A UK party rising up the charts is caught up in a scandal - crypto guy gave the party leader (personally) £5m which he failed to declare and he started the party a few days later indicating he was paid to start the party.
It came out when Crypto guy gave an interview and mentioned it not realising the consequences.
The party leader first claimed it was for security.
Then it was determined he had bought property with it.
"Crypto guy" is understating Christopher Harbone's (alias Chakrit Sakunkrit) reach. He was big in Asian aviation back in the day and is a relatively large player in the British DefenseTech space via QinetiQ. He was also one of the earlier investors in Tether.
He also previously bankrolled Boris Johnson and was his Ukraine advisor [0].
I remember watching Sky News and hearing that UK political parties were from then on forbidden to take donations in crypto which is just another nail in the coffin of crypto. All started going downhill when Satoshi left his Bitcoin project.
Christopher Harborne - not just a libertarian freedom loving crypto guy, but also the largest single shareholder of QinetiQ, a pretty notable UK Defence company.
They're idiots. They think that they just need to be buddies with the leading fascist and they're going to be golden. They don't have enough knowledge or curiosity to study what happened EVERY time this was attempted.
Hint: you might be buddies with the big fascist now, but this can change at any moment. And then you're just fodder for his _other_ cronies. Oh, and don't forget that even if you think that you're adept at court intrigue and covert ops, your _children_ might not be so skilled. Will they retain your fortune when the big fascist suddenly decides to... reallocate... some of their wealth?
It's not hard to figure out, the fascists have been more explicitly welcoming to crypto freedom or at least put themselves out there to solicit that vote even if you claim their underlying policies aren't. Trump offered the freedom of Ross Ulbricht at the libertarian convention, did Kamala come to the libertarian convention and offer anything?
Trump wasn't running on Libertarianism (you can argue he pretended to at the convention, but no one actually buy that) , he was running on "Neither one of us is offering you libertarianism, but I will at least come here and offer you something."
It's no wonder the fascists won the "libertarian" crypto vote when the message you and sister have for the comments as your campaign slogan to those voters is "your values are fucked" and "at least we're not the guy who showed up and offered you something."
Did you think "your values are fucked" is actually persuasive at garnering votes?
If libertarians can't parse than putting fascists in power is, long term, a bad fucking idea as demonstrated literally every time it's happened throughout history, I don't want their fucking vote. I'm not interested in their opinion about anything, especially this.
It is not my nor anyone else's job, including Kamala's for that matter, to coddle your sweet little fee fees about wanting your fake power-wasting money to work. It is especially not anyone's job to tolerate socially corrosive viewpoints like fascism to indulge your ponzi scheme. Full stop.
It's also well documented that fascists will happily enable and cosign the efforts of whatever their chosen right people are to steal money on industrial scales from everyone else, so they were always going to support crypto. Completely foregone conclusion and to be honest, I'd bet money that a notable amount of crypto figures did in fact know that and voted accordingly for the party that was prepared to let them get away with financial crimes, as they have done before, here and elsewhere.
If you're so offended at the notion of someone saying your values are fucked, respectfully, un-fuck your values and then I won't have to say it anymore.
I don't know where the logic "we're supporting horrible things, but if you look down on us for it that makes you worse! Yeah!" came from, but it's not very good.
No you can look down on "us." Just maybe come up with a better plan next time on how to get the non-fascists in power than high-IQ semi-polite versions of calling the voters retards / immoral / horrible while verbatim and literally saying you don't want their votes. If that's what you do, a fascist will come along and come up with a better plan.
You can sit in your tower of better/worse ranking game all you want, you probably are better than "us" but you can't just rest on the fact that you're better and that's going to get you to the finish line.
> You've answered the question as to why those people didn't support you
I asked no such question. You said:
> It's not hard to figure out, the fascists have been more explicitly welcoming to crypto freedom or at least put themselves out there to solicit that vote even if you claim their underlying policies aren't.
To which I said:
> If you back fascists to promote crypto, your values are fucked.
