Sorry, I strongly disagree. Comparing detaining someone for 10 days (for, apparently, a genuine violation of immigration law - self-employment on a TN visa) to killing twenty million people is in no way reasonable, and it's certainly not informative or curious. It's just a snarky ideological barb and a violation of those guidelines.
The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
If someone appears with invalid paperwork to a border crossing you simply turn them away, or in the case of international flights you keep them in a room for a couple of hours and send them back next flight home. You ban her for X years.
She was in some kind of kafkaesque simulacrum of a legal system with "constitutional free zones" and for-profit "detention" centers. Nobody knew anything inside or outside, only with a considerable amount of resources and luck they we are able to find her in the system. This is closer to the stories of my family during a dictatorship, moving earth and heaven to find close ones in jail when initially the police "didn't know anything about that". They were lucky, a lot of people never found their loved ones.
Sure, the US is not there (yet), but even then she could've been there 10 months or more there if she wasn't Canadian or wealthy.
So no, it's not a "snarky ideological barb" it's a good point that doesn't meet your aesthetic standards, at most the "skeptics like you" part makes it a bit too personal. Your strawman about his point seems worse imo.
> The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
This is so important and so often overlooked. The Nazis took power in 1933, but the persecution of e.g. Jews ramped up very gradually. At first, it was mostly boycotts and prohibiting Jews from working in government jobs. In 1935, they were stripped of citizen rights. In 1938, Jews had to change their names and carry a mark in their passport and Jewish children couldn't attend school anymore, and later that year Jewish shops were systematically destroyed and many Jews rounded up and imprisoned. But it wasn't until the start of WWII in 1939 that mass killings actually started taking place, and only in 1942 at the Wannsee conference was the holocaust as we know it today actually planned.
Many Jews stayed in Germany until it was too late because they didn't think that it could get worse.
That ellipsis that you put in my comment really is doing some heavy lifting here. Seems like you ignored everything else I said between those statements. It wasn't about one person being in jail for 10 days at all. I actually didn't mention that because I don't think it's one of the most pressing issues even if it is another example on the pile.
I was responding to someone dismissing concerns as "reflexive hysteria." Historical parallels aren't uncivil, they help examine patterns. The HN guidelines discourage flamewars and personal attacks, neither of which I did. I challenged a characterization, not the person. If discussing historical parallels to current events is now considered inappropriate for HN, that would significantly narrow meaningful conversation beyond what the guidelines actually state.
