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Yes, It's Fascism

theatlantic.com

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Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#381

Post by johnnyanmac »

tptacek wrote: post #358
johnnyanmac wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Dang will take action any day now...

What makes you think he isn't? That's a rhetorical question; he and Tom obviously do intervene with those stories.

I've read his responses here and in other topics over 2025. He still seems to maintain that politics is something to avoid, regardless of quality. Not explicitly, but the way he talks about it gives that impression.

Having a tepidness when it comes to the dozens of slop articles on some trivial Ai blogs contradicts this mission to encourage curiosity and encourage a quality discussion. It feels outright contradictory and feeds into this sentiment that "anything tech is fine, nothing political is". Having flaggers do the work and promoting it as "community vote" is a convinent smokescreen, even though we all know flagging is based on a super minority of the community.

I know it feels knee-jerk, but I had this sentiment for a few years now as AI rose, and it of course hit a fever pitch in 2025. I think seeing a Tesla earnings call flagged because it wasn't stellar earnings really made me go from quiet apathy to being more vocal on the phenomenon. The actions (which I disagree on) simply do not match the words behind it (which I overall agree with).

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#382

Post by johnnyanmac »

zahlman wrote: post #371
johnnyanmac wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the ones happened to be the reason I responded: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Those points have nothing to do with tone policing, so I don't understand the objection. Flagging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768275 is completely inappropriate (I do not accuse you specifically). It does not in any way violate HN guidelines. The comment it was responding to clearly did, and was correctly flagged and killed as a result.

[flagged]

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#383

Post by tptacek »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #381
tptacek wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think he isn't? That's a rhetorical question; he and Tom obviously do intervene with those stories.

I've read his responses here and in other topics over 2025. He still seems to maintain that politics is something to avoid, regardless of quality. Not explicitly, but the way he talks about it gives that impression. Having a tepidness when it comes to the dozens of slop articles on some trivial Ai blogs contradicts this mission to encourage curiosity and encourage a quality discussion. It feels outright contradictory…

The quality of threads in politics discussions is absolutely dismal. Just the worst. Many of the flagged stories are quite good! But good stories are a superset of good HN threads, and threads are the point of the site.

I think it's noteworthy that we couldn't even keep a metadiscussion of this topic completely civil. This shouldn't surprise anyone. "Don't bring up religion or politics"; it's a rule of etiquette (and probably the most common bit of advice in the "Respect" section of every page on WikiVoyage). Why do we think we're exempt?

It's very difficult to talk about, because it's important and people have strongly held beliefs. Respect that, and the purpose of this site.

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#384

Post by krapp »

derangedHorse wrote: post #321
ModernMech wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice but also endlessly frustrating and very very late, because what he regards as overuse of the term is really just people who were applying the term correctly for the past 10 years as people like the author refused to call a spade a spade. If the nascent fascist were discarded, people would have stopped saying it so much. The problem for people like the author is that other more astute individuals [1] correct…

> The correct framing is that the first insurrection succeeded If you redefine success to whatever you want, then sure. > In 2029 every Republican will go along with plan A If you treat people as enemies, they’ll become one. The arrogance in the assumption that every Republican will allow Trump to get elected for a 3rd term might spite them into it.

>If you redefine success to whatever you want, then sure.

The definition ModernMech actually uses in their comment would seem to be accurate. They did get away with it, they did assume power, and they are waging "information war" on the population. Although I might expand that to say they are waging war, in general, on the population. And government.

They're getting just about everything they wanted except AOC at the end of a rope, that seems like success to me. They're certainly having a better time than liberals or leftists. Or immigrants. Or black people. Or women. Or anyone else.

What part of this definition do you object to, and for what reason?

>If you treat people as enemies, they’ll become one. The arrogance in the assumption that every Republican will allow Trump to get elected for a 3rd term might spite them into it.

...which would mean they were enemies all along and ModernMech's assumption was correct?

People who actually had strong moral objections to Trump would oppose him regardless of the assumptions being made about them. People who lean into the evil because someone assumes they're evil are just looking for a justification.

And the assumption about Republicans seems justified given that they have the power to stop Trump and... haven't. At all.

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#385

Post by tptacek »

zahlman wrote: post #376
tptacek wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Show HN was due an overhaul even before vibecoding jammed it up, but I agree that's an issue too.

I'm happy to hear your ideas about this, including off-site (I could email you if you like) if you don't want to go further off topic here.

This thread isn't a great place for it, but I think we should formalize Show HN a bit (don't let people post freeform "Show HN" posts, have a submission queue) and then I have a lot of thoughts about community-based coaching.

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#386

Post by insane_dreamer »

dang wrote: post #214
zzleeper wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA. I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.

You've replied before I even had a chance to add a second sentence! Edit: admittedly it is taking longer than usual... I've answered that point many times, e.g. recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818 . If you take a look at that and have a question that isn't answered there (or here), I'd be happy to take a crack at it. I haven't had a chance to look at the flaggers of these recent stories to ve…

dang, first thank you for the moderation explanations

Besides those who flag political posts they don't agree with (which is a problem), I see a conflict in the comments between

those who think HN should be "politic-frei" because this is a "tech site" and "if I wanted to read about politics I'd go to reddit",

and those who agree this is a "tech/science/expand-curiosity-about-the-world site", and that's what makes HN a great community, but that it's sometimes, and especially recently, not possible to disentangle politics and tech. Musk/DOGE is a great example. No one asked Musk to drag politics into tech, and I wish I never had to read any articles about it and we could just talk about EVs and SpaceX, but he did, and so it's important to be able to talk about the impact which that has on tech, and on society, because this directly impacts us who are involved in tech/science. Tech/science does not exist in a vacuum.

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#388

Post by throwerxyz »

Acatalepsy wrote: post #364
TrnsltLife wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Slaves were brought here against their will. Illegal immigrants snuck in against ours.

So what? Are you're saying what ICE is doing is justified somehow?

Let me check.

Population of democracy vote for something.

President of democracy enacts stronger power for that something.

That something gets done.

People who disagree with democratic powers doing what they said they were going to do want to stop it by force.

That something now gets done, by force.

---

Sounds justified because it is.

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#389

Post by throwerxyz »

throwworhtthrow wrote: post #130

It's not just Trump. Look at how even the weak Republican pushback is framed. They have no moral objection to his actions, only for the risk of blowback. See Ted Cruz's remarks on Jimmy Kimmel: "[W]hen it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it." Or Brett Kavanaugh on Lisa Cook: that Trump shouldn't dismiss her because "what goes around comes around [...] if there's a Democrat president".…

Imagine voting for a party that wants to build more housing to solve the housing problem.

Now imagine the people who don't want more housing (for some reason) end up burning all new houses being built in a state.

Now imagine crying about how the people who want the houses to be built to solve the problem are still wanting more houses to be built.

Turns out it's harder to solve a housing problem when the houses keep getting burnt down. Who'd have thunk?

Re: Yes, It's Fascism

#390

Post by [deleted] »

belorn wrote: post #379
messe wrote: post #112

This should not have been flagged off the front page. I really worry for the people in the US, but I'm hopeful it's hegemony is ending.

Can we have a discussion that improves in quality if people dissent to the view of the article, agree with the article, or hold a view that is something in between? If the answer is no then the risk that someone will flag the article increases dramatically. If the discussion environment isn't open and peaceful then how much more likely isn't it that people will just disengage, flag, and then move on.

[deleted]
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