This is not a statement wondering why they didn't. I know why they didn't, even if I didn't directly say it. I'm saying here if your support for proper policies or candidates is contingent on their supporting your stupid shitcoins, then your values are fucked and I'm not interested in your conclusions as a result. Or to be more specific, if you're prepared to give Fascists power because you think it'll be better for your coinbase account, your values are fucked.
And while there is certainly a cost to having principles, to say that Kamala didn't win because she refused to court crypto is just ridiculously out-of-touch. That's a big question with a lot of variables, but I assure you things like:
1) Her being a woman
2) Her being non-white
3) Her being yet another pro-corpo do-nothing Democrat, with a back story including being a PROSECUTOR of all things
Had a shitload, a metric assload, an utter container-ship load more to do with her defeat than anything even tangentially related to your weird secondary finance system, and on that point I would bet a lot of REAL, not crypto, currency.
And here's the part you're missing about Trump and his ilk "showing up": that offer means nothing. Fascist regimes don't keep promises to their useful idiots, they keep them right up until they're not useful anymore. They'll feed your crypto conartists to the same wolves they'll feed me to, because nobody wins long-term under fascism, including the fascists who aren't currently holding the leash. Ross Ulbricht's pardon doesn't tell you Trump loves crypto freedom, it tells you Trump knows how to make a low-cost gesture to a bloc he needs this cycle. And frankly it tracks well that crypto holders were targeted by the Trump admin anyway, you're a self-selecting bloc of marks, ready and eager to hold ANOTHER bag to go with the one you've statistically speaking, already got.
But far more importantly: Fascists are not shy about the Fascist shit they aim to do, namely to harm people at scale. If you cosign that for bitcoin, I'm not here to persuade you or win your heart: that is not a position that a reasonable person takes, and so I see no purpose in attempting to reason with you.
1) The question I refer to is the ancestor to which our comments are under. A question under which we are responding, but not a question authored by you.
2) My apologies for not being more explicit -- the specifics of the loss of the "libertarian" "crypto bros" is not a wholistic cause but rather a small fraction of the cause but more importantly also a symptom. A symptom of something that happened in broader society of alienated or ignored voters being hoodwinked by smooth talking fascists that showed up with a message more enticing than "we don't want your vote" or "you're a self-selecting bloc of marks" or "your values are fucked." You can hate they're that dumb, or that immoral, or what not but at the end of the day their vote still counts as much as yours.
> the specifics of the loss of the "libertarian" "crypto bros" is not a wholistic cause but rather a small fraction of the cause but more importantly also a symptom. A symptom of something that happened in broader society of alienated or ignored voters being hoodwinked by smooth talking fascists that showed up with a message more enticing than "we don't want your vote" or "you're a self-selecting bloc of marks" or "your values are fucked." You can hate they're that dumb, or that immoral, or what not but at the end of the day their vote still counts as much as yours.
Yeah, no shit: that's literally how fascism has always worked, every single time. It shows up with simple, tidy, "common sense" answers to complicated systemic problems, because that's the entire product. Fascism is a con that skips the part where you have to be right. We're not going to out-simple that without becoming liars ourselves, so no, I'm not interested in a messaging arms race against people who don't have to tell the truth to win.
And "their vote counts as much as mine" is true enough, sure. But you don't get to hide the content of that vote behind "well they were just susceptible to a good pitch." What was the pitch? Let's actually look at it instead of being coy: the "simple solution" fascists are selling right now is some version of "X group is ruining everything." Trans people (wave) get blamed for the "destruction of the West." Immigrants get blamed for "diluting western culture." These aren't complicated ideas that require nuance to refute, they're stupid on their face, the kind of stupid that falls over the second anyone actually looks at it. And that's exactly why I don't waste breath "engaging" with people parroting it: if your entire platform is just scapegoating, you just want to feed a sacrificial lamb to the volcano to make it stop erupting, I'm not obligated to pretend that's a serious discussion. A human one certainly, and an impulse I understand as it winds through our history like mold in raspberries, but not a serious point to be debated.
