alt Hacker News> That includes gay people like me, who could hardly have admitted under our names to how we lived our lives for most of America’s history, as well as many other groups with minoritarian lifestyles
While the points made are completely valid I want to point out that the statement of "Hey, by the way, first let me talk about my sexuality" lowers the quality of dialog a significant degree.
31 million people in America are gay. 71% of Americans support Gay Rights (more than any other political issue polled). It also quietly insinuates that only people with a certain minority lifestyle would care about privacy or that their privacy is somehow more important than others. It's not. Privacy is a universal right that's important to everyone.
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Isn't the super dramatic shift in public opinion on this topic the exact thing that makes it such a good example? Isn't the point that anonymity is not considered a universal right yet it is obviously a good thing once considering this example and others? This is a super weird and wrong way to read it.
The reason this is relevant is because the statistics you quote represent a HUGE swing in public opinion. Only when comparing to things like slavery can you find such a swing in public opinion compared to 20 years prior, and that one had a war fought over the state's rights to do it.
About 68% support gay marriage yet one political party keeps trying to roll it back.
Similar support for abortion being legal yet that was rolled back not too long ago.
Just because a topic has wide support doesn’t mean it’s not under attack and worth defending.
I can't read this any other way than, "Do people really need to talk about their own top of mind problems when I don't identify with that?"
On the contrary, I find it a highly effective way to convey something that should be obvious but is often not. As you said, privacy is a universal right, but many don't consider it important until viscerally presented with examples of why it is. Kelsey's writing is immediately effective at doing so.
> people with a certain minority lifestyle
That phrase is a dehumanizing, Nazi-style talking point: it frames a group of people as a “lifestyle” problem instead of as human beings, which is a common setup for stigma and persecution. Nazi ideology repeatedly used this kind of language to normalize hatred and make targeted groups seem unnatural or dangerous.
Calling people a “minority lifestyle” is not neutral wording; it reduces identity to something frivolous or deviant. Extremist movements have historically used similar framing to make prejudice sound reasonable and to recruit others into it.
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> 71% of Americans support Gay Rights (more than any other political issue polled)... Privacy is a universal right that's important to everyone.
Per you, it surely must be important to fewer than 71% of Americans, no? The state of infringement on privacy seems to evidence that it's not so important to a lot of people such that they continue to be perfectly willing to elect and re-elect the politicians who enact the changes allowing infringing on it/fail to legislate in favor of privacy. Connecting it to an issue more people care about seems an attempt to argue for its important to those who otherwise are willing to look the other way.
FWIW, I fed my reply above into Claude and asked it to guess who wrote it. It refused (for safety) while also calling me out: "The style here (tight logical structure, the "per you" construction, the move of turning someone's own framing back on them) is common across a lot of contrarian-leaning commenters on HN"
>It also quietly insinuates that only people with a certain minority lifestyle would care about privacy or that their privacy is somehow more important than others. It's not.
How exactly does their post insinuate that? this comment is the "I don't even see color" as applied to internet privacy (with a touch of "just don't rub it in our faces")