Ironically, as ex zealot, desilusied with the endless fragmentation of Linux distributions and desktop dream, FOSS OSes currently are looking as the only way out of American dominated consumer OSes and related programming languages.
Plus in my deep Penguin days, SuSE was one of my favourite distros, I loved yast based management, and the KDE integration.
Yes, unless they are 100% under international standards, or 100% open source, they are subject to export restrictions from the overloads contributors, as per the countries their headquarters are located on.
it's honestly a crime that they don't get more traction. Tooling they've put out like the Open Build Service (which is distro agnostic), is fantastic. I've been using Tumbleweed on dev machines for a long time, and the fact that they ship fully tested images is imo just a vastly better way to do a rolling release.
When we bring a problem to them, which we pay them for, the turn around time is awful, and about 2/5 cases I end up having to break out the debugging tools and root cause/fix fix it because their support engineers can't be bothered.
Especially their nVidia support. Worse than useless.
>“We’re waiting for Engineering in Germany to get back to us.” is a common refrain.
From my experience in Germany as a consumer, customer support for all types of businesses from ISP, online shops, gyms, property management, in general, is a joke, so that stereotype tracks. You need to contact them via a letter from a lawyer or consumer protection agencies to get them to move their ass when you have an issue, otherwise they ignore you till that scary legal letter comes, at which point they go like "oh yeah, we were just about to get back to your customer right now, no need to take us to court over it". It's why in German companies the best paid positions are not engineers but accountants and lawyers.
In US (and UK as well) the customer is always right, in Germany (and France) the customer support is always right and the customer should be sorry for daring to bother the customer support with their problem.
That's why they have no international tech companies, because their mentality can't survive in the "customer is always right" cutthroat environment. So it's not really boggling to see how SUSE failed to get traction despite being technically superior from my PoV.
German companies thrive when the product they're selling involves a lot of made up red tape and bureaucracy (cough, AUTOSAR, cough) and customers are willing to wait months for a reply because they have nowhere else to go. The moment they DO have somewhere else to go, they take their money elsewhere, which is why German industry is in its multi year recession.
Why should SuSE be on the line for supporting nVidia, rather than nVidia itself or your hardware supplier? Or is SuSE now also selling corporate computer hardware?
I'm unsure what argument you are trying to make here? The page you linked makes no reference at all to nVidia. And directly below where it mentions Java (web servers are not mentioned at all, only web browsers), it also excludes:
* All 3rd party binaries such as fonts, sounds, artwork and branding
And further down, it also excludes:
* Packages without public available source
* Packages with non-Open Source license
I'm not sure if SuSE considers nVidia drivers to be 3rd party or not, but they are definitely without public available source and without an Open Source license.
True, but location matters a great deal, because some countries have a tendency to MITM any physical link they can get their hands on, even if that means scuba divers or secret rooms. But also who it is who is managing it, agree.
> I think the popularity dropped after the takeover in Europe
It wasn't the takeover, it was splitting SUSE linux into a paid stable/supported distro and a testing/community distro, like Red Hat had just done with RHEL/Fedora. Unlike Red Hat, SUSE didn't have the critical mass to force the community to be guinea pigs for paid customers, and it withered as folk switched to other distros, including the hot new entrant: ubuntu.
The focus should not be on the location, provided it is in the EU, but really the focus should be on carefully siloing the user data and make it only accessible to who needs them which is definitely no-one managing any servers and networks; it shouldn't matter (just dataloss, but not leaks which are not worthless). The info should be encrypted with different service dependent (healthcare, different levels, taxes etc) key pairs. As long as this data is accessible by anyone else but me, it's going to fall in the wrong hands anyway.
This is really good news. Europe has kept saying that digital sovereignty is a must, but for some reason, they have primarily considered US-based projects like Fedora and almost never SUSE. This has always made me wonder, because SUSE already has almost all the necessary tools; for example, Rancher and openSUSE and they're well known in Europe for quite a while.
good luck to suse, hopefully denmark will be first to migrate to linux and stay there unlike other countries (germany i am looking at you).
other than that i don't really believe owning EU data is the battle we can win with more regulations. I bet in 10 years nothing will change, maybe a few more grants, a few more laws..
