HackiNews

• WillAdams
  One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:

  -------------------------------------------

  House of Representatives, U.S.

  Part of Congressional Record --- Free

  FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA

  Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va

  Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957

  -------------------------------------------

  U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

  Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.

  I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.

  and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.

  • MomsAVoxell
    >Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.

    It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.

    Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...

    • chuckadams
      > What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...

      Or where they'd still like to take us. The only problem they have with Ayatollahs is that they call God by the wrong name.

      • zulux
        Well, that, and the rapeing and the murdering. And sticking their women in sacks isn't a good look for the theocracy.
      • MomsAVoxell
        I think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty good framework by which to assess the longterm viability of a nation/state/group. States which violate the principles of the UDHR tend to be dreadful places to live in many ways - and this is as true of Western states as it is the non-Western ones.

        I couldn't live in a state which allows its police forces to murder with impunity, for example.

        The point is that the moral authority we claim over other states is a fallacy. Until we are actually protecting civil rights to the extent we expect of other nations, we are hypocritically justifying our own states heinous track record.

        Alas, this seems to be understood pretty well by the ruling classes, who have subjugated human rights to mean "this gives us a right to justify the destruction of sovereign states and their peoples' we have deemed inferior".

    • 4798642799
      Spoken like a true terrorist.
    • [deleted]
      Comment removed.

      • trismus
        Nope, this is what the world thinks of America.

        • cowlevel
          It literally happened.

          Lee Atwater, Republican party strategist, 1981:

          > You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”

          He predates the war on terror though.

          • exogeny
            Yep, the southern strategy. Make the lowest white man feel superior to the best minority.

            It's truly amazing how well it works.

        • juleiie
          I am not even from USA… how much do you get paid for spreading vile shit online?

          Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? People invent cures, rockets, new physics and look at yourself, what a failure. Sitting there in some garbage in front of rows of phones. A slave.

          Accomplishing nothing except evil.

          • regretsresin
            Are you racist? Or a bot yourself? I genuinely cannot tell.
• mentalgear
  Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.

  The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.

  • VulgarExigency
    > Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.

    What makes you think they've stopped?

    • gadders
      Well, "they" did their best to stop Bernie running.

      • cowlevel
        They succeeded.

        I remember reading the online news about those primaries as they happened. Bernie wins this state in a landslide. Bernie wins that state in a landslide. Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states. At the end he doesn't have enough votes, oh dear. Some sort of investigation happened, but concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to.

      • swed420
        So did Dems
    • mentalgear
      Never said they stopped: industry 'leaders', authoritarians, will always try to keep and expand their abusive grip over others and claw as much power from the common people as possible. The methods are always the same: distraction, disinformation, abuse. The common people's only defense is transparent institutions and limiting power/wealth in general.

      See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military administration.

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

      • regretsresin
        The democrats participate in this export strongly too. Biden shut down a really important union strike. They are less overt about it, but go watch Malcolm X talk about foxes and wolves.
  • superdisk
    It's the most important election of our lifetime... For the fourth time in a row!

    • samrus
      Thats what happens when you live in increasingly interesting times
    • chasd00
      The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.

      My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.

      • cowlevel
        It is though? Like every single election, someone runs on the platform of abolishing democracy. Every single election, it's important that person doesn't win, or there won't be a democracy any more.
    • Micrococonut
      As long as people keep electing fascist billionaires to loot the country, the fight continues
  • accountrequired
    >multi-coalition, working class movement

    That is how Communists get their cultural revolution, you know.

  • regretsresin
    It doesn't all hinge on this November. It hinges on all the moments where people do work to avoid fascism. Some of that happens at the polls. Some of that happens at home. Some of that happens online.

    Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.

  • kspacewalk2
    >Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.

    It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.

    The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?

    And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".

    • cowlevel
      There's another country that has infiltrated the whole American government, and a third country that is often said to have infiltrated American academia and civil society, but we don't seem to worry about them. Why the distinction?
• andrewla
  Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter

  • mentalgear
    Interesting, true citizen action only revealed the FBI was the author of the blackmailing of MLK.

    > On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.

    • embedding-shape
      Some might call this lawlessness, but in a society where the government is keeping secrets from its own constituents, this sort of actions are the only ones a citizen can realistically do to return from a lawless and corrupt government, sadly.

      Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.

      • MomsAVoxell
        The corruption of government begins with its secrets. A truly free people keep no secrets.
• hypfer
  That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments. Wild. I guess the tactics have always been the same then.

  At least now we have LLMs that can produce this kind of stuff at human-overwhelming rates, so that is progress.

  • somenameforme
    I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.

    I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.

    So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.

  • williamdclt
    > That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments

    the corners of the internet that you frequent have much more eloquent haters than the ones I'm used to

    • hypfer
      HN is one of those places, actually.

      There are quite a few covert psychopaths on here that happily twist knives and hurt people.

      It's just hidden under layers and layers of indirection, jargon and plausible deniability. Not unlike your standard boardroom I guess.

