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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've been doing a lot of it lately. The idea of HN is intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation, and those things can't coexist with political battle.

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

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Flamebait? Flamebait to me is telling my friends and family that they aren't good enough just because they're Asian. I'm just responding to an article that somebody posted with my personal opinion based on my lived experiences.

If you don't want political commentary, maybe you shouldn't let people post political articles? I see articles here every other day stoking the ancient fears of yellow peril, saying China is dystopian, full of liars/thieves, etc.

Where is your outrage at any of this?

I guess it's ok if it doesn't offend you personally? You're content living in your bubble where everyone pretends that everything is ok and if someone who doesn't look like you or has different life experiences, their opinion is invalid?

I'm sure you'll ban me after this because you hate it when minorities complain. Why can't they just stay on the plantation?

I've posted plenty of comments chiding HN users for posting antagonistically against China and Chinese people and accounts expressing Chinese perspectives. They're easy to find if you want to. So from my point of view, your indignation here is quite misplaced.

I don't want to ban you, but if you keep blatantly breaking the site guidelines, what choice will we have? I'd much prefer it if you would take the spirit of this site to heart, and use it as intended from now on.

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

Thank you for addressing that point. I appreciate the work you are doing on that front.

However, you still haven't addressed the fact that if somebody speaks out about racism in the form of "affirmative" action, it's apparently flamebait?

I wasn't even the one who posted the article, I'm just responding to what I see.

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly, but when it comes to a social issue like affirmative action, one which is large and complex and has people with good-faith views on many sides, yes, it can often be flamebait when someone makes reductionist comments using inflammatory words like "racism" to dismiss large aspects of the thing. People don't do that when they're looking for thoughtful conversation. They do it when they're in battle mode because they have strong feelings on the topic, usually hurt and angry feelings. Those feelings are important and based in real experience. But if they're allowed to drive expression in uncontained ways, all we get are sharp words fired like weapons between opposing sides. Those discussions have a lot of energy in them but do not have a lot of information in them, and that means they're not interesting in the sense that we use the term (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and that makes them off topic here.

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