"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Let alone the mother of all unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Let alone the mother of all unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
For some reason mentioning obvious and strong historic parallels to the Nazi Germany is considered controversial here in the US - well, i come from USSR, a country which lost close to 30M of people due to the Nazi Germany, among them millions of Slavic (my ethnicity) and Jews (both are "subhuman races" with Slavic slated for 90% extermination with the rest to be enslaved, Jews - for 100%), my grandmother was a highly decorated veteran of that war, and a number of the members of extended family fought in the war too with some getting killed, and i see no reason to forget the history. If anything, i think we have to be vigilant in discovering, highlighting and fighting today anything and everything (like the complacence and cooperation with sub-humanization of a whole class of people) that back then resulted in such a catastrophe. Identifying the historic parallels is among the main tools here.
It's about the cheap and trivial dynamics of internet flamewar, which will flood everything if you let it and which has nothing at all to do with the noble things you're describing. Your comment upthread was guaranteed to provoke that, no matter how sincere your intention and how significant your reason for holding it.
If ever there was a case of "the medium is the message" this is it. No matter how elevated the material you put into that machine, you're going to get garbage out. We have many years of experience with this medium and others had decades of experience before us, and this experience teaches that if you throw Nazis into an arbitrary internet topic—especially one with any emotional charge, and especially if you do it quickly and glibly, as in your comment upthread—the forum will react like a chicken with its head cut off. What good or what honor does that do anyone? We need to be wiser about how we approach these things.
and here i hoped it was short and to the point - contrasted the 2 behaviors and pointed to the context which historically shown the critical importance of that difference and its consequences. Seems to be another case when we'd perceive ourselves in one way, and the world would do it in a completely different way. Among many things on HN i find extremely valuable is that exposure to completely different, including critical, opinions/views/etc. I see your point and appreciate your detailed explanations in this case and the effort you put into your role here on HN in general.
Thanks for the kind response. I appreciate it.
I don't mean this personally; I'm sure that trhway is sincere. Sincerity isn't enough. The burden is on the commenter to distinguish the comment from flamebait, and when it comes to Godwin effects the bar for that on HN needs to be high. Otherwise we'll end up with the nastiest, most repetitive and stupidest of flamewar. (The GP comment failed to clear that bar. The response downthread is of course more substantive.)
I'm not denying what you say about political developments. I'm saying that such important things deserve better. There are constraints on what the medium of an internet forum can bring to them, and to maximize what's possible we must respect what is known not to work.