Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

Not an American but here's my two cents: I know it's about the event happened few days ago, but based on what I've learned on the other side of the Earth during these years, I think overall, Censorship in any shape or form, when encouraged, will eventually develop itself to become "Government Enforced". I guess we all know how that goes.

I know the problem is complex, but I think the solution to the problem was based on basic human impulses (And very American if I'd say so myself. Sorry), because simply deplatform the app will not actually convince it's users to leave it, it does not educate those people about what's right and wrong, and it opened a huge playground for the conspiracy theorist to play around.

All around, I think deplatforming is a bad solution to this problem.

EDIT: Clarify: I'm not here to support Parler (not even a bit), and I understand the deplatforming was for the immediate issue. However, I hope those who involved in the decision making could look for a better solution that would convince people to claim down and be rational. That's all.

View on HN

I think deplatforming is exactly what we need here: neonazi and white supremacists are people who are reliant on easy to use discourse-amplifying platforms. The more you make it difficult for them to gather virtually, the more you’re breaking the spell that keeps them together. Before social media, physical neonazi or white supremacy chapter had A LOT of work to do to radicalize people, and were very easy to police and keep under control. With online-based organizational tools, radicalization became easier and harder to patrol. Do you think a random Arkansas soccer mom would have ever joined anything as crazy as Q-anon conspiracy, if she had to attend Q-anon chapter in person instead of participating in an online forum while doing the laundry?

There's a contradiction in your argument. On one hand, you claim these platforms "amplify" hate speech, and on the other hand, you want to push them to other platforms.

...but it is exactly that isolation that create the bubble induced amplification of hate-speech.

If everyone was forced to exist on the same platform (as a though experiment) then hate-speech would have to co-exist with rational thinkers and their hateful ideas might not propagate much.

...but the moment you ban/deplatform/censor/etc... then they begin to form isolated groups with no counter-balance of rationality.

> ...but the moment you ban/deplatform/censor/etc... then they begin to form isolated groups with no counter-balance of rationality.

The first such group that comes to mind is Heaven's Gate, which I think illustrates the opposite:

A brief reading of Wikipedia suggests to me that key members arrived in place via media attention, even though they spent significant other effort trying to recruit members.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group...

Have you been discussing this online with people that fervently believe the election was fraudulent? It is eerily similar to talking with someone in a cult. Any 'evidence' you present to them will be taken and 'debunked' by their fellow cult members.

There is already no counter balance.

Breaking up their platforms into smaller pieces is actually helpful and will keep them from readily finding new members on the internet.

I think this is something that largely gets ignored in all of these discussions about deplatforming, free speech, etc. There is a baked in assumption that all people are rational and will respond to well-reasoned arguments and evidence and will eventually arrive at a reasonable and evidence-based conclusion if you just bear with them and try harder. But my experience so far has not shown this to be the case.

I’ve tried to have a calm and reasonable discourse with people who believe in things like QAnon, anti-vaccination theories, the “deep state”, GMO conspiracies, among others, and I’m a single voice among however many hundreds or thousands of others they are listening to. No amount of evidence or rational argument will sway these people because they are swimming in a sea of voices reinforcing their views.

I’m not sure if deplatforming is the right solution here but I also don’t know what the alternatives are. Should we let them keep espousing and spreading patently false information that is actually causing harm to society to a large audience and hope that people just ignore it? That doesn’t seem like a good solution, either.

To be honest, rational argument and evidence doesn't exactly sway people of the opposite belief because they, too, are swimming in a sea of like voices.

Every time big tech bans or suspends a user, another supporter of Trump is born.

I hear what you're saying and I don't disagree that both "sides" are susceptible to group think and a mob mentality. I consider myself fairly moderate which is why I include examples of extreme views from the left (anti-vaccination theories, GMO conspiracies, 9/11 “truthers”) in my analysis, as well. I’m not a fan of misinformation no matter what the source is and do my best to try to “lead” people away from it.

That being said, what do we do in this situation (which is a common one I see in these kinds of debates)?:

- Group A claims X.

- Person N asks Group A to provide evidence for their claim X.

- Group A cannot provide said evidence, or the evidence provided is unreliable/cannot be validated.

- Person N asks for additional evidence that the claim X made by Group A is true.

- Group A insists they are right and refuses to provide any additional evidence for claim X.

- Person N chooses to not believe Group A’s claim X due to a lack of evidence.

What’s the next step? Assuming good faith on the sides of both parties, how do you reach some sort of agreement or conclusion?

And what do we do when claim X made by Group A is one that leads to violence or other societal harms (such as an increase in death and suffering due to the spread of disease in the case of anti-vaccination theories)?

