Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 319 posts

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#281

Post by bastardoperator »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #278
bastardoperator wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wearing a mask and mass genocide are not the same thing, they're not even in the same ballpark. If anything it weakens their entire argument. If you have any understanding of the holocaust you can in no way shape or form compare it to taking precautions during a global pandemic with a mask in public. All I see is a bunch on people that so badly want to be viewed as victims. I don't like wearing a mask either, but if…

Wearing and mass genocide are not the same thing, but wearing a Star of David is. That's how it started, and we know how it ends.

I'm not following you. The Jews were forced to wear the star of David as a form of humiliation. The people today wearing them are doing it by choice and it's in poor taste.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#282

Post by enchiridion »

mikeyouse wrote: post #265
enchiridion wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that is a well researched position, thanks for sharing. First of all I do think think all confederate flags should be retired. The confederate flags represent an enemy the US defeated. No American should feel pride about those flags. However, you’ve provided image links with no context but your own. I am not sure what any of those images represented back in the time. I’m also having a hard time finding informatio…

The South co-opted the flag as a similar symbol of "opposing the government" like the Revolutionaries had, but in their case it was to oppose the abolition of slavery. Here's a better pic of the Alabama flag -- it's a cotton plant with a snake under it and the phrase "noli me tangere" (touch me not): https://i.imgur.com/UIUZM4p.png Here's South Carolina's secession flag: https://i.imgur.com/14Yuw3G.png Another Georgi…

Thanks for the additional info. Where did you find out about this? Is there a good book or something? It’s all very interesting.

As far as rallies flying the Gadsden, they’re also flying the America flags.

I get what you’re saying, and I’m not one to make overt politic statements IRL in public, like flying any flag besides the US and maybe state.

Again, to me and a lot of people the Gadsen represents rebels against tyrants. It even represents that to the objectionable people who use it. However, the idea of rebelling in order to upheld human rights is fundamental to the US.

I am not willing to throw out the ideals or the iconography just because I disagree with the current (and confederate) rebels. I certainly agree with the flags original use when the US gained its independence.

So while I won’t be publicly flying the flag because I don’t like to make public political statements, I might just hang it somewhere privately. IRL conversations like these are incredibly valuable to me and I believe in the general sentiment of the Gadsden.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#283

Post by GauntletWizard »

bastardoperator wrote: post #281
GauntletWizard wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wearing and mass genocide are not the same thing, but wearing a Star of David is. That's how it started, and we know how it ends.

I'm not following you. The Jews were forced to wear the star of David as a form of humiliation. The people today wearing them are doing it by choice and it's in poor taste.

People are being forced to wear masks as a form of humiliation. People are being forced to present their vaccine cards as a form of humiliation. People are choosing to wear stars of David as a comparison of the two.

I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#284

Post by ashwagary »

adriand wrote: post #216
tonfreed wrote: post #74

Amazing that the 100 IQ elites all think they want a working class uprising, but when it happens they panic and smear them as every -ist and -ism label in the book. It's fine to disagree with the protesters, but at least be honest about what they want. They've been squeezed off online platforms and out of mainstream discourse, and this is what happens when it bubbles over.

A good friend of mine put it this way, and he’s right: —- So far, the “peaceful” protestors have desecrated the national war monument and the Terry Fox statue, flown multiple Nazi flags and Confederate flags and large numbers of “Fuck Trudeau” signs, stolen food from a soup kitchen, assaulted and threatened reporters, thrown rocks at ambulances, smashed car windows, threatened anyone wearing a mask, defecated on the…

Putting a paper sign and a hat on a statue isnt really desecration. The fact that they are attempting to overblow this tiny action makes me trust the media and the Canadian government even less.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#285

Post by chroem- »

dang wrote: post #269
chroem- wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang, I watched you single out all of my comments, and then later go back for a second pass to flag the other posters too after you read my profile description, so as to preserve the illusion of impartiality. Calling my posts "flamewar comments" implies I'm being uncivil, and this is how the HN echo chamber gets groomed. Please be more conscious of your own biases in the future.