I think regulations can be highly successful, if used aggressively enough. Look at China - they own their data, because they didn't allow it to be exfiltrated.
I think the issue at hand is that we've been half-assing our regulatory efforts.
No, as a good example for keeping your data sovereign. What you do with said sovereignty is another matter - I expect that part would play out differently in the EU than in China.
I wouldn't be too sure of the EU being a particular strong stalwart of public institutions vis a vis privacy.
They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
Big picture, there isn't a government in the world that is better for their citizens than the EU, but it's more like least-worst.
For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
> They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
There is a fraction that keeps trying to do so. The fact that they consistently keep failing is a sign the system in the EU as a whole is doing well in this regard.
> For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
To quote Goebbels:
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
>Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans.
Yes, let's give up our freedoms and live in a censored police state to prevent us from becoming Nazis again, that will surely end well. There were even books and movies about these dystopias and THIS is your solution? You can't make this up.
>We've learned our lesson from history
Your nation lived under Nazism 80 years ago, which you always use as an argument for why you're right, but it seems you learned nothing from your history, or learned the wrong lessons if you think government censorship is the way to go when that's exactly what helped get Nazis into power in the first palce. I can't facepalm hard enough at this.
For someone invoking the Nazi argument every other of your comments on HN, you sure are short sighted and lack critical thought and self reflection of what you're saying.
Please bring some arguments that can be backed by facts or studies that can be peer reviewed and examined by critical thinking, not by emotional appeals to "Nazis are bad m'kay".
Let's look at the results: For all its faults, the US's boundaryless freedom of speech assured by its constitution made it the longest running democracy to date, meanwhile your country has been juggling between monarchies, dictators and government policed nanny states all its existence, but has the audacity to think it knows what true freedom of speech is like when it never had it to begin with.
Your entire post is arguing with a straw man of your own making instead of engaging with any of my points. But you know that, you're just not interested in serious conversation.
That's your modus operandi, you misrepresent the opposing argument so you can get mad at it, then claim nobody wants to form arguments.
I have formed many arguments.
They've all gone ignored because you didn't have an answer and found it more convenient to try and argue with somebody you made up.
I would appreciate if you could engage in more honest discussion instead of purposeful misrepresention followed by mud slinging.
A little bit of intellectual honesty would go a long way.
Why don't you address any of the many arguments I've already made and you've ignored so far before asking for more? There's no point in bringing more until then.
> Please bring some arguments that can be backed by facts or studies that can be peer reviewed and examined by critical thinking, not by emotional appeals to "Nazis are bad m'kay".
You mean, like, the vast body of literature, the many museums, the crates of pictures and photos, the miles of movie rolls documenting and discussing Nazi atrocities, ideology, philosophy, science, policies and system of governance?
> Let's look at the results: For all its faults, the US's boundaryless freedom of speech assured by its constitution made it the longest running democracy to date, meanwhile your country has been juggling between monarchies, dictators and government policed nanny states all its existence, but has the audacity to think it knows what true freedom of speech is like when it never had it to begin with.
That's just alluding to American Exceptionalism. Germany did that, too, a lot actually. "Deutscher Sonderweg" was the key phrase. Anyhow, Nazi Germany is 80 years ago now and quite well researched, Socialist East Germany is 36 years ago now and also quite well researched, and all Germany has to show for it is the idea that if you like your liberty and justice for all you have to draw a line when somebody says "no, not for you, only for us."
Granted, it is not much, but it is something. If you look at it empirically, Germany has falsified a few approaches, while the USA is running on a hypothesis resembling the Weimar Republic in many ways, but certainly not all. EUropean's can't help it if they remember that shit better than USians, they were closer by for the last century or so.
>You mean, like, the vast body of literature, the many museums, the crates of pictures and photos, the miles of movie rolls documenting and discussing Nazi atrocities, ideology, philosophy, science, policies and system of governance?
Bad faith argument. I never said Nazis aren't bad, I just said that he is using the "Nazis are bad" phrase everywhere on HN as a universal joker card only for the purpose of emotional manipulation to derail the conversation into their side of the field where they can paint contrarians as Nazi supporters, instead of bringing valid on-topic arguments to disprove or prove the topic we were on.
