because it resembles much of human history, in which clever but powerless people struggle against morons -- morons who somehow gain control over a modern industrial state, then use that power to punish innocents who dare to assert simple human rights.
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
> Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan.
It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.
> This is got me laughing out loud.
I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.
The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.
The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.
(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c
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They want to undo the protestant reformation?
They are just a bit confused about which Martin Luther they hate.
So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?
I’ve never understood this mentality that people who read and watched handmaids tale, caused some done kind of weird obsession built on a literal fiction story, a made up story… especially since the reality is not only the polar opposite, but in no place on the planet have things ever been better for any people relative to all other places of their time than in the very European societies and cultures that you types are so suicidally fixated on being destructive of.
The irony of the handmaids tale types from my experience is that they/you are, in their/your suicidally manic self-harming obsession, advocates for the spread of Islam in the very western countries that have provided all of humanity all of its freedoms and comforts, which would ironically will lead to an actual handmaids tale type scenario you constantly warn of.
Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did? It makes the handmaids tale sound like a wholesome family dynamic.
> Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did?
Pertaining specifically to women? No, actually. Any chance you'd elaborate for the curious?
Not what he means but the ottomans and women have an interesting history…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Women
> So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?
Who were the other female composers of her generation?
It is a bit disingenuous to jump from
> polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators
to composers. Even the male composers of whom we know the names are few and sparsely attributed. Just look at the Notre Dame school and how little we know except two names with no attached biography and some beautiful music. And even only that by 'lucky accident' since a single, anonymous student wrote them down.
You'll definitely find abbesses like Herrad von Landsberg who did write and educate in her generation.
It's like, a metaphor man. A work of fiction. Not to be taken literally, yet conveys themes and ideas which can become a short hand for conveying these ideas. Tons of folks read Atlas Shrugged and thought "hey this is how the world actually is" too. Or worse, The Fountainhead. Shudder.
Sometimes, books which claim to be real like “night” by Elie Wiesel are full of bullshit/lies/fraud too!
His book sowed the seeds for holocaust denialism in GenZ.
It's laughable to paint Islam as the enemy of Western liberty when it is masked agents of a Christian nationalist regime who are terrorizing the streets of my city and cities across the US.
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> a thousand years...
less than a hundred?
So native American tribes and no white people? That would make a change.
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The text in the link is nice to read. I did a Google Translate on it which you can read here: https://pastebin.com/SdkKQkC6
>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
You can only move so 'fast and break things', when failure can land you and your family in jail or get you killed.
That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.
They originally wanted to make a helicopter. (Not kidding)
More like a ultra-light plane / helicopter hybrid or so, isn't it?
Sounds like an autogyro, indeed one of the lightest and cheapest ways to build a plane. They are basically planes with a free-spinning helicopter rotor for lift.
The private mechanics and electrical hacking culture that is the base for German engineering . Tûftler in jedem Schuppen..
I enjoyed learning about the town of Bad Kissingen
As a German, that name makes me think of pillows (Kissen).
Completely agree - although the shine has rather worn off the ‘move fast and break things’ approach.
SpaceX is doing fine woth that approach?
Great example.
But when Musk took that approach to DOGE, chaos.
And some of the approach hasn’t always gone well at Tesla either.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/06/01/elon-musk-wan...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/24/elon-musk-...
Rapid prototyping works well in engineering, because you can test for faults quickly.
But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.
In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.
This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.
Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets
A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.
A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.
The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.
Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.
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I keep on thinking it was a lot smaller! Wow!
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This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...
Well in this theme, there were 800,000 “boat people” (name given to the Vietnamese who escaped communism by boat in 1975-1995).
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
> Propane gas tanks became registered products
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
This was in the late 80s.
Oh wow. At that point, just make everything a registered item.
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
It was also not very unique? The social intimidation like arresting family members, public shaming and widespread people spying on people are just the cookie cutter template? China, NK are still cooking this recipe.
The GDR had possibly the highest ratio of secret police (Stasi) employees per # population in world history, it was really ridiculous how paranoid that government was. About 0.5% of the population were Stasi employees and an additional 1% were "inofficial employees", informers.
Its also the measly rewards that they did it for. In a dysfunctional economy, some people sold out there family and friends, cutting them of forever, for as little as a cheeseburger now and then.
People go on about surveillance but it's not really the problem compared to murderous dictatorships.
Murderous dictatorships are enabled by mass surveillance and personal data collection. Especially East Germany, which was obsessed with data harvesting on every individual and installed as many CCTV cameras as its budget and tech would allow. East Germany would be creaming itself over the panopticon we are walking into.
Yeah but there's lots of surveillance like stuff that goes on without turning into murderous dictatorships. In England where I live we have cctv all over the place and on the internet Google knows most of my stuff but neither really worry me - we haven't really had a dictatorship setup since 1215 or so.
1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line.
The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement).
If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/
Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.
> Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.
I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.
I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I'm not arguing in favor of a state run economy or a dictatorship or whatever else it is you seem to have concluded. Flawed though our system may be I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But all the same it's important to be able to recognize where we could do better. Optimizing for investor return is frequently not synonymous with optimizing for societal well being. I don't think engagement algorithms that result in negative emotions are really a benefit to anyone other than the company that deploys them.
So too for the online advertising industry. We - ie capitalists - have dedicated some of our best minds to building out something that vaguely resembles a panopticon. When you consider the intangible social and political externalities it seems to me that the place we've arrived at isn't a good one.
Don't forget that in addition to any negative impacts of the things that were built, every day spent in that way was a day not spent pursuing scientific or mathematical breakthroughs.
No, I understood well.
In my country, there is a barrage of Russian propaganda trying to relativize our shitty experience with the communist regime. They keep flooding the zone with claims about democracy being flawed, weak, bureaucratic, meaningless, and decadent. And it is working. People appreciate democracy a lot less than ten or twenty years ago.
Sure, there is a time for the self-criticism of the flaws of the West. I just think now is not the time. Democracy and freedom are under serious threat worldwide. Now is the time to keep reminding ourselves how great it is what we have built. Now is the time to be absolutely clear that the flaws of democracies are not in the same category as the flaws of authoritarian regimes.
I still remember what it was like living in a totalitarian regime - and I was living in a soft totalitarianism nearing its collapse. I am not old enough to remember the hardcore Stalinist era. And still, it was so bad that whatever you believe is bad about capitalism is like 1% of how bad it was. Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
Look, I am a pessimist. I think there is a very real chance that the US is turning into a Russia-like state. I hope not, but if that happens, very bad things are likely to happen in Europe too. We will all live it once again. If you still don’t understand what I mean, I suggest this: let’s bookmark this discussion and get back in 5 years, if we are still alive. Then, you will tell me what you think about optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. If you still think it is a problem worth mentioning by then, I will be very happy.
> Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding.
Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amount of opportunity available to our society in a general sense, it's more than a bit depressing to think that this is how we (collectively) chose to use it so far.
A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. Like yeah I think the advanced bioengineering is a fantastic accomplishment. I don't think we should get rid of it. Things were definitely worse before we got that figured out. I don't miss amputations and lobotomies. But is it really necessary to so badly misappropriate the opportunity that it affords us?
Given how different your perspective is from my own I can appreciate that my original short and rather flippant comment failed to convey that particular message.
There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good.
> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus
What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.
Nothing more than a fictional hypothetical for use as an analogy. Suppose advanced technology T requires broad societal effort to develop, for which societal mastery of advanced scientific topic S is a prerequisite. The analogy is nothing more than "first society achieves X, then it can achieve Y" where X is desirable but Y is not and both are fairly difficult.
I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.
The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.
Conversion metrics = people find what they want to buy quicker and more efficiently, allowing them to spend time on leisure that would otherwise have been spent on gathering needed goods.
Engagement metrics = making entertainment that's popular rather than what's mandated by the state's culture committees.
Optimizing them is a virtuous and noble profession.
Extensive effort to improve conversion metrics tends to result in dark patterns (and increased revenue).
Extensive effort to improve engagement metrics tends to result in negative emotional states (and increased revenue).
When it comes to entertainment, optimizing return on investment often means maximizing the size of the potential audience. The end result of that process is usually slop.
Dark patterns and slop aren't well defined terms. Engagement resulting in negative emotional states is not obviously a problem. Social studies academics pretend it is, but have no trouble with people consuming state TV news even if it shows them a constant stream of bad news stories.
> Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony
A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
I read a quote somewhere that said democracy does nothing to promote good leadership. The point of democracy isn't to elect a good government, the point is to quickly get rid of a bad government
The multi-year terms still lets bad governments do a lot of damage though, and they have to be pretty bad to actually be removed for good.
Perhaps it would be better to pick the government at random and then have much more frequent votes with the only choice being whether to pick a new random government or not.
If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.
Does Singapore force people to be bus drivers?
Once you have banned protest, how would you know if they were forced or not?
EVERYONE IS HAPPY.
Sounds like you haven't been to Singapore.
Not sure why you’d say that. Did you see protests or Something?
What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
There have been such dictators in the past. Singapore is one example. Arguably the British Empire was libertarian by the standards of its time (and empires).
Perhaps the least recognized example is America. The Constitution imposes libertarianism on the population against majority will. You can't change the constitution with a 50%+1 vote, so it forces freedom of speech and other rights on people who might otherwise easily vote to get rid of them. There's no one man enforcing the constitution, just a general agreement to obey SCOTUS.
>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
There was a democratic referendum in 2003 to essentially reduce the authority of the Liechenstein ruler, the population largely voted to grant absolute power to the ruling family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Liechtenstein_constitutio...
Authoritarianism is the oldest form of effective government. Just as curious note, dictatorship was introduced during the Roman epoch and was used as temporary measure during war times. Look for example in Ukraine where the same ruler is avoiding elections since some time due to war, in the root sense of the government-style it is possible to describe it as a dictatorship today, if it hadn't been for the negative connotation of that term in the last 100 years.
The ruler is not "avoiding" elections due to war, he is prohibited by the constitution to hold them during wartime (not to mention the feasibility of letting the inhabitants of occupied regions to exercise their voting rights). So it is not a dictatorship in any sense.
"East Germany" fell apart because the people stuck there quickly realized how "ridiculous" it was. (See the post you replied to.)
There was a lot of contact between West and East Germans due to the awkward nature of the division of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. In contrast, that contact doesn't exist between North and South Korea.
(Remember, West Berlin was an enclave inside of East Germany, and West Germans were allowed to travel through East Germany in order to travel in and out of West Berlin.)
As long as the country is very wealthy at least compared to its neighbors it might work.
Lichtenstein and Singapur found their niches, which do not scale to larger countries, Dubai was just lucky.
Happy slaves don’t dream of freedom.
I wonder what would happen to Lichtenstein if the EU would pull a Trump on them and block trade and airspace until the adjust their tax policies…
Not that this would ever happen.
Dubai and is a human rights cesspit.
Sharia law. Beat your wife. law. Fine rape victims. Use slaves, flog gay people.
Name a regressive and disgusting way of treating humans - it’s probably done there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai
Aren't those just plain old tax havens?
Yes and no.
They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.
And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.
But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.
>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was
Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
Do we? I’d say it’s pretty close, especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’ every time any social programme is proposed.
Eg: Shall we improve public healthcare?
> especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’
But... why would you include that? They're certainly not discussions of the DDR.
We do have socialised medicine where I live and it is falling apart TBH. Never hear it compared to East Germany.
By "we", I didn't mean Americans, but weaterners. We have the National Health Service where I live and it is a complete mess (I know someone who waited over seven years for a jaw operation, another who has several years to wait for autism screening). I don't want the American system, and the basic principle of the NHS is good but still....
This AI slop is a pretty accurate description of my local medical practice (bar the cheap joke at beginning and everyone having an English accent): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw
We hardly ever hear about East Germany or all the horrors of living in such a place. Very rarely these days. I've known quite a few people who lived under that regime and they told me what it was like. Everyone was being watched, and even school children had to write spy reports on their neighbours. All while the East German state kept proclaiming how it was a place of freedom and equality.
Dustpile of history, sure, but gallows first. Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable.
Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
A peaceful transition of power is nothing to sneer at. After a revolutionary change, they are rare.
1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
Look at Unit 731 as an example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ).
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
Yes, here in Poland 36 years later people still seriously argue the country would be much better if we hanged the communists off lampposts (like it was done in few other places).
There ws a great cost to a "peaceful transition". The entire judiciary was basically full of extremely corrupt people, half of the political class. Even today when the old judges are almost all gone the horrible culture they had still corrupts many younger ones (although today it is more towards incompetence and indifference rather than corruption).
Would it be better to have half a million (or possibly entire million if you count inevitable victims on the other side) die to avoid it? We are still paying the price.
There is an argument that had we sorted the communist problem successfully back then we wouldn't have politicians later that let themselves be corrupted by Putin into funding his army. And perhaps there would never be an invasion of Ukraine.
