The group chats that changed America • Hacker News Board

Re: The group chats that changed America

#161

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #159

mrguyorama wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has done literal concentration camps at least twice, has a literal torture camp we rent in Cuba explicitly to get around the "inalienable" rights of people in the US, and the current admin has literally sent people to an active concentration camp in El Salvador, and has joked about sending "homegrown" people to this camp and that El Salvador will have to build more as they blatantly ignore the courts telling t…

Did you miss where I apologized for misreading mindslight's comment? Your post would make more sense if I hadn't added the "Edit" bit to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43817409 (nor posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824481 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823390 ). But I did that more than 24 hours before you posted this.

I certainly appreciate that you apologized openly but that was a comment you made in the guise of "Site Moderator". Those comments sometimes come with corrective actions, and are specifically meant to shape behavior. They have been used to shape MY behavior.

I'm pretty sure I've been chided before for making a drive by comment on this site, but that seems to have been the case here, in your official role.

>On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response.

>At first I read it as a gratuitous Holocaust reference (i.e. some sort of throwaway flamebait)

Part of my response is that I cannot fathom even a little bit the way you mistakenly read the comment in such a way, unless you just barely even see the comments you are moderating. Was this driven by a "concentration camp" auto-moderator or something?

It's frustrating how often we are told to trust that you moderate fairly, that any concerns we have are just "sampling bias" or confirmation bias, that we can't really discuss or doubt the rules, that definitely no vote manipulation happens, but we also cannot expect you to read the sentence containing the supposed reference?

IDK, man, I was just surprised.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#162

Post by handoflixue » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:34 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #24

handoflixue wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those. Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this? There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun…

I don't need to know OP personally. The knee jerk "right is the way they are because of the left" gives the game away. Left is responsible for ehat they so and never ever excused with "right made them do it". Not even when they were 100% right in the hindsight. Right is not responsible for what they do. They are victims of circumstances even when they caused the circumstances.

I don't think it's at all helpful to think of political groups as monolithic stereotypes like this.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#163

Post by archagon » Wed, May 07, 2025, 7:47 PM UTC

> One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture.

It genuinely baffles and disturbs me that these corpos seem to think of themselves as the intellectual elite. History will remember them as little more than greedy idiots falling over each other to manifest a new age of violent and repressive authoritarianism.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#164

Post by archagon » Wed, May 07, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

freshfunk wrote: post #111

Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and resul…

I say leak every. single. one. Whatever it is they wanted to stay private, let it hang off their names for the rest of recorded history.

It’s the only facsimile of holding powerful people accountable we have left.