Hacker News Reader

Comment by pje | Hacker News Reader

Flagged? Sorry?

It's 100% pure politics, without any sort of connection to science or technology or startups or anything else that Hacker News is oriented towards. Worse yet, right in the opening section (just above the line) there is an inappropriate reference to current US politics. That's just throwing gasoline on the fire.

HN isn't oriented just to technology or startups. That's at the beginning of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

What it is oriented around is intellectual curiosity. There's little of that in current discourse about the word "fascism", and a lot of flame-throwing. It's the partisan frenzy of the moment. I imagine that's why users flagged this submission, despite Umberto Eco being perennially interesting and welcome here.

As soon as I saw it, I wondered how long hackernews could tolerate having Umberto Eco's guide to spotting fascism up on the front page.

Is a touchy subject on here, for some peculiar reason.

Now I wonder what that could possibly be.

You can't talk about fascism on hackernews.

Please don't post shallow dismissals here. That's in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Had you taken a few seconds to check it before posting a glib swipe, you'd have seen that it's obviously untrue: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story.... This very essay has had multiple discussions on HN in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173823

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413908

And that was the full original essay, not the Utne Reader's digest version. The issue here is not "you can't talk about fascism". It's that the talk going around at the moment is predictable partisan flamewar and name-calling, with the F-word being the biggest tomato thrown. It's that which we don't want on HN. When thoughtfulness returns to the discussion, I'm sure users will stop flagging submissions like this.

That is a smear of the community which counts as a shallow dismissal in the sense the site guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. By insinuating that "hackernews" can't "tolerate" Umberto Eco because people here are fascist, you're trivializing the word and contributing to degrading the discussion.

Under present circumstances there is little chance that a thread like this will be motivated by intellectual curiosity rather than partisan passion. Users who attempt to do the former get piled on with heapings of the latter. This very essay has been discussed with curiosity in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173823), but I don't think that's why it's showing up now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com