China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist (2019)

#101

Post by BrandoElFollito » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #89

why_Mr_Anderson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit out of touch with American politics, please remind me which one is the 'fascist leader' : village idiot that won previous elections or creepy uncle that won the recet ones?

American political discourse 101: Republicans = Fascists and Literally All Nazis Democrats = Marxists and Literally All Pedophiles

I must say that this correctly represents the US politics as seen from France.

We do not see the normal people who vote one way or the other, they are not news worthy. We see some fanatics and make our opinions based on that.

This is not different from how France is seen abroad, but somehow many people do not correlate these two facts.

Re: China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist (2019)

#102

Post by dang » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #100

dang wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle. This is against the site guidelines: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . We ban the sort of account that does this, because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. More explanation if desired: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://…

I don't think my account was using HN primarily for "political/ideological/national battle", but this was indeed such a debate. Still, can you help me finding out, where exactly I was destroying curious debate here? Because in my opinion, I was trying in honesty to actually have a rational, curious debate about the implications of a trade embargo against china. Without attacking persons, just by arguments supported b…

It's hard to figure out where a site like HN should draw the line when it comes to political arguments. We have to draw one somewhere, because political flames will consume the site entirely if we don't. But making all political themes off-topic isn't an option either (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). It's a tough problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844.

One key test that we apply is whether an account is using HN primarily to do battle about these things (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). Even when they're not breaking the site guidelines in other ways by being snarky and so on (which is very good if so, and not at all common with this sort of account), that's still out of sync with the intended use of the site. This test turns out to be useful because it's an objective moderation standard (so when people inevitably say "you're just moderating me because you don't like my politics" we can answer in good conscience that that's not true), and because it fits the data well: HN accounts really are bimodal this way, and the ones that are using HN primarily for politics are far more likely to be damaging the commons here.

Those are the principles we use. The factual question is whether your account was using HN primarily to argue about politics. If not, I'm happy to be wrong—it just looked that way to me when I skimmed quickly. Even bimodal distributions have borderline cases! But it would be good to get more squarely into the desired mode.

Re: China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist (2019)

#103

Post by hutzlibu » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #102

hutzlibu wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think my account was using HN primarily for "political/ideological/national battle", but this was indeed such a debate. Still, can you help me finding out, where exactly I was destroying curious debate here? Because in my opinion, I was trying in honesty to actually have a rational, curious debate about the implications of a trade embargo against china. Without attacking persons, just by arguments supported b…

It's hard to figure out where a site like HN should draw the line when it comes to political arguments. We have to draw one somewhere, because political flames will consume the site entirely if we don't. But making all political themes off-topic isn't an option either ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... ). It's a tough problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 . One key test…

"The factual question is whether your account was using HN primarily to argue about politics."

I am very sure, I did not and that could be easily verified, by a full investigation into all my comment history - but that would be probably out of scope with your other duties.

So first things first, yes, I probably did engaged more with political topics lately and also received a lot of heat for it, by having non-mainstream opinions. And no worries, I feel pretty much done with that and with no intentions at all, to engage with that further.

But I am actually disappointed with that, because even though I am aware that I am not perfect in my responses and aware and in control of all my emotional triggers - I am very confident, that all in all, my position and behavior is very anti-ideological, open minded and truth committed. And in my perception - I received a lot of undeserved hate for it. Fueled by strong tribal thinking.

For example this discussion about geopolitics. I can't help, but being reminded, that this forum is still mainly US-based. Let's just take my last flagged post in questions:

"Yeah, but since the US is NOT leading by shiny good example and continues to be allied with really bad examples like saudi arabia - the rest of the world views it all as just power struggle between china and US - which it mostly is."

In hindsight, I clearly see that I did not articulated my point very well, nor with the "desired mode" (SHOUTING is not part of it, I know) , but I really do not think that my post was factual wrong. But after this discussion I believe, no matter how well and nice and neutral I would have articulated it - my point would still have had the strong potential of starting a flame war, or just being flagged and downvoted.

(I mean, this answer was downvoted and it didn't even criticized anyone except the idea that a trade embargo will help with anything:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26679748)

So long story short: I just won't dive into these discussions here anymore.

I can live with that and probably be more productive in ways that matter more. So speaking of it:

I am planning to do a Show HN quite soon and I would therefore not like it, if my lates engagement with controversal topics with the result of flagged posts - would influence the visibility of my Show HN Post in a negative way.