Comment by thrance
1 day ago
"Actually, it's good they're registering every autistic persons in the country in a national database, under a president who is overtly eugenicist [1]."
No it's not. At minimum this is a horrible invasion of privacy, that I can't believe anyone on HN would defend. At worst this is straight Nazi shit, preparing the ground for extermination.
[1] https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...
> I can't believe anyone on HN would defend.
On this site, you can hold pretty much any opinion you like as long as you coach it in the most neutral-sounding "Modest Proposal"-esqe language you can.
To expand on what you said - you can post some grotesque things here as long as you don't provoke flagging or offending the ~90th percentile into down-voting your comment in the first 24 hours, and language plays a big part in this, such as hiding bigotry behind big words and playing into confirmation bias. Low-level down-voting can be countered if you can get <1% of HNers, who may be fellow-travelers in the fringe ideology to vociferously agree & up-vote your comment.
I think this is a side-effect of HNs voting rules, what counts as "adding to the conversation", and the limited window for voting down comments and unlimited time to vote up.
Very much so, HNers pride themselves in this "enlightened centrist" aesthetic, while giving extremely fringe analysis and opinions on any subject under the sun.
Everything that touches to genetics or education is a sight to behold.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in recognizing this. I've had literal holocaust denial and neo nazizm show up in comment threads before and I end up the one warned about "maintaining a spirit of curiosity"
I usually only lurk anyway as a physicaly disabled autist but this thread made me have to push thru typing pains.