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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

Can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Generally speaking, tolerating other beliefs and opinions until it inflicts obvious harm or is itself intolerant is considered “good.”

It’s one of those things we will never get perfect but I find we generally do it well enough to continue advocating for it. The problems start when people with extremely polarized beliefs fixate on marginalized groups that are not actually causing issues (transphobia), or they find something incredibly fringe then deliberately twist it and use it for fear mongering (satanic panic). Neither is done in good faith. They’re looking for a tool to project their moral frameworks in an aggressive, invasive manner.

“Live and live” is a pretty good role of thumb to live by for most people in most cases

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> “Live and [let] live” is a pretty good role of thumb to live by for most people in most cases

Absolutely nobody follows that rule. People just disagree on what is acceptable to inflict upon others with violence.

Idk I have managed to live my whole life without inflicting violence on others. Literally never been in a physical altercation.

Well, presumably you outsource the job of inflicting violence to others, like most people do. Voting for pretty much any political candidate is equivalent to doing so.

And every time you use hackernews you’re contributing to the climate crisis in some form or other. These kinds of comments are not productive.

There’s a difference between the two.

All politics is based on violence because violence is how laws are enforced. Thus by participating in politics (which includes voting), one implicitly endorses violence.

By contrast, an online service is not “based on destroying the climate”, that’s at best an unfortunate side effect, and possibly not even that as there are plenty of hosters that are climate neutral now.

More importantly, the fact that Internet infrastructure is damaging to the climate is widely recognized as a problem and there is a large-scale effort to fix it. There isn’t an effort to remove violence from the state though; the state is effectively defined by violence and anyone who supports the modern state in any way is inflicting violence by proxy.

> By contrast, an online service is not “based on destroying the climate”

And my voting is not based on doing violence to others, and I don’t have a reasonable alternative, and we both know the consequences even if it’s not our intention to bring them about. You are drawing your own line in the sand and sorting things into arbitrary categories on either side of the line. This debate is pointless, so I’m moving on. Have a good one mate.

if you genuinely think "All politics is based on violence " please do not participate in political discussions

Did you read the words immediately following the part you quoted?

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