Since the day I first found Hacker News, some years before I created my account, this site and it's comment section has always been on my daily reading list. I'm a very infrequent poster, but have since then read hundreds of comments, pretty much every single day. I guess my personality leans towards trying to understand rather than be understood.
I don't really have any connection to the Silicon Valley, but from the moment I first laid eyes on this site, it felt like an invaluable resource of insight on a huge variety of issues, not just tech.
Sadly, these days I mostly just hate-read it.
On geopolitical issues, there's almost zero understanding from the commentariat, and if there is any, to make matters worse, a lot of the time you have to squint your eyes to even read it. There's a huge part of the written english webosphere, dedicated to discussing and analysing this, the most important subject of them all, <i>war and peace and prosperity</i>, from a completely different viewpoint, but you'd never know by just reading HN. Luckily you can go elsewhere, and I suspect a sizable number of past commenters have, in frustration, done so.
Here, all you get is the same tired neoliberal corporate media viewpoint. Constant denigration of the long, long, list of the enemies of the American political blob. The glittering valley’s technocrats opinions are indistinguishable from those of the shining city upon a hill.
In this dojo, the opposing voice is almost nowhere to be found, always shut down with cries of robots and unfair comparing.
Russian, Chinese, Syrian, Iranian, Venzuelean viewpoints? Forget it. All these countries have news and opinion sites in english, but never to be linked on HN. Getting those opposing perspectives is not for the HN denizen, unless it has first been approved for reading by the NY Times. HN comments have not yet reached the complete unbearable insufferableness of r/worldpolitics, but to me it seems like just a matter of time.
Sorry, but it just really grinds my gears to read someone casually say that the North American people have no connection to the Iraqi people. The US “embassy” in Baghdad is larger than the Vatican. Like all these endless wars, bombings and sanctions against the Middle East is just a minor matter. At worst a small mistake, that in the grand scheme of things is of little importance.
NO.
The consequences of the West's relentless and cruel war of destruction and chaos against the core of the African and Eurasian landmass will be the defining cause of most of the problems the United States, Isreal, Saudi Arabia and Europe will face the rest of this century. A thousand years from now, all history books dealing with the early 21th century will have The Invasion of Iraq as the focal point, with most everything else a mere footnote.
The United States has tried over and over to prevent any even bigger and stronger entities to form on it's opposing, much larger landmass. It has decisively failed, inevitably so.
In the 2020’s, whether it wants to or not, America and it’s shrinking list of vassals will have to come to terms with what roles they can have in this new world order, our shared future of mankind. If these formerly dominant parts of the world can not imagine a role for themselves that is appropriate, the rest of the world will choose for us.