Or if we done away with the peaceful transition, the communists in other neighbouring countries would attempt to hold on to power with everything they got. Who knows.
"Should we have put 500,000 people to death?" sounds like pub conversation, to be frank. There are plenty of options between 'no repercussions for the old regime' and Rwanda.
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
You need "a little bit" of politician/judge/enforcer lynching to keep the government in line the same way they make a big show of "a little bit" of kicking in people's doors at 4am to keep the peasants in line.
I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
"I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?"
Maybe because of your language?
"Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable."
Because the optimum is a public process which proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt so that every good person supports their punishment and has the confidence (certainty of guilt) to support it publicly.
But if the choice is between no punishment and somebody gunning them down in the street or droning them, i prefer the latter.
Court processes are useful when guilt is uncertain at first look and you want to increase certainty. But dictators and their close supporters, the certainty is often sufficient by nature of many their actions being public. Sometimes they literally go on TV and declare they're going to a foreign country to kill their people and take their land. At that point, it only becomes a matter of making sure you have the right person.
And don't forget the victims. Many authoritarian regimes don't kill opposition outright (for various reasons) but imprison them instead. Such a victim knows many of the people (cops, judges, informants, etc.) responsible for / guilty of falsely imprisoning them. After a regime change, the victims go free and have often more knowledge of the offenses than can be proven to a court by the simply virtue of being there and therefore have more than enough confidence to deliver a just punishment.
>I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
It's a hard one. I can tell you something which doesn't work because the Americans have tried it twice so far. It won't work to say "Well, that was naughty, please don't do it again".
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
> The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later.
The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!
+1 to this! I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
Probably this is an also big component in the notorious German preference for cash over cards.
That was caused by interchange fees, and it has disappeared now.
It’s still a thing in some areas from direct experience recently. Hell it’s still a thing with former East Germans I know in the UK. And it’s not about interchange fees - it’s about purchase surveillance.
My ex partner wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos.
> wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos
This should be standard practice, I do it as well. Not East German but East European. We had our own Stasi that would terrorize youths for listening to Western music of Radio Free Europe.
Yeah everyone suffered that side of things for sure. I'd rather have location recorded but not leaked out to whoever sold me the phone personally. I don't sync any files to the cloud already.
Are you german? Most of my german friends tell me it is because after the experiences of nazism and comunism (in the GDR), most germans value their privacy a lot.
> I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences.
The film The Lives of Others should give folks a pretty good idea of what the Stasi was.
The havoc that finding out your family and friends spied on you for benefits, can not be overstated. How deeply anti social and lonely such a divided and conquered socialist utopian society is can not be expressed in words, and yet it can.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesbeauftragter_f%C3%BCr_di...
Nowadays we don't even need family and friends to spy on you for benefits; websites and apps do it for advertising revenue.
I wonder if future generations will wonder why being spied on and monitored was even noteworthy, let alone a cause for concern.
> Germany's strict privacy laws
Not anymore.
No, on the contrary. Germany is a big proponent of chatcontrol.
These are two very different things. Significant parts of the German government and many German members of the European Parliament are proponents of Chat Control. The general population, however, still has a strong desire for privacy and a deep fear of surveillance and data collection, shaped by historical experiences with two dictatorships (the Nazi era and the GDR).
That said, there is a substantial disconnect between the substantive preferences of the voting population and the actual policies and decisions of the parties they elect. This is partly because promises like “internal security” gain much more traction in times of growing uncertainty and global instability, while only a relatively small portion of the population fully thinks through, or is willing to think through, the consequences and concrete legislative changes behind those promises.
Nevertheless, looking at both public attitudes and court rulings, it is still fair to say that data protection in Germany, even compared to other EU countries, currently enjoys a particularly high status.
In practice the average German voter is still supporting the coalition against the AfD despite that the coalition is implementing Soviet-like policies. They talk constantly about banning the most popular political party, for example, and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions. Germans who aren't actively supporting the AfD should feel no sense of moral superiority, there simply isn't anything in the historical context to feel proud of there.
> and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions
Do you have any sources to substantiate this claim? In particular, including under which law a prison sentence or fine was imposed for the expression of a constitutionally protected political opinion.
Nice try. The German constitution is a poor document and doesn't protect political opinion, so your "constitutionally protected" political opinion caveat just makes it useless. You'd just defend every example with "our constitution allows that" rather than recognizing that it just means the constitution itself is wrong.
Example: the American author CJ Hopkins has been repeatedly prosecuted in Berlin despite being acquitted the first time, because in Germany there's apparently no constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. His "crime" was criticizing COVID authoritarianism. You're now going to tell me why the German constitution allows this, and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
Any source showing people being imprisoned or fined merely for expressing an anti-left opinion then? Which specific law were they convicted under?
The claim that Germany has "no constitutional protection against double jeopardy" is false. Art. 103(3) of the constitution embodies ne bis in idem. The German criminal procedure allows legal remedies (appeals), including Revision (appeal on points of law), which can be brought by both parties before a judgment becomes final. That’s what happened in this case.
In the CJ Hopkins case, the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB. One can freely say "the government acted authoritarian during COVID"; that kind of political criticism is protected speech under Art. 5 GG.
> and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
I’m not interested in moral justifications. Morality is a matter of opinion, and you’re entitled to yours just as I am to mine. The same applies to your view of the German constitution.
However, backing up claims about concrete cases with sources helps me (and others) understand which cases you’re referring to and whether they actually support your argument in a way that lets me learn something new (preferably) or whether we'll simply end up acknowledging that we have different opinions on the matter ;)
You're doing exactly what I said you'd do. Zero shame. Morality is not just a matter of opinion.
> the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB
Of course it was the issue. German media puts swastikas on things without any legal problems when they are government aligned.
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/SPIEGEL-Nichts-gelernt-Jahre-Bund...
It's only people criticizing the left who get prosecuted under such laws. That's deliberate.
> Which specific law were they convicted under?
Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively. Habek has filed criminal complaints against over 800 people. The German Chancellor has probably filed thousands of such complaints given the numbering of the case files.
From a German court order:
At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.
The public prosecutor's office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.
This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. ...
> Morality is not just a matter of opinion.
I'd be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion.
> Of course it was the issue. German media puts swastikas on things without any legal problems when they are government aligned.
Are we talking about the use of swastikas or your statement that people are imprisoned or fined for voicing anti-left opinions? I'm happy to do both, but it feels like those are two different things.
The use of swastikas (and other symbolism of banned organizations like the NSDAP) is prohibited in Germany if there is no clear rejection of the NS tied to it or if the rejection cannot unequivocally be derived from the context.
