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Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

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Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#31

Post by gindely »

krapp wrote: post #27
gindely wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments censor. I really wish I could read the "flagged" posts sometimes but the rules are the rules.

Everyone censors. A community is defined by a common set of values and cultural norms, which are a means of censoring those of outgroups in order to maintain a cohesive identity. People censor themselves constantly in order to stay within the boundaries of the law and the norms of public decency. An online community which has a specific purpose by definition censors content which falls outside that purpose. Hell, the…

choosing what not to say isn't censorship. Censorship is when the someone with power forces you to refrain from saying something - not just in a particular forum, but in any effective way. This place tells you "if you want to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, consider twitter or wordpress". Censorship is when the government tells you "if you want to to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, please consider the gulag or child porn charges". The difference is stark.

Diluting words of meaning doesn't help maintain free speech. It helps destroy it. If we don't know what free speech is, we can't defend it.

(The fact that you can't post illegal content is a form of censorship. But that's not hackernews censoring you, it's the government. The fact that some content is illegal is literally the definition of censorship.)

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#32

Post by mnl »

alfonsodev wrote: post #25
mrleiter wrote: post #15

That is just utterly sad and reprehensible. I cannot find better words. They are stuck in my throat.

This is how lack of planning and saturation looks like, workers in those houses might have been positive of SARS-CoV-2 and put in quarantine at their homes, in some places volunteers are helping to cover those positions, we don't have all the information of every house, it is a drama, I want to think and attribute it to incompetence rather than evil. Other countries should learn from this and don't let the system sat…

They have to show up at work by law, but there are unscrupulous people making a lot of money with shady nursing homes that simply have shown their lack of any human decency with this.

I'm pretty sure they'll get their due retribution, people are aghast at this criminal behaviour here.

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#33

Post by gindely »

mnl wrote: post #18
gambiting wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Spain is an inherently dysfunctional country. That's not a balanced opinion. That's just throwing shit into the crowd to see a reaction. If you really believe the stuff that you said, then explain why you think it's disfunctional and then we can have a discussion about it - maybe we'll even agree on some points! But otherwise you're just noise at best and provocator at worst.

That was simply zero information about the nursing home situation in Spain and plain old (you should guess where it comes from) political internal ethno-supremacism. Meanwhile in the real world, for instance, I live next to a nursing home with 100 cases (6 deaths so far), 35 of them workers, that has been transformed into a state field hospital with support of all authorities and the military after the business asked…

Other people are saying that the reason there's more deaths in Italy than other countries is because in Italy, there's sharing living spaces by the elderly and the young. An old folks home (I suppose that's what is meant by "nursing home") is kinda the definition of segregating the elderly. Sounds like that doesn't help - because even segregated living environments have enough interliving. Old folk need to get food and medicine and it's not retired people in the shops.

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#34

Post by krapp »

gindely wrote: post #31
krapp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone censors. A community is defined by a common set of values and cultural norms, which are a means of censoring those of outgroups in order to maintain a cohesive identity. People censor themselves constantly in order to stay within the boundaries of the law and the norms of public decency. An online community which has a specific purpose by definition censors content which falls outside that purpose. Hell, the…

choosing what not to say isn't censorship. Censorship is when the someone with power forces you to refrain from saying something - not just in a particular forum, but in any effective way. This place tells you "if you want to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, consider twitter or wordpress". Censorship is when the government tells you "if you want to to spread certain ideas on the in…

>Censorship is when the someone with power forces you to refrain from saying something - not just in a particular forum, but in any effective way.

Choosing what not to say based on a fear of the consequences of that speech means that society, or whatever group you're communicating with, has exercised some form of influence or social authority over your speech, which is censorship. The oft-expressed axiom that "The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins" is censorship. Who are you, or anyone, to say where my rights begin and end?

>This place tells you "if you want to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, consider twitter or wordpress". Censorship is when the government tells you "if you want to to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, please consider the gulag or child porn charges".

And the consensus on Hacker News seems to be that those are perfectly equivalent, that a platform rejecting certain kinds of speech or users being told what sort of speech is acceptable and what isn't inevitably leads to Orwellian fascism. Terms of service and codes of conduct are routinely considered censorship. Amazon banning the sale of Mein Kampf is censorship. Twitter banning anyone for any reason is censorship. Youtube not showing extremist videos in recommendations is censorship. Why is there suddenly a grey area where there never was before?

>Diluting words of meaning doesn't help maintain free speech. It helps destroy it. If we don't know what free speech is, we can't defend it.

Attempting to "thought police" the meaning of words in such a prescriptivist manner is censorship. Who are you to say what words mean? When I use a word, it means precisely what I intend it to mean, no more, no less.

Government censorship is one form of censorship... and the only form of censorship relevant to the first amendment, but "censorship" itself is a much broader and more complex phenomenon.

