[unity1001]

There is nothing 'nationalist' about this. The past 40 years have seen an immense amount of trends that were manufactured for profit originating from the US. From privatization of social services to reduction of labor protections. From atomization of social life down to individuals because 'individualism was better' to having those individuals subsist on prozac to keep their resulting depression under control. From sugary food spam then to obesity being bad to now obesity being ok. In the process, a lot of such trends were exported everywhere, including sociopathic scandals like the Avandia drug scandal. (which is one of many). This is without even touching the subject of overseas wars and how they are manufactured with the same trend-making mechanic, starting from how a certain people being 'evil' and their lives not being worth 'that much to ensuing invasion, occupation and destruction being 'a mistake'.

A trend is manufactured by whatever private interest, industry group or segment that catches a moneymaking or career-making opportunity. They push it as hard as they can. If they end up being able to gather popular dynamics behind them for whatsoever reason - like how some people are jumping on this bandwagon - then the trend becomes ever stronger and more easily exportable.

The topic at hand follows on the heels of the mentality that exported all of those to everywhere around the world. If that is a trait of the US as a nation, then there is a problem with that and the rest of the world cannot stop calling it out because 'that would be nationalism'.

By the way, nationalism in its negative sense means people elevating their own nation above others and demeaning others. Not criticising some other nation beause of their actual deeds. At no point I said that 'this particular nation is better than the US and therefore they are superior'. I literally said that the only country on the planet that this is a mainstream trend is the US, which means that the US goes against entire world. Which is obviously not 'a nation'.

I want to stress again that such logic would literally prohibit any criticsm of US foreign policy and prevent anyone from saying that the US has been invading and destroying nations in the past 40 years - due to being 'nationalism' in the subverted definition of 'criticism of a particular nation' that you reduced it to.

[dang]

You've replied to me three times and responded only about the 'nationalistic' aspect. From this I see that I did a poor job of explaining why your comments were so abusive of HN. Even if we accept your definition of the word 'nationalistic', it ought to be clear that you broke the site guidelines extremely badly.

By nationalistic flamewar I simply mean the kind of flamewar that happens when people put down other countries on internet forums. It's a shallow, simple definition that doesn't have any nuance; nor should it, because internet hellfire doesn't have any nuance.

If you don't like that use of the word, that's fine—it's not the main point. The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar that wrecked this thread, and moreover would completely wreck this forum if we allowed it to. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34200065 where I've explained this in more detail. You've been a good HN user otherwise, but we can't allow this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.

[unity1001]

> The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar

That makes it clearer, thanks. I do understand the concern about flamewars. I moderated forums myself. However, how will the criticism about things that originate from a specific society, organization or country will even be possible in such an environment then. Any criticism by naming anything would amount to an assault against a group or country under that standard. Or, is it so that if such criticism is raised, but just the origin is not specifically named, that would be compatible with the guidelines?

[dang]

Thanks for these kind replies—I really appreciate it.

I think it is safer to make one's case on $topic without attributing it to a source that many people are likely to be identified with (e.g. national origin or whatever it is). Any time someone feels pressure against a place of identity, it feels like they're being attacked, and at that point the driver of discussion ceases to be $topic and starts activating survival circuitry. The only responses at that point are defensiveness or counterattack (or both). Curious conversation, which is the raison d'être of this place, becomes impossible.

If, however, the argument makes no sense without that attribution, I would try to do it in a way that includes lots of reassurance that one isn't disrespecting or putting down the identity (e.g. nationality or whatever it is), and make a point of explaining the connection to $topic in a limited and respectful way.

It's necessary to err on the side of doing it this way, even if it feels excessive, because although you may know that you're not attacking someone's identity, they don't have any way of knowing that up front. We all have a lot more context in their heads than we include in our internet comments. Readers don't have any of that information unless we explicitly include it. That's one reason why it's so easy for people to misread others' intent on the internet - I've written about this in various places, e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....