Pretty sure the person you're responding to sees that clearly and may in fact be trying to point it out.

The original view presented by the quote is a child's view of authoritarians: they force you to behave the way they want you to.

The other commenter is pointing out how they work in practice, how they'll work with this, is by making noncompliant behavior the accepted norm and then enforcing it selectively based on their changing goals and targets.

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pixl97 6 hours ago | parent [-]

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

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rootusrootus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People like to throw out that one line from the blog comment because it is a wonderful partisan critique of the modern Republican party. But I think it is more interesting with the first part of the comment [0]:

"There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely."

[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

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cucumber3732842 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is an ironic choice of trite quote when contrast with the limitless HN comments one can reference (or have your AI of choice dig through) from the "big data era" during which HN was very, very, very fond of these "we'll slap up 1984 and it'll be great because nobody will speed or litter or install a mailbox post without calling 811" sorts of schemes.

But of course now that the tech of choice is AI and it's threatening everyone's jobs and status it's a bad thing.

There's a lesson about people there.

	▲	rootusrootus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> There's a lesson about people there. Could be. But it could also just be a Goomba fallacy.