Comment by grantheaslip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grantheaslip | Hacker News Reader

I come to HN for the tech stories, not for completely ill-informed, conspiracy-theory-laden political speculation. I get that it's not my place to say what HN should or shouldn't be, but some of the nonsense I've been seeing recently, especially about the domain name seizures and WikiLeaks, is really making me lose respect for this community.

I'm a political science student and a web developer, and though I don't claim to be an expert on either, I think a lot of you seem to think that the world is a whole lot simpler than it actually is. I've said it before—I think a lot of what makes geeks great at conceptualizing data and logic makes them terrible at understanding nuance and subtlety, and without the ability to see shades of grey, you're always going to have simplistic, naive understandings of the world. How do you operate on a day-to-day basis when you think that the government is out there to take away your freedoms and cover up conspiracies at every turn?

To explain a downvote.

I don't think anyone here (or very few at least) honestly believes that the government is foundationally motivated to take away freedoms or cover up conspiracies. I'll concede only that considering Assange's point of view as one operational principle in the complex, subtle machinery of society is at least not a bad intellectual exercise --- if not more.

Moreover, Assange's tactics are fundamentally technological. Wikileaks and its operation both depend and reflect upon the capacity of the internet to share information with very low transaction costs. This is another face of the same arguments that Zuckerberg or Schmidt have made on the intersection of society, internet, and privacy.

Finally, Wikileaks is one gigantic hack with possibly global repercussions. I'm fanatically interested to see how it plays out.

For HN to have a greater than passing interest in this seems rather characteristic of the community. Moreover, meta-discussion of this nature has been repeatedly discouraged, and ad hominem rhetoric is pretty low on the discourse hierarchy. Cut it out.

Don't get me wrong, the stories themselves are perfectly appropriate for HN, it's the comments (many of them very highly rated) that worry me. Comments like:

- "Anyone surprised he hasn't 'disappeared' yet?"

- "I have a conspiracy theory that the day he does get rubbed out, he won't publicly die, he'll just be "hiding" forever. Some nefarious organization will privately fill his role and take over Wikileaks."

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948734:

- "The value of Wikileaks is that it makes secrecy more difficult for governments [...] Sadly, much of what has been leaked shows simply that the government is putting on a show for the American people and that much of what is kept secret is done so for propaganda reasons, not security reasons."

- "If public release of this information is damaging to US interest, the answer should not be to suppress this information, but rather to behave in an agreeable way in the first place."

- "So, yes. I do say that governments should have no secrets."

- "Every time I hear someone criticize Wikileaks it just seems to me like they simply don't want to know what's happening in the world."

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945352:

- "...the only reason for political parties is to have places where various special interests can line up against each other."

- "The government is censoring our means of communications, end of story."

- "While it no longer makes economic sense to manufacture buggy whips, perhaps there is a Renaissance in the construction and sale of jack boots?"

I'm not 100% pro-government, and I'm not at all pro-American (though I think America has not-completely-deserved bad reputation), but these issues are complicated and nuanced, and I get the impression many of these commenters think they know a whole lot more than they actually do. A lot of this stuff is on the same level of discourse I expect from YouTube comments, not Hacker News, and I find it kind of upsetting because this is one of the few public communities where I'm pretty consistently impressed by the level of discourse.

So my apologies if it seems like I'm lashing out, but I really don't like seeing this bizarre late-night-AM-radio underside of HN.

Ah, well attacking the comments I agree with. Since you posted on the main thread I assumed it was targeting the article itself. Ad hominem is still pretty ineffective around here, though, even when it's patently deserved for the quotes you picked.

It would be great if you can show instances of that nonsense and explain why they're nonsense.

1. The belief on HN that the WikiLeaks release was a responsible thing to do, and will produce a net benefit because, you know, OPEN=GOOD and SECRETS=BAD! Here's my thoughts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949234

2. The belief that shutting down a few domains selling counterfeit goods and trafficking stolen goods is the first step toward widespread government censorship of the internet. My thoughts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945648

Reply on news.ycombinator.com