Hacker News Reader

> The continuous political vigilance widely acknowledged to be necessary to prevent liberal democracy from devolving into tyranny is incompatible with the political disengagement you seem to prefer, so I think would be not at all a disgrace if your opinion were unpopular.

That is if you believe that politics have infected all corners of the Internet because there's a "struggle to prevent democracy from devolving into tyranny", paraphrased from your quote.

In my opinion it is the other way around: politics are everywhere nowadays, and it's perfectly fine and encouraged that teenagers participate and radicalise further toward one side, people whose critical mind are still under development. Add a sprinkle of bipartisan politics, so it's often a matter of black and white, and the amplifying power of social media, and that's the perfect recipe towards tyranny, bigotry, entrenchment and moving further and further from the centre.

I said this on other threads and I'll repeat: until not very long ago at all, politics was a game for rich, old people. It still is, but these days you're shamed if you're not actively involved in it.

I'm from Europe, while this attitude has started to affect over here as well, it's come from the English-speaking world (two famous bipartisan democracies, which are very overrepresented on the Internet) yet people are always quick to point out "The internet/world has always been so politicised." No it wasn't, in my experience.

I am not the original commentor but would like to address :

> > It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal > Why?

I have seen where almost ALL discussions lead to judgement based on politics and that takes away from the core discussion point. What is the point of having separate subs then?

For example take this link (https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/khlnyz/ronaldinho_o...), this was the top post on the subreddit when I saw it last night, the top-most comment is not about well wishes for his mother OR about how he thought about Covid OR whether or not he denied covid but rather the fact that he is "right-wing". Now I understand how bad it is but that is not the point of the sub. And that has become the norm , at least on reddit, which if not a disgrace, at least leaves a bad taste.

I've seen people take time to go through your profile and dig out one comment and then label you, just one. That feels like a disgrace.

> I've seen people take time to go through your profile and dig out one comment and then label you, just one. That feels like a disgrace.

Eh, depends on the comment. I recently saw a particularly erroneous comment about COVID-19, so I checked the poster's comment history to see whether it was worth trying to engage them in good faith, or just post a dry correction for others to see. I then saw this comment posted earlier that day:

> I don’t know if it’s blacks in general that are just retarded or if it’s balcks coupled with the history of slavery that makes them so useless and violent, either way I think this country would be VASTLY better off without them.

...I think it's pretty fair to label them based off of that one comment. For content that abhorrent, any number of occurrences above zero is enough to tell what kind of person a user is.

Yeah I mean sure, see, my personal POV is the world isnt binary and there are always, always edge cases. The thing you said seems more of an edge case where one comment is sufficient. But this has to be the exceptional cases, not the norm (however, it is not a norm for reddit users, surely is for celebrities / well known figures)

you forget reddit is a constantly living thing. Check the thread again. You have to scroll way down to see any negative notions. Its clearly just noise.

> ...I think it's pretty fair to label them based off of that one comment. For content that abhorrent, any number of occurrences above zero is enough to tell what kind of person a user is.

Whilst I agree that the comment you refer to is absolutely abhorrent and should be treated as such, I also strongly believe that people have the capacity to change and that we as a society should be pushing for that change.

If that comment was from a number of years ago, any number of things could have happened to change that persons view of the world and the people in it.

If you have someone who's so misinformed that they hold these horrendous views then casting them aside forever is, in my view, the opposite of what we should be doing.

In the physical world we tend to put people in to the 'correctional' system (whether it works as a correctional system is very much up for debate), but in the virtual world, we just censor them and let them go away and reinforce their views with each other in their own space.

We'll never get a better society if we don't challenge the nasty parts of it and work out why people go down that path and, critically, forgive them if they change.

Where did you find that comment? My googling is failing me...

Also, that comment is interesting because the actual things stated (higher violence, worse economic output, net burden on the state) are literally true and uncontroversial but the way they are phrased and the mere fact they are brought up at all tells an unpleasant story.

Unless of course the commentator is just ignorant or uncaring about such implications (e.g. an edgelord).

> Where did you find that comment? My googling is failing me...

The comment in question was posted on /r/allmyopinions.

> The continuous political vigilance widely acknowledged to be necessary to prevent liberal democracy from devolving into tyranny is incompatible with the political disengagement you seem to prefer

This is backwards. The tyranny is caused by the vigilance.

> The tyranny is caused by the vigilance.

Not of those interested in liberty, but, sure of the vigilance of would by tyrants when met with the apathy of those who prefer liberty.

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” —John Philpot Curran