CSS to browse the Washington Post without its insufferably self-righteous slogan | Hacker News Reader

CSS to browse the Washington Post without its insufferably self-righteous slogan

gist.github.com

37 points_vres39 comments

I can see disliking the tone of the slogan, but the heights of bitterness/derision surrounding it obviously speak to something deeper. Is this just general political warring (Washington Post is seen as liberal, right?), or is there something more specific/dramatic?

I suggest reading [this essay](https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/what-is-the-fifth-wave/), which OP links to on his website, for more insight into the philosophical background he's coming from.

US Partisan politics... you both assume people would side with you?

I didn't say I agree with that essay. It's relevant because it's linked to in OP's bio.

I didn't imply that. If you two (you and cmoog) go like "$other_person is doing bad thing"... this does not seem very adult to me. Ignore it. Go on. OP got flagged for this reason, and you should get, too.

Indeed, I deleted my related comments and post because of that, except here. I apologize for being unconstructive. That said I do think your imputation of _partisan_ politics onto this is a bit odd; I am no Democrat and OP has nowhere stated that he's affiliated with any party.

I had the impression that you were blue American and the cmoog person a red American.

There are nuances. Many like myself no longer have a political party, as we feel unrepresented no matter what. We think both sides are bad and resent the fact we are stuck with two parties (really none, as with any two party system when both sides agree you have no choice).

People can discuss the merits or problems with the parties without belonging to either.

Unfortunately there are a lot of extremists on both sides who insist on name-calling, or using labels to insinuate.

Politics is a mess but personally I feel America is a case study on what happens when politics and business are allowed to run unchecked.

I'm not even from the US and i hope this will stop soon.

Thanks for the link. It's an interesting read. But the rather hyperbolic route the author takes in this article-ifesto raises the question of whether their criticism of self-righteousness is more like projection of their own weakness directly onto the WaPo.

The author also speaks of the resilience of "reality" while seemingly working to spin a new model of reality out of whole cloth. The latter is fine with me and aligns with their position of how the fifth wave is operating, but taking both of those positions in one article always seems to point out a kind of inner conflict.

It's too bad because my gut tells me that the fifth wave as described could easily reconcile these kinds of things and maybe even help the WaPo out along the way. And if the fifth wave is really logically what the author says it is, there should be no reason for bashing the WaPo...as opposed to say pitying it? There's a lot of emotion in the mix, and it distracts.

I know you personally note you don't necessarily agree with this article, but I just have to say reading this takes me back to a time as a child when were vacationing with another family in their cabin and I used the bathroom and read one of the magazines by the toilet. Even at 11-12 the article seemed interesting at first, I couldn't quite piece together what point was being made with the information presented though and had this weird skeptical feeling as I read, at the end I realized it was making an argument that somehow the Clintons were responsible for various earthquakes that suited them politically. I might have laughed if it hadn't felt so serious.

When I asked my dad what the hell I saw he just said "Oh, John's into a bunch of conspiracy shit." Which then lead to an interesting conversation about Bobby Fischer and the dark holes one can go down. Anyway, I get that vibe reading this, this is a smart person trying to make sense of something that scares them, be wary of getting sucked in.

One group of people have frustrations with the Washington Post, another group of people have frustrations with those people. Goes around in a circle.

To my mind, they led the race to the bottom that is US journalism today.

If you object to their slogan enough to make this, surely you could just find another news outlet to use altogether. This is ironically as performative as their slogan is.

The Washington Post, and New York Times are papers of record and have reporters who do actual reporting.

You can decouple that, somewhat, from their editorial boards who basically just emit mind poison designed to drive you crazy if you don't buy into their exact brand of McKinsey-designed soft-power jingoism.

"Democracy Dies in Darkness" is a cynical "Master-Signifier" meant to distract you from the implicit national biases the paper has. This makes people feel good about consuming their news, as if their virtuous consumption of news is part of some larger project to calm the world through reasserting a hegemonic neoliberal order.

It's certainly rich coming from a company that geoblocks the EU for some content rather than detach themselves from the analytics teat.

I prefer to just not browse the Washington Post.

Yeah. I refuse to click links to these news sites. I just assume the HN comments will contain any important information.

Whats up with the comment from the branded persona on this gist? I can't tell what the comment is suggesting, only that it seems to be referencing something.

Besides that, check out Lynx browser for your daily download of news. Surfing HN from Gopher net is also a great way to avoid this type of sensory overload from new sources. Everything is equal in ascii.

Are you referring to me? I apologize for coming off as a "branded persona"; I commented because I like thinking about impractical but interesting questions, like "what's a reasonable accommodation for discomfort?" This is a great example of technology being flexible enough to let users accommodate themselves; the web in general is good for that in a way that lots of other software isn't.

Content warnings are often a gateway topic into this idea, and I wanted to explicitly draw that connection in this case. I apologize if that's somehow unreasonable.

What you just did to that person's snippet isn't cool. You just tried to rally your followers on Twitter against the author, and then when you got asked about it you deleted the tweet but still doubled down.

Yep, I was not being constructive. I have apologized to the author of the snippet and deleted my comment.

EDIT to clarify for posterity: I inaccurately connected the OP's political opinions to a position I disagree with, and wanted to talk about it, but opened the conversation in a very unconstructive way and got defensive. That's my bad. In order to not get piled on, or be tempted to continue the conversation, I've deleted the relevant posts. I'll leave this one up as a mea culpa.

Even now as you are replying and apologizing, you're still editing, re-editing, and justifying, just take a break.

It seems bad to me to delete and just pretend I didn't say something unhelpful. That's not a good way to improve.

But you did just delete everything and pretend you didn't just try to assail this person.

Is this your book? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0979PWD4Z

The sad thing is I had this on my wishlist and wanted to read your book, but now connecting the name on the cover with the behavior I see here I feel like you took that from me. This entire interaction disappoints me and I don't want any part of it.

A little extra, maybe, but these are extra times. Hardly "insufferably self-righteous"

Jeff Bezos isn't going to save us from "darkness."

What is "darkness" in this context?

Who knows. The point is Jeff isn't going to do it.

A lack of journalistic coverage

You mean the hands-off owner that lets WashPo do wahtever as long as they don't make Amazon look bad

There's still a lot of room to maneuver in there

Is it a slogan or a threat?

I think of it as their mission statement.

Isnt WP where Taco went after /. ? I thought that move was going to be much more significant than it ended up being. I guess I had not browsed WP much since then, and it looks like it hasn't changed much. Did I just imagine it?

Or, if you have uBlock Origin installed (as you should), then you can simply right-click and "Block element..."

How do you handle custom css/js for web pages anymore?

Can't tell how people does that nowadays, but I use userscript/greasemonkey

I use Stylus for FF for CSS.

ublock origin. I have my own list of hidden elements and css rules which I update directly in gist.github.com and they synchronise among all my devices.

I really like Tampermonkey (resurrected Greasemonkey) because it lets you apply both custom CSS and custom JavaScript, and works well with Firefox's sync provider.

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