[olivermuty]

"Rant about politics", haha. Or as other people like to call it: "A real concern described in an apt manner".

I have observed these inflammatory sub-graphs of comments myself and have thought to myself that this must be a huge growing grounds for unmoderated and unwanted behaviour because it more or less becomes invisible once flagged enough.

[erdii]

In this specific case complaining about "politics" gets the sour by-taste of enabling (or at least not condoning) harrasment to the point of single folks taking their own lifes over it.

Why?! Even if you're not sure what to think about the queer movement; even if you have already made up your mind about the queer movement and oppose their ideas or some of them; I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

hastily jotted rant for the folks who'd like to complain about "politics" from creeping into every discussion everywhere:

It's really sad to see so many folks disconnecting and immediately dismissing whole groups of other folks as soon as they start complaining about an issue they have because of "politics". :(

I get that you don't want to get involved in shit flinging shows and that its tedious to figure out who's in the right and who's in the wrong. Especially because there are never clear answers. If you feel like this and then proceed to complain about 'politics' creeping everywhere, please beware of this:

Pretending to be apolitical doesn't work most of the time, as politics is basically another word for "acting (or deliberately not-acting) in some kind of public sphere" which you all do, and when the "policitics" have arrived at a topic, then they'll stay there at least in that specific case you are witnessing! You just are part of a hyperconnected and confusing world with a lot of conflict, wether you like it or not.

Pretending to be apolitical also serves the upholding of whatever status quo is currently in place because anything that has even a slight chance of changing anything is inherently a political topic.

Please don't turn your heads on "political" topics or, at least, don't complain about it in that way as it mostly enables unjust behaviour to continue. It doesn't even matter if it's the person who brought up the "political" stuff who is acting unjust or the folks they're complaining about). In both cases it's probably better to either avoid commenting at all or to convey your critical thoughts to that "political" conversation.

[pjc50]

> I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

There are plenty of people who do want the freedom to say exactly what they choose, including a lengthy period of directed harassment, and shrug their shoulders if someone commits suicide over it. There's not much that can be done other than ban them from civilized spaces.

[pessimizer]

"Bullying" is a judgement. Intrinsic to the word is a judgement that what is being done is bad, and the person doing it would not describe it that way.

And by that I don't mean that it's not bad to bully people (it's rather tautological), I mean that talk of bullying often begs the question, and is intentionally done in order to elide past the actual events that occurred. Lèse majesté laws against talking about the King, elected officials, or even cops or bureaucrats now get justified as anti-bullying.

I missed any rant about politics in the blog however. But this thread has a smell of "my politics aren't political because they are true, and your politics are political because they are lies."

[jcranmer]

What the referer-replacement page was talking is Kiwi Farms, which is doing the kind of stuff that even the US First Amendment's very expansive protections fails to protect. (The criminal liability here is "intentional inflection of emotional distress", although note that most lawsuits that allege that are groundless lawsuits that largely fail to make it pass the motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim stage as "they made me feel bad" isn't sufficient to allege an IIED).

[nyssos]

> The criminal liability here is "intentional inflection of emotional distress",

Intentional infliction of emotional distress is a tort, not criminal.

[keybored]

I mean this is correct. Bullies, or at least the adult ones, don’t call what they do bullying (except the absolute geniuses that think “actually bullying has a social corrective behavior, I’m just helping actually”).

We’re all just busting each other’s balls, right? Look at George, he’s laughing! He’s totally in on the joke and not at all just showing submissive deference in order to not lose face.

[logicprog]

I'm glad at least some other people on this horrible site feel this way.

[im3w1l]

To me, you have to distinguish between harassment directed at a person, and on the other hand discussion about a person.

It is not possible to use hacker news to send messages to someones email. It is not even possible to send a dm to another hacker news user. You could potentially imagine hacker news being used to organize harassment of someone, but I have never seen either accusations or evidence of such a thing.

So then we have established, that since harassment directed at them is impossible, the issue they have is that people on hacker news write bad things about them.

Next, those things seem to often be flagged or downvoted, reducing exposure. But that is apparently not enough, because they can be found on google. So here we arrive at the core issue. There is content on Google about this person, that they would rather not be on Google. This is the complaint. So this person is basically saying that if there is unfavorable coverage of them findable on google, that is harassment, and it needs to go. If it isn't purged it's bullying that could lead to suicide.

This is a very ambitious "landgrab" if you will, and it starts to seriously infringe on other peoples rights.

It's similar in that manner to other things like "stop terrorism" or "think of the children". Yes clearly harassment is bad, and terrorism is bad, and pedophiles are no good. But we can't completely give up on our freedoms because of that.

[lelanthran]

> Or as other people like to call it: "A real concern described in an apt manner".

Oh please. Every activist for every marginal issue says the same thing. Doesn't make it true.