I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
dividefuel · · focus · HN ↗
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
CMay · · focus · HN ↗
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
the_gipsy · · focus · HN ↗
It's the USA eating itself and trying to attack Europe, if anything. It's American fascist billionaires who own, buy, and steer these social networks.
CMay · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
the_gipsy · · focus · HN ↗
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.
CMay · · focus · HN ↗
Originally we had The League of Nations. The idea was a sort of collective defense. Europe failed. They did not come to each other's aid.
After WW2, that was the second time the US had to come stop the wars. We weren't simply going to join a defense pact if Europe couldn't demonstrate that its own collective defense had teeth. So the establishment of the Western Union was an attempt to demonstrate to the US that Europe was finally ready. Then NATO was formed.
Now, Europe has been underfunding its defense for decades and not meeting their NATO commitments, so that original question was back on the table. Can Europe even defend itself? Is it overly reliant on the US?
So, no. We will not apologize for being tough with you, because the world is changing and you no longer have the option to just stagnate. We're not losing any allies, that's just rhetoric and propaganda. You're not a serious person if you think that somehow western countries aren't going to help each other.
Making you stronger means you can help yourself or even help us later. Fundamentally, if our allies are stronger it also changes the Chinese calculus on how much of a threat from Europe they have to factor in before possibly starting World War 3.
The bottom line is, get off your asses and light a fire under your government to invest in defense spending, or be a small part of the cause of future millions of deaths, because your feelings were hurt.
If you don't even have enough compassion for fellow humans to want to stop World War 3, then you have no moral ground to stand on.
camgunz · · focus · HN ↗
Putin wasn't forced to invade Ukraine. What was he even putatively trying to avoid? NATO's not belligerent (you can't simultaneously argue that Europe's military is pathetically weak, but also that it was so muscular and menacing that Putin had to respond proactively).
Hitler chose to start WW2. He wasn't forced to invade France to stop communism. He wasn't forced to attempt over and over to invade Great Britain to stop communism.
China, Russia, etc aren't looking for openings to start WW3. It would be devastating to them--just the war with Ukraine has had generational consequences for Russia. They also aren't innocent nations who, after intolerable saber rattling by the West, will have no choice but to start WW3. It's further not the case that the only deterrent to these innocent nations regrettably starting an insane conflict is a heavily armed Europe. The US is pretty heavily armed! France and GB are nuclear powers!
CMay · · focus · HN ↗
What we see today is different. Russia and China are projecting a shift to their hemisphere in terms of world influence. The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
The CCP was directly established by Comintern, and even though the current thinking is that global communist expansion was abandoned, the way Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela have been behaving make communist or "post-communist" states a resurgent threat.
War would be devastating, but the idea is that if it was a World War, then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China. This is part of why we have supported Ukraine, but not overinvested. It's part of why we captured Maduro, who was threatening to invade his neighbor. It's also part of why we're sorting out Iran, because we need to take that trigger button out of China's toolchest. Imagine it going off while we're busy with China.
With the state of the world now, if China invaded Taiwan and tripped the Japanese tripwire, we would largely be free to focus on China. That is I think what Chinese analysts see now.
camgunz · · focus · HN ↗
I think when economies falter governments falter, and their philosophies are discredited. So it makes sense that governments were on thin ice in the wake of WW1 and the Great Depression, and that more radical parties from the left and the right were ascendant. I think something similar is happening now, if of lower magnitude. But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
> The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
> then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China
You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
Finally, I don't exactly know what you mean by "focus on China." The West's relationship with China is complex, a lot of people are focused on it. The likelihood of direct confrontation with them is quite low, as it'd be disastrous for both sides.
CMay · · focus · HN ↗
Communism was an absolute existential, civilizational and culture destroying threat. That is how it was seen back then in Europe. Without that threat, fascism would not have risen. Communism wasn't a scapegoat for a totally separate fascist ideology, fascism was a direct counter to the threat of communism. People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument. So you can't separate them the way you do here.
