So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked?
Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.
I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.
Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit.
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> getting your family out of the concentration camp
Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that.
We’re talking about the group chats that may have “changed America” into a place where our president pays foreign dictators to house criminals in a overcrowded prison, and where they may be debating sending American citizens. When exactly is the aforementioned rhetoric appropriate, when it’s too late?
It seems to me directly in line with the nature of the article as written, the tech context we currently live in, and i don’t think it’s against HN guidelines to speak uncomfortably truths. In fact it seems core to what we’re trying to do here.
Thanks for all you do here, not trying to turn this place into Twitter, but I also think it’s important that we not
fall into the trap of not being willing to confront the outrageous truths of what’s happening in our community because the rational response is outrageous.
I appreciate the reply. My reaction, like most moderation comments, was shallow and limited in scope to what I know about forum dynamics. If you come out swinging with Nazi references, you're turning the knobs to 11 from the start. That's not compatible with the kind of discussion HN is going for. It's particularly troublesome when the thread is new, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Also it's not as if that was the only such reference in the comment.
Reading it the next morning, though, I think I misread what mindslight meant by "getting your family out of the concentration camp". Now that I'm reading it differently, I can see how my reply came across as too heavy-handed. Sorry all!
Hey, we appreciate you, dang. More than you probably will ever know. That this community is still what it is... it blows me away, and it is in large part due to your vigilance. Thank you.
I'm afraid that's sample bias. We've done exactly the same kind of moderation countless times on all wings of commenters for many years.
You're right that not every comment which should be moderated actually gets moderated, but this is not because we're secretly on one side or the other. It's because we don't see most of what gets posted here. There's far too much of it to read, and we can't moderate what we don't see. If you see a post like that going unmoderated, the most likely explanation is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
To politically passionate users, it always feels like the mods are against them and secretly in cahoots with the other side, but this is an illusion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If it helps at all, the other side has exactly the same complaint, just with the political bit flipped. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26368875 for a plethora of quotes; they're years old now, but the phenomenon is perennial. Here are a few more recent cases:
> We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do.
This is in response to someone who is violating the rules on extremist/flame bait/trolling with a right wing bent. It appears that you were pointed out this comment based on the inclusion of the word “rabid”.
Now instead of coming in as a mod enforcing impartial rules, you’ve added words that give the tone that you are only admonishing this person because they got snitched on.
If I believed you were impartial then even if you were pointed out this instance of rule breaking by an impartial observer, I would still expect you to treat it in a neutral manner.
I understand after reading your links that I am probably falling to some sort of bias when I called you out on this particular, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone these days
Would it help you build some trust if I, as the original commenter in this thread and long time HN user with showdead=yes, said I have not noticed an overriding left/right bent to moderation? There are definitely topics and periods where there is more frenetic energy from the "left" or the "right" causing more heated comments, but this is not a moderation bias.
And I agree that my original comment was treading the line in a few places! I think some of that is necessary these days, as I said in a follow up. Honestly I'm still reeling a bit from dang's response of effectively 'oh, you were talking about the current concentration camp? carry on then'. Because yes - I wish that term were still unnecessarily inflammatory.
(also FWIW the other "right wing" comment you're talking about is actually coming from a "left" perspective. I don't think it's an appropriate response to this topic, and I'm personally past that kind of self-flagellation because the time to focus on fighting the "rabid progressivism" is when it has power. But we're all processing this in our own ways)
The US has done literal concentration camps at least twice, has a literal torture camp we rent in Cuba explicitly to get around the "inalienable" rights of people in the US, and the current admin has literally sent people to an active concentration camp in El Salvador, and has joked about sending "homegrown" people to this camp and that El Salvador will have to build more as they blatantly ignore the courts telling them to bring people back.
This is asinine Dang. Making references to REALITY as it exists right now is not "flamewar".
The HN guidelines have never required people to ignore reality.
Discussing concentration camps in the context of the US has never been "flamewar" territory. This is like when Google bans your account for showing historical footage of atrocities. Whitewashing reality like this is gross.
I certainly appreciate that you apologized openly but that was a comment you made in the guise of "Site Moderator". Those comments sometimes come with corrective actions, and are specifically meant to shape behavior. They have been used to shape MY behavior.
I'm pretty sure I've been chided before for making a drive by comment on this site, but that seems to have been the case here, in your official role.
>On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response.
>At first I read it as a gratuitous Holocaust reference (i.e. some sort of throwaway flamebait)
Part of my response is that I cannot fathom even a little bit the way you mistakenly read the comment in such a way, unless you just barely even see the comments you are moderating. Was this driven by a "concentration camp" auto-moderator or something?
It's frustrating how often we are told to trust that you moderate fairly, that any concerns we have are just "sampling bias" or confirmation bias, that we can't really discuss or doubt the rules, that definitely no vote manipulation happens, but we also cannot expect you to read the sentence containing the supposed reference?
It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away.
I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response.
This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks.
Well, thank you for looking again! I'm curious how you interpreted it? I thought about swapping around the two parts of the sentence to put the familiar context first, but thought it landed better the way I said it.
On the original topic, because I will acknowledge that my comment did have several bits of dry tinder in it - the sin of my lead in sentence was that it was irreverant. It would have been inappropriate if it were responding to another comment. But I think there has to be more leeway in initial comments so that there is a chance of moving past the politicized pit of arguing about whether something even exists, and towards a less-widely-shared but larger understanding such that we might actually do something about it.
I think the fundamental problem here is that we as a country now have something that can be straightforwardly referred to as a concentration camp. There are probably other terms that are more technically accurate, but not so much as to forgo the cultural touchstone of what we're actually really close to.
I'd say you are in a similar position to maybe 2016ish or so (my own mental timeline is a bit hazy), when the tide had just started to turn against the prevailing "woke [0] brigade", and insightful but not-completely-defensively-worded comments would get jumped on by a bunch of reasonably-phrased but inflammatorily-framed comments, making it seem like the original comment was starting the flamewar.
[0] I personally hate this term like others hate "concentration camp", but it's awfully hard to argue against its current utility, regardless of how far from its original meaning it is.
At first I read it as a gratuitous Holocaust reference (i.e. some sort of throwaway flamebait). Later I realized you were probably referring to ongoing current events. One can agree or disagree but that at least wasn't gratuitous.
This is vile dan. What do you believe we should call a prison complex holding forty thousand humans on the basis of their social affiliations, tried en masse or not at all, never known to have released a single one? I'm flexible on nomenclature but if you're going to veto I think you should suggest an alternative.
I vastly preferred the world in which we could leave the "Elite Jewish Conspiracy" thread unpulled, and write off the rare person mentioning those words as some crackpot. But the reactionaries have been pulling hard on these types of threads, and using the bland generic negative responses to drive even more engagement - "see THEY don't even let you talk about it!". So like maybe we - the "left" if you prefer that narrower label, but really "actually-conservatives" (as in we actually respect the institutions and values of our society, rather than merely pretending to) - need to start tackling these topics head on?
Putting my original point a different way - maybe we need to stop taking the mild widespread pushing of societal tolerance/progressivism/etc from our institutions for granted, and acknowledge it as a hard-won asset created from the horrors of World War II? Like the rightist machine of unquestioned hierarchical execution has and likely will always exist in our society, so if there's some ever present cloying refrain of "don't embrace the rightists" expressed throughout our institutions and media is that really surprising? The alternative is to give the rightist forces of top-down control a blank check, which they will eagerly embrace to carry out individual-prerogative sadism as we're currently seeing.
Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.
I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.