What Hacker News says

trod1234Feb 2025

I used to really like this news/op-ed outlet back when I didn't know anything at all. It hit all the right points, points out the problems, and had a clear narrative I could get behind. When I was young, and dumb.

Temporally it hasn't been that long at all since then, only about 5 years, but the difference those years made might as well have been 20. With lockdown and the time to read, you have time to read and contemplate, and when you decide to read the classics, a whole new world opens up where the answers become crystal clear because you stand once again upon the shoulders of giants. A fog is lifted, and no one seems to realize just how bad things have gotten but in retrospect after reading about the American Revolution, WW2, The Stasi, Mao, first-hand accounts. Its amazing.

Nowadays, its easy to pick this all apart. The author is drawing comparisons with 1984, but has failed to realize that 'The Party' that he is so anxious about isn't the Democrats, or the Republicans. Its anyone beholden to central bankers. The Central Banks are 'The Party', and they have infested both sides and quite a lot of government.

In a plurality, having two parties continuously above the 33% threshold guarantees no other parties can win in practice.

Most of the plugs the author hits now have been worn down by perspective that normally comes as a combination of education with age. Most of the points and rhetoric all come back to one book that helped Hitler take power.

That book was called The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon written 1895. Other aspects come from more recent research into Torture, and Influence (i.e. Robert Lifton, Joost Meerloo, Robert Cialdini, and the Cult Deprogrammers, etc).

The many warnings fell on deaf ears, the people believed that these things weren't happening because the people doing them said so, and it started long before, with the erosion of our institutions by the Boomer generation which promoted most heavily Judicial Activism.

After the point of no return.... The fall has us all. No one wanted to listen and do something when it could have mattered. The cost was simply too much back then, and it increases with time, so now its going to come down to lives just like any safety rule written in blood.

It is sad that this has to happen, but that is what happens when you let the enemy take over a generation's education, and instead of teaching them the tools they need to survive, you give them Wokeism.

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giardiniApr 2022

Social media enables behaviors once limited to crowds, mobs, parliaments, etc. Thanks to improved communications people can exhibit these behaviors w/o standing up.

Gustav Le Bon's book "The Crowd" explains group behaviors (and misbehaviors). The context may be, say, the French Revolution, but the behaviors are the same as exist in social media today.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind : Gustave Le Bon https://archive.org/details/crowdastudypopu00bongoog

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sklearncowboyJun 2021

To me the easiest way to understand social media is to read Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. It is a brilliant book as it is really just Freud commentating on The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon.

The most basic idea is once you join a psychological group you stop being fully rational and mostly act on emotions driven by the group.

Everything just makes sense after digesting parts of that book.

The part you mention about organized religions is also just the group.

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matgillardApr 2021

Can only agree. I recommend you to read The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Lebon

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giardiniJan 2021

Evidence of what? Don't be vague.

Few on the right pay attention to the Qanon meme. In contrast leftists believ most, if not all, conservatives are rabid Qanon faithful. But Qanon is a myth concocted by the left for the left.

As I've stated earlier, the left simply generates an endless sequence of lies, publishes (or yells them) them awhile and then abandons them when the next lie is concocted for publication or if the lie falls flat in the public eye.

No autopsy, no inquest is ever performed on the left's past outrageous lies. If you ask them about the "Russian conspiracy" they'll ignore you and shout about the rightist "insurrection", their latest meme.

The left is, essentially, a mob:

"The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind Paperback – December 24, 2016 by Gustave Le Bon"

https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-Study-Popular-Mind/dp/163600016...

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rqsSep 2018

> The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior.

I don't think this is the right target to blame. The much deeper reason is people ARE stupid, while think they are clever and correct. You, me, all the others included. And at the same time, the education once applied to us, failed. Simply put, it's not a technology problem, it's a sociology problem.

Around the year 2002, when I was connected to the Internet for the first time, I thought it was a magic place where you can discuss with people on a topic until the truth emerges and learned, then everybody come to a conclusion and live happily ever after.

That thought was the very first few which been destroyed. Because I instead found people are more likely to turn discussion into a "clan war" and mob each other instead. And that was long before Twitter or even Google is a thing.

Here is a book that many people may already read, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-Study-Popular-Mind/dp/143410055...

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