And you can see this trick works because you came out of the woodworks kicking and screaming about proving me how Nazis are bad, when nobody was trying to debate that fact.
The longest run up until now... But you shouldnt be so sure that it is still a democracy and you shouldnt be so sure that the fact it was kept a democracy for so long was because of free speech absolutisme. I for one, think that the US of A has lost a lot of its narrative in the last 20 years. I think its the narrative that kept it a democracy until now.
> Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
Lol, just what I'd expect from a European. "Oh no, big government please protect me against the scary Nazi misinformation!" As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
> To quote Goebbels:
>
> > When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day? This doesn't stop Nazis from taking over the government or the rhetoric from spreading—see AfD's rise in Germany—it just means once they've grappled control of the government, now there's established precedent for them to censor anti-Nazi speech and expression without any sudden changes.
Well, good luck with that. It didn't seem to work out so well the last time you took that approach, but what do I know.
> As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
They beat them out on the battlefield, at great expense in both resources and human lives. The "free marketplace of ideas" was unable to stop Nazism.
> So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day?
What you're referring to has been formulated by Dr. Karl Popper, an Austrian who had to witness the rise of Nazism as the Paradox of Tolerance. To quote:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
[...]
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Popper’s perspective aligns with the view of tolerance as a social contract. The protection of tolerance extends only to those who reciprocate it. When one party breaches this contract by imposing on others’ rights or safety, the injured party is no longer obligated to extend tolerance to the aggressor.
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
And who gets to decide who the intolerant parties are in an argument/dispute in order to justify the use of force against them?
The quote you posted literally advocates for censorship, oppression and genocide of the other side, except since it's of those YOU view as being intolerant, so then it's somehow moral and OK for you to do it against them, but you wouldn't agree to that when the other party does it to you when they view you as the intolerant one.
Because that's exactly what the Nazis did when they got into power: they removed the ones who they considered to be intolerant form their perspective, and it's exactly the rhetoric Zionists use to justify genocide in Gaza: they're just removing intolerant people so then it's morally ok.
When people use critical thought to dissect my comments, I respond in kind. You should try it some time.
Regarding your attempted equation of Nazism and anti-Nazism, a common tactic used by modern day fascists to create a sense of moral ambivalence, here's a simple fact:
The Nazis did not, in fact, persecute people they thought of as intolerant. The Nazis were driven by racial and ethnic hatred - intolerance was a point of pride for them, not something to be fought.
Your behavior suggests either deep ignorance or malicious attempts at distorting the conversation in a right wing extremist way. Either way is not a good look.
Literally no party ever, not even the Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, ever thought "we're the bad intolerant guys and we're proud of it".
On the contrary, they all thought they were on the right side of history and that all the atrocities they were doing, they were the right thing, done for the greater good.
Nazi literally means "national" and "socialist" as in for the country and the working people, both words with good meaning behind them on their own, up until WW2.
>Your behavior suggests either deep ignorance or malicious attempts at distorting the conversation in a right wing extremist way. Either way is not a good look.
What behavior? Correcting your wrong takes with facts and arguments? Every point you brought up here I have disproved with arguments.
You once again are twisting my word and misrepresenting my point.
Never did I say "we're the bad guys and we're proud of it" was their self-identification. They did, however think "we will not tolerate the Jewish threat to our aryan volk" - i.e. an openly pro-intolerance ideology.
I would highly recommend you gain a deeper understanding of issues before making bold proclamations about things you know very little about.
> What behavior? Correcting your wrong takes with facts and arguments? Every point you brought up here I have disproved with arguments.
You do not even engage with my arguments. You try to derail them, by building straw men to then get upset about, as with the example above. It shows either a limited understanding of the matter at hand or a conscious attempt at muddying the waters.
This behavior, too, is well-documented historically.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul Sartre.
>They did, however think "we will not tolerate the Jewish threat to our aryan volk" - i.e. an openly pro-intolerance ideology.
I never said the Nazis weren't being intolerant, I just called you out for painting those you don't like as intolerant as the Nazis in order to justify using censorship and state force against them in the name of greater good.
