[AuthorizedCust]

I’m reluctant to use “luxury” to describe these rights, and even more reluctant to suggest the west shares them well.

The former sets up an argument that these rights are superfluous, and the latter fails to recognize areas where the west does poorly at upholding rights, especially the limitations on speech imposed by many western governments.

[JumpCrisscross]

> former sets up an argument that these rights are superfluous

Luxury has more than one meaning [1]. If you prefer the language of counting blessings, so be it, though I could also pedantically quibble it implies a divine underwriting of our fundamental rights.

> the latter fails to recognize areas where the west does poorly at upholding rights, especially the limitations on speech imposed by many western governments

This crosses from pedantic quibbling to missing the forest for the trees.

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/luxury

[matesz]

> the limitations on speech imposed by many western governments

Ok enough I quit hacker news

[wholinator2]

Then go. The quality of your comment is extremely poor and is the exact kind of talk that will eventually turn this place into reddit, echo chamber devoid of actual discussion and difficult ideas. Here, the goal is to say something meaningful and extend the conversation, not stop discussion with vague appeal to emotions about frustrations with the "wrong opinion". I'd've actually been on your side in a discussion if it had continued rather than being stonewalled by attempting to set up a barrier between who's allowed to post and who's not. By commenting that you're implicitly pushing this place towards a culture that throws its hands up and plugs its ears whenever a "difficult" idea is presented. If you cannot handle that, then this isn't the place for you.

But who knows, maybe if you'd genuinely asked and heard them out instead of going all, "we don't like your kind here", you might've found yourself agreeing with them. Who knows, but this is about the genuine and free discussion of ideas, not baiting flame wars.

Edit: this is a long comment. It's the first one I've posted after seeing growing number of anti-discussion, reddit-like behavior. It's personally frustrating to me because this is where I go to get away from stuff like this. I hope this isn't too angry or judgy, and I hope everyone's doing okay.

[hairofadog]

To be fair, while I wouldn’t generally be in favor of a comment like the one you're replying to, I did feel empathy for it in this case. It's not about avoiding a difficult topic; it's exhaustion with this extremely tiresome tendency to try to bring bad-faith arguments about social media moderation into literally every topic. It reminds me of the scene in The Big Lebowski:

https://youtu.be/pn-kxUEySy0

"Excuse me, sir. Please keep your voices down. This is a family restaurant."

"Oh please, dear. For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"

Is social media moderation worth discussing? Sure! Is, "Teens may or may not have been executed for distributing movies, but on the other hand they deleted my tweet" a conversation worth having? Debatable.

[LegitShady]

The list of people who care about you being here is empty while people concerned about the trajectory of free expression is a significant portion of several democracies. Good luck on Reddit or Slashdot or whatever is next for you.

[crims0n]

OP was making the point that we shouldn't take our rights in the West for granted, because there are people in the world who have it demonstrably worse. Not every statement needs to account for all variables.

[pksebben]

"you should be glad all I do is yell at you, honey. Jerry down the block beats his wife with a belt"

[_3u10]

There are also people who have it better. Some countries even have the right to life.

[0dayz]

I mean you're allowed to move to north Korea if you want.

[41tor]

I'd rather move someplace slightly better like... Queens

;-)

[imwillofficial]

Compared to, I don’t know, the entirety of human existence, we live in absolute luxury