Comment by dang
3 years ago
Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags, but I didn't do so in this case for multiple reasons. The primary reason is that HN just had two enormous threads about this topic:
'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646617). That is not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I don't see how it helps anyone.
Those who feel strongly in favor of a piece like this need to understand that there are also many users on whom it would have the opposite intense effect. It gets harder to communicate under such conditions, and HN threads are supposed to be meaningful communication, not battle.
All of this was happening in two recent threads I linked to—including controversies about article choice. That is inevitable, but it's also a matter of degree.
Do you think there are any cases where expressions of anger are necessary or correct? Or are you only able to see things in terms of "quality discussion" and "meaningful communication." Do you measure that only in terms of apparently calmness of the participants.
Do you see how this favors the party doing harm over the one being harmed? After all it's much easier to remain calm while you're transgressing than while you are being transgressed upon.
Have you ever read that mlk speech about the white moderates. Do you view yourself as being more devoted to order than justice? From here this is explicitly the choice you're making, but I wonder if you understand it that way.
It's partly a matter of venue - union members reduce their demands to easily chantable slogans on the picket line. That's not what they do when negotiating with management.
I assume you are talking about MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wasn't criticizing the moderation of their language but the moderation of their ideas. He was famously a practitioner of a kind of radical moderation himself - the notion that a pervasive system of oppression supported by state-sponsored violence can be successfully resisted and overcome by nonviolent means. If one can accept that (despite the fact it clearly 'favors the party doing harm'), expressing one's views on a random nerd messageboard without bombast and fulmination hardly seems like an unreasonable burden.
Of course expressions of anger can be necessary and correct. (I don't think I'd use the word "correct" for this—I don't think of feelings as correct or incorrect, because if a feeling exists, it's always for a good reason—but I suppose that's a tangent.) It's not clear to me why you'd ask this, since the answer is obvious and I don't think I implied otherwise. Perhaps it is the frequency with which I ask people not to engage in flamewar on HN? But internet flamewar is something different from expression of anger in general.
As for your other questions: I do not view myself as being "more devoted to order than justice", and no I don't understand it that way—not at all. Does that answer your questions?
These things can look totally different from different positions and it's easy to arrive at inaccurate perceptions when all we have to go on are tiny blobs of text online. I'm happy to try to clarify my perspective as best I can, as long as I can feel that the questions are coming in good faith and not as a cross-examination. I confess to wavering a bit on that latter point when I read your comment.
It really just seems like your position here, on this specific issue, is that we already talked about this. We just had a discussion about it the other day, and people were worked up about it, and so we don't need to and in fact should not have a discussion about it today.
The thing is it is still happening, and so people should be worked up about it every day until it stops. And our industry is specifically involved implicated and complicit at the very core of the matter, and so action is necessary from us. From you, even.
Like do you understand that you're not going to be judged on the "tiny blobs of text online" you're going to be judged by the consequences of our collective actions and your role in influencing them? And that your role, specifically dan, is one of power and influence? People are going to write books about the relationship between the american tech industry and the genocide of palestinians and you are going to be in them. I'm not cross examining you but you should reckon with the fact that people will.
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