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Comment by endtime | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate you taking the time to explain your downvote - thanks.

>this isn't just "political crap" as it has many, many implications of the state of the world.

I don't know why you think X being classified as political crap precludes X having implications for the state of the world. That's exactly what political crap does, as well as lots of other types of crap that also have nothing to do with YC or hacking or entrepreneurship or Silicon Valley or technology or CS.

>The term hacker is not limited to tech and business... figuring out how they work, and making them better.

Arguments about words are highly uninteresting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/. HN is obviously geared towards tech and startups.

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You are missing the point entirely. As was mentioned, the vast majority of "political crap" does directly affect the tech and startup world... especially something as widely used as PayPal... so this submission is entirely relevant to and valid for HN. Now, I agree with your sentiments on some "political crap"... submissions solely about Sarah Palin's stupidity or along those lines probably have no place here. But you expressed your disinterest in a submission about PayPal and their actions (of which strongly infer their detrimental stance on the progression of mankind) not because it isn't relevant to HN, but because you don't agree with the majority of the comments here. If the majority of the comments supported PayPal's decision to hold all donations made to Courage to Resist, I have a feeling you'd feel much differently about the submission.

>If the majority of the comments supported PayPal's decision to hold all donations made to Courage to Resist, I have a feeling you'd feel much differently about the submission.

You're welcome to ascribe to me, on near-zero evidence, whatever political beliefs you want (though my opinion vector has low cosine similarity to all the standard labels I've encountered, so you'll probably be largely incorrect whatever you guess). All I'll say is that in this case my comment wouldn't have changed at all if the comments all said "They have the right not to do business with someone" or "Would you complain if this was al Zawahiri?" or something else defending Paypal's actions. In fact, I wrote my comment before reading anyone else's.

>In fact, I wrote my comment before reading anyone else's.

Really? Because your first comment says:

>All the people commenting on this thread implicitly approve of its presence on HN

Yes, because they commented on the topic at all, not because of the content of their comments.

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