> China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
They are Marxist-Leninist to the extent that it is baked into their constitution and "corruption" often means you are not upholding Marxist principles or carrying forward the revolution. So, reformers, democracy advocates, not using your money to benefit the state and so on. From a post market reforms perspective, they are more like a neo-mercantilist command economy, but make no mistake that the Marxist philosophy is alive and acted on in China. They were being lax before Xi Jinping. Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
> Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
China does not need a giant navy with all these bombers, jets, carriers and destroyers, building out all these fake islands across the region and demanding that no regional countries allow foreign countries to help them with military fortification. They don't need all of that in order to take Taiwan. China lacks critical resources that would prevent it from being reliant on external trade, the same way Japan did. The difference is, Japan was afraid of communism and China wants to prevent the communist party from falling the way the Soviet Union did.
Taking back Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet is about finishing the communist revolution which in China was less about class warfare and more about anti-colonialism. It's even baked into their constitution for this reason. What they will do with their power once they have it, is unknown. What they already do with the power they have is very concerning and not promoting peace in the world. This does not suggest great peaceful eventual motivations in their region if that's what they support.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin.
Stop thinking about Trump admin this, Trump admin that. It's the US. It's a very common mistake for people to see some presidential candidate and think that's everything they are and when they become president then that's what the US is. Universally, the US has its own aims and the presidency tends to align with those aims in one way or another regardless who becomes president. Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb? That's basically what you're describing. We've got thinktanks on top of thinktanks on top of thinktanks and objectively some very smart people in the admin whether you like their politics or rhetorical strategy or not. Like, measurably. So, no. Your not understanding of strategy is not proof of lack of strategy.
> They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc). Communists just love controlling the resources. Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
So, yeah we wrecked them and with good reason. The US treated them fairly in the 1950s, gave them a standard international oil deal like most countries have, built hospitals, schools etc but then the communists tricked the population into thinking we were stealing their oil, then they nationalized it and after that no oil companies wanted to invest there. So their oil infrastructure fell apart and in the 1990s/2000s Venezuela tried to reverse course on their communist resource manifesto and give oil companies the same standard OPEC style deal they had in the 1950s before the nationalization, but no companies wanted to invest again. Same problem happens in Cuba, because Cuba keeps inviting companies to invest and then they steal the company's assets and nationalize it or otherwise.
So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
This is what many Venezuelans think about it and this is just one person, but many could echo this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cylfhA8pNgY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cylfhA8pNgY
camgunz · · focus · HN ↗
Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.
> Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
No, it's Han Superiority. That's why they haven't expanded south: they don't care about non-Chinese. Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
> China does not... need all of that in order to take Taiwan.
The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. ... Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb?
Obama spent years getting the JCPOA. Trump tore it up, spent billions of dollars, caused a worldwide energy crisis, and Iran's ascendant. Some presidents have better foreign policy than others.
> This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries.
Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
> They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc).
The Biden admin didn't think this was credible.
> Communists just love controlling the resources.
Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
Is Trump a communist or do more than just communists like to control the resources?
> Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
> So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
CMay · · focus · HN ↗
Of course not, he never planned to attack the Brits. They declared war on Germany after Germany attacked Poland. To be fair, they told him that's what they would do if he attacked Poland.
One point of attacking Poland even though they were anti-communist and inviting Russia to join in, is to disguise the true aim from Russia which was to invade the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist International. And they certainly eventually did invade.
Japan would have joined in, but invading Russia from their side was very unfavorable.
> Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
Technically they did kill the land owners and hand the land over to the workers. Then they murdered countless intellectuals and elites to make sure that workers had no competition in being on top. Then they enslaved the workers, tortured them, stole their production and took back their land. Even today they largely keep their wages suppressed.
You could argue that core Marxist principles are taking a back seat to national strategy, but the CCP higher ups are definite believers of Marx even if it might be easier to describe their system as some kind of neo-mercantilism. To them the reality is the same as it was under the Soviet Union. They cannot achieve their goal of communism in a world where capitalism also exists.
