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Comment by std_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

People go to the toilet to get the crap out. Same for many online forums.

Most online forums involve the cunning use of pseudonyms so when I say "FYAD bitch" it doesn't come up on my college applications...

Not yet. The data is there to link it to you.

And by what legal means would a private university access that data to connect it?

What keeps them from doing it? Internet communication is not private. Everybody with access can record and sell it.

If you're not posting under your confirmed real name, in a facebook group under the control of the private university, there's probably nothing they can do.

Reading a document dump from somewhere. Same way people accessed the Ashley Madison subscriber data.

Many do it for fun while not being racist. 4chan is an example.

I saw this firsthand with a former flatmate of mine. He passionately studied Semitic languages and Persian at uni, spent a lot of time traveling or studying abroad in Israel, Arab countries, and Iran. His social circle in Europe was heavy with immigrants from those countries and with them he seemed to be the best of friends. And yet he loved to visit 4chan and collect anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim memes to repost elsewhere just for the lols. Deciding if a person is "really racist" or not has become a challenge in our age.

But making that shit turn up everywhere just normalizes it. People start seeing those things and agreeing with them, no matter how "ironically" he intending them to be taken.

Ideas like "let's get Donald Trump elected for the lulz" have real-world effects. "It was just for laughs, mate" isn't really a good excuse. At a certain point, it approaches "watching the world burn" territory.

> Ideas like "let's get Donald Trump elected for the lulz" have real-world effects.

Do you have statistics to back that claim?

I'm not making a claim either way on the idea that Donald Trump was "meme'd into office" as has been claimed elsewhere.

My statement is that attempting to get someone elected president just because it would be "funny" to see that person as President has real-world consequences. At some point these things go beyond being "just a prank" regardless of how effective they are at actually accomplishing their goal. Were they to actually accomplish their goal, it would have real-world consequences beyond just providing more fuel for their image board meme battles.

Why do we need to decide if someone is "really racist" in the first place? To make ourselves feel good about being morally superior? To feel offended on behalf of people who we may not even understand?

Political correctness really has gotten out of hand, and the sooner people realize this, the sooner they'll begin to understand how we ended up with Trump as president.

The pendulum swings both ways. Be careful how hard you push it.

I think it’s entirely normal that if you have a friend who expresses two completely opposite sentiments, you wonder which of them he/she really espouses. It has nothing to do with feeling good or superior.

Trump is also politically correct, just not the kind we're used to. He didn't say anything about the Portland knife attack and had a lot to say about the London one. Doing so kept his base happy.

Don't be fooled into thinking Trump is not a politician.

Judge him by his actions.

As much as you say that, repeating something over and over eventually normalizes it no matter how much you try to remain conscious of this process.

... According to you. You don't get to police or interpret how anyone else thinks.

Maybe "repeat it often enough and it will be true" applies to you, but you don't get to project your thought processes onto others.

There's a pretty wide spectrum between "do whatever you want" and "let's implement thought-crime." I don't understand how me saying that something is a bad idea for anyone to do somehow becomes "policing" what other people are thinking. Could you please explain that to me?

I probably was too extreme by calling that particular instance "policing" so I apologize for wording that poorly.

But, that aside, your claim of "normalization" remains baseless.

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