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Comment by madaxe | Hacker News Reader

Fracking is a topic fraught with controversy, and the issues are indeed complicated.

If by fracking you're talking about that wonderful process that extracts that bountiful nectar of progress deep from within our mother earth, creating jobs, building commerce and bringing warmth into our family homes, I'm all in favour of it.

If by fracking you mean the systematic destruction of our ecosystem, and the wanton waste of our precious resources, while causing earthquakes and the toxification of the water table, then I oppose it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we must be strong, and hold our opinions close to our hearts, for the future is in our hands.

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Good if-by-whiskey example. For those that weren't on HN yesterday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey

Recycling old stories, turning them into memes, and posting in other stories for the lulz... I thought this was HN, not Reddit.

I am generally opposed to meme regurgitation (I have had more than enough of that to last me a lifetime) but this example was pretty exquisitely done.

Not "doing a meme", making a point. There are arguments for fracking from both sides - unfortunately the pro side takes a very short term view, and the con side takes a long term view.

The length of politicians' terms fundamentally shape the direction policy takes, along with the fact that, whether it's conscious or not, there's the "well, I'll be dead by then" phenomenon.

It turned into if-by-whiskey as I wrote it. There's a difference between lolcats and discourse.

For this reader, whatever point you were trying to make was lost. There are arguments on both sides about everything, but there's no value in posting an if-by-prosecution on every Aaron Swartz story. To me, your original post reads as:

  [generic topic statement]
  [endorsement via obvious positive traits]
  [condemnation via obvious negative traits]
  [trite conclusion]

I fail to see how this format furthers discourse since there was nothing clever in its use; it's essentially a search and replace of whiskey terms with fracking terms. What you've said above about long and short term views and how this shapes policies introduced by politicians is what you should have written in the first place. That is interesting and encourages discussion.

Nicely played.

Before I read this post I didn't really grasp the if-by-whiskey fallacy. Nice job :)

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