Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Alt Right, yes, "neo-Nazi" member of it, AKA of the Alt White, no, and I challenge you to show where I said I was that. Not entirely enthused about Jews != "neo-Nazi", outside of fever swamps like the ADL.

As for blaming the Holocaust on the Left, it's right there on the f+++ing label, and bald assertions will never convince us that National Socialism was not a part of the Left like International Socialism is. Or that the Left wasn't responsible for the majority of the 20th Century's genocides. Hmmm, were the Young Turks of the Left? On the other hand, while Imperial Japan was collectivist (which was sort of baked in the pie from ~1600 or so anyway), it wasn't of the Leftist flavor.

But, yes, to the extent the inchoate Alt Right has a position on it, one of them is that Jews are to be "excluded if not eliminated from society", as in all societies that are not Israel. You've got your own homeland now, which we of the Alt West fully support, relocate yourself there.

Specifically "diversity + proximity = war", and we want to avoid "war" such as it is or will be.

These threads are toxic waste dumps, and you did more than anyone else to make this one so. But you also did something that goes beyond merely pouring toxic waste into threads (which plenty of other people have been doing as well).

> You've [Jews] got your own homeland now, which we of the Alt West fully support, relocate yourself there.

It makes me sick to read that here. My first instinct is usually to let users off with a warning, especially when they've been here a long time and post good comments in other contexts. But we've already given you countless warnings, way more than we give most users who repeatedly flout our requests to use this site as intended. And then I recall that you just told Jews to "relocate themselves" on HN, and I want to throw up. Therefore I've banned your account.

Thank you, Dan.

Yeah, if you want to convince people you aren't an anti-Semite and neo-nazi, calling the ADL a "fever swamp" without some substantial supporting argument probably isn't the best place to start.

Of course, following that up with calling for the mass exclusion of Jews from all societies other than that of the State of Israel is not helpful, either.

And there'd be more consistency to your argument there if you argued that non-Jewish Whites should be, similarly, excluded from all societies other than those of the European continent.

How does a neo-Nazi end up with more karma than me on Hacker news?

You should be banned from here. Seriously. Advocating that Jews be "excluded if not eliminated from society" is hate speech.

It greatly disappoints me that the HN moderators apparently think it's okay to leave virulent anti-semitism unchecked.

I am Jewish. I have never been to Israel. America is my home. Why do you want to tear that away from me?

> It greatly disappoints me that the HN moderators apparently think it's okay to leave virulent anti-semitism unchecked.

We don't come close to seeing all the comments here, so that's not a valid conclusion to draw. The likeliest explanation in such cases is that we haven't seen the post yet.

You're right.

I apologize for assuming that you had seen the comment and for believing hga's assertion that you had reviewed his comments and determined that the good made up for the bad. This was entirely my mistake, and is probably a testament to the effectiveness of a veneer of respectability over cold-blooded hatred.

That a long-time commentator could call for ethnic cleansing of myself and my family upset me greatly and I apologize for letting that emotional reaction extend to the moderators.

If you would like to remove this subthread, feel free. I don't want people incorrectly assuming that HN mods don't care.

I 100% know you are working in good faith and I thank you for what you do--the profusion of straight-up white supremacy (notable over the usual stew of MRA nonsense and generally reprehensible race politics) over the last few months has started to make me wonder if this phenomenon on HN is important enough to y'all for you to be paying it the attention it deserves in order to effectively combat it. I started using my favorite-comments list as a hall of shame, and mostly gave up after, like, two days because there were way, way too many of them to actually pick up on 'cause it really is all over the place.

I appreciate what you're saying in this subthread, but from below, the infection has to this point seemed to largely pass by the proprietorship. And it's some bad shit, so that's pretty worrying! Of course, I am a very biased observer, and I'm certainly not suggesting you take what I'm saying as Gospel but merely anecdotal experience...but I know I'm not the only one in this subtree who's getting this vibe, 'cause we've talked about it off-HN.

I banned two accounts in this thread as soon as I saw what they had posted, so I think your impression is probably a mix of us interpreting some of these comments differently (though probably not the worst ones, such as here) and simply not seeing the same comments.

When it comes to interpreting, we try (hard) to give users the benefit of the doubt. That does leaves room for comments that suck, but the alternatives that I'm aware of would suck worse.

Two things that override the benefit of the doubt are (a) when someone is using HN primarily for politics or ideology, and (b) when we warn someone or ask them to use the site as intended and they still don't change. If you notice cases of that, or cases where we need to be warning someone and haven't yet, those are what we most appreciate having brought to our attention. I skimmed through both your 'favorite' comments and flagged comments lists and didn't see any clear cases of these.

Please try to at least crack down on the most consistently hateful users.

Do you email the mods about the worst comments?

EDIT: (I didn't downvote you, btw)

I emailed the mods about this comment thread. In retrospect, that should have been my first action (instead of commenting under the assumption that they had seen it).

Your question was most likely rhetorical, but here goes: hga has had a lot of non-political comments on the site as well, and been on the site over twice as long as you have. That's a lot of time to gather karma.

They've been recently called out by the HN mods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994342

Yea, my question was more rhetorical.

For the record, I think it is a problem that someone can consistently drop hateful political rhetoric (I looked through hga's history) essentially without repercussions. It looks like he has some perfectly fine technical contributions, but that shouldn't be an excuse to regularly derail threads with hateful commentary.

Any new account which displayed hga's history of political commentary would be summarily banned. I'm skeptical that HN should allow such commentary to continue just because it comes from the same account that has technically good content.

I was purely providing a speculative explanation, not a justification. Nor do I think some calculus balancing good posts versus bad posts is being done by the mods. If you read me as implying either, that wasn't in any way my intent nor my position.

Sorry, I didn't think you were arguing that at all. I'm mostly just venting about the level of hate which so many humans are seemingly capable of (and how few resources the rest of us have to combat it).

Nor do I think some calculus balancing good posts versus bad posts is being done by the mods.

It is, though, based on ... dang's comments I think, in a previous incident.

They to date don't appear to believe that I "consistently drop hateful political rhetoric" nor to I believe I do, and I certainly try to avoid "regularly derail[ing] threads". Take this discussion, for example, what I've had to say is pretty much by definition on topic in a topic about "White Nationalism"

Please don't confuse our not seeing all the comments with endorsements of what we don't see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com