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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

Why the hell was this flagged? What? God forbid someone posts a great blog article with good photos about a person visiting a rally for a group often discussed disdainfully on this very website and demonstrates that they're not all monsters or redneck idiots.

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

   Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Also though,

  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

This isnt just politics. This is a nuanced & complex view of the world. This is anthropoly that happens to involve poltitics.

The anti-anything-at-all-political bias is way out of control, utterly unchecked, and absurd. [Ed: Im ok with this particular flagging, but it makes me so sad that some of the biggest & widest & most impactful parts of our world are off limits to discussion.]

Good hacker - obeying and citing rules.

Simply bullshit. It got flagged because it didn't fit a certain hive mind narrative I already mentioned. Top posts on HN routinely feature politics of all kinds, much of it quite ordinary or banal and far from touching upon some "interesting new phenomenon". Given how little is actually described (and with decent photos no less, accompanied by an in-person narrative) about conservative rallies, I'd say this post fit the bill just fine.

it's the ones who are not the most overtly monstrous or redneck idiots you need to watch out for, who'll work behind the scenes to do things like put christian fundamentalists on the supreme court.

Of course, lets demonize all of them, redneck or capable of intelligent discourse. It doesn't matter, they're just cogs in a large right wing conspiracy. The funny thing is how many progressives consider themselves highly reasoned, unprejudiced people, despite being subject to exactly the same sorts of deeply emotional, irrational biases, just in other directions.

So, what you're doing here is dehumanizing an outsider group (fundamentalist christians) so you don't have to feel bad doing bad things to this group. It's not a productive frame of mind for anything other than future coping with obviously immoral violent destruction carried out by you or your group on said outsider group.

A more productive thing to do is to look at why they still exist, what they do better than progressives (i.e. they build enduring societies, something that is not at all obvious progressivism does because of, for example, the extremely low birthrate in progressive societies). And figure out ways to improve progressivism from what these other societies are doing.

oh, right, because from the text of my comment which is a statement politically opposed to putting fundmentalist christians on the supreme court, you made the extreme leap to saying that I'm some supporter of violent immoral destruction. I don't see where I wrote anything about that. Been watching much Newsmax or OAN recently?

Political discussions without any "tech" aspect to them routinely get flagged here.

Ukraine Invasion really ran hard on this site earlier this year, and the comments were 49% geopolitical, and 49% domestic-political, at minimum. The remaining 2% were about actually-interesting-to-hackers like military technology or tactics.

So, no. It is indeed true that the borg-mind flags only those political topics that induce cognitive dissonance in itself.

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