I don’t have a good answer, here. I desperately want to have rational and productive conversations with people with whom I disagree. But how do you avoid a deadlock situation like the above?

Agreement, and conclusion should be reached by applying procedures to which sides* agree: be it a coin tossing, asking oracle, or voting. Opposing side won't magically disappear when your side achieves power over media. What will likely happen instead they will get more reasonable motivation to wrestle this power from your hands with any means possible.

*Btw, usually there are more then two sides: it's just stale majoritarian system which leaves people just two unsatisfactory choices in US.

> to which sides* agree:

But that assumes both sides are operating in good faith - it's pretty clear in the example that A are not (as are some sides in the real world.)

The example tells about inability to reach conclusion in debates, but explicitly assumes good faith, you probably skipped the final part. And in real life as well, not a lot of people would be inclined to choose civil war instead of political/cultural one.

> Group A cannot provide said evidence, or the evidence provided is unreliable/cannot be validated.

Recall my post that evidence cannot sway "person N".

Every time we accept violent behavior, that behavior grows.

Violent thinking exists whether or not we "accept it". By putting all the violent thinking people on their own isolated platform, we are facilitating the escalation of their thinking into coordinating actions.

The best school to become a thief is jail. Concentrating violent thinking people together will agitate the self-radicalization that occurs. How do you avoid this?

> The best school to become a thief is jail.

I think that's a US thing. Other countries seem to be genuinely more rehabilitative. Looks like 55% of the state prison population is there for violent offenses: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Handling non-violent offenders away from the violent ones might be a good start.

I completely agree with this. You will find a ton of stories about nonviolent people who had to become/join violent groups in prison just to stay alive and not be abused incessantly.

You can't you just have to let it happen until they implode and you can throw them in prison but at least you've limited their recruitment.

Agreed, now do antifa and BLM

You are assuming that they will not ultimately form censorship resistant platforms that that will be far more dangerous than having their conversations visible to the majority.

Not only is that game of whack-a-mole unsustainable, it will lead to the creation of un-silencible platforms. ...and if they are scalable they might become the new standard.

It will be pretty sad if social media platforms are ultimately displaced by the platforms created due to their censorship.

And it's a fair assumption. If they do, those platform won't have state-like power and leverage like Facebook or Twitter, and will be way easier to patrol. The real solution would be to break down facebook and regulate gigantic internet leviathans to avoid that they become more powerful than nation states. While we work on it, this might be the best solution we have to stop easy radicalization.

Giving how gullible the general public is, I think this will be a great way to stop the flow of garbage into their gullible minds. Sure the zealots and mentally unstable will find other means to communicate with each other but deplatforming Trump right now is critical to preventing another Capitol building repeat. He needs to be stalled until he has to show up in NY state for tax/real estate fraud charges. Then he will be more focused on that rather than trying to stir up more mayhem.

Modern online communities fracture into as many sub-groups as deemed necessary by both algorithms and user preference. Moving everyone to one platform won't limit the spread of violent hate speech, or limit organized sub-groups from co-ordinating violent activity.

From a platform perspective, there isn't much difference between companies curtailing the use of their platforms to carry out violent activity and those platforms curtailing other illegal activities such as spamming or malware distribution.

We don't consider sending 1 million unsolicited emails free speech, and wouldn't consider a gang using reddit to co-ordinate free speech. Is there any difference for groups coordinating the violent overthrow of an elected democracy?

I see your point but unfortunately this is really not how platforms these days work... Even if people are on the "same platform" they get trapped in their own echo chambers because by doing so the platforms make the most amount of money.

> the moment you ban/deplatform/censor/etc... then they begin to form isolated groups with no counter-balance of rationality.

(1) Rationality is not a counterbalance to implacable, violent division when there is a fundamental conflict of value. Rationality is just ruthlessly optimized maximization of one's own utility function.

(2) For those things where rationality in principal could be a counterbalance, the problem is that people (all of them) are not rational (rationality is an abstract, unattainable ideal), and the ways in which certain people are irrational can minimize the effect of what partial rationality other people in the group they are incorporated into have.

When a group tries to exclude certain ideas from general conversation, it tends to be ideas whose expression is seen as indicateling one or both of (a) irreconcilable conflict of values with values that the rest of the groups sees as table stakes, and/or (b) incorrigible and toxic-to-the-group irrationality in assessment of reality and pursuit of values, whether or not these values are compatible with the group’s values.

So, in either case, the decision is not made in a lack of awareness that isolation removes, int he abstract, rationality as a counterbalance in the conflict between the core group and the excised group, it's is made instead because of the belief that rationality does not function as such a counterbalance with the concrete group targeted for excision, and indeed that the presence of that excised group mitigates the function rationality otherwise would serve as a counterbalance to conflicts within the core group.

