Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by saurik 1457 days ago
It's a well-known thought process that has even been covered by places such as the Washington Post (among others, to be clear)... which I took the 30 seconds just now to find for you -- even though I think it is extreme frustrating when people whine about proactive citations for this kind of thing as it simply isn't a fair way to have a conversation -- and then when I switched back here to write this I realized that "the person who made the claim" in fact said it as well.

Like, this is a well-known enough thought process that the person I responded to had already felt a need to dig into this themselves before, only they dug into it wrong as a misinterpretation of the claim. Where I'd say we currently stand is thereby "seems like a credible hypothesis worthy of discussion". If anything, I can see a more useful way to ding the original claim here -- based on my knowledge of this ongoing discussion -- but it isn't to whine about how they should have already needed to provide evidence in their initial post, and nor certainly is it "I found a bunch of counter examples".

But even that seems like a non-sequitur as the interesting thing here clearly wasn't an attempt to sideline us into a discussion about police but was instead just an attempt to make a wider discussion about annoying usage of passive voice and other language shenanigans to avoid directly admitting blame or control -- which is an entirely fair point and I will strongly claim is a fully valid thing to be discussing and criticizing of this statement by Nintendo -- and while I could see reasonably pushing back on it in that light in a ton of ways, again: that set doesn't include whining about citations during a discussion and likely doesn't include defenses of oblique rebuttals :(.