      • MomsAVoxell
        Techno-feudalism is an Ayn-Rand objectivists wet dream, after all. There's profit in oppression.
      • my-next-account
        I think it's typically quite obvious, or maybe I haven't seen the psycopaths. However, SWEs can be real dick heads. Just made me think of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_5uVdy5YmA

        Uploaded 16 years ago... I can't believe that a video I thought was so hilarious back then is dating me so hard.

      • hsuduebc2
        Can you be more specific? This is heavy moderated environment and I would say it's one of the most pleasurable places on public internet to be.

        • ballmerpoint
          It’s not heavily moderated. This is the usual link dang/tomhow give when they explain why their moderation is necessarily sparse:

          https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

          This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.

        • hypfer
          Not really, because a generic observation cannot be expressed specifically. So that's a weird question to begin with.

          It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.

          As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.

          It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting. Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.

          What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.

          • semireg
            There must be some logical fallacy here where, reduced down to human existence, all toxicity is hidden under layers. This is both an ultimately true statement of any suspiciously viewed human interaction and it kind of makes the argument moot.

            Reminds me of the recent thread about LLMs controversial take on humanity: we are all terribly cynical, hallucinate importance, and we are all bad/good deep down inside.

            • mjburgess
              I guess they are saying people argue/comment in bad faith. That they don't really mean what they say, and at least, they say it not to discuss it but for some hidden agenda.

              The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.

              I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).

          • brookst
            If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?

            • regretsresin
              Unlikely. Plenty of anti LGBTQ rhetoric is permissible here by mods, for example.

              However, it often uses queer lingo - words that folks might think aren't notable, but queer folks will instantly recognize as an attack.

              Refusing to call a gay man's husband a husband, but subsisting in friend or partner. Calling someone biologically male. Etc.

              These get deployed quite subtly here, and because none of the words are slurs, they don't get moderated. (Though HN also permits overt slur usage -- search for the r-slur and you'll find plenty of cases.)

            • hypfer
              > If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?

              Are we going to play "prove me right" here? :D

              Come on, this is just a direct personal attack. Go play better. Hide it with a more elaborate construct.

              • tacitusarc
                It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.

                • hypfer
                  > It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.

                  I'm not sure if can truly let this pass as a more sophisticated construct, but I do appreciate the opener that already invalidates dismissal.

                  That's a good tactic. Thank you for playing.

                  I feel great btw :) Thank you for your concern.

              • Arnt
                Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone is a troll "just asking questions" or actually just asking that question. More so on HN than in most of the world, I mean.

                • cowlevel
                  And that ambiguity is precisely something that trolls hide behind.
                • retromagik
                  Yep that's why the trolls lick that strategy

                  • hypfer
                    An interesting realisation there which I believe will shape the upcoming years of discussion spaces is that one can shift the burden of proof there.

                    Instead of leaving it with the moderation to prove without a doubt that someone is trolling, one can default to assume trolling and demand prove that it is not the case.

                    As it is impossible to bring up proof for either of those things, the house wins and people make damn sure to quintuple-check if their messaging is decent.

                    I don't think that that is a good solution, but the status quo was horrible, so maybe the pendulum swinging in another direction for a while might help us discover saner solutions.

        • MomsAVoxell
          Try to criticize the US' war machine as it relates to the US' tech industry, for example. You will incur the wrath of a thousand HN fascists.

          Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.

          Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.

    • ranger_danger
      Ironically this is quite common on 4chan, although so are many other much more childish things, but there is an occasional flash of someone with real knowledge using it to be a clever asshole.

      I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.

  • timmmmmmay
    the modern internet has given everyone a higher level of immunity to this kind of thing now that it's in the background everywhere at all times; the FBI would need to step up their game today

    • blurbleblurble
      Huh? Elaborate? If anything people are much more at risk of this kind of thing.
  • antonvs
    One commonality is the lack of restraint that anonymity can produce.
• fransje26
  > I repeat - no person can argue successfully against facts.

  In some aspects, times have changed..

  • ajs1998
    I think they mean it will tarnish your legacy. Obviously lying works short term.
• mcv
  I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
• krunck
  And failing that the government assassinated him.
• crab2
  https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fedpost

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131162

• lifestyleguru
  Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.

  • cowlevel
    Apparently most of these huge spam waves originate from just one or two people which is why they're so similar. If a certain type of spam stops arriving it means that specific person got bored.
• whycome
  Vox is paywalled too?
• antonvs
  Almost every adjective in that letter is a projection by the author. He/they must have been a real piece of work.

  • gadders
    Well, there was that rape incident that MLK allegedly encouraged: https://www.standpointmag.co.uk/the-troubling-legacy-of-mart...

    Apparently the audio tapes get released in 2027 so we may find out for sure then.

    • iAMkenough
      With 20 seconds of audio, I can make MLK Jr. say whatever you want.

      • chasd00
        The very funny “presidents discuss anime” video opened my eyes and that was like 3 years ago. Audio is going to have to require some kind of proof of authenticity going forward.
  • protonbob
    No he really did all that stuff.