If we're gonna go after people for intolerance I expect a lot more proof of criminal wrongdoing and argumentation than just comparing them to Nazis since you're doing exactly what the Nazis did to justify their intolerance towards the Jews.
>"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies
Not sure how calling people who disagree with you as antisemites helps in any way since I never said anything in support for the Nazis or against the Jews.
Edit: Answering to your reply from below here to not balloon the thread any further:
>"I did not call you an antisemite, I pointed out a common behavioral pattern of antisemites."
So your argument is: "I'm not calling you an antisemite directly, I'm just using a quote to describe your pattern of behavior as being antisemitic." ? Do you even hear yourself?
Like I said before, you're the one who can't stop using Nazis as boogeymen and Jews as a humans shield in arguments all for the sake of emotional manipulation, then call people antisemitic when they disagree with you.
Again, I did not call anyone an antisemite. I quoted Sartre describing antisemites. This is you twisting my words yet again. I would really welcome some less dishonest tactics from you.
That you keep seeing yourself in that description is something you should probably do some introspection on. The repeated insistence that I meant you with it does raise some eye brows, however.
China is especially good as an example because it shows that most tech companies can be made to bend to their regulatory whim. Europe is hesitant in that regard for fear of getting left behind. China shows that this fear is mostly unfounded.
And in cases where Western companies don't want to invest in China due to their regulations, local alternatives seem to quickly pick up the slack and over time even become better than their Western counterparts (at least in certain aspects). Just look at all those Chat+Payment things over there.
> Europe is hesitant in that regard for fear of getting left behind. China shows that this fear is mostly unfounded.
It's hard to transplant the Chinese experience elsewhere. Not only due to Europe's current far greater dependence on American software and cloud providers, but also due to China's far larger pool of technical expertise, likely resulting from many decades of heavy emphasis on math and science education, together with far greater social and monetary rewards. I doubt that European politicians or their electorates have the patience for a big turnaround that may not start to pay off for several decades or even generations.
Thankfully, we have parts of the ex soviet bloc that had the same heavy emphasis on math and science. You wouldn't believe the number of Romanian software engs I've worked with.
Are you trying to say that there are no businesses in Europe at all? Like 100% unemployment?
Or are you saying that you would personally find it easier with fewer regulations? For instance, there are probably laws that make it illegal for people to point a gun at you and make you hand them all your money. Do those hurt your business?
If you can't run a business in Europe, maybe it's the wrong business, or maybe you're in the wrong place. But there are hundreds of millions of people in Europe who have a job, so I think it's safe to say that it's not impossible to run a business in Europe.
Definitely! They set an even playing field (i.e competitors can't undercut me due to shoddy quality or questionable labour practices), enable interoperability and create an open market.
Ironically, as ex zealot, desilusied with the endless fragmentation of Linux distributions and desktop dream, FOSS OSes currently are looking as the only way out of American dominated consumer OSes and related programming languages.
Plus in my deep Penguin days, SuSE was one of my favourite distros, I loved yast based management, and the KDE integration.
> related programming languages.
Does it matter what country a programming language originates from?
Yes, unless they are 100% under international standards, or 100% open source, they are subject to export restrictions from the overloads contributors, as per the countries their headquarters are located on.
Some examples,
https://www.java.com/en/download/help/error_embargoed.html
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/e...
>SusSE was one of my favourite distros
it's honestly a crime that they don't get more traction. Tooling they've put out like the Open Build Service (which is distro agnostic), is fantastic. I've been using Tumbleweed on dev machines for a long time, and the fact that they ship fully tested images is imo just a vastly better way to do a rolling release.
Their corporate support is a joke.
When we bring a problem to them, which we pay them for, the turn around time is awful, and about 2/5 cases I end up having to break out the debugging tools and root cause/fix fix it because their support engineers can't be bothered.
Especially their nVidia support. Worse than useless.
Enthusiastically agree. A point of curiosity… are you in the Americas or in Europe?
I’ve often wondered if the support is better if one is on the “correct”side of the Atlantic.
At a minimum, one would have the benefit of having time zone alignment with Engineering staff.
“We’re waiting for Engineering in Germany to get back to us.” is a common refrain.
>“We’re waiting for Engineering in Germany to get back to us.” is a common refrain.
