> Igor Sikorsky... fled in 1917 because the Soviets threatened to shoot him.
> The US has been working itself up to this for about 20 years now, since the “war on terror” started, and the oligarch weaponization of “woke” politics to keep the left from raising their taxes post Occupy Wall Street. Now it’s a war of terror, and the enemy, as they say, is us.
The "Woke Left" is coming to shoot us! Any day now!
> Conservative family-oriented religious people like Sikorsky and Seversky [...] being the backbone of every functioning civilization for all of human history.
Honestly, nobody is getting "cancelled", harassed, or whatever, for manifesting these adjectives. It's ALWAYS something beyond.
Well if you move the goalpost to "taking away equal-rights from homosexuals"...
what else should we include? Racism, misogyny..? Do you really wonder why someone would get attacked for being homophobic, or are we just playing hide and seek here?
No, I'm saying that you are claimed that cancelling "conservative family-oriented religious" people (who very often oppose gay marriage, at least in the US) doesn't really happen ("It's ALWAYS something beyond").
However, after being pointed to an example of that, you actually support it. (by implying that people "taking away equal-rights from homosexuals" should be cancelled).
The article I linked to explores this phenomenon in more detail.
Also, homophobia is a charged word. Heteronormativity [1] is probably more descriptive.
You are proving my point to the dot: beyond "conservative family-oriented religious" really lies "proposing to make homosexual marriage illegal".
And also my second point: "Homophobia is not happening", it's just being conservative. But also, "homophobia is happening! and it's a good thing!"
I don't know about heteronormative/homophobic. But wanting to make gay marriage illegal sure sounds very much like hating those people specifically. It hurts noone if they marry, but they hurt a lot if they can't. I think "homophobic" is the correct nomenclature in this case, and "heteronormative" is more about your personal or your group's preference and manifestation.
> beyond "conservative family-oriented religious" really lies "proposing to make homosexual marriage illegal".
Right, it often does. But yet again, that means that people do get cancelled because of voicing and supporting socially conservative beliefs.
> it's just being conservative
Heteronormative is an important part of social conservatism in the US. If you think that's not the case, I'd be curious to know what do you think a person who is "just" socially conservative believes in.
If you want a very specific thing, which is to ban gay marriage, then you can't demand to put it under some broad term or be called some softer term as distraction. Otherwise you're just self-censoring because there is no point in arguing semantics.
If merely your own preference were "heterosexuality, family-oriented and religious" without interfering in other's lives, then of course "homophobic" would not apply and nobody would call you that.
> what do you think a person who is "just" socially conservative believes in.
"Conservative" can mean many things, I admit that especially in the US it can mean opposing homosexual marriage. But the article was speaking in global terms ("every functioning civilization for all of human history"), and in that context it can mean many even more many different things.
All in all I find this game of "secretly being homophobic" pathetic, and that you would quote "That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is" is extremely ironic. Just be straight with it and say that you hate gays, or that certain people are lesser people or whatever you think. You're gonna get in trouble anyway. Or is it worth the trouble to hate people? Good luck.
> All in all I find this game of "secretly being homophobic" pathetic, and that you would quote "That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is" is extremely ironic. Just be straight with it and say that you hate gays, or that certain people are lesser people or whatever you think. You're gonna get in trouble anyway. Or is it worth the trouble to hate people? Good luck.
This last paragraph is just a boring personal attack/implicit threat, and obviously not OK. You are not going to have a lot of luck convincing people who disagree with you like that. And you may get yourself in trouble on HN. [1]
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
If 3/4 of the voting population agrees, then yes? That's explicitly what the US constitution allows.
Probably not in this generation but there's a theoretical possibility in some future generation, and it also applies the other way, polygamy, incest, etc., can also theoretically be made legal.
It's unlikely for a huge chunk of the population to intentionally lower their own status, but it's not a 0% chance.
It would be more difficult to do in Canada or some other countries, but also not totally impossible.
That's what voting and majorities and supermajorities means.
He was campaigning against equal rights for homosexuals, not polygamy, incest, "etc.".
In some countries a wide degree of relationships are today being legally accepted as "family", such as brothers or friends living in a household. The important thing is that this does not affect anybody wanting to live in a traditional family.
If democracy was purely about what the majority votes, and not also protecting the minorities to some degree, we should not call it civilization then. Reducing it it to a "legal majority rule" does not make e.g. slavery legitimate or morally acceptable.
The final arbiter of what counts as 'legitimate' in the US is what's spelled out in the Consitutition, assuming the government and military are willing to enforce what's written.
There are some extreme scenarios where that would no longer apply, but passing readers will get the point without needing to read every possible corner case.
Another great example of a physicists being atrocious at doing humane scholarship. Between praising tsarists Russia and having his favorite translation of the futurist manifesto published on his blog, this is just straight fascism on the front page of HN.
The linked article suggests that Russia might have kept its educated people if the Bolsheviks hadn't taken power and driven all those people into emigration. Few people would dispute that, and it is important to note that the Bolsheviks did not overthrow the tsar: he was already gone by the October Revolution, having been deposed in the February Revolution earlier in the year.
So, it’s not about praising the tsar. If Bolsheviks specifically hadn’t screwed everything up, Russia may well have remained on the same path of development under the tsar-free regime brought in during February 1917.
> having his favorite translation of the futurist manifesto
In spite of Futurism's undeniable links to early Italian Fascism, I suspect that, overall, the Futurist Manifesto is discussed as an important piece of literary history and an interesting text by more people who are broadly on the left, than people who literally believe in fascism. After all, Futurism was an example of Modernism in the arts, but much fascism today often makes it a point to rejects Modernism.
