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Comment by RadiconCDF | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with someone indulging in a consensual relationship that happens because someone is attracted to their power?

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Could you please stop creating accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle? Regardless of what you're battling for or against, this is poisonous to what HN exists for, so we have to ban accounts that do it. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As usual, you are merely picking views you do not like. Your participation in ideological battles is far more gratuitous than any commenter on HN because you are the censor. The front page has more politically charged articles this year than ever - and people who reply honestly are punished if they disagree with your openly one-sided argumentation. I have several email records to prove others feel the same way and have tried to reason with HN admins directly about this - to no avail.

Banned accounts cover the spectrum, so if what you're saying is true, we must dislike all the views.

Or we could just be moderating according to the guidelines, like we say. I'm confident the bulk of the community agrees with that. If they didn't, we'd never hear the end of it, where in fact the only accounts making these complaints are the few most ideologically strident ones.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

The problem is when this happens on the job. Then, you have a number of problems.

Was it genuinely consenting or did the more powerful person pressure the underling into a relationship? Did the underling really earn their promotion or did they get it because they are sleeping with the boss? Can the underling end the relationship and keep their job or would they have to first line up employment elsewhere?

Etc.

...because the rest was told to be good, nice, to play by the rules, defer pleasure and will never reap benefits, will get more work as a reward for good work, might not keep being alive until retirement etc. while those who bypassed those rules have access to whatever/whomever they want (almost) due to natural attraction to power innate to many (often attractive) people. A hyperbolic alternative would be end of civilization, i.e. direct, literally cut-throat conflicts between all groups for anything interesting. Wise rulers in the past mastered the art of discretion so that the regular folks weren't aware and could keep dreaming; now that's almost impossible so seeking a moral guidance from more-less openly immoral leaders is futile and pointless.

If you're really asking..

It's hard to distinguish from someone being attracted to not losing their job and feeling pressured into a relationship.

What you described in a vacuum is not wrong. Outside of a vacuum it makes the "pin the tail on the sociopath" game harder. Sociopaths and good meaning people are fighting a battle on the fields of eglatarianism right now.

Good people and sociopaths are on either side of the trench. There's good people fighting each other even though they're both trying to go through life taking the path of least evil. The sociopaths are saying crazy things they don't even mean because it attracts a fief. As a side effect, this emboldens each side because they're laser focused on the crazy coming from their opponents. The fight will go on longer than it needs to because the issues are muddied by the distracting crazy. This confuses people and makes them lose sight of empowering the good and stymieing the bad.

If history is a guide, a new "common sense" will arise that attempts to further protect the innocent and further stymie abusers. Somehow in order to make this bargain a bunch of evil people will get rich. Crazy how it always works.

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