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anticodonlast Sunday at 10:37 AM1 replyview on HN

LOL. Have you ever read what Ukrainians said in the last 35 years? Not some pretty recital from CNN, ABC, BBC, DW, but actual words said and written by actual Ukrainians?

Or, for that matter, have you ever read Reddit? I'm 100% sure that if I open any subreddit like /r/politics, in the first 10 posts there will be something like "burn all Russians", "we must nuke Russia", "Russian are subhumans and they must be eliminated from Earth". Such phrases are so pervading there that I stopped visiting reddit even for reading technical subreddits. BTW, Reddit moderators never ban users for calling to kill Russians (also, in 2022 Meta openly said it is ok to say such things openly, just to note that nazism is welcome in the West, or to be precise, it never went away and it wasn't an invention of Hitler).


Replies

perching_aixlast Sunday at 10:41 AM

Yes, people say a lot of dumb and reductive shit everywhere, I've been around. What I'm saying is that while it's entirely reasonable to get upset about it and react accordingly, you also have the option of exercising self-awareness and agency, and not swing the pendulum the other way.

Case in point, maybe the most rational action to take after reading something that strikes you as stereotypization is probably not whipping out a stereotype about "westerners" or whatever of your own. Where the dividing line between west and east moves around about as much as the dividing line between balkan and not balkan, of course.