From my experience in Germany as a consumer, customer support for all types of businesses from ISP, online shops, gyms, property management, in general, is a joke, so that stereotype tracks. You need to contact them via a letter from a lawyer or consumer protection agencies to get them to move their ass when you have an issue, otherwise they ignore you till that scary legal letter comes, at which point they go like "oh yeah, we were just about to get back to your customer right now, no need to take us to court over it". It's why in German companies the best paid positions are not engineers but accountants and lawyers.
In US (and UK as well) the customer is always right, in Germany (and France) the customer support is always right and the customer should be sorry for daring to bother the customer support with their problem.
That's why they have no international tech companies, because their mentality can't survive in the "customer is always right" cutthroat environment. So it's not really boggling to see how SUSE failed to get traction despite being technically superior from my PoV.
German companies thrive when the product they're selling involves a lot of made up red tape and bureaucracy (cough, AUTOSAR, cough) and customers are willing to wait months for a reply because they have nowhere else to go. The moment they DO have somewhere else to go, they take their money elsewhere, which is why German industry is in its multi year recession.
>That's why they have no international tech companies
Well, they do have SAP. Though based on what I've heard their support is not exactly top notch
Don't forget about Siemens!
> Their corporate support is a joke.
SUSE also really like their "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!"-style random subscription audits too.
Why should SuSE be on the line for supporting nVidia, rather than nVidia itself or your hardware supplier? Or is SuSE now also selling corporate computer hardware?
Because its in scope for their support license that you're paying them for.
nVidia is neither Java nor a web server.
https://www.suse.com/support/policy-products/
I'm unsure what argument you are trying to make here? The page you linked makes no reference at all to nVidia. And directly below where it mentions Java (web servers are not mentioned at all, only web browsers), it also excludes:
And further down, it also excludes: I'm not sure if SuSE considers nVidia drivers to be 3rd party or not, but they are definitely without public available source and without an Open Source license.Because SuSE has YES-certified the hardware it's running on.
"Customer support data is stored exclusively on EU-located networks and servers"
We should not just focus on the location. It's about who is managing the servers and networks.
> We should not just focus on the location
True, but location matters a great deal, because some countries have a tendency to MITM any physical link they can get their hands on, even if that means scuba divers or secret rooms. But also who it is who is managing it, agree.
SUSE S.A. ownership does seem to be entirely European, if you're worried about Safe Harbor type issues.
https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/18/suse-taken-private-major...
They were a German company before being bought by Novell in 2004. I think the popularity dropped after the takeover in Europe.
Now that they are completely disentangled again, let's hope they restore the popularity. It is a good distribution.
Popularity dropped because of backlash from the controversial MS deal that Novell did with Suse in 2006.
> I think the popularity dropped after the takeover in Europe
It wasn't the takeover, it was splitting SUSE linux into a paid stable/supported distro and a testing/community distro, like Red Hat had just done with RHEL/Fedora. Unlike Red Hat, SUSE didn't have the critical mass to force the community to be guinea pigs for paid customers, and it withered as folk switched to other distros, including the hot new entrant: ubuntu.
The focus should not be on the location, provided it is in the EU, but really the focus should be on carefully siloing the user data and make it only accessible to who needs them which is definitely no-one managing any servers and networks; it shouldn't matter (just dataloss, but not leaks which are not worthless). The info should be encrypted with different service dependent (healthcare, different levels, taxes etc) key pairs. As long as this data is accessible by anyone else but me, it's going to fall in the wrong hands anyway.
This is really good news. Europe has kept saying that digital sovereignty is a must, but for some reason, they have primarily considered US-based projects like Fedora and almost never SUSE. This has always made me wonder, because SUSE already has almost all the necessary tools; for example, Rancher and openSUSE and they're well known in Europe for quite a while.
good luck to suse, hopefully denmark will be first to migrate to linux and stay there unlike other countries (germany i am looking at you).
other than that i don't really believe owning EU data is the battle we can win with more regulations. I bet in 10 years nothing will change, maybe a few more grants, a few more laws..
I think regulations can be highly successful, if used aggressively enough. Look at China - they own their data, because they didn't allow it to be exfiltrated.
I think the issue at hand is that we've been half-assing our regulatory efforts.