Using swastikas is therefore somewhat risky in any context, since it is a matter for the courts to decide whether a specific case qualifies as allowed use or not. It is far more probable that the use of a swastika in an anti-left statement will not qualify, since it is challenging to add value to an anti-left statement by using a swastika while still clearly rejecting the NS at the same time.
Again, happy to talk about § 86a StGB, but I would first be interested in how you come to the conclusion that this is being used to suppress anti-left opinions. I.e., how is using a swastika necessary or even helpful when voicing an opinion?
CJ Hopkins said he wanted to warn the public of a 'newly rising totalitarianism'. He posted a picture of a corona mask with a visible swastika and the caption 'Masks are symbols of ideological conformity' and a quote from the then minister of health stating 'Masks also always send a signal'.
Pretty much all of that is legal, also when looking at § 188. The only real issue is the use of the swastika. Using common symbolism like 'OBEY' instead would immediately remove any legal doubts.
> Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively.
True, Germany also forbids insulting anyone. This is not restricted to politicians, and there is no difference in which insults are punishable for politicians and non-politicians. This is very different from how things are in the US, where insults are not punishable offenses per se. § 188 mostly refers to the degree of penalty possible when directing an insult towards any politician and what's necessary for a different degree of penalty to apply.
However, this is used by politicians across the whole political spectrum alike, including the far-right. The same reports you mentioned with regard to Robert Habeck exist for Alice Weidel, who filed hundreds of complaints under §§ 185 and 188. This is regardless of ongoing criticism of this paragraph voiced by the far-right, liberals, and others alike.
How is this specifically targeting anti-left opinions?
> You're doing exactly what I said you'd do. Zero shame.
Meta: Reading this, it feels like you don't particularly enjoy this conversation. So let me say this: I'm really happy we are having this discussion. It is something completely different to read about other opinions in the paper versus actually talking to someone with a different perspective. I'm genuinely interested in your opinion, and my questions are serious questions, not rhetorical ones.
I don't feel any animosity towards you, and I hope you can also gain something from this. If you don't share that sentiment, I'm completely fine with leaving this thread as is and accepting that we won't reach any agreement right now.
It's interesting that this is a serious movie by the director Michael 'Bully' Herbig, who is generally known for bad taste comedies, full of clichees about race and sexuality.
+2, very nice movie. Might be very eye-opening for any some about what it was like under USSR umbrella...
+1, really well-done movie!
I watched Night Crossing in my german class in high school. I remember it being intense.
For the 80s it was intense yes. Watching it now that same tension feels milder but I guess that's because every single TV show now has to have constant explosions, car crashes etc in it.
There is actually gunfire in it and a teenager dies in the beginning but it still feels less intense due to the 80s pace IMO.
They have the 2018 movie free to watch on Fandango At Home, which doesn't even require you to login to watch it: https://athome.fandango.com/content/browse/details/Balloon/1...
I watched it on Kanopy last night, free but you have to log in with a library card. The fandango link above asked for $2.99.
Great movie yes! The 1980s one, I have not seen the new one.
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I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.
If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!
I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(* as have others, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652703)
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It is interesting how dictatorships for resourceless countries needed to keep the people in like east germany or czechoslovakia. But current dictatorships with natural resources like Venezuela or Iran let dissent go. It makes them more stable sadly.
Since West Germany considered East Germany to be occupied territory, East Germans had automatic citizenship in the west. This made it uniquely easy to emigrate into the much wealthier country.
That's not fully correct. The West accepted only a single German citizenship. So everyone from East Germany could immediately be issued a "German" passport by the Western authorities.
For the East there were 2 citizenships. They had no adjectives, they only talked about "citizen of the German Democratic Republic" and "citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany".
The occupation view was not official politics after 1970. The West had recognized the East as a state. But citizens of both states were assumed to have the same citizenship.
Edit: recognized as state should maybe recognized as some kind of state. Like the citizenship there were numerous differences compared to other foreign nation states.
Well apart from the high chance of being killed at the borders.
Sure, but they did have a place to go to. Unlike all the other people that risk getting killed at a border
From the reports I'd read and the interviews I'd seen, it's not that Venezuela let people go so much as it couldn't stop them. Many people who fled the country state they had to hide their property and children to prevent it from looking like they were not coming back when crossing the border. This might have been an agreement with Columbia, since Columbia doesn't want mass migration into their country. In some cases it was starve, jail, die or flee which is not the same as "let go".
Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
As a Venezuelan, I think the difference is not the Natural Resources, or at least is not the main difference. In 2017, the shortages and economic crisis generated by 15 years of communist policies has pushed around 4 million people out, and then, the regime "elected" a Constitutional Assembly which has the power to create a new Constitution and to overrid any previously elected organism (as it was at the time the opossition controled National Assembly).
At that point I leaved Venezuela inmediatly with my 2 minor aged kids, because for me it was a NO BRAINER that the first thing they will do was to limit the emigration and the free ciruculation. My train of tought was very simple. As any other Socialist Dictatorship before, this one needs to halt the staggering loss of skilled proffesionals like Medics, Engineers or whatever they deemed of National Security, I mean, you still need Doctors, you still need the Electricity and Water to get into the industries and houses, and specially for Venezuela, you need to keep the Oil flowing off the earth...
BOY WAS I WRONG, they never put a formal limit to the emigration and at least another 5 million people leaved Venezuela (so far). It did not matter at all that the already in shambles Public Health system collapsed, they doctors that stayed were private and they attended only the capacity that could pay for the scarse services, the basic services did not matter that much either, as people got use to get them once or twice per week, and even a country wide blackout of 3 weeks was not the end of the regime, and the Oil, well, does not matter either because what was once 3.5 million barrels per day went to be as low as 300.000 bpd.
So, what was the difference? well, for all its downfalls, it seems to me that the XX century Communist/Socialist dictatorships were guided by Ideology, they really thought theirs ideas were for the better of their people, so having no Healthcare was a REAL PROBLEM, having no public services was a REAL PROBLEM. Of course, their recipes were doomed as their political ideals, but at least they tried.
The Venezuelan Regime has no Ideology (it has some in form of propaganda, but that is different that actions) as the latest news can attest, They couldn't care less about the people and the wellness. They did not use any "Natural Resouces" to keep any level of living conditions, they just let loose the ruins of the economy they had messed so badly to let the most savage neoliberalism to correct the course while they stayed in power to keep leaching two sources of income, whatever oil they could produce and the drugs operations revenue, alongside their cut on any business their allies (AKA "Enchufados) could come up in the "liberalized" economy.