What a sinister way of saying that I do things in sequence! Would I could do it in parallel—the time it would save—but my yogic powers don't go that far. I didn't look at your profile description. I'm not moderating you, or anyone else, in particular. It's just a job, and quite routine. Comments can be flamewar without being uncivil—there are lots of ways to spread flamewar. One is generic ideological rhetoric. Pleas…

In theory I agree wholeheartedly, however in practice HN consistently allows off-topic far left political spam while marking any attempts to combat it as a "flame war". This phenomenon is more than a psychological bias: it's a self-reinforcing artifact of HN's demographics.

I offer you a challenge:

I will provide you with quantitative data that I am correct on this issue, and in return you remove the restrictions on my account.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#286

Post by dang »

chroem- wrote: post #285
dang wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a sinister way of saying that I do things in sequence! Would I could do it in parallel—the time it would save—but my yogic powers don't go that far. I didn't look at your profile description. I'm not moderating you, or anyone else, in particular. It's just a job, and quite routine. Comments can be flamewar without being uncivil—there are lots of ways to spread flamewar. One is generic ideological rhetoric. Pleas…

In theory I agree wholeheartedly, however in practice HN consistently allows off-topic far left political spam while marking any attempts to combat it as a "flame war". This phenomenon is more than a psychological bias: it's a self-reinforcing artifact of HN's demographics. I offer you a challenge: I will provide you with quantitative data that I am correct on this issue, and in return you remove the restrictions on…

First, the restrictions on your account are because you've been breaking the site guidelines. The way to get those removed is to provide evidence that you've stopped breaking the guidelines and won't break them in the future. That has nothing to do with any of this other stuff—it's not as if being right about bias or demographics (if in fact you are) would make it ok for you to break HN's rules, although people often act as if that non sequitur were true.

Second, it's not obvious how to study this kind of thing quantitatively without making interpretive calls, and whoever controls the interpretive calls completely controls the outcome of the study. In other words, all this would do is reproduce the same cake at a meta level, just with a distorting layer of pseudo-objective icing. The chance that anyone with strong ideological passions is going to run some quantitative analysis about this and come up with anything but the conclusion they already believed, is approximately zero. Has there ever been any study of this sort that did that?

I'm not saying that a good quantitative analysis is impossible, but it would need to rigorously account for this effect (of people reading into the data what they already perceive and believe). How to do that is not obvious, and any 'offer' that comes without a serious plan for it screams bogusness to me. I don't mean to imply that you're intentionally making a bogus offer, just that one would be foolish to take it.

Besides all that, the one empirical analysis you've offered so far ("I watched you single out all of my comments, and then later go back for a second pass to flag the other posters too after you read my profile description") was completely imaginary. That's hardly unique to you—it's just devilishly difficult to perceive these things objectively. The mind simply can't resist its own narratives.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#287

Post by chroem- »

dang wrote: post #286
chroem- wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory I agree wholeheartedly, however in practice HN consistently allows off-topic far left political spam while marking any attempts to combat it as a "flame war". This phenomenon is more than a psychological bias: it's a self-reinforcing artifact of HN's demographics. I offer you a challenge: I will provide you with quantitative data that I am correct on this issue, and in return you remove the restrictions on…

First, the restrictions on your account are because you've been breaking the site guidelines. The way to get those removed is to provide evidence that you've stopped breaking the guidelines and won't break them in the future. That has nothing to do with any of this other stuff—it's not as if being right about bias or demographics (if in fact you are) would make it ok for you to break HN's rules, although people often…

All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber, and if I can objectively demonstrate my hypothesis that lopsided moderation is reinforcing that same echo chamber, then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point.

My initial thinking is to use a text classifier to assign political alignments, or lack thereof, to HN comments. From there I can compile statistics about each of the comment classes. This entire process can be done in an executable jupyter notebook for visibility and verification of results.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#288

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

vba616 wrote: post #249
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. As soon as you have to defend your “peaceful protest movement” with the statement: “we’re not ALL nazis,” you’ve lost the plot.

