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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

As a conservative: We aren't all that hateful, are we?

From what I see the people who swings the banhammer over people just because they posted in wrong sub and generally tries to stifle free speak are mostly SJW etc, not exactly what I would call conservative people ;-)

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I don't think that you really can make that separation. True, reading Salon or Alternet or something equally "progressive" you very much get the same ditohead feeling as when you listen to Rush Limbaugh's callers.

Then again, try to leave a comment on any "conservative" site, which does not conform to the virolent idiocy sometimes encountered at such sites and good luck with ever getting it published. (And if it gets published: good luck with handling the abuse, which follows)

Both camps seem to reside mostly in their bubble, completely intolerant to other opinion, which don't match their group think criteria. Which is sad, because it makes meaningful discussions with differing opinions impossible.

At a loss to us all.

Overuse of the banhammer is not limited to left-y subs and the dreaded "SJWs". Happens frequently on all sides. /r/the_donald will frequently ban for comments made in other subs, as will /r/conservative. Culturally conservative subs like /r/TrueChristian or /r/European will ban easily as well. Of course, some of the lefty subs will too. Some ideologically focused subs, like /r/kotakuinaction, will allow dissent but most of it will get so viciously downvoted it might as well be censored.

And you know what: I don't really have a problem with that. Wanting to keep your political sub, left or right, focused on a particular ideology, without the distractions of debate from those completely opposed, is not a bad thing. Happens all the time in the real world. The DNC is not going to allow Ted Cruz to give a speech, nor is the RNC going to invite Bernie. Your church, assuming you have one, will probably not be inviting atheists to say "God doesn't exist" from the pulpit.

It's not that conservatism is hateful, but that the brand of conservatism propagating on Reddit is a particularly hateful one.

It may not be obvious, and not everyone participating is aware of it, but there is a lot of parody going on in /r/the_donald. I think the prime motivation is disgust at how deeply political correctness has permeated our culture.

What this all morphs into if (when) he wins the election remains to be seen. I'm both excited and scared to find out.

> "I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase 'In these days of political correctness…' talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, 'That’s not actually anything to do with "political correctness". That’s just treating other people with respect.'Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase 'politically correct' wherever we could with 'treating other people with respect', and it made me smile."

-- Neil Gaiman.

http://www.upworthy.com/what-political-correctness-does-and-...

Yes that certainly sounds very nice (pretending that political correctness is only about "being nice"), but in my opinion is an excellent example of the problem.

Some topics are going to hurt people's feelings, there's no getting around it, so if "treating people with respect" is an absolute, then it is in many scenarios outright censorship of ideas. The article you links claims that is simply not true but offers absolutely nothing to substantiate that claim. I find this type of reasoning pretty common on the left.

http://i.imgur.com/dmgpS.png

You can see that process in action on metafilter.com. There, terms like "treating people with respect" are basically euphemisms for a continually narrowing set of opinions-treated-as-fact. You can't go against them without being dog-piled and probably banned (more or less for the reaction your disagreement caused in others).

That hasn't happened to me, but I've seen it happen enough to not want to bother.

Eh. People used to say /pol/ and /k/ were parody, too.

They don't say that anymore.

Also, Weev. Remember how he was just a troll?

http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-and-troll-weev-is-now-a-straig...

Straight up swastika tattoo.

Since when was /k/ parody?

I never thought it was. But its defenders and minimizers used to tell me that the folks who gave it its reputation and its denizens their nickname were "in on the joke."

Its entire culture is in its own special way a joke, from the love of Soviet everything, to the nagant-bolt-as-a-prostate-massager, to the skinwalker stories - and each of these is made even funnier the more that it gets taken over the top. IAmTheStrielok becoming famous from swallowing a DU bullet and nearly dying from radiation poisoning, for example. In that way, sure, layers of irony, inside jokes, etc. But in the end, it's all just memes - superficial board culture used as flavoring for the very real and serious discussions about all things weapon-related.

I was referring more to the openly and unapologetically racist aspects of the board. "It's just memes" isn't an excuse for some of the vile shit that has leaked out of there over its history to the point where they're called /k/lansmen for a reason.

Correct - it's not just memes, it's also leakage from /pol/ and an excellent pleb filter.

But no, having been there for some 5 years now, I've barely seen the term /k/lansmen tossed around.

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