In that sense, the comparison is quite in line with the rest of the conversation on this site.

I am a direct descendant of people who signed on the Texas Declaration of Independence. Those folks moved to an "empty" area where there were a bunch of people who they didn't consider to be "real" people (because my ancestors were objectively racist) and then when the government of the area forbade keeping chattel slaves they performed an armed revolt and established a racist state. That racism was so important to them that Oklahoma has a panhandle.

If the descendants those people are scared that a tide of brown folks are going to do the same thing to them, I can understand why- I don't agree that other groups of people operate with the same sociopathic view towards their fellow humans, but their fears aren't mine.

Unfortunately you're not going to find much of a critique of that incorrect view of how humans deal with each other amongst the tech bros- they are such a product of this time and place that it's like asking fish what they think about the water.

The entire focal point of the power that generated Texas is the idea that that there are "real" humans who have rights and are people, and then there are folks who aren't. And the real folks have a destiny to be the historical victors, and the rest of us just better hope their machines break before they make the planet uninhabitable for the rest of us, because they have the guns and the bomb and if they draw a line on the map it is as real as they are, and if you don't respect that line you're not a real person anyhow.

So of course folks who are happy to think of "Texas" as if it had just been existing there forever, without history, think it is okay to kill 20k people as if it were some kind of historical necessity.

It's a similar racism that exists everywhere in these colonialist situations. It's not the only element in play in any of these situations but it's an important structure.

That racism is such an vital element of that power that it appears invisible, often even to folks who are suffering its effects.

Johnnyworker, I appreciate the fight you're engaged in on HN.

I generally have a couple of searches open for different topics; for the last couple of months mostly about the situation in Palestine. I've enjoyed seeing some of your writing across several threads.

Typically the people on this site have some pretty horrific ideas about the world, full of bizarre premises that appear (to them) as banal and natural understandings of the world.

I don't especially blame them for that viewpoint; if you've never spent a lot of time around, say, the reservation system for indigenous folks in the US or if you've never, like, read a materialist history of what the US has done in Guatemala, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, and so on- if you've never gotten any other history than that of the far-right US victors in the second world war, you might be forgiven.

Power creates specific subjects, and those subjects are often blind to certain facts about how power works to create a world that seems uncreated, natural, and necessary.

People who have been able to function well under these highly authoritarian regimes are interesting; that is why I read what they write here.

It is an important viewpoint to mark because it is the viewpoint of the people with the guns, people who think they will never have to even see the carnage they create, much less suffer a similar fate.

They are happy to see power work on other people because it maintains the fantasy that power is not working upon themselves.

"If you never think to move, you'll never see your chains" and all that nonsense. Or, if you prefer, it feels to me like people in these systems often take some comfort that power is operating on "the bad guys" because that is how they feel like sane good guys. If power only works on brown bodies, then it must not be working on their own hearts and brains.

Anyhow.

I don't think you'll change any minds here- I personally don't think it's worth engaging on the topic of imperial power with folks employed to work at the heart of the imperial core.

But still, it' is nice to see folks at least speaking up occasionally. Keep up the good fight.