Comment by heresie-dabord
5 months ago
> yet-another interchangeable flamewar
You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar".
What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.
I'm not talking about the events themselves or how significant they are—I'm only talking about HN comment threads.
Often, a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ..., Sn) produces threads that are more or less the same as their predecessors, rather than focusing on the specific new information introduced by any Si. This particularly happens when the topic is a major and divisive one, like the current one.
What happens in this cases is that people tend to post their generic views about $Person or $Topic, often in vehement terms and without much curiosity about the specific details of what's happening. In this way we get threads that don't differ very much from one discussion to the next. That's what I mean by "interchangeable".
Consider adding a mandatory keyword search when submitting a link - like every human-averse helpdesk.
Maybe if submitters see something was already submitted 800 times, they'll get the message; though, I have my doubts.
There's already a feature so that when you try to post a link, and it's been posted recently, you're instead taken to that discussion and your submission instead counts as an upvote.
Doesn't solve the sameish story being posted from multiple sources, though.
Any chance of implementing a backend "merge items" feature that redirects dupes to the canonical item?
You may know this, but exact duplicate submissions do get redirected to a single canonical item.
But conceptually-linked ones of course don’t.
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Can you give a bit more technical detail of what you have in mind?
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You can’t have your cake and eat it too bud. You’re saying contradictory things. “Yes this is a shit show but please have civil discourse” just doesn’t work anymore.
We can be civil until the very end of the world, I guess. I’ll make sure to hold my knife and fork correctly while civilization falls apart.
If you've found contradictions in what I'm saying, I'd be interested, but you need to find them in things I've actually said. I certainly haven't said the thing you've put in quotation marks here.
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I don't personally care how anyone holds their knife and fork - I prefer chopsticks anyway.
But yes, I do intend to be civil and thoughtful right up until my death, no matter what happens in the world.
That's how I want to live my life, and I'm glad to be part of this community which has clearly stated goals that align with mine, and a moderator team that does as good a job as I'd expect while maintaining a fairly light touch. There's almost nowhere else like this on the internet.
It's also important to state clearly that being civil and thoughtful does not equate to being passive. It does not equate to failing to take action to defend your ideals and way of life. You can be a highly active and passionate person taking strong actions everyday to guide the world (back) onto the path you believe in, and you can do so while striving to remain thoughtful and civil.
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"“Yes this is a shit show but please have civil discourse” just doesn’t work anymore."
Why not? Do you think a violent discourse would work better?
(also I have not seen dang making any concrete statements about the topic)
I tend to disagree, in terms of coordinated upheaval we saw something similar in Andrew Jackson's presidency. Nothing new under the sun, I'm afraid.
Please say more for those of us who are historically ignorant but interested!
So I won't go into too much detail given the nature of the forum, but beyond the complete change in tone that Jackson brought to the presidency, something that Trump is also routinely criticized for, prior to Andrew Jackson we had an entirely different banking system.
He engaged in a conflict with the central bank overseeing national finances and banking and vetoed the bill renewing its charter, in part because he perceived the bank as supporting his political opponents. It still had four years to go, but the next year he unilaterally pulled all federal deposits from the bank, putting them in smaller state banks. This crippled the Second Bank of the United States with no Congressional approval or oversight. In fact, he was officially censured by the Senate for doing it.
Some other similarities in tone or type:
Jackson wasn't initially taken seriously as a presidential candidate - he was a political outsider and "a man of the people." He thought the federal government was corrupt and against him. This feeling was not helped by his winning the popular vote in the election of 1824 but it being taken away by the electoral college and ultimately decided by the House of Representatives in a "corrupt bargain."
He basically replaced his entire cabinet because of a conflict between the wives of his cabinet members and the wife of his chief of staff, who had married the widow of another cabinet member after a rumored affair and that member's subsequent suicide.
He had a "kitchen cabinet" of unofficial and unappointed advisors who had extremely significant power in the Federal government, such as Martin Van Buren (who would later become VP), John Overton, and Francis Blair (Editor of the Washington Globe), including some of the richest people in the country at the time - some of whom were bankers, by the way, and directly benefited from the destruction of the 2nd National Bank.
He criminally investigated his presidential predecessor's staff, alleging (and allegedly finding) corruption.
He was accused of being a dictator and a despot, and rattled his saber against Europe, almost going to war with France.
He nominated and successfully appointed completely unqualified judges.
We didn't have the current system of executive agencies until the latter half of the twentieth century, but if we did Jackson would probably have dismantled it.
A couple of books I liked about this era are: The Birth of Modern Politics - https://archive.org/details/birthofmodernpol00lynn
American Lion by Jon Meacham
I don't agree with our friend's equation of then and now, but here is some information about Andrew Jackson.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson
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That same statement applies to literally every moment the country has existed.
Unprecedented things happen in every US presidency, they're just different things. (Hard to mention examples because the ones I am most familiar with are the last 6 terms, and each topic has flamebait potential)