Hacker News Reader

Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

One thing I worry about with that solution is that it seems that the elite is more and more detached from the common man. They no longer know his concerns, fears or opinions.

Let's say some leader decides to build a thousand new coal power plants, and the people want him lynched for destroying the climate. Filtering that hatred out is not a clear positive.

View on HN

Except, given the premise that this filtering could be tuned on an individual basis:

Those who want to know the stories around the coal plants can allow them through

Those who choose to avoid the more violent parts can choose to not see them

The consequences of and responsibility for seeing/not seeing any topic becomes a personal choice, not one of any corporation or central authority. I see this as a very big positive step.

I'm not sure if I want the leader to be able to filter it out, is what I'm saying.

Let them eat cake!

What's happened historically is that people will go up to the person, in person, and yell at them. Ideally, this chases them out of where they are.

For example: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ted-cruz-wife...

This is a much better approach than going online and screaming vulgarity, because this prevents them from enjoying their actual life. If your opponent is genuinely doing something wrong, you want to make them miserable. You don't want to Be Mad Online at them.

What you show there is what's referred to as harassment. It is generally against the law.

Speech is speech, and in America, it's constitutionally-protected. If they touched him, sure, but they didn't.

Enough people yelling persistently at someone could be perceived as threatening. Might you not feel threatened by people surrounding you, yelling at you, and refusing to leave? Getting that close crosses from protesting to intimidating. Notice that Sen. and Mrs. Cruz were having difficulty getting through the protesters to leave.

What something is perceived as by the recipient doesn't matter (unless the person who perceives yelling as a threat reacts violently, in which case they'll probably lose office/have their business boycotted, anyway, on top of being faced with whether the judge perceives the "threat" to be credible or not) when it comes to speech. It's still speech.

Edit: The above poster edited this after I had replied, and everything after the first question mark my comment isn't responding to.

No good can come of this approach.

It worked well for France:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

If it starts earlier, the violence can be avoided.

Really? How did the French Revolution go? The French Revolution is a famous disaster. Reign of terror, oppressive government, many people killed, tons of bad stuff.

Brought representative democracy to France, made life far better for your average person, directly can be tied to Code Napoléon being enacted across France, sparked democratic revolutions globally that had lasting impacts that can still be felt today...I'd say pretty well. Definitely no worse than the American Revolution.

The deaths of the ruling class were unfortunate, but didn't necessarily outweigh the benefits.

A modern version of the French Revolution is far more desirable than allowing the planet to be made uninhabitable by the actions of the ruling class, for example.

In the French Revolution, three hundred thousand people were killed. In the American revolution, thirty thousand died. Killing ten times as many people means the French revolution was worse than the American revolution.

The French revolution resulted in years of oppression before things shook out for the better. The Articles of Confederation were imperfect but were not an oppressive government.

Citation for an improved standard of living due to napoleon's code is needed.

It has been widely-argued that the American Revolution was an influence on the French: https://www.history.com/news/how-did-the-american-revolution...

Finally, I doubt the planet will be uninhabitable. Perhaps harsher or more difficult, but definitely not uninhabitable. Humans are profoundly-adaptable creatures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com