Call it a symptom if you want. But the disease was never "we didn't message nicely enough at crypto bros." The disease is that "blame the weird/foreign group" still works on people who'd rather have a villain than an explanation. That's on the people selling it certainly, and also it's on the people buying it: Both things are true at once.
Fascism is a political phenomenon of the early twentieth century. There are no current politicians who are operating in the early twentieth century. So, to speak of “currently active fascists” is anachronistic. Typically at some point in the discussion someone will cite Umberto Eco’s definition of fascism, but other people do not have to accept his extension of the term past its sell-by date.
For the people currently active in politics who espouse heinous policies sometimes (and sometimes not) reminiscent of fascism, then advocate against those policies directly. Using such a vague umbrella term, and one interpreted by many as a distinct cultural shibboleth, isn’t likely to win over the people you need in order to prevail.
What exactly is your motivation for rejecting the term?
Do you wish to make a constructive point about how we can work to stop this push for tech-autocratic-authoritarianism, and how we need to approach it a little differently than if it were simply fascism?
Or are you just denying that this current movement rhymes with a powerful cultural touchstone, to stymie those who would oppose it?
When your post history is largely political battle (and apparently in contravention of HN guidelines), you’re obviously not asking that question in good faith but rather as some attempt at rhetorical oneupmanship.
The tech industry has created a lot of societal problems that unfortunately now rest solely on politics. The dynamic was much nicer years ago, before billions of dollars were pouring into building wholly non-consensual surveillance systems, when it was possible to focus on constructive code-based approaches to avoiding this control. For example with mere web surveillance on the open web, you could squint and see that it was possible to choose alternatives, use a secure browser, etc. But obviously this doesn't apply to things like ANPR and remote attestation.
I am asking the question in good faith - to see if there is constructive conversation to be had rather than merely quibbling over terminology. That is positively in the spirit of the HN guidelines.
Also I take issue with your characterization of "battle". I am more than willing to entertain political positions that I disagree with. The problem is that I've found very few people who are willing to be honest (including with themselves) and own up to the implications of what they're advocating.
With that line of thinking, you can attribute any ideology to a time period and declare it invalid today.
Professor Jason Stanley who has written two books about the topic calls the current US administration fascist. Similar with professor Timothy Snyder and I think several other respected historians.
Another is we discuss actual policy positions rather than using presumed pejoratives to brand everyone who doesn't agree with us as "literally Hitler!".
Damn, you got them all, there's been no rise of right wing populism glorifying hitler, the end of democratic institutions, the rise of dictatorial leaders, and expulsion of "foreigners" up to and including concentration camps at all recently, its just all losers with purple hair screeching.
Every time I see someone pearl-clutching about speaking honestly about fascists, my mental picture is unsympathetic as well. "Fascist" may be inflammatory but it's certainly not inaccurate. Fascists are a real part of the world, trying to language police them away doesn't work.
Moldbug (Yarvin), who is intellectually upstream of the tech-authoritarian movement, explicitly claimed the term reactionary and spent so many words strawmanning concerns about fascism he de facto claimed that term as well. And either term is a hell of a lot more accurate than "conservative", which [unfortunately] continues to be in use as an emotional fig leaf over what is actually a radical agenda of destruction.
But this has never been true. Lots of valuable, productive, and loyal Nazis ended up in political prisoner camps.
Because that kind of kleptocracy runs on constantly fighting factions and incentives and selfishness. The core belief is selling someone else down the river because you can.
there's a difference between being a good and loyal fascist and being in with the fascists. you've actually hit on it. those valuable, productive and loyal nazis were allowed to do whatever they wanted without regard to the law when that benefited the party, then that same behavior that was legal and encouraged was what got them kidnapped and murdered by the party as soon as the winds shifted. The core belief of fascism is two-fold: selling someone down the river because you can and believing that either through compliance or raw power you'll never be the one sold down the river.
It came out when Crypto guy gave an interview and mentioned it not realising the consequences.
The party leader first claimed it was for security.
Then it was determined he had bought property with it.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-nigel-fara...