921–930 of 965 posts
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It's not just a run of the mill worker's strike, though, it's tactically ingenious- they were able to put huge pressure on people very quickly without ever needing to get violent or aggressive. Good for them.
They're simply seizing the means of transportation, and reminding the government that the economy is dependent on them.
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People still have their rights to do "dumb choices". I'm triple vaccinated, got omicron one month later of being vaccinated, still believe that the vaccine helped me to have it almost asymptomatically, but I'm ok with people saying that dont want to be vaccinated.
If it wasn't clear I think we agree very much.
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Commenting only on the flags themselves and not the protest or the hack: Canada is not part of the USA. Trump was a President of the USA not Canada; the Confederacy was made from the bits of the USA furthest away from Canada; and while a literal interpretation of the word “America” in the initialism “Make America Great Again” would refer to the entire continent, it is usually understood as specifically just the USA a…
Honnestly, there's a lot more people moving from Canada to the US than the reverse. Maybe there's a desire to embrace the American way (of course, the state media won't touch it!). When hiring, we get a ton of resumes from Canada to transfer to the US but the reverse almost never happens.
Adjusting for population sizes (USA has ~9 times the population), a random Canadian is about 4 times more likely to go south than a random American is to go north.
But there’s a reason I was focusing on just the symbolism, and that’s that I know how limited my knowledge is in this instance.
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Occasionally self-defense laws protect guilty people, but that doesn't imply that the law isn't a self-defense law . I'm sure there's lots of good criticism of this law, but characterizing it as the OP did is patent dishonesty. Even Vox wasn't willing to go that far ffs.
Self defense was already a thing. Why the need for new legislation?
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It's because I called this all out for what it is and the moderation here has the thinnest veneer of fairness. A few very high profile posters get away with absolute murder on this board (especially in the form of personal attacks) because they pass the SV ideological purity test, but the rest of us have to keep our opinions to ourselves.
I'd like to see links to the personal attacks you claim we're tacitly ok with. I can only think of one user who I carve out occasional exceptions for (for reasons other than you'd expect, and not someone very-high-profile). Other than that, I'm pretty confident in saying: no, we don't do that. All this has zero to do with "SV ideological purity tests". If you follow the moderation here, you should know that we have n…
Even if you were to concede that, you'd probably counter that you can't read all the comments. And, of course, that is so. But that is beside the point that I have made many times before: the community's bias allows such users (and those who espouse certain views) to break the guidelines without penalty, while heavily penalizing others and those with contrary views.
Every time I see you tell someone that moderator bias is an illusion, I can't help but think that you are talking past each other, because the elephant in the room (which I have rarely seen you even acknowledge) is the extreme bias in the community's downvoting and flagging behavior, which naturally results in the official moderation actions being biased toward what is flagged, which amounts to a de facto official moderation bias. (If a community only calls the police when certain groups of people break the law, the police's actions will naturally be biased toward enforcing against those groups of people, because they aren't omniscient.)
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Usually. Nobody is perfect. There are certain topics and certain people that do not get moderated fairly and HN itself has certain biases that are encouraged or have opposition to them discouraged. If you know what they are, you know what they are. Bringing up HN's (often subtle but often not-so) bias against average poor people gets heavily moderated here. I give dang credit versus other moderators elsewhere who are…
> If you know what they are, you know what they are. I don't know what they are! Perhaps you could clue me in at hn@ycombinator.com?
In the same threads, "conservatives" and "conservatism" and Republicans and "liberty" are freely condemned, mocked, and accused of all sorts of evil behaviors and intent, without even being downvoted, much less flagged.
This happens regularly, any time these topics come up in a popular thread. So it's hard for me to understand how you could be unaware of this de facto community bias.
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Per dang's nice request, let's open this up a bit and talk about why this is happening. It's now acceptable (and even lauded in the comments of this post) to doxx people with the wrong opinion. What changed to make otherwise reasonable people approve of this course of action? I want to know what societal switch flipped. I've seen it posited that it's due to the pseudo-anonymity of the internet, but that doesn't seem…
> Something has fundamentally changed to allow this level of dehumanization towards the "others". Nothing has changed in the level of dehumanization. It's clearly a very human failing that has played out in history time and again. The only reason it feels more prevalent, is because we've turned it inward toward what used to be a more cohesive group. So we can ask why we're breaking apart, but there's no mystery about…
At the same time, we may ask why American society seems to be more ideologically polarized now than at various times in recent decades. If the root cause is natural human failing, what is the second-level cause? Could it be that American society has been under a form of ideological siege and sabotage for many years, that is now coming to fruition?
For example, it's documented that, as far back as the early 20th century, the USSR funded programs to demoralize American society through means as seemingly innocuous as making public art and architecture uglier. As well, Marcuse's "long march through the institutions" has now had 50 years to take effect, and polls have shown that American academia is much less ideologically diverse than in past decades, now being nearly entirely formed of those who vote for one party.
There are elements of history that seem like weather, coming and going in cycles, but there are also parties taking active roles to effect certain ends, and we would be wise to be aware of their influence.
