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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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

Is this a joke? Half the damn comments on this site are entirely unsubstantiated bullshit and you’re enforcing the rule on THIS comment which doesn’t even make a claim to be substantiated?

If you’re claiming it is without substance you’re simply erasing sex, which is OBVIOUSLY A SUBSTANTIVE CONCEPT.

Sure, and the GP was not a substantive comment. It was a generic, off-topic, flamebait tangent. Why flamebait? Because people can't discuss that topic without yelling at each other, and certainly not when the trigger is an information-free one-liner.

Speaking of yelling, can you please not use allcaps for emphasis on HN? This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

By the way, "substantive" isn't the same as "substantiated". It just means containing information that would be of interest to a curious reader. For example, if I describe an anecdote from my experience, that can easily be substantive without there being any need to substantiate it (e.g. by proving that it happened).

If this is off topic, so are all topics of substance. “Flamebait” is just a term for “topic you’d rather not have on the forum”.

I don’t particularly care for the guidelines as they significantly harm the quality of conversation. You’re welcome to ban me.

I have posted and do frequently see "unsubstantive" comments, but somehow the mere connotation of gender is a flag.

From a historical perspective, such a question in even its simplest form is entirely valid given the nature of gender roles in societies. Are/were conspiring women's groups more or less feared than men's? I don't know myself, and my comment was sincere in that regard.

Both you and pmontra above are completely misreading thaumasiotes's comments in a knee-jerk reaction. They were simply paraphrasing the intent of the quote from Trajan... If you have an issue with it, bring it up with Trajan.

So we can discuss men but not women on this forum?

Could you please review the guidelines and stop posting comments that clearly break them? They include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

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

So thaumasiotes was sarcastic here

> Women getting together is fine. Not once have groups of women ever been known to rebel against the government.

I agree with the sarcasm. Women are generally less problematic than men but they rebel when it matters. Another example, Rosa Parks.

Speaking for myself, no, that statement is entirely serious. Women are not now and never have been a direct threat to any government. They don't fight wars.

Would Trajan have known this? Of course.

Compare your descriptions of suffragettes' terrorist activities with the research on how effective terrorist campaigns are at even getting their favored policies implemented. (And then, of course, ask yourself whether Trajan could have been aware of a 20th-century women's movement.)

Women work. Withholding labor is a threat to the state. Women were a crucial part of the civil rights movement. Women are absolutely a threat to the state.

Please keep cheap gender rhetoric and grandiose pop-historical generalizations off this site.

It is my understanding that, in the classical world, conspiring women's groups were viewed with suspicion by men in general, but not viewed as a threat to the government.

The concept of a women's conspiracy was familiar. Lysistrata involves all the women of Athens conspiring to end the Peloponnesian war by calling a general sex strike.

Gender isn't a flag per se. The problem is that invoking it with a generic, informationless one-liner is almost always going to be flamebait. Not just gender—this is true of any divisive topic. If you add something interesting and thoughtful to the discussion, it's a different story. That's welcome. You just need to express it in a flame-retarding way, not the internet equivalent of a lit match.

All this is covered by the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We didn't come up with these rules in a bubble bath! They've all been hammered out by the brutal processes of the internet forum.

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