Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lazyeye 306 days ago
"I probably shouldn't extrapolate this historical anecdote to the modern era..." yes cherry-picked history taken in isolation is utterly meaningless.

Just for balance here's some cherries I've picked on the left side of the political spectrum:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

2 comments

How do these people relate to Democratic Socialists in the United States of America in the twenty-first century, since that's the political affiliation of the person we're actually talking about?
Taken to its extreme, any system of government is bad. The people you list there have one thing in common and it's not socialism: they were all malignant narcissists. A malignant narcissist in charge of any government -- left or right wing, communist or capitalist -- will create chaos, death, and destruction. Witness now, the American government falling into fascism under the leadership of yet another malignant narcissist. If things keep going this way, the US will suffer the same fate as the USSR. Not because the US fell to socialism, but because it fell to narcissistic authoritarianism.

Mamandi, for his part, is not a malignant narcissist, so New York should probably not turn out like Soviet Russia. The US as a whole on the other hand may not be so lucky.