It's strange though how theoretically communism should be inundated with empathy, but in practice it barely cares about people and treats their lives as a commodity. It would be hilarious how stupidly bad their logic is in thinking that a brutal philosophy would be allowed to expand and control the Earth, if it wasn't so sad. They like to think of themselves as the clever deceptive geniuses who know better and are truly logical, erasing religion and going all in on science, yet they do the most insane illogical things that guarantee the most basic kinds of failure.
Failing to establish the fundamentals of a state to give most workers a decent living is bad enough, but to do that in exchange for a failed attempt to control the world is even worse. Failure has limited consequences too, because they can simply lie about how things are so the normal pressures that should exist for them to do a better job aren't as potent.
> The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
That doesn't change what I said. They still don't need all of that. China is also of the Russian mindset when it comes to human life. They don't mind throwing a bunch of their people at a problem to go die, so casualties is not a big issue if it came to that. China has also shown itself very capable of taking negative results in order to reject something else. So if there is something they want enough, they can likely suffer for it.
> Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
I mean, technically these countries don't formally publish charges for someone in an uncooperative foreign country, because the UN typically doesn't like going into a country to capture someone. That means they rely on the person coming to them or being extradited, but both of those require the person coming to their country so you can arrest them or avoiding them fleeing before an extradition. So you have sealed warrants that nobody knows about until the moment the person enters your country and they get arrested. The ICC was investigating Maduro and Venezuela, but their investigations have often been delayed and if they did have a sealed warrant for Maduro, nobody knows.
The way the US accelerated the timeline is that the ICC does not handle terrorism cases. By identifying that Maduro was assisting cartels that are on the formally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list and that he was promoting the distribution of drugs into the US for _political_ reasons and these drugs have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, there is a kind of justification. For example, how we attacked terrorists in some countries without permission from a country is by claiming they are Unwilling or Unable to sort it out themselves or assist.
Another important distinction is that, if Maduro had been rightly elected he might have had more protection as a head of state, but instead since he stole the election and this was internationally recognized, he didn't have the same kinds of protections.
Some people argue that less fentanyl comes out of Venezuela than other countries, but they ignore the fact that cocaine alone has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US so it is its own issue.
Obviously there is some gymnastics going on, but we would not have done this if it wasn't important.
> Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
That's mostly Trump trolling. Venezuela is still a sovereign state as per the UN, but we're managing their transition period since they don't have a legitimate government. The US used to have an oil deal with Venezuela that was pretty standard and quite the international norm. Communists then lied to the people and told them we were stealing their oil. They got elected and nationalized the oil, so oil companies left and stopped investing. In the 1990s and 2000s, Venezuela tried to return to the old deal to attract oil companies back, but nobody wanted to come back due to the risk they they would just nationalize their investments again. We're not simply taking their oil as "spoils", we're paying for it and the deal is structured to reduce the perceived risk that investors face when they invest in Venezuela. The deal is worse than what Venezuela used to have, but that's expected when you betray the trust of companies and investors which now means there's a risk premium included.
> This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
Algorithm? It's called Reuters. It's called AP News.
> Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
Venezuela was responsible for countless thousands of American deaths and has engaged in wildly unlawful things, disregarding international law blatantly. Maduro was not the leader of Venezuela, so we didn't abduct the leader. We are definitely blowing up drug boats, though and have taken out almost 70 of them now. In the middle east, we've launched strikes on lots of unarmed people that we designated as terrorists and these are just people working for the cartels that have been designated as terrorists. They don't have to be carrying a gun. These groups have killed over 1 million Americans over the past 20 years, which is more than any terrorist attack. I think a lot of people simply don't understand the scale of the problem we're facing in terms of grayzone warfare. The US is uniquely targeted, because we've been the only country standing in the way of countries like China or Russia having their way.