The linked site is well known for being quite on the right, and arguably too unhinged to deserve HN links. But there is so much better evidence you could have pointed to for that, than your two assertions I quoted here.
Well, considering that at it's peak , only about 10,000 out of 330 million americans applied to give up their citizenship a year, I'd say the second part of the authors article is BS . They mention some regional and covid related events to argue that a certain group of people are getting persecuted in the US. r/persecutionfetish if it were reddit
Moral of the story: As an autocrat, when your power is challenged by society as a whole don't fight back attempts at democratic control else worse things may happen for everyone (if you care, also you may end up in front of a firing squad)
(And don't go to war repeatedly, war is always a gamble)
From the part of the article where the author draws the moral of the story:
> As America descends into the California model of madness and tech-mediated kakistocracy, the smart and adventurous Americans; the kind that found tech companies, or build devilish new weapons for governments, will leave. I know many who have. Virtually everyone I speak to (of course a biased set) is thinking about it. Left wing, right wing: people in tech, military technology, finance, crypto; they see the US heading over the waterfall into madness and want no part of it.
Assuming for a moment that this observation is correct, what are the destinations that the smart and adventurous Americans are leaving to? What places in the world are now the most hospitable and the most rewarding for talent? My naive impression was that Wester European countries are even less agile and enterprising than the US, and anyway, move in lockstep with it. Russia is obviously out. I doubt people are moving to African countries. Nor do I think I heard about an immigration wave into China. And despite Balaji's bullishness on India, I thought net migration is still out of India rather than the other way around. Same with Eastern Europe. So where are these Americans going? Australia? Israel? Singapore?
I've known a few American techies who have set up shop in South Korea and Thailand. The tech scene in Turkey has been, to me, surprisingly active. I've heard distant rumor of people looking at Brazil.
They are also extremely odd choices for people that think the possibility people might boycott them for their political tweets is a threat to their freedom of conscience comparable to Soviet Russia...
I'll add to this...all the cases I personally knew of were in hardware development, as with the notable cases in TFA. I suppose you may evaluate a locale differently for a hardware company than for an Internet startup.
Nowhere? Americans are (almost) the only people subject to income tax even on income not made in the US. You'd need to get a very good income to live on two sets of taxes (how unfree for such supposedly free people...)
That means that for your first $120k earned, if you pay tax on that in your country of residence and meet other criteria, you will not be double taxed by the US.
Two things on this front. The first is a foreign earned income exclusion. The first $120,000 you earn is not taxed. The second is that one can also renounce their citizenship. It's not particularly extreme if you only plan on returning to visit, rather than live in America, and is quite handy not only for avoiding double taxation, but also making it vastly easier to bank abroad.
America has a habit of making laws that it compels other countries to follow, and banking is definitely one of those. Foreign banks dealing with US nationals have a mountain of paperwork, rules, and regulations to abide to the point that US citizenship is often a substantial hurdle to foreign banking. And, as usual, the extremely high wealth types that acts like FATCA [1] ostensibly target have little difficulty finding ways around it. It's the 'normal' people who get hit the hardest.
You make renouncing citizenship sound far easier than it is: renouncing US citizenship is irrevocable. You might have elderly relatives you want to look after once they become too frail to look after themselves; you can't do that on recurring tourist visas. You won't be able to see your relatives for extended periods of time.
(plus you still have to pay outstanding taxes, plus an exit fee that goes up substantially if you make a lot of money;
plus I'm pretty sure the Swiss median income, for Tina Turner's example, is higher than 120k USD per year so you're always paying taxes)
as a counterargument, every single aerospace engineer I know (a few dozen), mainly in socal, has no plans of ever leaving. in fact, aerospace engineers I know from the UK and europe are dying to move to the US.
I buy that people they spoke to "think" about it, like people saying they were going to leave the US when trump was elected but no mass exodus occurred. it feels like pure fear mongering with people "thinking" or "considering", since that means nothing. The US isn't falling or dying, and even if it was its worth saving rather than running away. they're even spouting misinformation like the USG is preventing people from revoking citizenship because they dont want people to leave, despite the reason this was occuring was because of COVID regulations.
The US is the greatest country in the world, bar none. It has a lot to improve upon and these intelligent people should try their hardest to improve it. this article is anti-american at best and is abundant with conspiracy theories to the point it is noncredible.
Many companies are indeed leaving California [1], and moving to 'friendlier' areas. The same has been true of numerous high income/wealth individuals. If California levies a wealth tax, I'd expect them to accelerate the decline. Norway actually had their own experience with this recently. They decided to slightly raise the wealth tax (which they already had in place) to try to squeeze their highest wealth citizens even more. Enough people left the country that their net tax revenue actually decreased. [2] To stop this, they're now considering trying to pass an 'exit tax' where people who leave the country will be taxed. I'm sure that'll work out great for them. I'd never heard the term kakistocracy before this article, but wow does it fit for much of the world's governance in modern times.
The mass emigrating to other countries take is a little eccentric, but companies and people are doing this with moves out of California to places like Texas, etc.
> The US has been working itself up to this for about 20 years now, since the “war on terror” started, and the oligarch weaponization of “woke” politics to keep the left from raising their taxes post Occupy Wall Street. Now it’s a war of terror, and the enemy, as they say, is us.
The "Woke Left" is coming to shoot us! Any day now!
> Conservative family-oriented religious people like Sikorsky and Seversky [...] being the backbone of every functioning civilization for all of human history.
Honestly, nobody is getting "cancelled", harassed, or whatever, for manifesting these adjectives. It's ALWAYS something beyond.