Have you just used China as a good example for user privacy?
No, as a good example for keeping your data sovereign. What you do with said sovereignty is another matter - I expect that part would play out differently in the EU than in China.
I wouldn't be too sure of the EU being a particular strong stalwart of public institutions vis a vis privacy.
They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
Big picture, there isn't a government in the world that is better for their citizens than the EU, but it's more like least-worst.
For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
> They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
There is a fraction that keeps trying to do so. The fact that they consistently keep failing is a sign the system in the EU as a whole is doing well in this regard.
> For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
To quote Goebbels:
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
>Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans.
Yes, let's give up our freedoms and live in a censored police state to prevent us from becoming Nazis again, that will surely end well. There were even books and movies about these dystopias and THIS is your solution? You can't make this up.
>We've learned our lesson from history
Your nation lived under Nazism 80 years ago, which you always use as an argument for why you're right, but it seems you learned nothing from your history, or learned the wrong lessons if you think government censorship is the way to go when that's exactly what helped get Nazis into power in the first palce. I can't facepalm hard enough at this.
For someone invoking the Nazi argument every other of your comments on HN, you sure are short sighted and lack critical thought and self reflection of what you're saying.
Please bring some arguments that can be backed by facts or studies that can be peer reviewed and examined by critical thinking, not by emotional appeals to "Nazis are bad m'kay".
Let's look at the results: For all its faults, the US's boundaryless freedom of speech assured by its constitution made it the longest running democracy to date, meanwhile your country has been juggling between monarchies, dictators and government policed nanny states all its existence, but has the audacity to think it knows what true freedom of speech is like when it never had it to begin with.
> made it the longest running democracy to date
the US didn't have universal suffrage until the mid 1960s
You can make it up and you did.
It's easy to misrepresent an argument so you have a nice straw man to get mad about.
I would invite you to attempt some more intellectual honesty - it would make for better discussion.
Tell me what did I make up? Try forming an argument instead of throwing accusations around.
Your entire post is arguing with a straw man of your own making instead of engaging with any of my points. But you know that, you're just not interested in serious conversation.
That's your modus operandi, you misrepresent the opposing argument so you can get mad at it, then claim nobody wants to form arguments.
I have formed many arguments.
They've all gone ignored because you didn't have an answer and found it more convenient to try and argue with somebody you made up.
I would appreciate if you could engage in more honest discussion instead of purposeful misrepresention followed by mud slinging.
A little bit of intellectual honesty would go a long way.
OK, so no augment, just more accusations. thanks
Why don't you address any of the many arguments I've already made and you've ignored so far before asking for more? There's no point in bringing more until then.
Point me to those arguments. I saw none, just emotional cries.
"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." - Henri Bergson
> Please bring some arguments that can be backed by facts or studies that can be peer reviewed and examined by critical thinking, not by emotional appeals to "Nazis are bad m'kay".
You mean, like, the vast body of literature, the many museums, the crates of pictures and photos, the miles of movie rolls documenting and discussing Nazi atrocities, ideology, philosophy, science, policies and system of governance?
> Let's look at the results: For all its faults, the US's boundaryless freedom of speech assured by its constitution made it the longest running democracy to date, meanwhile your country has been juggling between monarchies, dictators and government policed nanny states all its existence, but has the audacity to think it knows what true freedom of speech is like when it never had it to begin with.
That's just alluding to American Exceptionalism. Germany did that, too, a lot actually. "Deutscher Sonderweg" was the key phrase. Anyhow, Nazi Germany is 80 years ago now and quite well researched, Socialist East Germany is 36 years ago now and also quite well researched, and all Germany has to show for it is the idea that if you like your liberty and justice for all you have to draw a line when somebody says "no, not for you, only for us."
Granted, it is not much, but it is something. If you look at it empirically, Germany has falsified a few approaches, while the USA is running on a hypothesis resembling the Weimar Republic in many ways, but certainly not all. EUropean's can't help it if they remember that shit better than USians, they were closer by for the last century or so.
>You mean, like, the vast body of literature, the many museums, the crates of pictures and photos, the miles of movie rolls documenting and discussing Nazi atrocities, ideology, philosophy, science, policies and system of governance?
