Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by viridian | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

viridian·

Look, I also find sarcasm extremely annoying, it's an anathema to meaningful discussion.

However... your non-sarcastic interpretation is clearly in bad faith, and ratchets up the hostility even further.

Why post this jeering reply?

View on HN

He's advocating for a return to medieval methods of justice, and trying to cloak that advocacy with sarcasm. If that's not worth derision (the kind of derision where you simply point out what one is saying), what then is worth derision?

I fail to see how that conclusion is even possible. He's not advocating for anything, he's just taking the opportunity to dunk on Israel.

His actual cloaked argument, insofar as it exists, is that Israel does not uphold these standards you value. You clearly disagree, and of course the sarcasm is unproductive, but he's not advocating barbarity (but levying an accusation of it).

I agree with you that if all he did was attack the Israeli court system, we could have a reasonable discussion. However, he was not dunking on Israel, he was dunking on the enlightenment and western values of jurisprudence, for example the right to a fair trial and the concept of presumed innocence. In any event, his comment was flagged and is now deleted, so apparently the mods agreed with me.

As a heads up, flagging is rarely done by mods, and overwhelmingly done by normal users with sufficient karma to do so, so it probably wasn't Dan or Scott. For example, the comment header for the comment I am currently replying to looks as follows:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com