Ask HN: Why are we all pretending everything is normal?

What can be done is participating in resistance when you can. Turn in work slower. Lose documents. Be the sand in the gears. Be the mosquito in the room.

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We've been pretending for a while, now. We pretended Facebook was acceptable for democracy even after the fallout of Cambridge Analytica. We pretended Google wasn't abusing us with AdSense because none of us users saw the harm. We pretended Microsoft and Apple wouldn't sell us out to politicians and sycophants at the nearest opportunity, and assumed TikTok wasn't a trojan horse despite American market access in China being curtailed for years.

Authoritarianism just seems like the next natural step. It's obvious that Americans don't intend to regulate or boycott harmful businesses, so now what? Money takes control.

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Are you referring to the climate and ecological crisis, or the many cascading problems resulting from overextraction of limited resources?

There won't be any tech on a dead planet.

>I know we’re supposed to be tech focused but I see no posts regarding the situation at large.

There have been plenty, but Hacker News has been very assiduous in flagging every one.

A lot of people support the current regime and have vested interests, political and financial, in normalizing what they want to be the new status quo.

A lot of people simply don't care unless it affects them personally, or they're simply in shock.

Either way, it's politics and Hacker News interprets politics as intellectual damage and tries to route around it. Not much one can do, this isn't a free speech platform, it's a curated speech platform.

This is the new normal. Welcome.

And honestly, if you looked at how weird politic was before the World Wars and the Cold War, we may be reverting to the mean. RIP Pax Americana

flagged - rorschach test

tech people are the ones running and driving "it" forward. almost all of them. the rest of the constituents is meek, irrelevant in terms of actual relevance - beyond hierarchies & chains of command.

indie/ low tech is rare.

people striving for symbiotic methods are even rarer.

the now got reduced to a ticktockish attention span and sphere. even among artists.

the buck counts more than the message. the message is no more than "compensation". "i blinded myself, mhwiwiwi"

fuFAANG/Fortune5000 are more vulnerable than todlers but even peeps with toddlers don't "transcend" ...

it's a full metal jacket kind of rationale ... "better u now and the rest of us later than me boss now" ...

it's just a couple of million years, don't worry.

the huge rock implicitly linked to the development of Earth doesn't know mercy.

life will evolve somewhere far away yet again. only a matter of time until your genes get combined again, ... if you are not among the reasons why that rock got on its way, that is ... like too many of 'dem dinosaurs, 'member?

It seems there are a lot of heightened emotions everywhere. But one thing to note is that Trump laid out this vision while he was campaigning, and he got the popular vote based on it. A lot of non-white, non-male, and non-European people voted for Trump.

There’s clearly an ideological tipping point for some people that’s essentially a point-of-no-return, whereafter they view anyone who differs from them, however slightly, as an existential threat and an enemy to be dominated. It doesn’t matter if your ideology is left or right, if you think that way, it’s very aggressive.

In general, I think people should try to borrow their ideology from all parts of the political spectrum as what fits one situation, doesn’t work for another. The overall goal, I think, should be to optimize for both social stability and individual liberties, as both of those facets of society have historically shown to result in the most productive and effective societies and economies.

It really helped me to listen to Eli Lake's Jan 22, 2025 podcast on Honestly having to do with American populism, especially that of our last populist president, Andrew Jackson.

The basic idea is that populism does not become the new norm (as per poster legitster) except for a period of maybe 8 - 10 years. Grassroots populism provides a corrective when the ruling elites have lost touch with the chief concerns of the people. Both the Democrats and the Republicans will tweak their platforms to incorporate some of these ideas, and having done their job, the populists will fade away. Before this wave of populism departs, there will probably be a bipartisan agreement that DEI programs have gotten out of control, that gender reassignment surgery for children is a bad idea, that the first amendment to the Constitution is a good thing and should be defended. (That last sentence, "Before this wave of populism departs..." reflects my speculation, not that of Eli Lake.)

Public administration should be "boring" and a utility that provides predictable quality services without the corrosive corruption of total regulatory capture. The problem right now is it has devolved into a spectacle of personalities and fanatical team sport that occupies disproportionate mindshare that reduces happiness, economic output, world standing, and more.

The most sensible way forward would be in the spirit of Aaron Swartz's realization that the political operating system was sick and now needs urgent care. And so no enduring reform can be realized from within because of vested interested benefit from the ever sliding status quo. This demands a broad base of ordinary people to overthrow the oligarchs using deliberate, peaceful means by the multitudes. The time still isn't ripe yet, but the time is coming for a necessary and essential reset back to sane adult competent leaders who listen to the people irrespective of money, and provide public administration for the benefit of the majority of folks. Small government is no panacea when the billionaires' rival the state in power and influence, smart government not influenced by big money is where the US needs to be to thrive and to continue. Perhaps America should do representative democracy differently with a variant of sortition rather than celebrity popularity contests sold by mass media.

My brain thinks about three things when I read about what’s happening.

1. Can the next administration fix everything. Can they undo all of the crazy things happening.

2. Will we get into a civil war situation. Just watch the movie. It’s real possibility at any moment.

3. Some of the executive orders directly hurt the people in the fly over states and other southern areas. Will they finally see the person they elected cares nothing about them?