Comment by testing22321
3 days ago
So democracy is falling in the most militarily powerful country on earth, citizens are being executed and rights stripped… and you think it’s not OK to be angry?
You think we just shouldn’t discuss it at all because people are angry?
Putting our heads in the sand will not help.
> and you think it’s not OK to be angry?
no, it’s perfectly fine to be angry, I would be very concerned with anyone’s mental health who isn’t angry about this.
> You think we just shouldn’t discuss it at all because people are angry?
Well, if we just want to discuss how angry we are, that’s just called venting. That’s fine, vent. But don’t confuse that with discussion. I don’t find venting about how angry something makes you to be all that compelling most of the time. Sometimes someone distills the issue at hand into something very poetic and poignant, and that can sometimes be cathartic, but other than that it’s just pure emotion being tossed around and it just amplifies hatred.
> Putting our heads in the sand will not help.
Not sure where you’re drawing this conclusion that I’m putting my head in the sand. Or that people posting their outrage on HN are somehow not sticking their head in the sand, as if the dispensing of internet hot takes is somehow “doing your part” (hint: it’s not.)
> That’s fine, vent. But don’t confuse that with discussion.
The idea that discussion should be dispassionate and analytical is just wrong. All that does is hides biases. Discussion should be honest; often that means being messy and angry.
there are a lot of places to be angry on the internet. in fact, basically every single website other than HN is a place to be angry. HN is deliberately not that, or at least it aims to not be that.
But people on HN are angry in non-political threads all the time, to the point that there are several items in the guidelines about it (the latest being "don't be curmudgeonly".)
And not everyone in every political thread is simply expressing anger. The majority of comments in this very thread are reasonable. The ones that aren't have been flagged, which is proper.
But flagging all political threads for "anger," regardless of the actual anger on display, while being far more lenient towards it elsewhere (no one is flagging every thread where someone expresses rage about javascript or AI or the modern web) seems hypocritical.
If HN were only anger, then HN would suck in general, yes. The quality of discussion on this site generally coincides with how much people are able to separate their emotion from the facts at hand. For threads like these that basically drops to zero.
I haven’t really been able to find any comments here that are all that reasonable, other than the meta-discussion we’re having now (and trust me, I hate meta-discussion like this. Honestly I’m regretting even bringing any of this up at this point. I should have just flagged and moved on, and had a discussion with IRL friends or family about it instead. Or talked to a therapist, I dunno.)
3 replies →
> HN is deliberately not that, or at least it aims to not be that
Is this a joke? I don't think anyone in this thread is half as angry as people get about React or Cloudflare
Yes, you should discuss only what is allowed. If you use the technology to dissent against your rulers, then it should be switched off (until you come back to your sense and submit yourself to the mercy of mulas).