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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

I'm sad the posts about USA withdrawing from the Paris deal all got purged fro the front page yesterday. Yes, some political issues aren't relevant on HN, but this I think was.

Edit: Kinda ironic that this post is now having the title [FLAGGED] and being dropped from the fp as well. Edit2: Still flagged but back up, interesting

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It is ironic. It was briefly at #1 but seems to be dropping again now.

No HN only allow political ideologies or narratives they agree with. The moderator team do not hide that they are SJW's.

As another example, currently HN's narrative of choice is how Uber is literally the worst thing since Hitler and you can't go a week without seeing 3 or 4 top-voted links bitching about Uber. Perhaps some people like being able to conveniently travel from point A to B without caring about what some whiny keyboard warrior hates about Uber this week.

What's an SJW?

Not playing dumb, just interested in what it personally means to someone who applies it to others as a (pejorative?) label.

A Social Justice Warrior, though it's mostly used to refer to people who weaponize feminist ideology and use it to disturb peace in a community.

I don't know what SJW accusation has to do with Uber here, nor have I observed any particular SJW inclination within the mods. There's plenty of SJW action on HN, especially in threads about diversity in IT industry - but I'm yet to see a HN mod behaving that way.

I went and checked, and the OP seems to have been offended over this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14358379

The OP posted "*he" as a "correction" for a "she" talking about Chelsea Manning, and seems to have been offended they got downvoted.

Apparently they may not be familiar with the difficulty of assigning gender. The least politically charged way to seeing this is to look at Olympic sports, and https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/sex-testing-olympian... is a good overview.

I'd draw particular attention to the case of Ewa Klobukowska who was stripped of an Olympic Gold medal for "failing a chromosome test" (ie, exactly what the OP is claiming should be the arbitrator of gender).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Jos%C3%A9_Mart%C3%ADnez-... is another case.

Ewa Klobukowska later had a son, and had her medals returned.

Yeah. It was a surprise to me when I first discovered just how complex sex/gender is, in purely factual terms. I suppose over time society will have to develop sub-qualifications, because having just one binary category (man/woman) doesn't properly work at categorizing various aspects of a human being, like:

- grouping by the way someone looks (influenced by hormones)

- grouping by reproduction capability (can or can not be pregnant)

- grouping by reproduction hardware

- grouping by which group of partners one finds sexually interesting

- grouping by various other aspects of biology (chromosomes and all)

Different areas in life really want to categorize by a different set of those aspects, and bundling it all under one word starts to become problematic. My programmer intuition tells me we need to become more explicit about which aspect we mean at any given moment.

And of course it gets even more complex when you consider how things like hormonal changes (either natural or unnatural) effect gender.

Also there seem to be other factors which aren't understood yet:

The researchers identified a region of the hypothalamus, known as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), as being responsible for sexual behaviour. This area is always larger in men than women. However, in their study of six MTF GID sufferers, a female‐sized BSTc was present in all subjects. Additionally, the size of the BSTc was not influenced by taking sex hormones in adulthood. This implies that these individuals had a powerful biological force compelling them to be female, rather than just a psychological conviction.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2600127/

But.. I guess yelling "SJW" is much easier, or something.

> Ewa Klobukowska who was stripped of an Olympic Gold medal for "failing a chromosome test" (ie, exactly what the OP is claiming should be the arbitrator of gender)

Chromosomes are the arbitrator of sex. We know about intersex people and have known about them for some time. None of this means men can become women and women can become men

> I don't know what SJW accusation has to do with Uber here

This is why I mentioned political ideologies and narratives too.

I'd still love to see a citation for "the moderator team do not hide that they are SJW's".

As for allowing in only what mods agree with, I haven't observed such a thing. In fact, Uber stories serve as a great example. Since the first stories many years ago to this very day, HN community remains essentially split between those who love Uber and focus on the benefits it brings vs. those who hate Uber and focus on their anti-social business practices. Nowhere I've seen mods trying to force the discussion in favour of either side.

(And Uber stories are like catnip for me, so believe me, I follow those discussions closely.)

I'd agree with this - having previously been active on reddit and other social forums, HN is generally the most open to debate and alternative opinions that I've come across. Perhaps not so much with politics, where you'll get a mixed bag of genuine debate and left-leaning bias, but most subjects are treated as open for debate and that's one of the biggest draws for me.

I disagree. I got indoctrinated with left wing ideology here. It wasn't until I actively went and looked at right wing arguments to consider them seriously that I realized that those ideas are being misrepresented here

that's why I say I'd exclude politics when it comes to neutrality on HN - as a conservative/classical liberal myself, I've had very few productive political conversations here. Most other subjects are up for debate though.

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