People were defending it by claiming that the protestors were using swastikas to call out the Canadian government as being like Nazis. How do you know what's going on? Are you there?

If that was actually the case — they are asserting the Canadian government are literal Nazis — that's offensively stupid. It's also kind of a convenient excuse, and probably the only way you could positively 'spin' displaying such a blatant hate symbol.

We both know that's not the real reason they are displaying it though. Organizations and governments are frequently accused of being the second coming of Hitler's National Socialist party, but in what distorted reality does it make sense to accuse your opponent of being fascists by flying a hateful, fascist flag. That's not how things work.

> How do you know what's going on? Are you there?

Are you really asking me if I'm embedded in a protest movement that has defaced the Terry Fox statue and raided a homeless shelter? No, I'm not. But a quick google uncovers a quote from the 'movement's' spokesperson, who was asked about the proudly displayed symbols of hate:

> When asked specifically about the swastika, he brushed the question off: “People troll, do stupid things, whatever. Who cares?”

That doesn't exactly fit with the narrative you presented, and suggest they don't have an explanation for why members are showing hate symbols. And so it's logical to assume that the members displaying these ridiculous hate symbols are doing it because they are hateful people, who feel these symbols are the best way to communicate their message to the rest of the world.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#289

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

yonaguska wrote: post #252
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. In what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement, and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates. All because this disorganized, disruptive and aimless rabble believe wearing a piece of cloth on your face is the deeply offensive and tyrannical. Has anyone actually been squeezed off online platforms for sayi…

> Has anyone actually been squeezed off online platforms for saying they are against mask mandates? Not masks, but I've been banned from most of Reddit for posting CDC stats about covid vaccines, questioning their value for younger people, and recounting adverse reactions in people I know, as well as questioning lockdown measures. I don't use any other social media. > worryingly misleading medical misinformation. Mos…

I'm not going to address all your remarks because I don't have time, and also because I think you're last point is the most salient:

> Either way, people are sick of the lockdowns and government overreach, none of which has been particularly effective...

How could you possibly know this? We don't have an alternate universe we can examine to see how things would have gone globally without public health measures.

> while simultaneously being detrimental, especially to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Not everyone has the privilege of working from home.

Yah, I do fully agree that the public health measures pursued have had a negative financial impact on those more economically vulnerable who work in low paying jobs. But at the same time, these are the people who most need protection, as they don't have much job mobility and have to work on the front lines. You know what's worse than getting paid less? Dying from covid, or being unable to work because of COVID, or suffering the long-term effects we don't fully understand yet. I've heard so many horror stories from people working in grocery stores, etc, where there are mask requirements (In some cases, implemented not because of government legislation, but rather because the private businesses decide it's appropriate) that are routinely ignored by customers. These customers, when confronted, often become verbally or physically abusive (AFAIK there was a story about a security guard being murdered somewhere in the states).

Just FYI, I work in a customer facing job (onsite IT), and have been working in an office with a large number of people for almost the whole pandemic. I have to a wear a mask 8-9 hours a day. I say this because I don't want you to assume I'm arguing in favour of something that I won't be subject to.

Re: GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

#290

Post by dang »

chroem- wrote: post #287
dang wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the restrictions on your account are because you've been breaking the site guidelines. The way to get those removed is to provide evidence that you've stopped breaking the guidelines and won't break them in the future. That has nothing to do with any of this other stuff—it's not as if being right about bias or demographics (if in fact you are) would make it ok for you to break HN's rules, although people often…

All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber, and if I can objectively demonstrate my hypothesis that lopsided moderation is reinforcing that same echo chamber, then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point. My initial thinking is to use a text classifier to assign political alignments, or lack thereof, to HN comments. From ther…

> All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber

You could justify anything that way. That is the sort of thing garden-variety trolls come up with.

> then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point

That doesn't follow from your premise at all.

Edit: btw, I thought I'd deleted this - I think it failed to go through because of a network failure. I tell people not to do these tit-for-tat things and try to avoid them myself for the most part (which often means succumbing to temptation and then editing or deleting after the fact). Since you've replied, though, I'll leave it up now.

Post reply on HN