All the people that leaved the country (including me) just made them easier to keep control of whatever was left. Ever decreasing political or social opposition, less pressure of the shambles public services and so on and on...
The Natural Resources is just a part of their Income, it does not affects the hability to control or to even extract richness from the system.
I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism.
I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange for the regime stability.
Would that be possibly because while Venezuela and Iran have oil to extract and sell on the international market to enrich the coffers of the oligarchs in power, the only resources Czechoslovakia had was labour. The oligarchs could only enrich themselves by exporting manufactured goods like shoes and buses, mostly made from imported materials, extracting the excess wealth from the labour of others the way Venezuela and Iran extract oil from the ground?
No, the whole USSR had exit visas but it was resource rich. Russia still is. It's not the case that the USSR's only resource was labor.
First, of course I am talking about Socialist Dictatorships of the XX Century in an academic way, from what I have read, So I really don't know as much as what I have lived through in Venezuela.
When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems
No communist ideology? What was the regime demanding compliance with, do you think? The normalization era was a return to Marxism-Leninism, not a departure from it.
Czechoslovakia in that period had one party politics, justified because multiparty democracy was "bourgeois deviation". It was a state run centrally planned economy, because the left wing don't believe in capitalism or free markets. Officially unemployment didn't exist, because only imperialist capitalist right wing economies had unemployment. Party membership and associated ideological compliance was required for any important role. Culture was censored, people were imprisoned by ideology police.
It is bizarre to claim that the USSR was not ideological. It collapsed because it was pure ideology in defiance of reality.
The reason the USSR kept people behind a wall is because they were able to mentally justify it to themselves within the framework of their far left ideology. They viewed the west as corrupt and, more importantly, full of corrupting ideas. They were just much more committed to winning the propaganda war than a place like Venezuela is because their worldview was formed at the end of the Victorian era when travel and communication was much more easily restricted. Maduro's socialist worldview was formed much later, when the idea of preventing Venezuelans having access to capitalist ideas would have seemed much more ridiculous.
Of course there was a state ideology. Just the majority of the society and even the party did not actually believe it. There was a saying that there was more communists at a western university than in the whole Czechoslovakia
Are you Czech or Slovak to be able to speak with this much confidence?
I have spent 13 years in Czech Republic, admittedly after the curtain fell, and I can tell you for a fact that they were “communist” because otherwise tanks.
You can see the relationship they had with the ideology in pretty much any sliver of cultural material from the period and after.
One of favorite escapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Papago_Escape
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
I don't think the Great Papago Escape was that great - "Over the next few weeks, all of the escapees were eventually recaptured without bloodshed."
The thing that makes this balloon escape story is so enthralling is that it actually worked.
I mean, their escape was quite complex and did actually "work", it's just they didn't get very far beyond that. Any dramatization would clearly need some comedic element
Interesting story. The lack of dramatization might have something to do with making Nazis sympathetic characters. Hogans Heroes aside.
The Damn Interesting podcast (no affiliation, just a huge fan) had an episode on this topic if you prefer to listen to this story: https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting
"Stuff you should know" and "Freakanomics"
I felt so tense and anxious listening to that.
There were many "escapes", some weren't so romantic. E.g. for some escapees the drive to what they viewed as freedom was so intense that they did not hesitate to kill someone, e.g. a stewardess on a hijacked plane.
To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
A reminder of something much bigger, much longer, and far more tragic. People died, families split, a country divided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people
Yup.
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
The barber I patronized for many years was a boat person. Wonderful people.
Was curious to know the calculations involved. Found them to be pretty simple.
Vibe-coded an online calculator for future escapists: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site
You can compare them with the original calculations that can be found at https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/ballonrechner.html !
I did compare with the wikipedia article linked in this HN thread. The results were comparable.
Now calculate the necessary rate of fuel burn and fuel requirement for a given trip; tensile and tear strength needed for the balloon material and seams.
Tbf they probably didn't do all these calculations, but should have. They risked their lives by getting some of these things wrong.
Done. Updated: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site
Thanks..
In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story
Yeah I'd be curious into how they acquired so much money
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Read a memoir by a KGB agent who arrested a man in Moscow who was passing info to the CIA. Had been doing so for years. The CIA had the typical western attitude towards money so they kept giving him stacks of rubles. Thinking they were being generous. The man (a professor, I think) had nothing to spend it on so he stacked cash up in a closet. Had around 1 million stored when he was caught. He probably would have been better off just burning it as the money was used as evidence in his trial.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
Yes the movie Night Crossing also shows very well that there was a lot of suspicion, for example they had to buy the fabric from lots of different places and this a slipup actually caused them to be ratted out (not sure if this particular part of the story happened to these people in real life too but it was really a thing)
Likely black market deals/work I think. Also just getting a replacement car was not really easy for normal people.
Yes, was noticing the same. It was easy for them to sell the car and get a new one, so this meant a lot of connections and underground "jobs" for the extra revenue.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
More interesting escapes from the DDR, this time by three brothers, who all fled separately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethke_brothers
> The Berlin Wall fell six months after Egbert's escape.
Ironic. Still quite an adventure. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
The investment, planning, danger, and dogged persistence… incredible story.
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Singapore not far behind (~40% from memory), a one party state but with voting, sometimes described as essentially an elected recallable monarchy. Also note most of those countries have relatively low emigration rates of native citizens.I think "immigrants" is the wrong statistic here, since it includes workers with no path to citizenship. (In some cases, they can't leave because their employer stole their passport.)
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
You're still an immigrant even if you can't become a citizen.
> > it includes workers with no path to citizenship
> You're still an immigrant even if you can't become a citizen.
Yes, like I said. My point is that these two scenarios are very different:
1. "I am +1 to the immigrant count because this is a great place for me and my family to live and I wish for us to move here permanently."
2. "I am +1 to the immigrant count temporarily because the wages here are so much more than I could earn at home, and I'm remitting that money back to my family who live somewhere else. As much as this is an opportunity for me, we could never move here because same wages would have my family homeless and starving, making this a terrible place to move permanently."
Both people are happily adding to the "immigrants inside" count, but they are very different judgements about the country.
I'm not sure it is wrong. I'd have no path to UAE citizenship, nor do I particularly want one, I'd likely have lower wages. And I'd still like to live there more than most places.
That's a good point. Perhaps a better statistic would be people who want to emigrate or immigrate. We're introducing a bias by measuring only those who actually do.
For me, this is the maxim that governs speaking with someone defending a totalitarian regime.
