Please stop taking HN threads on ideological flamewar tangents. That's not what this site is for.
If I were moderating a site like HN, I think I'd have explicit guidelines for anyone wanting to present a perspective which is a minority view or in any way otherwise controversial.
My guidelines would recommend special care in keeping your presentation with a completely neutral tone and an absolute absence of snark.
And in particular, the poster should be explicitly informed that his or her opponents will not, cannot, and probably even should not be held to anything remotely like the same high bar. Because that's life, kid.
In my opinion, someone with a contrarian view has an added responsibility: the responsibility of one who possesses more truth than others, since that is what having a minority view feels like (and maybe is). One has a duty to consider others' difficulty in hearing that truth. If you use the truth as a weapon, you trigger resistance and discredit it, which deprives others of it for longer. This harms them and sets back the cause of the truth, even while expressing it. The greater the truth, the more harm in that case.
When one knows one's view is unpopular there's a temptation to be pre-emptively defensive. One laces comments with snark, ridicules the conventional, and so on, as a way to flip the dullards the bird in advance, since you know they will reject your truth anyhow. It's like a Dostoevsky character who can't help tweaking the nose of the person he's talking to. Some even cultivate the art of packing as much snark into their language as possible, having given up on persuasion. I think it's fear of being rejected that causes it, plus a desire to show off: see what a contrarian I am.
What happens of course is that people react badly to being provoked, except for a few who identify with your side and join in the provoking. To us this feels like the dullards rejecting the truth; to them it feels like we're fanatics and assholes. Then we get a loop of anger and noise. Such discussions are all the same and learning is no longer possible.
The principle that the one who sees more (or thinks he does) has more responsibility is a way of keeping open a discussion in which people can still learn things and figure the truth out together. When one isn't up to this responsibility, maybe one should be silent until one is, not as a matter of censorship but of continence.
From outside, this thread looks like a set of mocking, contemptuous dismissals of anyone who doesn't agree with that ideological monoculture. Even without any dissenting thoughts, it remains a flamewar; just a flamewar with only one side. Perhaps I'm alone in finding that a little creepy.
What's the evidence that causes you to believe that there is an "ideological monoculture"[1] here? I don't know how close to a majority it is, but I'd guess there are many people that would agree with you. I for example 'vouched' for your top comment in this thread, since I thought it was wrongly flagged. But I cringed when I saw your 'Weimerica', because that's just not a useful means of discourse, and will cause people to dismiss your earlier (worthwhile) content.
I'd guess that Dan's response to you came from the same sentiment: you started well, but then veered off into "sheeple" territory[2]. Consider: is he more likely to offer corrective advice on "tone" to people with ideas he wants to see more of, or to those whose ideas themselves are unwelcome? Rather than concluding that your ideas aren't welcome here, consider that the problem might simply be the tone.
[1] Speaking of monoculture, did you know that Dan isn't American? Happy Thanksgiving, Dan!
[2] Regardless of the aptness of the term, I find "sheeple" a reliable indicator of a failed argument.
It is one phenomenon when everyone agrees. Probably everyone is right. When everyone who speaks agrees, and everyone who doesn't agree doesn't speak, that's quite a different pattern.
As I noted above, I agree: I think the problem is the tone. In combination with this pattern, of course.
(I should have just noted that it seems possible that the reason American parents find their children less safe in public is that they're right. Parents are worried about assaults and kidnapping. I couldn't find statistics on child assault and/or kidnapping, but the Japanese rape rate is roughly 27x (not 27%) lower than the American [1]. Given this fact, it's not immediately obvious why one should search for an additional cause of the disparity.)
Wherever our moderator is from, his perspective is an American perspective. This is an objective factual statement, like the fact that English is an Indo-European language. Probably in the same geographic region 100 years ago, there was a living pre-American intellectual tradition. But it hasn't existed since 1945 at the latest.
(The most concentrated remaining geographic locus of pre-American ideology is -- by no coincidence -- the subject of this article. Nippon Kaigi anyone? But I don't believe Dan is Japanese. And even Japan isn't exactly what it once was.)
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Japan/Unite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi
You don't think the incoherence of the following posts proves the flaggers correct?
(Edit: are you saying happy thanks giving to me (not a mod) or dang (a mod)? Either way: Happy Thanksgiving!)
I lack certainty, but I think the post I vouched for is still a useful addition to the conversation. Generally, I try to flag (and recently, unflag) individual posts rather than expected user behavior.
That said, I probably wouldn't have tried to recover it if I'd read the Weimerica comment first. The later posts have some oblique insights. I can why one might downvote them (I didn't), but (unless I missed something) they don't seem flagworthy.
> are you saying happy thanks giving to me (not a mod) or dang (a mod)?
I was saying Happy Thanksgiving to the moderator Dan Gackle, since Monday is the Thanksgiving holiday in Canada. I hoped this was clear since he's the author of the grandparent comment, but I suppose other Dan's can share the goodwill!