Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

a tyranny of the minority backed up by politicians, government appointees, and judges, all who realize their power by separating people into groups to play off each other. Each new victim class further increases the power of government, the loss of privacy, and worse the loss of community and seeds of distrust and anger are set to drive people into different camps.

when the individual becomes so important that community suffers we have our priorities wrong.

View on HN

This seems a bit off base to me.

For at at least some of the cases discussed in the article, there is nothing minority about it at all. For example, the social pressure to disallow children's independence is by far the majority position now, as far as I can see. The "free range kids" folks and similar represent a minority that gets a lot of social disapprobation for wanting their kids to have the same sort of freedoms that were common place 25 years ago. Vague and unsupported concerns about "safety" are usually hand waved about.

What you say may be in play for some of these issues, but I suspect it is far too blunt a tool to truly explain much of it.

Do you mean "opprobrium"? Approbation is praise.

indeed I did mean disapprobation, thanks!

What minority in the US is currently given special treatment by the government? It certainly isn't black people. It certainly isn't Hispanics, or homosexuals, or transgender people.

What are you talking about specifically?

Look at hiring practices and policies. By law, minorities, and women most certainly are given special treatment when it comes to government positions. As well as veterans, whom some may argue, have earned it.

Homosexuals and transgendered people are still too 'bleeding' edge to be classified as a 'protected' class. Give it 10 years and they likely will be.

This seems to be a commonly expressed concept, the idea that in large this phenomenon is strongly either caused or encouraged by a 'conspiracy' of the government.

How about multinational corporations that answer to nobody and are staffed by the top psychologists in the world to subtly manipulate the masses? Is that a "conspiracy" in your eyes or merely reality?

Personably, I just consider the timing of all this stuff suspicious. Like how it became an increasingly large issue right after talk of income/class inequality and the 1% and Occupy and all that stuff. Suddenly the focus switches to something more convenient for large corporations and the well off...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com