Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

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Serious question: Why on earth is this flagged?

I thought sharing strategies against authoritarianism would be as free speech, open discourse as it gets. Open discourse as promoted here on this site is among the first targets in any authoritarian society.

We tech people should be merit based — vuess which form of society prevents exactly this? Suddenly instead of appointing the manager of a nuclear plant based on merit, they are appointed based on their loyalty to the regime. This may have huge impact for us tech people.

I am aware that some in the US may see anti-authoritarianism as "partisan", but if you immediately think the people whose line you tow are meant when someone mentions how to deal with $BADTHING, the thing boiling your blood shouldn't be them mentioning $BADTHING, the thing boiling your blood should be that those whose line you tow got you to defend $BADTHING. And you know it is bad, because otherwise you wouldn't try to shoot the messenger.

Edit: If you disagree or think the flag is deserved, I'd be curious to hear your perspective

For starters: I agree with you.

The guidelines for Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) state that they don't want "political" topics posted here, and prefer topics that "good hackers find interesting" and that foster constructive discourse.

These topics do tend to create a lot of low-signal posts and I think there's a certain contingent of HN users who flag for that reason. I think there are also a contingent of users who flag these topics because they are, to put it bluntly, trying to censor them for ideological reasons.

The latter group is beyond help. The former I think would do well to wake up to the state of the world and use the considerable reach of HN to wake others up.

"Good hackers" will be having considerably less interesting conversations under an authoritarian regime, and by that point it'll be too late.

Problem is the latter group includes Ycombinator and their investors. The hypocrisy is many are actively meddling with politics and working with the current administration.

In general, have a look at one of the many comments dang has written about why submissions are flagged, particularly lately. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

Wrt this comment and submission: Maybe people don't like their blood boiling here?

I suspect that people are not asking why it's flagged to understand why but rather stating that they disagree with the flagging, but I might be wrong...

As the guidelines say, comments about downvotes and flagging are to be avoided generally. I'm commenting because it's already flagged and only few will see the negative impact of my boring comment! I hope it leads some to more understanding and away from fear anyhow.

Given there are many questions about flagging by invested users, answering them would be indeed tedious!

I do not disagree that discussing flags is generally uninteresting and it would be intellectually dishonest to exclude this case, just because I happen to differ here.

But I do think discussion of this topic is relevant for our shared (hacker) culture and I explained why, so this isn't just questioning the flagging, it also offers a on topic thought.

And given the current times (not only in the US) this is a relevant topic for every citizen that wants to keep their society non-authoritarian and merit based.

There is a cost to having heated discussions on HN — but there is also a cost to not having them in some cases. I argue that this is one of those.

Rules are important and make this place what it is, but it is more important to act in the spirit of the rules than by the letter.

dang wants hacker news to be a curious place and politics is generally not a very curious topic. The first 70% of posts on this thread were anti-intellectual trump supporters.

He's worried HN will become a battlefield, and it will be, just like businesses and universities will also be a battlefield as people are coerced into supporting systems they don't believe in.

Where he's wrong is that once authoritarian regimes are done replacing societies enforcers with loyalists, such as the military and police officers, what comes next is sources that influence disobedient thought, and curiosity is fundamentally disobedient. Curiosity has no meaning without objective truth, and curiosity can't be practiced without questioning authority.

HN is oligarch owned and funded, so neutrality implicitly supports HN's patron.

dang has to make the choice all liberal people have to make (and curiosity is a very very liberal goal), and that's to participate in a system of loyalty towards PG and let HN be a place that implicitly supports this coup through inaction, or to dissent and instead support the value of curiosity in the long term, by letting hacker news be a platform that propagates dissenting news, rather than a platform that limits it and keeps the platforms users inside of the "approved" bubble of thought.

It's always easier to do nothing, and it's always hard to fight for a world you want to live in.

No political system exists without cercion, you just have to make sure the coercion serves a higher purpose, like curiosity, rather than a man.

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