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
My favorite east Germany escape stories is the escape is train driver’s Harry Deterling, that just drove the train into wall (which was not fully a wall by then if I understood correctly) https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/chronicle/_year1961/_mon...
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
The Wikipedia page references Günter Wetzel's website. Reading https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/missverstaendnis.html , he's written down more information - apparently they came to a disagreement about the story, and on that page there's more detail, from his point of view: for the first attempt they did everything in Wetzel's house (whose oldest kid was 4), because of concerns the Strelzyks' children (who were 10 and 14) could blurt something out. After some disagreements (Strelzyks told some relatives about the balloon, Wetzel thinks the balloon was too small) Wetzel gave Strelzyks all they've built (he was also worried about getting caught with the stuff, especially since now the relatives have heard about it) and decided to follow the concept of a ultralight airplane.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
I think it's such a crazy idea, even if a 5 year old tell a teacher about it or something, who's going to take the story seriously?
After they found the remains of the balloon from the first escape attempt, the Stasi put out a reward for information, I think everyone would take the story seriously at that point. It was why they decided they had to go through with the second attempt, because they were convinced the Stasi was going to catch them soon. But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt.
> But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt
The repressive state apparatus was moving too slow. Maybe they hoped there won't be a second attempt after the first one failed, maybe it wasn't promptly reported to the appartchikhs and handled internally by the Stasi to avoid backlash.
I would assume they did not tell them anything at all, until the time was there. And after the first failed attempt, they were probably shocked enough for real to understand the situation and keep their mouths shut.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
> Propane gas tanks became registered products
Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.
Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.
> not used to prevent crime
Wouldn't "registration" as used in the article mean the purchase details were sent to the authorities, so they could investigate/stop a potential escape attempt?
Registration always precedes confiscation.
Even if the devices were registered, you might be up and away before they figure it out. But if another family flew away, that registration list would be handy door to door.
The registration serves as a deterrent, and therefore does reduce crime. It wouldn’t have been practical to outright prohibit propane gas.
Meanwhile in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli
I first read about this in Reader's Digest back in the eighties.
I'm not the only one then! :-)
I read about them in RD long before I saw the film, I think. It is an amazing achievement and I doubt most people could have pulled it off. Thinking about it now... You would have to wait until the wind was going in the right direction, and wouldn't change, and also be well away from the border to avoid patrols. They had luck on their side.
I think I saw the film in the late eighties/early nineties round about the time the Eastern Bloc was falling apart so it had less impact.
The autobiographical graphic novel "Time Zones" by Sven Diekmann describes an attempted balloon escape from the GDR in 1977, but it was thwarted at the last minute [1].
It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.
I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.
[1] https://store.bookbaby.com/book/time-zones
[2] Authors website: https://www.svensiekmann.com/bio
Fascinating. Always enjoyed the near-history one can feel in east germany.
Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.
Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).
What is just awesome, to a tinkerer, is the great can-do spirit people had then. You couldn't buy it, so you made it yourself. They were going to do a helicopter, but for the lack of a suitable engine. As if the rest was just a solved problem, and may well have been, given the background of one of them.
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
I feel like hard situations force people to adapt. This was not a unique time in history, it continues today in warzones and places like Ukraine. It is only a few comfortable western countires who have such comfort of everything being a click and 1 days delivery away.
Poor family members though
I recently read a book of interviews with people who escaped from North Korea, and what shocked me was the discovery that the relatives of those who escaped are often executed (publicly) and that even children are executed in North Korea. We live in a terrible world. I mean... you expect a book from North Korea to contain terrible things, but somehow it was even worse than I expected.
Left wing thought doesn't contain any philosophy of limitations on state power, so under a left wing regime there is no limit to what it might do. No matter how terrible something is, if it can be imagined they will consider implementing it. To avoid that outcome there has to be an understanding of the flawed nature of government, and from that an ideological commitment to a state limited in power and role.
So everyone not a libertarian is dangerous?
Only if they get into power? I mean what's your reading of the last few centuries of history?
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We're talking about North Korea executing children because their family members escaped. Doesn't get more left wing than North Korea. Not a good look to deploy a stock reply without thinking.
North Korea is an extremely class based society. About as far away from left as it gets.
I'm not sure you understand the situation here. Everything I don't like is left-wing.
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> Everything I don't like is left-wing.
Your sarcasm isn’t obvious enough
What's scary is that Russia plans to do this again.
But not that surprising when you look at Russian history.
Collectivism: Ideas so good, they’re mandatory
Political buzzword du jour: every dictatorship ever.
You know there isn't an ideology called collectivism, right?
>hey needed just ten minutes to inflate the balloon and an additional three minutes to heat the air.
That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.
The engineering ingenuity and determination required to pull this off is truly mind blowing. Building a homemade balloon under such surveillance is an amazing feat.
I remembered Damn Interesting (fantastic website!) has a nice narrative-story-style article on this "pop up from persecution" story":
https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
Also an audio podcast available for the article, that's more thrilling.
Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?
Other than North Korea, are there still countries that are literal prisons that you can’t leave?
It’s astounding to me that this was a thing. The fact that it’s so rare now is one of the quiet ways we have in fact progressed.
I spoke with the people working at a German resort in Tunisia. I was there for a short stint as sound tech. The only way out of the country is smuggling. You don’t get permission to leave if you’re of working age and can contribute to the economy.
Cuba had exit visas up until 2013.
The USA doesn't literally prevent you from leaving, but it uses its unique control of the global banking system to still tax you when you move to another country.
Fun fact Tatcher and Reagan wanted to avoid German reunification at all costs.
Since then, the trust of wives in their husbands' weekend projects has dropped considerably.
There was a mcgyver episode about this.
People will do anything to escape the fruits of marxism. Discoursers today should take note!
My elementary school showed the Disney movie about this at least once a year.
That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
I think a lot of that programming and political action was because at the time there was genuine fear of communism taking over in the US and other western nations (like it already had in Eastern Europe).
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
For example, "Don't Be a Sucker" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
I think people do tend to forget the meanings of the important words over time though. For example:
Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice. (Some people reapply that definition to the word "populism". No, it's real democracy to elect the people's choice.)
Censorship = intentionally suppress certain ideas and messages
Propaganda = choosing what to publish (or even publishing lies) to intentionally create or support a particular worldview or narrative, especially one that favors certain political people or groups (as opposed to simply publishing truth to keep those in power accountable)
Fascism = the state tells you what to do, not the other way around
Liberty = the people choose what to say and do with their own lives, without interference by the state (besides enforcement of laws written by democratically elected legislators)
Justice = everyone is equally accountable to the law regardless of who they are. This especially includes legislators and rich/powerful people.
> Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice.
That rather rules out what happens in, say, the USofA, where entrenched party politics limits the choice of the wider population to those few candidates that are backed.
> Some people reapply that definition to the word "populism". No, it's real democracy to elect the people's choice.
Populism isn't democracy, democracy isn't populism; it's generally used to describe a cynical political strategy of appeal to the broadest, lowest common denominator instincts, to gain support from a base who at best get little more than lip service toward addressing their real needs. Frequently associated with strawmen and strawissues as a focus of common manufacted enemy, etc.
> > Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice. That rather rules out what happens in, say, the USofA, where entrenched party politics limits the choice of the wider population to those few candidates that are backed.
It’s also weird in that the candidate with the most votes might not win. The electoral system is weird.
Sure .. but 'less' so.
In the EU, European Union, member countries are voting on EU positions .. whether it's weighted or unweighted, it's a collection of N countries voting, not a collection of N millions of people voting.
Similarly in the USofA, formed as a union of states to have a common government for those things that are agreed to superseded individual state interests.
I live in a country with mandatory voting - everybody (of age, save for those convicted of _serious_ crime) votes, and ranked proportional voting.
Compulsory voting offends the sensibilities of a number of USofA citizens, but there is a strong case to be made for it, ranked voting does a lot to avoid two party Hotelling's law quagmires where major parties barely represent anybody and yet MySportingTeam divisions dominate.
That's not weird at all. Democracy as the word is commonly used does not require direct popular vote, let alone at the highest tier of government. Every "democratic" country I'm aware of uses a more complicated scheme.
Then you've got the part where the US was never billed as a "democracy" to begin with but rather a "democratic republic".
What's weird to me is how quickly a group with an advantage will attempt to discard compromises and other agreements once they have what they wanted.
Agreed on all points. The USofA is very far from true democracy. For starters, the NGO networks and a lot of unelected bureaucracy are the real government authority by quite a margin -- all of whom are directly opposed to and working against the US Constitution.
> NGO networks and a lot of unelected bureaucracy are the real government authority by quite a margin
In a well structured government for the people by the people such groups are as essential as military, as law enforcement, as health professionals, etc.
Politicians debate policy and advocate on behalf of representatives.
Unelected civil servants put policy into practice and need to be immune from the cycle of elected officials, just as the military needs to be.
All these groups, military, judges, civil service need to be held to high standards and subject to scrutiny with respect to professional conduct.
The USofA looks a bit off to outsiders in many respects, not simply tipping. So many elected positions that aren't merit based and seemingly immune to standards and termination for misconduct.
Downvoters: The story is about the terrible politics, and should be a cautionary tale that's immediately very relevant. Unless you were only interested in the ballooning "maker" angle?
How long did it take them to plan this escape?
From the second sentence, "over a year and a half of preparations". The third paragraph gives a starting agreement date of 7 March 1978, and the successful flight was 16 September 1979.
Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?
Remember the GDR called the Berlin Wall the "Antifascist Protection Barrier"
There were no fascists in the DDR.
There are fascists in the former DDR today.
So I guess it worked.
The fascists were everywhere in the DDR: just called members of the party or as part of the Stasi.
And I take the definition of fascists as anyone who prioritizes their political system, State or political view to a point of depriving any other citizen of their basic freedom.
Authoritarianism isn't the same thing as fascism.
That is arguing a distinction which is a really bad look.
Some ways, yes, some ways no. Communism and Fascism in practice had mutual influences on one another although they would be loathe to admit it. (By Communism here, I mean Communist party rule, not the future utopia which none of these countries ever achieved.)
If you want to take a more Trotskyite view, many post-revolutionary states enter a so called "Bonapartist" phase, where militarism, ultranationalism and symbology combine to produce something which looks a lot like Fascism. Mao and Stalin were not above using ultranationalism and chauvinism to push their rule. North Korea has gone all the way with this with Juche which contains mystical, ultranationalist and even racial supremacist features.
"There were no fascists in the DDR."
Not officially although in reality the Stasi quite happily reused Gestapo files, and there were numerous National Socialists who ended up east of the border.
The GDR had a series of fake political parties, besides the Communist, in order to pretend they were a democracy. I believe they did have one that pretended to appeal to such people.
"There are fascists in the former DDR today."
Much more so than the west which did not have years of Communist rule.
> There were no fascists in the DDR.
That was certainly the party line of the DDR at the time. Do you honestly believe it?
It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who served in East Germany, claims that his war in Ukraine is justified in the name of denazification. It’s an easy rhetorical trick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
I believe this about as much as the Chinese Communist official who claimed that there were no homosexuals in the PRC.
In reality, a lot of careerists shifted their loyalties from the National Socialist government to the Communist one. There were several years in which the Communists, much like their western counterparts, tried to weed out all the Nazis, before realising many of them were experienced in administering things. (The Eastern Bloc had its own smaller version of Operation Paperclip, although the scientists tended to be less willing.)
I believe the USA-Mexico border wall was called something similar
That wall is to keep people out from another state, not in.
After all, they kept Paul Robeson in by simply pulling his passport, no wall needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson#:~:text=A%20month...
I don't need to go to Wikipedia to read about Robeson. Guy became a Stalin fan and crumbled mentally when he realised the USSR was not what it claimed. Great singer though.
I think part of what they didn't like was that in Old Man River, instead of singing:
for Moscow audiences he sang:That's how east berlin marketed it too, it still features bi-directional blocking abilities, like all walls.
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
> Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia
dystopia ?
Communism is the idea of "can't we all just get along?" which is obviously not something you can actually implement, but is easily used as a buzzword by evil regimes. Remember, H-tl-r called his regime "socialist", much the same way N-rth K-rea calls itself "democratic"
You can spell out Hitler and North Korea here. Meta has no power here.
Incorrect. Users are running autoflag bots.
Every day you make comments that are downvoted (and probably flagged) by several people... I think it's quite possible that the real issue is not "other people."
Usually people who feel (or are) targeted are not 100% innocent.
There's a clear pattern where comments containing certain words are flagged much more often than comments containing mildly cens-red versions of those words. Could be HN itself but if we assume HN isn't lying about how its algorithm works (a big assumption) then it must be user flag bots.
It's not just my comments - you see something similar with headlines on the front page that contain certain names like El-n M-sk. They will accumulate hundreds of points and comments and then be cens-red.
That’s not the idea of communism.
