112 Gripes About the French • Hacker News Board

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#251

Post by nobleach » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #164

Jkol wrote: post #152

The opening paragraphs are lovely and absolutely not what I'd expected based on the name. This is the America we want to live in. "We insist upon the right to express our own opinions. But we also believe in the right of others to express their opinions. For the right to speak involves the duty to listen...We know that the truth can only be found through open and honest discussion, and that the common good is served…

We need to be reminded of this. The left and right are so divided that they're intolerable of one another. Neither side believes the other is worth listening to. It's a shame. We're all animals traversing a complicated landscape. There's daily pain and suffering, and then we die. We should remind ourselves how similar everyone actually is, and that the diversity of our views are humanity living and breathing through…

What's worse, that division is extremely profitable to some. So they spend their resources stoking that division. This only serves to drive the wedge deeper. Meanwhile, it's like the classic game of Three Card Monte. We are so busy hating the people we're told are "our enemy", that we ignore potential real enemies.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#252

Post by true_religion » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #177

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following your logic: 'French girls were fully permitted to go out but there was just a process to follow - presence of a chaperon.' Seriously, just open Wikipedia and read about different countries e.g.: In the United States, paternity testing is fully legal, and fathers may test their children without the consent or knowledge of the mother. Paternity testing take-home kits are readily available for purchase, though…

Except that taking someone's DNA without their consent (or the consent of their guardians) is nothing like making girls (and women) be accompanied by a chaperone. I always find it fascinating that many American people believe very strongly in individual freedoms, the same people often believe these freedoms do not apply to children (or teenagers) and parents should have unconditional ownership over their children.

But do you really need the consent of all the guardians?

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#253

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #42

> France sounded like a muslim country back then: >> Most French girls before the war had far less freedom than our girls back home. A great many were not permitted to go out without a chaperone. France is dominantly Catholic in religion and in morals... Can you imagine: from that to disallowing fathers to do a DNA test in less than 100 years!

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

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

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#254

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

Bayart wrote: post #109

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #42

> France sounded like a muslim country back then: >> Most French girls before the war had far less freedom than our girls back home. A great many were not permitted to go out without a chaperone. France is dominantly Catholic in religion and in morals... Can you imagine: from that to disallowing fathers to do a DNA test in less than 100 years!

What are you on ? It's perfectly legal, there's just a process to follow because it's completely illegal to take someone's DNA without their consent, unless there's a criminal procedure with sufficient proof. Sneaking a paternity test by taking someone's DNA surreptitiously would be not only worthless as a legal document, but also put you on the spot for litigation.

Please omit personal swipes from your HN comments, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. It just makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without that first bit.

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

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#255

Post by robgibbons » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

shijie wrote: post #241

RHSeeger wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of this, but it also plays poorly with > Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." But I guess, to be fair, giving the other sides a fair chance to make it's p…

This just seems like a rather clever permutation of ad hominem. “The reason I won’t refute your argument is that it is so incorrect that it would take me forever to explain why.”

Not really. Ad hominem is directing the subject of your argument at the person instead of their ideas.

Brandolini's law is more like the adage, "a lie can travel halfway around the world, while the truth is lacing up its boots." It's very easy to spout correct-sounding lies in such a volume that countering them becomes an academic challenge.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#256

Post by nautilius » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #231

cycomanic wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The what you call "reflexive anti-american bullshit" comes because of post like yours, which without evidence spout claims such as "we do more good than anyone else - by a assive margin". The US (as in government) like all large powers are doing a lot of self interested power politics. They have overthrown many democratically elected governments and supported (and sometimes even put in place) some of the worst dictat…

Go look up humanitarian giving. These are quantifiable numbers. We do more than the next 10 countries rolled up. We AGREE about the negative bullshit the US has done. We're actively trying to work on that shit, none of us like it. We've actually done a stellar job looking at our history and current practices and saying "That was fucked up" and "We should fix this going forward." But we still do WAY more good than, li…

Your source says that, per capita, Germany pays more than the US.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#257

Post by danans » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

julienfr112 wrote: post #238

danans wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race operates on an individual regardless of their behavior. It is a construct that is based on physical appearance only. Race is something that an individual has no control over. Culture and ethnicity are constructs derived from behaviors, including language, manner of dress, interests, etc. Culture/ethnicity is something that depending on the individual, they can have far more (though not total) control over, via c…

Yeah, maybe French people could just unfrench their frenchiness...

The whole point of the pamphlet is they shouldn't have to in order to be accepted by the American troops, but a white French person with sufficient linguistic and cultural flexibility could pass for a white American, and largely would in contexts where they did not have to speak.

And black person could never do the same.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#258

Post by Stupulous » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #207

dheera wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xkcd doesn't agree with the "duty to listen". https://xkcd.com/1357/

I don't see those things as incompatible at all. "giving the other side a fair chance to make its point" (from very next sentence) doesn't mean they can't blow that chance by being obnoxious, unfair, offensive, or plain wrong. I don't think the OP argues that this "duty to listen" extends forever, that you have to keep listening after you have determined that "the other side" is being an asshole.

I think a tit-for-tat approach is fair. If the other party is demonstrably not listening to you, you can drop the duty to listen (and you should probably just disengage). If someone is participating in good faith, but wrong or an asshole/obnoxious/offensive, I don't think that justifies censorship.

In any argument at least one and frequently both positions are plain wrong. Both parties think that is true of the other. If that were a reason to drop free speech norms, they would always be dropped.

Civility is an aspirational value, but communities that enforce it invariably will do so in a biased way. Rude behavior is easy to spot in the outgroup and easy to overlook in the ingroup. Offensiveness is nebulously defined- someone might be offended by the word 'asshole', someone else by the banning of vulgarity. How a community defines civility privileges people from backgrounds that define it similarly. Those closest to the issue will have a harder time keeping their emotions in check- eg. a white person might have an easier time arguing dispassionately about racism than a minority.

If you can get around those issues, I think you should. Civil discourse optimizes for a lot of the factors that justify free speech in the first place. Not so with being wrong; a major benefit of free speech is that those who are wrong and participating can be righted, to the benefit of all parties.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#259

Post by themeiguoren » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

heffer wrote: post #169

baby wrote: post #10

This whole thing is amazing. It still reads really well today, like there's no tone of racism and nothing seems inappropriate (which is a hard thing to achieve with time). I wish we had such a book currently on how arabs and the muslim world are different, but not so different than us. > We didn't come to Europe to save the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to Europe to do anyone any favors. We came t…

> nothing seems inappropriate "The French can't drive a car. They can't keep it up. They ruin vehicles." The French, on the whole, certainly do not drive as well, keep a car up as well, or protect their vehicles as well as we do. Neither do women, compared to men. We have had more mechanical training, more technical experience. And at the present time we have incomparably better maintenance facilities.

It’s an anachronism that doesn’t fly today, but to be fair this seems descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#260

Post by systemvoltage » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

esrauch wrote: post #243

rayiner wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just 50% of the population. Folks on the left will sniffily tell you that stuff where the vast majority of the rest of humanity agrees with the right isn’t even up for discussion.

Your sentence is really the same divisive "other side is crazy" crap that everyone else is complaining about. Folks on both the left and right (under US definitions) will sniffily do that same thing and act like their positions are obviously correct and the other side obviously unreasonable.

The left controls all corporations and big tech (see Google’s new policy for misinformation). So one side has an unreasonable amount of power.