Bad faith argument. I never said Nazis aren't bad, I just said that he is using the "Nazis are bad" phrase everywhere on HN as a universal joker card only for the purpose of emotional manipulation to derail the conversation into their side of the field where they can paint contrarians as Nazi supporters, instead of bringing valid on-topic arguments to disprove or prove the topic we were on.
And you can see this trick works because you came out of the woodworks kicking and screaming about proving me how Nazis are bad, when nobody was trying to debate that fact.
The longest run up until now... But you shouldnt be so sure that it is still a democracy and you shouldnt be so sure that the fact it was kept a democracy for so long was because of free speech absolutisme. I for one, think that the US of A has lost a lot of its narrative in the last 20 years. I think its the narrative that kept it a democracy until now.
Not the longest. The longest is San Marino - since 1600.
What's with the Vatican?
Not a democracy, an elected absolute monarchy. More akin to the prince-electors of the HRE.
it's a democracy, without universal suffrage
like the US until the repeal of the Jim Crow laws (1960s)
> Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
Lol, just what I'd expect from a European. "Oh no, big government please protect me against the scary Nazi misinformation!" As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
> To quote Goebbels: > > > When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day? This doesn't stop Nazis from taking over the government or the rhetoric from spreading—see AfD's rise in Germany—it just means once they've grappled control of the government, now there's established precedent for them to censor anti-Nazi speech and expression without any sudden changes.
Well, good luck with that. It didn't seem to work out so well the last time you took that approach, but what do I know.
> As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
They beat them out on the battlefield, at great expense in both resources and human lives. The "free marketplace of ideas" was unable to stop Nazism.
> So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day?
What you're referring to has been formulated by Dr. Karl Popper, an Austrian who had to witness the rise of Nazism as the Paradox of Tolerance. To quote:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
[...]
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Put differently, tolerance is a social contract: https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-...
Popper’s perspective aligns with the view of tolerance as a social contract. The protection of tolerance extends only to those who reciprocate it. When one party breaches this contract by imposing on others’ rights or safety, the injured party is no longer obligated to extend tolerance to the aggressor.
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
And who gets to decide who the intolerant parties are in an argument/dispute in order to justify the use of force against them?
The quote you posted literally advocates for censorship, oppression and genocide of the other side, except since it's of those YOU view as being intolerant, so then it's somehow moral and OK for you to do it against them, but you wouldn't agree to that when the other party does it to you when they view you as the intolerant one.
Because that's exactly what the Nazis did when they got into power: they removed the ones who they considered to be intolerant form their perspective, and it's exactly the rhetoric Zionists use to justify genocide in Gaza: they're just removing intolerant people so then it's morally ok.
It is clear you either have no idea what the Nazis did or are purposefully trying to muddy the waters to provide cover for Neonazism.
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When people use critical thought to dissect my comments, I respond in kind. You should try it some time.
Regarding your attempted equation of Nazism and anti-Nazism, a common tactic used by modern day fascists to create a sense of moral ambivalence, here's a simple fact:
The Nazis did not, in fact, persecute people they thought of as intolerant. The Nazis were driven by racial and ethnic hatred - intolerance was a point of pride for them, not something to be fought.
Your behavior suggests either deep ignorance or malicious attempts at distorting the conversation in a right wing extremist way. Either way is not a good look.
> intolerance was a point of pride for them
Literally no party ever, not even the Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, ever thought "we're the bad intolerant guys and we're proud of it".
On the contrary, they all thought they were on the right side of history and that all the atrocities they were doing, they were the right thing, done for the greater good.
Nazi literally means "national" and "socialist" as in for the country and the working people, both words with good meaning behind them on their own, up until WW2.
>Your behavior suggests either deep ignorance or malicious attempts at distorting the conversation in a right wing extremist way. Either way is not a good look.
What behavior? Correcting your wrong takes with facts and arguments? Every point you brought up here I have disproved with arguments.
You once again are twisting my word and misrepresenting my point.
Never did I say "we're the bad guys and we're proud of it" was their self-identification. They did, however think "we will not tolerate the Jewish threat to our aryan volk" - i.e. an openly pro-intolerance ideology.
