[Buldak]

I agree. That is not to say that everyone getting upset nowadays is necessarily in the right. But I think what many people remember as calmer, more reasonable discussions of yesteryear are largely a reflection of greater hegemony.

[QAPereo]

More voices also means more noise, but I think this is a transitional period, and the noise will find its level again. The value of giving people a franchise based on what they have to say has to start somehwere, and it’s an admittedly rough start. I feel like too often the value of the underlying process is ignored in favor of obsessive complaining sbout reasonable and expected cultural growing pains.

[wildmusings]

Ah yes, the growing pains of ruining people's lives for having the wrong opinions. Just reasonable growing pains!

[dang]

Would you please do a better job of following the site guidelines? They include "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." They also include "Snark is deprecated".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Mithaldu]

I wish you guys would straight-up forbid sarcasm. It would improve discourse a lot.

[wildmusings]

What is a more generous interpretation of what he said? I didn’t misinterpret it, I used a rhetorical device to unwind his obfuscation of exactly what he was defending. If you only follow a dry analytic tone, then you deny yourself an essential tool for disarming sophistic contortions that defend things that are clearly indefensible when plainly stated.

[dang]

A more generous interpretation seems easy to find, so I'm not sure that arguing about "what he said" would get to the point. The point seems to me to be at a heart level, i.e. do you really want to be generous or not. If you don't, answering your question will just be another argument that does no good, and if you do, then we should talk about that instead.

[wildmusings]

Orwell gives a good example of these kinds of contortions in Politics and the English Language:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

To which the proper response is the ungenerous and sarcastic, "yes, of course it is right to murder your opponents when it benefits you". Because to engage otherwise is to give the sophistry more legitimacy than it deserves.

[dang]

I'm fond of that essay too. But if you're going to play the Orwell card it's best to make sure that you're not playing it cheaply, i.e. to justify personal venting or sophistry of your own. Just because someone else is doing those things doesn't mean we aren't also.

[QAPereo]

Did you honestly expect that just because the stakes are people’s lives, that somehow the result wouldn’t be ugly? Welcome to Earth, or rather, to the rest of Earth which has never been so monumentally sheltered. To speak by way of analogy, it’s not unlike the harm done in the tech world, to people, to economies, to the environment, in the name of progress and “growing pains” of new tech.

[wildmusings]

When you're defending malicious attacks on people's characters, for the crime of having the wrong thoughtful opinion, on the basis that "life is rough", you've hit rock bottom.

That's not even a defense of the behavior, just an acknowledgement that people do bad things. You could say the same thing about any bad behavior, up to and including mass murder. Welcome to Earth, where people do such things!

[QAPereo]

When you're defending malicious attacks on people's characters...

I’m explaining, not defending. As I already said, welcome to Earth, try to be outraged by the inevitable, only as appropriate.