Comment by Double_Cast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Double_Cast | Hacker News Reader

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> as you yourself have said, they could just be evil

This is exactly the opposite of my opinion. Very rarely do people think of themselves as "evil". E.g. I highly doubt Bin Laden thought of himself as an evil man. He probably thought he was doing the Middle East a favor. Same goes for Hitler.

My embarrassment and disappointment is directed towards contemporary society, the decadence of which I find your comment's non-chalance indicative of. And no, you're not as clever as you think you are by distinguishing rationality from emotion as if they were mutually exclusive. That you posit others believe emotions are something to be ashamed of is a straw man. Or better yet, a Straw Vulcan [0] (it looks like temporal covered this topic already).

[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan

your perception of society's "decadence", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, is your problem. i was trying to have a discussion here, but you're apparently deliberately misreading everything i write because you have some battle to fight against society... wow.

must be hard being so superior to everyone around you, huh? ;)

I'm not trying to fight a battle against society. I was trying to express exasperation at your explanation.

A thought experiment. Imagine that everyone in the 18th century (including 60 year old men and women) jokingly called each other "retard". Would this strike you as immature? What if I expressed this sentiment aloud, and someone responded "There's a confounding social factor. If one were to object to such a social norm, he or she might be called a square and thus ridiculed! Maybe it's not right, but we can never stop being people."

This response bothers me. To call it a "confounding" rather than "additional" factor implies that risk of reputation somehow funges against the immaturity of the social norm. I would argue that calling people "retards" is immature regardless of the mechanism driving the social norm. On top of this, you seem to be implying that I think myself "superior" to those calling other people retards.

(Now replace every instance of "retard" with "evil democrats". That is my original argument.)

(By the way, your comment frames things as if you're 100% the good guy, and I'm obviously a villain. This is the exact behavior the Robinson article criticizes.)

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