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Comment by refenestrator | Hacker News Reader

Was I not respectful?

The shape of global politics is interesting to me. Your call.

I didn't say you were disrespectful. Actually I'm grateful for the amount of restraint I noticed in your posts—especially since you're representing a minority point of view, as we've discussed more than once in the past. All that is fine.

The problem is that that's not enough. Accounts that use HN primarily (exclusively?) for political/ideological/nationalistic arguments are breaking the site guidelines. This site is supposed to be for curious conversation on intellectually gratifying topics, and an account that only uses HN for arguing about $hot-divisive-topic (be it China or any other) is clearly going against that spirit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history. I post on a wide range of topics. The last 2 weeks I posted about bitcoin, education policy, tax policy, the British royal family, software architecture and that upvoted comment on the Chappelle thread that you flagged (which was admittedly wading into the muck a bit).

I'm sympathetic to the fact that flame wars about China are too common here, and hey, banning the non-american point of view might end them, circlejerks can only go so far on their own. So maybe you're right, but I wouldn't be super satisfied with that solution.

We're not "banning the non-American point of view" and I don't think you should stoop to such a cheap shot, which is exactly the sort of thing that garden-variety trolls come up with. I've consistently defended the minority viewpoint here [1], not out of political agreement but because I know how difficult their position is, and how most of them are posting in good faith—they're not spies, shills, bots, or agents, they're legit HN users whose background or relationships have naturally led them to their views.

> That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history.

I looked through your most recent 60 comments and counted 9 that weren't on flamewar topics, and that was being generous, because several of the latter were about Bitcoin and religion. It's true that a few were about software - but on the other side, quite a few of the other 51 were blatantly breaking the site guidelines. On balance, your account has clearly been using HN primarily for ideological/political/nationalistic battle. As you know, we ban such accounts. I spend a lot of time replying to people who feel that we don't apply these rules evenhandedly (from all ideological/political/national sides, btw), so I think it's pretty important to actually do so.

[1] I put this list together yesterday for a user who emailed because they were worrying about Chinese spies on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. I think it makes the situation pretty clear, if anyone has the stamina to slog through it.

Just so long as we're clear that my "ideological battle" was scattershot takes across a bunch of different topics. I'd hate to be thought of as having a coherent ideology :)

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