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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

If that's your first instinct, then by your standards no country can be criticized for much of anything. After all, pointing out the negative outcomes of a purposefully designed system is the exact same as prejudice based on immutable birth characteristics.

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No country's people should be blanket stereotyped. That's my first instinct. 'why are people from xyz nation more likely to be associated with(negative thing)....'. nah, fuck that kind of talk.

Where did you see me saying that? I didn't even mention any people or generalize that all of them are this or that. Saying that cyberwarfare companies are more likely to be in Israel, which is what I did, seems like the most objective way of framing my observation. Other replies already gave some good reasons for why that may be, and all of them have to do with the systems built within the country, not some inherent property of their people. They could change these systems if they wanted to, it's not inherent to them.

Right, this discussion totally isn't being used as a bash Israel/isrealis as inherently bad with lots of blanket statements.

I went out of my way to write the comment in as neutral of a tone as possible. I didn't even state my opinion on Israel or anything it's involved in to avoid starting a flamewar in what would otherwise be a standard question about adversarial technology and cyberwarfare. The only expressed opinion was about the companies themselves, which I think it more than warranted. Yet, as I said in a sibling comment, people are seeing ghosts anyway and disregard the perfectly normal question because they think I'm not really curious about it and am asking it for nefarious reasons.

again 'I'm not racist, I'm just connecting the dots around crime statistics in an impartial way'. This thread was filled with all kinds of nefarious stuff around the same topic at the time I posted, and of course was disclaimered as 'totally not anti-semitic' even though time and again jewish people have said the discussion around IP often veers into 'the stereotype is deserved' and 'if American jews don't like it they need to distance themselves from Israel more' (a race now has to take affirmative action to show they 'are the good ones'?) and that that does in fact feel anti-semitic to them. But then the 'anti-zionsim' card gets played (with zero explaination of what anti-zionism means exactly, does it mean a nation of 8 million jews, the majority left on the planet, just gets wiped out and jews what? Go where? ) and it can't be anti-semetic to say 'the steretype is justified' and 'you need to prove you are one of the good ones by stating publicaly your opinion on something half way around the world'.

here's a nice response for you 'it's the shiftiness of jews'. There's your totally not racist as fuck/antisemitic dot connecting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112408

I kinda wish these threads wouldn't get 'cleaned up' so we can see the actual totally 'not antisemitic' HN discourse plain as day. I'm sure the above comment will get removed/cleaned up and you can go back to 'connecting the dots around crime statistics isn't a core part of racist cannon'.

>Right, this discussion totally isn't being used as a bash Israel/isrealis as inherently bad with lots of blanket statements.

I see lots of (maybe un-carefully-worded, maybe?) bashing of the actions of the current Israeli government, and its defense forces and intel apparatus.

That's 100% fair game, anywhere on the planet.

What's I don't see is the rank antisemitism you claim, except for a few outlier recently-created accounts.

The most despicable thing I see at scale in the conversations is the attempt to silence critics of Israel with slanderous accusations of antisemitism. It used to work, as a tactic, but it (like the "racism card") has been vastly overplayed and is rapidly losing its value.

Your fair discussion distilled:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112408

"it's the shiftiness of jews'. Racism doesn't exist anymore, and calling these discussion anti-semitic is me just shielding isreal as a tactic. Fuck off.

> "it's the shiftiness of jews'. Racism doesn't exist anymore, and calling these discussion anti-semitic is me just shielding isreal as a tactic. Fuck off.

Can't find the quoted phrase in the referred comment: did you just make it up or did he edit it out? Other than that, he made some observations about Judaism. Off-topic perhaps but nowhere near racist. Fuck off.

If you think that one person's comment is the distillation of the whole thread, then you're not paying attention to the rest of the thread (or very knowledgeable about statistics). I clearly acknowledged the existence of antisemitism in these discussions, but also that it is an outlier. Good job, you found the outlier! Hooray!

>Racism doesn't exist anymore

Who said that?

>calling these discussion anti-semitic is me just shielding isreal as a tactic.

Yes, when the discussion is about the current government of Israel, the IDF, its intel apparatus, and their actions.

>Fuck off.

When you have no point, use anger.

Ah I shouldn't call out what I think is racism because 'it doesn't have impact' anymore. Nah. You think labeling nations /communities and by extension their peoples is fine. I don't. It's simple as that.

I didn't attempt to silence anyone. I simply called out what I see. Silencing is what HN does when they moderate the Ukraine Russian discussions different than their newer standard for Israel Palestine.

I'd rather have nations be held accountable for being bad global participants than hiding behind cries of -isms. Israelis can always elect a better government if they don't like the stereotypes the current one earns them.

You might also look into the tale of the boy who cried wolf. The more you keep shoutin "antisemtism" in an attempt to shut down criticism the more people will learn to just ignore that word or ascribe to it a meaning far different from the one you want.

I get it, anti-semitism doesn't exist because 'Israel bad'. But also, as you state, the stereotype is earned.

Oh well, each individual must be judged on their actions and merits, but this doesn't prevent us from observing how groups behave on average. Nobody ever shouted racism when it's said that French are chauvinistic or that Germans follow rules strictly- it won't and shouldn't tell you anything about single individuals but you know there's a grain of truth in the generalisation.

Ah the good old 'I'm just noticing crime statistics'.

Opposed to noticing what else? Vibes? Sound a lot more racist than factual and provable realities based on real data.

Finding an understanding patterns and acting according to them is the most logical and natural thing a human or any life form can do. You would call someone speciest for not hugging a bear just to feel ideologically pure.

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