[joshka]

I think this belongs on hacker news (and unflagged) mainly because of who Tim Bray is. Notably co-inventor of XML, worked on a bunch of web standards etc.

Whether you agree or disagree with non-US citizens coming to America to engage in the advancement of technology, the important thing is to have discourse on the topic. That is in line with aims and goals of this site. This story is much less politics and much more about the impact of social policy on technologists.

As a non-US citizen myself but who has lived there for some time, I find that having and expressing an opinion on things like this is difficult due to the danger of such retaliation mentioned during border crossings and my daily life.

[atoav]

As another non-US citizen I feel similar. My profile as a maker and software dev with extensive infrastructure knowledge should be exactly what the US is looking for, but I already decided the US isn't a country I am going to police my own speech for.

First watching the tearing up of the societal contract in the US over the past decades turned this into a country that feels like it is on the brink of a collapse. No longer can regular Americans rely that working hard will give them a good or even decent life. This means intense pressures are at work with some very desperate people, bringing out the ugliest (but also sometimes the most beautiful) bits of humanity, all while you have richer folks at the top who act like how their country operates at large is none of their business as long as there is a cut in it for them. Why should I care about the US if you guys don't even care about it yourselves?

Second the US is highly unreliable. Laws, democracy, human rights, treaties, consumer rights — all are treated as negotiable, optional things that you use against your enemies and ignore when it affects your own. With enough money everything can be bent around. There are no principles at work that one could rely on and that is no foundation to build a life on unless you are literally ready to join the ranks of people acting like cartoon villains — something only people do who have no self-respect for their limited time on earth.

Yeah, I don't see myself even visiting the US in my lifetime.

[RetroTechie]

> First watching the tearing up of the societal contract in the US over the past decades turned this into a country that feels like it is on the brink of a collapse.

Hehe, reminds me about a video I saw some years ago.

They asked ordinary citizens what a reasonable distribution of wealth should be. Like the share of overall wealth owned by the richest 10% (or 1% or whatever), vs wealth owned by the rest of the population. Let's call this ratio "X".

Then those citizens were asked what they thought the wealth distribution was actually like (let's call that "Y"). No surprise: people thought wealth was much more UNevenly distributed than it should be.

Then they showed what the distribution was like in reality (let's call that "Z"): way more extreme.

So, wealth distributed way more uneven than people thought, and that in turn way more uneven than what people thought it should be.

That alone explains a lot of what's wrong with the US imho: broken/corrupt politics, outsized influence of tech bros (including outside US), a health problem bankrupting people, people turning to drugs, a militarized police force, incarceration ratios, homeless epidemic, etc etc.

Especially in a highly developed country where total wealth is enough to have everybody live comfortably & care-free.

As opposed to some poor war-torn country where wealth is also unevenly distributed, but it's obvious and everybody knows it. And overall wealth is a lot less to begin with (so people being desperate isn't surprising).

US' downfall turning it into a banana republic, its erosion of democratic institutions, human rights etc, is a logical result from the above. I'm not expecting that to improve sadly :-(. Things will probably get worse & there will be blood in the streets.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> I think this belongs on hacker news (and unflagged) mainly because of who Tim Bray is.

A vouch option for Flagged submissions would be appreciated. I wonder if it used to be there but was removed.

[Freedom2]

I spoke to a few HNers who I know flagged this post. They mentioned that they flagged it because it goes against the HN guidelines - a holy grail of sorts - and that the post does not invite "curious discussion". When prompted, they mentioned they would much rather read about pro-Musk technological exploits than anything against the US.

[GJim]

Unfortunately, flagging is heavily abused here on HN. Criticism of adtech and attempts to defend privacy laws will bring out flagging in droves; almost as if some HN'ers salaries are dependent on opposing such laws!

Some sort of meta-moderation system to prevent abuse of flagging would be welcome.

[xingped]

Unfortunately HN is likely astroturfed just as much as any other forum, despite the otherwise seemingly substantiveness of HN compared to sites like Reddit. And unfortunately there's no way to cancel out bad faith flagging and downvoting the same way you can reply to bad faith commenting. It's more invisible and easier to abuse (once the karma thresholds have been reached, which isn't hard).

[igneo676]

The mitigation mechanism is moderators like dang who manually intervene

It's not perfect, but it ain't nothing

[insane_dreamer]

there are tons of posts on HN that don't invite "curious discussion"

this is one that would actually invite curious discussion if some people weren't clutching onto their "God Bless America (We're #1!)" pearls quite so tightly

[Teever]

More and more I'm finding that the most interesting conversation about America isn't coming from Americans anymore.

There was a time where I was quite interested in listening to people from America talk about their fascinating and crazy sounding country, but as time goes on I find that to be much more repetitive and not insightful.

Now I'm more interested in what people from other countries have to say about America, and I find it fascinating how Americans online find this unsettling and sometimes get snippy about it really weird ways.

Sometimes I wonder what political threads on HN would be like if Americans weren't allowed to participate in them. For the people in the crowd who take things more literally in know this isn't possible, it's just an interesting thought experiment.

Would that result in more 'creative' conversation?

Maybe for a while until new patterns/tropes/memes were built up by the users that could comment on them. Maybe the issue with the political discussions that too often the people talking about them are too close to them, too immersed in them?

[AnonC]

> A vouch option for Flagged submissions would be appreciated.

AFAIK, upvoting a flagged submission cancels out the flagging to some extent. I don’t know the internals of how this process works. I’ve upvoted the submission in an effort to get it unflagged (it still may not get to the front page or may rapidly drop down though).