Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

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No, you stupid uncritical fucks, it's Fahrenheit 451. Not a single goddamn mention of Bradbury on the entire page, and his work (and arguably Heinlen's in If This Goes On and Friday) showed us exactly where we ended up.

Seriously, kind and gentle folks of HN who are outraged at Trump and the alt-right and everything else, go read the goddamn book. Order it off of Amazon.

Here's the dirty secret that it covers and 1984 and Brave New World don't:

We do this to ourselves, because we're too goddamn lazy to deal with conflicting views and too offended by the past, constantly looking for the succor of a softly-lit screen giving us the faded third-hand synthetic afterglow of existence. TV was the start, and the current social web the reasonable conclusion.

Like, seriously, have a goddamn quote:

  Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on
  the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, 
  lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians,  
  second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, 
  Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or  
  Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial 
  are not meant to represent any actual painters, 
  cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, 
  Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!... 
  Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. 
  They did.(54)

And the funny thing is? This post is going to be rank-banned and thrown at the bottom of this comment section. Sure, upvote the submission here, but don't be blind to the glaring hypocrisy of the site you're doing it on.

EDIT:

Here, go read some selections from the work here::

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

EDIT 2: The "you" in that first paragraph is in regards to the authors of the submission, not our readers here on HN. I've different words of disapproval for us. :P

  And the funny thing is? This post is going to be rank-banned and thrown at the bottom of this comment section. Sure, upvote the submission here, but don't be blind to the glaring hypocrisy of the site you're doing it on.

From the Hacker News comments guidelines:

"Avoid gratuitous negativity."

"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted. "

You're yelling at no one. You'd do better to get attention for your cause by not treating everyone on this site like a demon.

Pish posh.

HN mods regularly violate their own guidelines, play favorites, and outright ban views they find unsettling.

Well said, you get an upvote. I completely agree but I think your tone will be unappreciated by many here on HN.

But in all honesty, don't you think each book predicted a different aspect of our lives? For example, 1984 describes the government while F451 describes the sentiment of the crowds, and finally Brave New World describes our behavior as a society.

I did downvote you, because you wrapped your meaningful contribution ("don't forget Fahrenheit 451") in insults.

I did upvote him, because your downvote deserves to be canceled because that is stupid.

Do you have any more intelligent response than "because that is stupid"? Yes, a good point was made. But, also, let's try to remember to maintain some level of professionalism here! If you want to troll someone, go to Twitter.

It's well established in multiple threads that people downvote and flag views they find unacceptable and has nothing to do with guidelines.

The world will always include bad actors. That doesn't mean we should encourage or tolerate bad behavior.

Whatever gets you through the night.

HN commenters are turning this place into another safe space. Contrary views are not tolerated.

Considering the animated discussions from a wide variety of positions, I'm not seeing what you are. I do see strong bias against overly aggressive and uncivil behavior. I also see a few members who have a hard time seeing beyond their own bias. It's natural to be more aware of behavior against your own "side". It's just one of our cognitive biases we need to be aware of and guard against.

Comment and submission data is available via the HN APIs. Put together an analysis and share your methodology and results. Regardless of your findings, I know I'd be interested in seeing them. I'm sure a lot of other HN members would be, too.

Are you even reading? Some posts are not even allowed to be listed by the mods here. They don't show up dead, they just don't show up at all.

I pay pretty close attention. I browse with showdead on. Can you clarify what you mean by "don't show up at all"? Posts by banned users are dead as soon as they're posted, but I think you mean something else. Do you have a couple of examples of what you're talking about?

Mods will occasionally detach subthreads, and have even been known to remove them from a story.

As one might imagine, a subthread without even a story parent is basically inaccessible unless you know its precise ID.

Well it's not known to me. What makes you say that? We don't delete comments or posts like this, but if you know of specific cases we can certainly take a look.

You...do appreciate the difficulty in finding these instances if they weren't bookmarked at the time, right? Also, just how silly it is to have the alleged censors say "Oh, well, that's news to me--can you find examples of the things we memoryholed?"

It might help if you folks kept a public moderation log.

I don't think it's unfair to ask someone to back up a claim, especially when the dataset is publicly available through the API or (more conveniently) in BigQuery:

  SELECT count(*) FROM [bigquery-public-data:hacker_news.comments] 
  WHERE parent IS NULL;

Story and comment IDs are also simply incrementing integers. We're not making it easy on ourselves to hide this sort of thing!

Oh nifty. When did you all add that stuff to BigQuery? The Firebase API suggests that that dataset is going away in like a month.

I don't see you actually arguing your point, beyond a heavy dose of pathos. The reason this kind of approach gets downvoted is that you're replacing any sort of argumentation by just trying to attack the issue on an emotional level, and a very manipulative one at that ("people who don't agree with me are uncritical hypocrites").

I don't know if it's terribly useful to argue which book is more relevant. There seems to be some truth in all of them, but then also a lot of assumptions and unfounded claims, and they all honestly feel very dated. I think I've seen a lot of the same ideas better expressed on blogs.

My preferred author is actually McLuhan. If we're going to talk about TV's, the internet, and social media, I think he covered that whole subject a lot better, and with a much more interesting point than "people suck": that technology can have effects we cannot predict, and that we're letting reality shape us as opposed to us shaping it. "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

We're currently in a time where any sort of philosophy that implies large systemic effects that override will is rather unpalatable (talk about avoiding controversy) to most people, but that's not an assumption we can buy on faith if we want to talk about how and why things are.

The first thing that really needs to be proven in all these sorts of discussions is whether or not the development is somehow unique and extra-bad. I'm not convinced that the current state is so much worse (for whom?) than a time when certain minorities had to deal with more than having their toes stepped on. I really don't know what to do with that statement since the two things are very related. We were huge dicks to certain minorities for millennia. We're now trying to be considerate, and perhaps overdoing it. But what do you propose, not doing it? Maybe this avoiding stepping on toes is a sign of something else, something bigger, something older?

Or was that not the point? Unfortunately, you haven't clearly stated yours, you just quoted an author.

Yeah, people get offended. They get lazy. They live in ways that are not fashionable. When is somebody going to ask why? "People suck" is such a lazy (haha), boring answer, it's a nonanswer. People haven't magically changed, why do they "suck" all the time? Anyone want to answer that?

I don't think anyone wants to, since the answer is rather grim, and it doesn't have anything to do with minorities.

You make a good point.

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