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Comment by dgllghr | Hacker News Reader

You know, I have a lot more sympathy for the under-privileged and the under-served who have politics with which I disagree when I see articles categorizing them as losers. Maybe sympathy is a good lesson here.

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I hear you. We're giving the British people a lot of crap for exercising their rights. I wish folks would respect this fact rather than sensationalizing the result and causing a lot of negative attention and guilt.

I was afraid the article would go with the bad connotation of losers (i.e.: people that 'deserve to lose') but, reading the article, it felt more just like a descriptive connotation (i.e.: people that are losing money and quality of life)

Still, your point is generally valid

You can't talk about "losers" in modern American English without invoking that connotation. I am quite certain that whoever wrote that headline knows this; you don't get to produce content for an A-list blog like the Washington Post without having a working knowledge of semiotics and the dialect in which you're writing.

I think it's a subtle (OK, maybe not so subtle) jab at Trump and his supporters. He uses this kind of language all the time -- calling people he doesn't like "losers".

The author here is attempting to be clever by turning around and using the same trick against them. I wonder if it had the desired effect...

Too clever by half; wrestling with a pig in the mud only makes the pig happy and you full of mud.

Don't use other people's argumentative frames if you actually disagree with them.

Sounds like WaPo is still smarting over getting its press card pulled. (As they should be! It was a brilliant move, and it's had them on the back foot ever since - their latter coverage of Trump reads like a cross between red-top tabloid and schoolyard bigmouth.)

The inflammatory wording may be a deliberate choice as the Washington Post has been getting a lot more click baity these days.

One more example of it: "The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it"[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/24...

I'd expect this level from a troll on twitter, but there were times WaPo was better than that. Not anymore.

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