I would highly recommend you gain a deeper understanding of issues before making bold proclamations about things you know very little about.
> What behavior? Correcting your wrong takes with facts and arguments? Every point you brought up here I have disproved with arguments.
You do not even engage with my arguments. You try to derail them, by building straw men to then get upset about, as with the example above. It shows either a limited understanding of the matter at hand or a conscious attempt at muddying the waters.
This behavior, too, is well-documented historically.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul Sartre.
>They did, however think "we will not tolerate the Jewish threat to our aryan volk" - i.e. an openly pro-intolerance ideology.
I never said the Nazis weren't being intolerant, I just called you out for painting those you don't like as intolerant as the Nazis in order to justify using censorship and state force against them in the name of greater good.
If we're gonna go after people for intolerance I expect a lot more proof of criminal wrongdoing and argumentation than just comparing them to Nazis since you're doing exactly what the Nazis did to justify their intolerance towards the Jews.
>"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies
Not sure how calling people who disagree with you as antisemites helps in any way since I never said anything in support for the Nazis or against the Jews.
Edit: Answering to your reply from below here to not balloon the thread any further:
>"I did not call you an antisemite, I pointed out a common behavioral pattern of antisemites."
So your argument is: "I'm not calling you an antisemite directly, I'm just using a quote to describe your pattern of behavior as being antisemitic." ? Do you even hear yourself?
Like I said before, you're the one who can't stop using Nazis as boogeymen and Jews as a humans shield in arguments all for the sake of emotional manipulation, then call people antisemitic when they disagree with you.
Once again, you are twisting my words.
I did not call you an antisemite, I quoted Sartre pointing out a common behavioral pattern of antisemites.
That you see yourself reflected in such should give you pause, but is no fault of mine.
He who doesn't learn from history is doomed to repeat it.
I'm not twisting your words when you're calling people antisemites.
Again, I did not call anyone an antisemite. I quoted Sartre describing antisemites. This is you twisting my words yet again. I would really welcome some less dishonest tactics from you.
That you keep seeing yourself in that description is something you should probably do some introspection on. The repeated insistence that I meant you with it does raise some eye brows, however.
I think it's more an example of successfully enforcing regulations.
China is especially good as an example because it shows that most tech companies can be made to bend to their regulatory whim. Europe is hesitant in that regard for fear of getting left behind. China shows that this fear is mostly unfounded.
And in cases where Western companies don't want to invest in China due to their regulations, local alternatives seem to quickly pick up the slack and over time even become better than their Western counterparts (at least in certain aspects). Just look at all those Chat+Payment things over there.
> Europe is hesitant in that regard for fear of getting left behind. China shows that this fear is mostly unfounded.
It's hard to transplant the Chinese experience elsewhere. Not only due to Europe's current far greater dependence on American software and cloud providers, but also due to China's far larger pool of technical expertise, likely resulting from many decades of heavy emphasis on math and science education, together with far greater social and monetary rewards. I doubt that European politicians or their electorates have the patience for a big turnaround that may not start to pay off for several decades or even generations.
Thankfully, we have parts of the ex soviet bloc that had the same heavy emphasis on math and science. You wouldn't believe the number of Romanian software engs I've worked with.
So far we thought the though guy on the school playground would always be on the same team, now it doesn't feel like it will ever be the case again.
Yup, it's a win-win.
You either bend a foreign company to your will or you get to build a local champion.
Regulations work, you just have to enforce them.
i am curious if you are from eu or ever tried to run a business here
Are you trying to say that there are no businesses in Europe at all? Like 100% unemployment?
Or are you saying that you would personally find it easier with fewer regulations? For instance, there are probably laws that make it illegal for people to point a gun at you and make you hand them all your money. Do those hurt your business?
If you can't run a business in Europe, maybe it's the wrong business, or maybe you're in the wrong place. But there are hundreds of millions of people in Europe who have a job, so I think it's safe to say that it's not impossible to run a business in Europe.
I am both from the EU and running a business there. Do you have any questions you'd like me to answer?
yes, do you really believe more regulations help you?
Definitely! They set an even playing field (i.e competitors can't undercut me due to shoddy quality or questionable labour practices), enable interoperability and create an open market.