Modern warfare is very different than war 150 years ago. Look at Bosnia and Syria for typical examples.
And before you say: oh, they're different from us, remember that Sarajevo was a modern city that hosted the winter Olympics 8 years before brutal war broke out. Most of its citizens thought the idea of war happening was absolutely preposterous, until it wasn't.
I agree. I'm surprised more HNers aren't aware of this potential. To be clear, I condemn those pushing us toward political violence, but it has a decent chance of arriving in the next 6-12 months even.
So the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct headquarters was just overrun, weapons seized, and burned down by hundreds of citizens. National Guard and SWAT are en route.
Are you still so sure about the idea of internal civil strife being "unsubstantiated fear mongering"?
And by the way, race-based civil conflict is only a small part of the structural problems I'm worried about. There are multiple deeper, more dangerous threats on the horizon.
For example, are you sure that Trump will peacefully vacate the office if he loses the election? If not, what exactly do you think will happen then?
Finally, not that this matters a whole lot to me, but to provide you with "substantiation" that you may accept, many mainstream media outlets have covered this in detail in the past year or two. Here are just a couple, Google keywords such as "US civil war 2" (just "civil war" turns up Avengers stuff) and "boogaloo" for more mainstream media coverage:
I don't get out much but it doesn't seem likely to me that internal civil strife will actually break out in widespread violence. Who would fight whom, and to what end? A lot of us are mad at each other, sure, but we don't really want to shoot each other. South Park did a whole episode on it.
I appreciate this comment and mostly agree with the contents of it. But I take exception with the use of words like "evil", "monsters", etc.
I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.
I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.
If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.
I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.
And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.
(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).
By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.
I'm not using those words literally but as a way of communicating the emotional effect of what I called the shock experience. (Edit: by 'emotional effect' I just mean how it feels.)
In the comments, an educator references an excellent article related to this confusion, "When Can you Meaningfully Add Rates, Ratios, and Fractions" that implicitly suggests some pedagogical approaches: https://flm-journal.org/Articles/11019C10CF34E90DC5866E53E90...
But restaurants and hairdressers are known to be places where COVID-19 can be actively spread to large groups of people. And gyms are even worse.
We should be encouraging people to go outdoors, and to not congregate in large groups.
Finally, bear in mind that public officials, like scientists and laypeople, are just figuring all this out, too. It's a novel infectious agent, after all. But it's important to self-correct quickly.
Ironically, it looks like masks may turn out to be one of the most effective interventions, yet there's a huge political backlash against them that many pols are stirring up, so 20-30% of the country will never wear them.
> I wish they had considered going back decades ago
Considered what? You've said they had a hard life.
Edit: Oh, I misread that (parsed it as "considered, going back decades ago", thinking you were implying you wish they had considered the effect of their actions). Yeah, I think for many older immigrants who were forced to emigrate from their homeland because of warfare or economic collapse, going back makes sense if conditions have improved.
They're too old now, health issues keep them house bound.
There was a time where they had the money and vitality to tackle the things that kept them out of their comfort zone. They were forced out of their country by a military invasion, and so in their mind, the country as it turned out wasn't theirs anymore either.
But they meet up with others who left under the same circumstances.. there's a shared culture, but it's all stopped in time. Frozen.
> I don't quite understand the power imbalance here
There's only a power imbalance if workers are prevented from organizing, or if they (for whatever reason) refuse to organize. Or if they workers are very easily replaceable.
Obviously, if you're one of 200 workers, you can't negotiate evenly with the ownership as 1/200th of the company's workforce. Same goes if you're an unskilled worker who is easy to replace. However, even then, if you organize with all 200 of your co-workers, you are closer to a balance in negotiating power since it would be hard for said company to replace all 200 workers at once.
> The most powerful movers are the most exploited and dispossessed people, but they don't want to risk what little they have.
By that logic, then technical folks, particularly devops people, are in a very strong role to make change. AWS is a very significant portion of Amazon's profits, and it will crumble to the ground if they mass strike just as much as Amazon's retail sector will crumble if the FC workers mass strike.
You think AWS can maintain 3+ 9s with 50%+ of their operations people striking? Look at what simply shifting to remote work has done to Github uptime over the past month: 99.6% after months of 3+ 9s. Their uptime would likely stop dropping quickly, particularly if strikes extended into weeks.
And before you say: oh, they're different from us, remember that Sarajevo was a modern city that hosted the winter Olympics 8 years before brutal war broke out. Most of its citizens thought the idea of war happening was absolutely preposterous, until it wasn't.