alt Hacker NewsThe longer things stay vague, the more I become concerned that this may be a scenario that is so common that it has an enduring meme [0], where:
1. The person claims that a broad swathe of facially reasonable and views are being rejected or forbidden in a way that is an unfair overreaction.
2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.
3. They are actually facing difficulty from a much much narrower--or entirely disjoint--set of view.
In this case, OP has claimed the average HN commenter is hostile to a general class in the form of "our liberty has been improperly infringed by a false appeal to security", especially national security.
I don't think that claim is credible, and I'm offering to demonstrate it by rattling off a bunch of counterexamples... However, that won't mean much if it turns out OP real grievance has some important details they are trying to keep secret.
[0] https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
Replies
I think not in this particular case, and downvoting more than flagging, but I see perfectly reasonable things downvoted. In fact I often upvote things I disagree with because I think the downvotes were unfair. I have been downvoted for reasons that are not obvious to me, and sometimes for posting verifiable facts. Its hard to guess what a particular person's experiences might have been.
This is a pattern that exists but there's also another pattern where people downvote things they disagree with, on platforms that have downvotes. It's seen on HN and Reddit and it's thought to be the reason YouTube removed downvotes.
> 2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.
And yet we all know why that is. We have decided that certain ideologies that are ... let's call it "easy to criticize" (because they deserve some damn serious criticism and have done enormous damage. Oh and not just one such ideology). To make things worse, in many places such discussions have been legally banned. And some of these ideologies are very visible in politics or even on the street. And discussion of such ideologies immediately devolves into pinning the blame for all that went wrong in history on a particular segment of the population.
We have collectively decided such ideologies are to be considered above criticism, and you're quite right, it's not working.
It used to be commonplace to bring the horrors of certain ideologies and expose them everywhere. In movies, on the TV, exposing the blatant failures and aggression of ideologies was commonplace.
Depicting communist dissident prisons happened in children cartoons. Associating islam with slavery, including depicting how commonplace rape and open commercial exploitation of female slaves was in islamic nations was normal. The reality hasn't changed: IS/Daesh reintroduced slavery, as one of their first acts, but it is utterly forbidden to discuss why they might have done so. Frankly, islamophobia is just a word meant to shut down criticism of the very bad parts of that ideology, as well as the supremacism built into that faith, something that has no place in America, or anywhere on the planet. And on the other hand communist and ex-communist nations are still full of dissident prisons, but it can't be discussed anymore. What communism has to do with socialism also can't be discussed, or even that socialism has evolved over time (e.g. why socialism, was rabidly anti-immigration not 30 years ago, and the reasoning behind it)
And the problem is that any suggestion of going back immediately and directly runs headfirst into extreme aggression.
Hence, no discussion.
yep, the very first response tweet had confirmed my immediate assumption about the kind of people that 'meme' would be 'enduring' with.