> Igor Sikorsky... fled in 1917 because the Soviets threatened to shoot him.<p>> The US has been working itself up to this for about 20 years now, since the “war on terror” started, and the oligarch weaponization of “woke” politics to keep the left from raising their taxes post Occupy Wall Street. Now it’s a war of terror, and the enemy, as they say, is us.<p>The "Woke Left" is coming to shoot us! Any day now!<p>> Conservative family-oriented religious people like Sikorsky and Seversky [...] being the backbone of every functioning civilization for all of human history.<p>Honestly, nobody is getting "cancelled", harassed, or whatever, for manifesting <i>these</i> adjectives. It's ALWAYS something beyond.
Another great example of a physicists being atrocious at doing humane scholarship. Between praising tsarists Russia and having his favorite translation of the futurist manifesto published on his blog, this is just straight fascism on the front page of HN.
This is a strange essay.<p>The arc from Russia in 1917 to California today is absurd.<p>Russia lost World War I and fought a terrible civil war for a few years. I imagine San Francisco as a paradise in comparison.
Well, considering that at it's peak , only about 10,000 out of 330 million americans applied to give up their citizenship a year, I'd say the second part of the authors article is BS . They mention some regional and covid related events to argue that a certain group of people are getting persecuted in the US. r/persecutionfetish if it were reddit
Moral of the story: As an autocrat, when your power is challenged by society as a whole don't fight back attempts at democratic control else worse things may happen for everyone (if you care, also you may end up in front of a firing squad)<p>(And don't go to war repeatedly, war is always a gamble)
From the part of the article where the author draws the moral of the story:<p>> As America descends into the California model of madness and tech-mediated kakistocracy, the smart and adventurous Americans; the kind that found tech companies, or build devilish new weapons for governments, will leave. I know many who have. Virtually everyone I speak to (of course a biased set) is thinking about it. Left wing, right wing: people in tech, military technology, finance, crypto; they see the US heading over the waterfall into madness and want no part of it.<p>Assuming for a moment that this observation is correct, what are the destinations that the smart and adventurous Americans are leaving to? What places in the world are now the most hospitable and the most rewarding for talent? My naive impression was that Wester European countries are even less agile and enterprising than the US, and anyway, move in lockstep with it. Russia is obviously out. I doubt people are moving to African countries. Nor do I think I heard about an immigration wave into China. And despite Balaji's bullishness on India, I thought net migration is still out of India rather than the other way around. Same with Eastern Europe. So where are these Americans going? Australia? Israel? Singapore?
The mass emigrating to other countries take is a little eccentric, but companies and people are doing this with moves out of California to places like Texas, etc.