That’s actually the point of libertarianism, anarchism: do what you want, but you will only do well if you get along with the rest of the society by providing something helpful to them, as no one is forced to help you. And that’s why free market capitalism works. Even the most selfish individuals have needed to cooperate, work for others or open businesses with useful products for society in order to be able to accumulate wealth.
So much havoc caused by having a fascist/communist government in Russia, from partnering with Hitler to start WW2, through this stuff to Ukraine and it seems about half the evil in the world. I hope they fall one day and turn to something normal.
This is so impressive. Survival of the fittest at work.
Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.
One guy did use a plane to land in Red Square. Remember him?
He was mentally disturbed, which kinda proves the point. After returning to Germany, he stabbed a woman for rejecting his advances. Later, he was convicted of shoplifting, and a few years after that he was convicted again of selling stolen goods.
Definitely a "character", even if medically sound enough to stand trial.
I didn't know about the stabbing bit. You'd have to be off your head to land a plane next to the Kremlin. He was lucky he wasn't shot down.
Not to live there though, just as a "symbol of peace".
I'm not sure it worked much as a symbol of peace. He got sent to a Soviet prison/interrogation for a while which I'm sure was a laugh a minute.
Yes he was so cool. The plane is still in a museum.
PS: He was dumb as hell too of course, and it was only due to incredible laxness of the air force that he was never shot down.
I'm not sure any countries really shoot down light aircraft unless it's an active war zone. They are not much of a threat and it's also hard to tell if they are there legally or not.
You're more likely to get hassled when you land like the Ethan Guo guy (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04rql923kdo)
This was the soviet union in a very tense time. If he hadn't been shot down he would have been forced down. But yes that would have been a more likely outcome, true.
PS: Don't forget the Soviets knowingly shot and killed an entire airliner full of people. I saw an interview with the fighter pilot later and he didn't even have remorse for what he was doing, "just following orders". What a monster. But that was pretty typical there. Anyone with a backbone questioning orders was already dying in a gulag.
Guo must have been a few sandwiches short of a picnic to try and fly to Antarctica unaided as well. Three year ban from Chile isn't long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servi%C3%A7os_A%C3%A9reos_Cruz...
If I were in the US I would certainly leave to a more socialist country. I could not live there. Even before Trump.
However there is a spectrum between it. I don't think either extreme is great, neither American unrestricted capitalism nor full-on communism. A balance of both is needed. I was a lot happier in the 80s when Holland was a lot more socialist. Less things to worry about, a safety net, cheap housing and schooling, still the ability to run your own business if you really wanted to. We had a great combination.
However the VVD neoliberals (who idolize America) have destroyed it over the last decades and there are so many huge problems now because they always went for the quick fix.
With full-on capitalism you get lots of disenfranchised people angry at not having any upward mobility, corporations just dump all over the citizens, and differences in wealth get insanely high. With full-on communism you end up with a surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes. The secret sauce is in between IMO.
What would you call the current surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes in the USA? Is that full-on communism?
Totalitarianism exists on both sides of the spectrum.
That is a non-answer.
I understood your question to be a rhetorical one.
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.
West Berlin was also a showcase city.
> yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states
yawns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_Soviet_Union_aliyah
The Soviet Union had almost no legal emigration prior to the 1970s, and limited, targed emigration quotas after. The US, by contrast, prior to 1965, had strict quotas limiting immigration (based on national origins).
You are moving goalposts.
There were a lot of things in the USSR but leaving by "escape and defection" was not the only option.
It amazes me that some people will somehow still have the audacity to defend communism...
Same. Anyone who defends a red coloured party, after red coloured parties did so much damage in the past, is obviously a monster.
"That wasn't real Communism! It's actually great when done correctly!" /s
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- What capitalists did in 6 months that communists didn't manage in 50 years?
- Make communism look good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_nostalgia
It was mainly the USSR's doing. China managed to switch to state capitalism. I guess we'll see how that works out for them.
Communism and socialism have always looked good when compared to the principles of other economic and political doctrines:
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality. - it needs to suppress any other political alternative - it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
It necessarily increases the concentration of power in the hands of the few. Some of you may recall a statement about power corrupting, etc.
Just on the face of it: extending the idea of company towns to an entire _nation_ seems bad to me on paper.
Morally there are also a boatload of problematic assumptions behind communism. Start with its defacto assumptions that the state is entitled to the labor of everyone. It doesn't treat people as having any sort of agency whatsoever, just a commodity for the ruler. Their 'virtue' only goes as far as how they serve. That they denominate the unit of value as the toil of its subjects as something it has in abundance for granted, and thus as near worthless, and problem solving as a matter of throwing bodies into the breech. Meaning little need to improve efficiency. The produced goods are expensive and scarce. All the same problems as slavery.
In the end there is an awkward question. What separates Communism from a bronze age god-king's palace economy where everyone is a slave of the ruler?
Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better. Utopia - no, but better than capitalism. Without an example of a communist state shielded from constant attacks, sabotage and sanctions from the dominant capitalist we will never know how good it could get. We just know the imperfect as it was, it was still better.
> Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better.
Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).
Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
there's a wikipedia link above (showing indeed Czechia amongst the least "nostalgic" - only 25% in 2021). As for elections results, how many ppl don't bother to vote (31% absenteeism vs 36% best electoral score, ANO)? how many tv stations do communists have, how many lavishly funded NGOs? how many instances proving the "communist" party to be no more that a pale imitation if not straight up controlled opposition...
As for the "flawed methodology": 66.2% of Romanians regret Nicolae Ceausescu in a study..."commissioned by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile" - I'd say if the "institute" of bad-mouthing communism had to admit that number... well it seems the russian bots are extremely efficient, maybe we should listen to them instead of useless Ursula bots ;)
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They could each have their own balloon. Your mom would be trapped in East Germany, however.
I loled
Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.
Basic food was really cheap in eastern germany as well.
But cheap food is not everything.
> That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
>The family members included:
> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37
> Doris Strelzyk
> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15
> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11
> Günter Wetzel, aged 24
> Petra Wetzel
> Peter Wetzel, aged 5
> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2
Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
Not as of my knowledge. Coincidence I suppose, or desire by them to keep it private.
> Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
A gentleman does not ask a lady's age.
This true story moves us because it resembles much of human history, in which clever but powerless people struggle against morons -- morons who somehow gain control over a modern industrial state, then use that power to punish innocents who dare to assert simple human rights.
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
Too many morons. Too few balloons.
> Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis
Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan. This is got me laughing out loud.
While the difference between the two may still be wide, it is a lot more narrow than it was a year ago. Some people find this concerning.
> Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan.
It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.
> This is got me laughing out loud.
I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.