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#35

Post by mnl »

gindely wrote: post #33
mnl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was simply zero information about the nursing home situation in Spain and plain old (you should guess where it comes from) political internal ethno-supremacism. Meanwhile in the real world, for instance, I live next to a nursing home with 100 cases (6 deaths so far), 35 of them workers, that has been transformed into a state field hospital with support of all authorities and the military after the business asked…

Other people are saying that the reason there's more deaths in Italy than other countries is because in Italy, there's sharing living spaces by the elderly and the young. An old folks home (I suppose that's what is meant by "nursing home") is kinda the definition of segregating the elderly. Sounds like that doesn't help - because even segregated living environments have enough interliving. Old folk need to get food a…

Yes, retirement home. The idea is problematic (wishful thinking actually) because you can't guarantee that people providing care there aren't infected. They might be asymptomatic or incubating. You can test them, but I don't think you can do that every day and then that such testing equals perfect filtering. Once it's inside isolation simply doesn't work.

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#37

Post by dang »

mPReDiToR wrote: post #7
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe delete your comment? You aren't doing yourself any favors by saying that kind of stuff.

Are we supposed to only say popular stuff? All ideas are worth discusding, even if only to explain why they are not going to be implemented.

It's certainly not that you're supposed to only say popular stuff. But if you're going to say something unpopular and inflammatory, the burden is on you to do it in a way that isn't destructive of ensuing discussion. If you just post it as raw flamebait and start fires, that damages the container here, which is already fragile. The site guidelines are designed to help us all protect against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

In a way, the one who has a contrarian (a.k.a. unpopular minority) view has a greater responsibility—not morally, but practically. If you know some truth that most people don't, that has much greater potency than most information, and you're responsible for how you handle it. If you act like a cowboy and just blare it at people, they will seize up and become less receptive, which discredits the truth and leaves its cause worse off than it was before. So the community interest (not to be destroyed by flamewars) and your personal interest (to express something unpopular in a way that can be heard) actually coincide.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#38

Post by dang »

gindely wrote: post #23
x__x wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Are we supposed to only say popular stuff?" I've noticed a lot of censorship on this site

Governments censor. I really wish I could read the "flagged" posts sometimes but the rules are the rules.

You can read everything that gets posted here, including all [flagged] and [dead] posts. Just turn on "showdead" in your profile.

The only exceptions are outright-deleted comments, and we never do that except when the author asks us to. (Exception to the exception: once or twice a decade, we've had to delete something for legal reasons.)

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#39

Post by dang »

enriquto wrote: post #2

Spain is an inherently dysfunctional country. A ridiculous ghost of an old evil empire. Its territory must be split and given to neighboring countries and new countries that are created.

This is the sort of denunciatory rhetoric we don't allow on HN because it leads to flamewars, and of course because the vast majority of the time it's just cheap and ugly, with people attacking others for garden-variety reasons (fear, anger, projection), as humans do.

However, comments where people are criticizing their own background (country, in this case) are more complex and are a special case. I wish I could dig up some of the moderation replies I've posted to commenters in this position over the years, but unfortunately my HN Search fu has failed to find any. (Edit: I did find a small one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732812)

They also have a particular taste. As soon as I read this, I could feel that you were probably writing from that perspective. Such comments have a bittersweet quality. Even though the rhetoric is harsh, one can sense that the speaker has 'paid' for it with lived experience. Of course, coming from a minority inside that country, it gets even more complex. But I bet that if someone were to come along and criticize Spain in an ugly and stupid way, you'd be the first to defend it—because you know it and because that would be the only noble thing to do. As John Lennon said to Rolling Stone: I can diss the Beatles, you don't get to diss the Beatles.

However, all this subtlety is lost on the internet. Your comment isn't what it appears to be, but that doesn't matter, because people will react to it as if it is. If you post like this to HN, you will start a flamewar regardless of how much complexity is behind the message, and this will damage the container just the same as someone posting out of ignorance and prejudice. So we need you not to do it here, to protect the community. You're welcome to share your experience in other, more personal and substantive ways, if you choose.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. These are arcane details, but it's interesting to me that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22673470 picked up on the overtones in your comment. Family members (speaking metaphorically) can hear these things.

Re: Spanish soldiers find bodies in Madrid retirement homes

#40

Post by enriquto »

dang wrote: post #39
enriquto wrote: post #2

Spain is an inherently dysfunctional country. A ridiculous ghost of an old evil empire. Its territory must be split and given to neighboring countries and new countries that are created.

This is the sort of denunciatory rhetoric we don't allow on HN because it leads to flamewars, and of course because the vast majority of the time it's just cheap and ugly, with people attacking others for garden-variety reasons (fear, anger, projection), as humans do. However, comments where people are criticizing their own background (country, in this case) are more complex and are a special case. I wish I could dig…

Thanks. I was writing that as a passport-carrying citizen of Spain, who thinks the situation is hopeless and the state can simply not be reformed from inside.

The negative reaction to my comment was a bit surprising, considering that citizens of the USA often make similar remarks about their own country, and that these remarks are seen in good light on HN. But it seems that there is a small team of Spanish nationalists around here that will not tolerate such deviations. I do not really care too much about them.

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