The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, the power of the tools keeps growing until one day, it will be absolute. Whoever is on the wrong side of the ideological coin flipping when that happens will be in big trouble.
>The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat.
Yep. Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society.
See slavery, bloodletting, alchemy. Although with Bitcoin’s popularity, it seems as though alchemy is back in again.
> Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society.
Of course I believe that.
I also believe that the tools the world uses to communicate are controlled by a small number of people who may not always share in whatever the prevailing tolerant attitude of the day is.
It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance.
There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.
Breaking the site guidelines like this is not ok, regardless of how wrong you think someone is. We've had to warn you about this more than once before. If you keep doing it, we will ban you.
> sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
Would you please stop posting to Hacker News in the flamewar style? I'm sure you can make your substantive points without aggressive snark and internet shaming à la Twitter. Please do.
This comment goes very bad when you start accusing the other person of reeducation camps, reign of terror, mass murder, and all the rest of it. Please review the site guidelines and keep this vicious, tedious slop far away from HN, if you want to keep commenting here.
Among many other rules that your comment broke, there's this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." You're required to follow that rule, and all the others, whether the other person does or not.
Edit: it looks like this account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed, as the guidelines explain, and we ban accounts that do it. I've banned this one. If you keep creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we will ban your main account as well.
Posting like this is unacceptable on HN. Nazi evil doesn't entitle you to pour acid all over the container here. Regardless of how right you are, venting bile and taunting others helps nothing and is destructive of everything we're trying to achieve here, such as hopefully have a place for discussion that isn't flaming shit. We need experienced users like you to help build that, instead of breaking the site guidelines blatantly. This whole subthread has been hellish, and it's extremely disappointing.
Please review the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Your key flaw, and HN's key flaw -- and to be fair, one shared by a lot of other people! -- is the pursuit of civility as an end in itself. Horrendously evil people can accomplish their goals while publicly conducting themselves with perfect civility, as history has taught us again and again. And HN's stance is that that's OK, because all that really matters is they're civil about it.
This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".
You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.
Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.
The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, the power of the tools keeps growing until one day, it will be absolute. Whoever is on the wrong side of the ideological coin flipping when that happens will be in big trouble.