Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found security flaw in state site

One consistent stance on bodily autonomy would be that vaccinations should be mandatory, and so should abortions.

I hope no one is seriously advocating for that position, so obviously the issue of "consistency" is more complicated.

An adult is able to weigh for themselves the risks and benefits of receiving a vaccine. A child is not able to weigh those risks and benefits, and it reasonable in general to have that decision made by their parents.

I suppose someone could say, to be consistent, that we should allow parents to decide for the child in his or her mother's womb how to weigh the risks and benefits of being aborted versus being born, but at least for a healthy child we would never accept that being born is a worse outcome than being dead.

So I think that protecting adults from unwanted vaccinations and protecting pre-birth children from being aborted can be a consistent stance, even though, I accept, the problem is much more complicated than even that.

What's funny about the fact that there was a numerical encoding system for names/words in the first century AD? It's kinda cool, actually. Also, the "mark of the beast" isn't the hash, it's a physical mark that contains "the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

Your comment is a bit too polemical for me not to feel that ideological passion is driving it, but I can see where you're coming from, because the GP wasn't really written in the flamewar style. Its tone wasn't flamebait. Nonetheless, the content was. It was the sort of comment that feels perfectly objective and neutral to people who already agree with it—but only to those.

There's one non-obvious link in the moderation logic here, which might help to explain a bit. We don't really moderate comments—we moderate subthreads [1]. In this case I was swayed by the fact that the subthread was 350 posts of especially-wretched flamewar hell.

I often put it this way: the value of an HN comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This is a weird idea at first—it was to me, at least—because how can I be responsible for what other people do? But when the genre is conversation, and it's relatively predictable how people will react, it's my (i.e. each of our) responsibility not to do things that will predictably generate poor conversation. Conversation is a dance [2]. We need to take the other into account, regardless of how right we are or feel we are. It's not really about being right; there are more important things.

For those of us who tend to think of ourselves as atoms, this is hard to learn, especially because internet posts feel like atomic operations. They're not, though—they're molecular, and the threads are the molecules. To be a good atom, you need to take into account what ions are floating nearby and thus what molecules are likely to form out of what you post. It's not that hard to know this—the dynamics are relatively predictable.

[1] Coincidentally I wrote about this yesterday, if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386

Sure does seem like you don’t have any examples to back up the assertion that democrats are equally anti-intellectual.

If you make that assertion, you can’t be upset when people ask for examples or evidence. It’s extremely relevant to the (as of yet) unsupported argument you made.

Let's start with the hypothetical that a pregnant woman is expected to die unless her fetus is aborted. In this rare, but frequent enough situation, society must choose between murdering the fetus through action and murdering the mother through inaction. Who would you choose to murder?

Abortion isn't the only topic that people make a "moral" stance about, and in some ways it's the least interesting. It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.

On second thought, it does illustrate the difficulty most people have in thinking about continua rather than binary variables. Aliveness is, to me, clearly not binary. The fetus is minimally alive at conception and becomes alive at birth, but during the pregnancy is neither fully alive nor fully not alive. Similarly, an adult with brain damage, in a coma, isn't quite dead, but is also not fully alive.

I think that if we discussed specific situations, nearly everyone would wind up agreeing with the continua. It's only in the abstract that they insist on their binary labels. That's been my experience, anyway. Everyone's ethics are parsimonious, until it's their friends, family, or themselves that are in consideration.