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> If you know what they are, you know what they are. I don't know what they are! Perhaps you could clue me in at hn@ycombinator.com?
Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized, the comment gets downvoted, and often flagged. Even comments written by people who lived in communist states, offering first-hand accounts, without breaking any HN guidelines, get downvoted and flagged. In the same threads, "conservatives" and "conservatism" and Republicans and "liberty" are freely condemned, mocked, and accused of all sorts o…
The active ingredient here is the phrase "I see". What you're seeing feels obvious to you because you feel strongly on the topic. People who feel differently have very different "obvious" perceptions. (Edit: like here, which was just posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063.) These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver, and I do mean entirely—it is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN.
Because these perceptions are predictable from the passions of the perceiver, it follows that they don't tell us anything about the community. They only tell us something about you—namely, which position you personally favor or disfavor, and how strongly. That's why other users perceive the opposite bias to what you perceive. Their passions are producing their perception the same way that yours are—they just happen to have opposite passions. Consider these gems:
zero left wing chatter. instant ban by this fash site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302617
a community full of some pretty extreme opinions, generally right-wing and regressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439442
most of people on HN are ancap or fascists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958681
There are reams of this stuff, coming from all ideological tribes. Same community, incompatible perceptions—why? Because they're not actually incompatible. They only appear so if you take them as objective claims about the community. As expressions of the preferences of the perceiver, they're not only compatible, they're isomorphic. Whatever mechanism is producing these nearly-identical comments, it can't be "political skew on Hacker News", because the claims are coming from all factions.
Usually at this point someone objects, "so you're just claiming that HN is perfectly neutral in every way? the community has no biases of any kind?" No, that doesn't follow. I'm only saying that comments like yours and the 3 I just linked to don't contain any signal about this, because the feeling of bias tells us nothing about the actual statistical and demographic situation. (Well, it tells us that HN produces enough data points for everybody to run across some that rub them the wrong way. But that's not enough information to conclude anything about HN as a whole.)
It's incredible how deeply these feelings go and how convincing they are, so the mechanism is probably hard-wired into all of us. My hypothesis, which I call the notice-dislike bias (a terrible name), goes like this: because painful experiences make a deeper impression than pleasurable ones, we're all more likely to notice the data points that bring up dislike/disagree reactions in us (i.e. give us pain) than we are to notice the kind that we like/agree with (i.e. give us pleasure). Not only that but we weight the painful ones much more heavily. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), in which people are convinced that the community (and usually the moderators too) are overwhelmingly stacked against their particular views (for example, your view that communism is bad). It's easy to see that these generalities are false, because the opposite side has exactly the same feeling—they just perceive the bias the other way around, like the other 3 I linked to.
Usually at this point someone objects, "You haven't proven anything—just because somebody else has a wrong perception, it doesn't follow that mine is". Yes, a perception of this type may happen to correspond to the real situation, but only by accident—like a wrong solution to a math exercise that ends up at the right answer, but is still incorrect. What matters is how the answer is derived. The perceptions we're talking about are derived from the perceiver's internal pleasure/pain experience, and that mechanism is not capable of assessing reality accurately. Essentially, we are all projecting the inverse of our own preferences onto the outside world, and then feeling surrounded by hostility.
Normally I don't offer a verdict on particular claims about this, but I feel pretty confident in saying that there is no pro-communist bias on HN. The comments that you see getting downvoted are, in many cases, downvoted because they're breaking the HN guidelines. Any comment that makes grandiose, repetitive ideological claims is already breaking the site guidelines, and when people go after each other about communism (or any other $classic-ideological-flavor) they're nearly always doing that. I have to ask commenters to stop doing this all the time on HN—not because I'm a secret communist or secret-anything-else, but because these discussions are not interesting in HN's sense of the word. We want curious conversation here, and people bashing their $other-side with well-worn talking points (be it "communism killed x-hundred-million people!" or anything else of that nature), they're not having curious conversation.
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>there is no violence, and no obvious danger While there is no outright violence, there is torture to local residents, there was attempted arson, there is continued intimidation and harassment of those wearing masks, there is intimidation of visible minorities, there are attacks on businesses.... Is that enough to convince you that the situation is out of hand and than stricter action is needed? The protestors haven'…
I've said this before. There's a strong libertarian bent to HN and I'm not surprised if there's a large contingent of this site that actively supports the convoy. There's people here that are strong supports of Peter Thiel, if that's any indication of where their sympathies lie. But, most of them are not residents of Ottawa, and the lived experiences of people in that city, particurlarly those who have had run ins wi…
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> "there is no violence, and no obvious danger." This is false and I would expect better of HN posters. A group of the protestors locked the doors to a downtown apartment building with handcuffs and then attempted to set that building on fire. Although nobody has been injured yet, there have been plenty of weapons seizures as well as incidents of protestors ramming police vehicles and/or attempting to arrest police o…
> A group of the protestors locked the doors to a downtown apartment building with handcuffs and then attempted to set that building on fire. What evidence is there that that was real? An allegation was made on Twitter, but only thing I've found that digs into the details looks like a complete debunking (see links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30336974 ). It's from a biased source and I'm open to any factua…