This argument only makes sense if you act like history began in the 20th century. There was so clearly much more widespread racism and neonazism long before the mainstream internet. Also yes I do think that soccer mom would go to an in-person event if she sees some politician that appeals to her fears and biases, we've seen that all before. It doesn't mean she'll storm the US capitol building, but it does mean she can exist without Facebook.

Deplatforming is isolation and in a sense, this already happened on reddit because they could isolate their own topic ( eg. TheDonald) from other opinions ( eg. Snowflake).

I'm not sure where the sitting is, but the ones radicalizing right now don't get a counter opinion.

We all can agree situation and potential solutions are complex beyond imagination, but there is one place, one long term action that could solve most of this to some degree - proper mandatory education, based on proved science. Learn kids critical thinking, rather than raise another obedient generation who doesn't think for themselves and picks up a narrative from some place and then just sticks with it. Learning more soft skills at school (at which most teachers suck, but that's another topic), psychology, why people behave as they do, biases, how our childhood affects us all etc. I think generally our schooling systems globally need big rehaul, but for topic discussed, I can't imagine what I mention it wouldn't bring some improvement.

Teaching with current level of science as hard baseline is already a place where some western countries like US fail (ie evolution vs creationism topic).

I don't think the change I mention is in direct interest of many governments, so its more like a pipe dream and an additional burden on parents to drill this into their kids.

I would de-emphasise pop psychology, and more emphasise:

- clarity: while not everything has a right or wrong answer, but lots of things do

- robustness: it's okay for people to disagree with you, and also for you to be wrong and learn from it

- reason: avoiding the standard fallacies

- agreeing to disagree: individuals you know/interact with and your relationships with them are more important than abstract tribes you may or may not belong to

> proper mandatory education, based on proved science

In the case of political discourse, that may improve the case around some 'fringe theory' concepts which add fuel to the fire, but it's not going to stop the core 'fire', which is driven by philosophy/ethics/metaphysics.

People need to be able to break the 'fourth wall' in these debates in order to question their philosophical biases, and empiricism-as-answer-to-all-problems is also a philosophical bias - eugenics was seen by many as 'scientific virtue' in the 1920s, as one obvious example

I've been saying the same, but sometimes I doubt something like that could be implemented. "Based on proven science" doesn't work for most things social.

How do you teach someone to self-analyze and understand where their problems are actually coming from? To question their own conclusions and rethink what they know?

Still, it's possible to improve the current education system, by a lot. The current "learn this, don't ask why" doesn't work, and to make it worse, parents can be just as uninformed and stubborn as their kids, so they'll come to school raising hell over their lil' precious' bad grades.

As I understand it, this is essentially what various specialties bucketed under “therapy” work to understand and practice ethically and safely. “Give all schoolchildren therapy” sounds a bit radical but I imagine there are ways to scale it that would be 100x more valuable than the typical curriculum.

1. Scientific and rational debate are first class citizens in online communication

2. No speech limitations should be placed on online discussions unless it deviates away from rational debate.

3. Newsfeeds are sorted by popularity AND scientific accuracy.

4. All opinions about an issue, article, or topic are categorized and mapped on a spectrum. Meta data for quick analysis: how does my opinion compare to my peers?

Teaching is one group of people trying to instill their ideas/understanding to others. There's always an authority to decide what should be taught, and it's power will be abused. Resorting to just proven science may limit these abuses but will leave you without social sciences/humanities altogether, because they almost never operate with properly (from scientific pov) proven things

And I just I want to add,

As long as the Internet exist, ( not only the Web, but the Net ) you are only pushing these people to other places. And possibly to an invitation only sub group. They will form its circle in Telegram or other means of media. A bit slower than they first appeared. But the power of internet meant that movement is still relatively quick. And with the power of Hyperlink, news and information spread just as fast as they are in a single group.

So the platform isn't Facebook, Twitter or Youtube, It is the Internet. Or the name information super highway really describe the point better. Which sort of brings the question of regulating the internet but we wont go into that for now.

There is another point wroth mentioning. The making of decent fake news that cant be easily rebutted is far easier than the time and money required to spent for Fact Checking. Not to mention most people dont bother Fact Checking in the first place.

Having been on the other side of the fence with freedom of speech taken away, I agree with parent and grand parent;

Freedom of speech is of extremely high importance for any free society and should not be taken for granted

I think deplatforming is a bad solution to this problem.

I agree that deplatforming is a bad solution to the problem. I don't think there is an easy solution to "the problem", certainly not by tech companies. The response by tech companies is more like an emergency response to a dangerously close attempt to overthrow the government. It is an incredible show of power by the tech companies, and I am sure both political camps have taken notice regardless of their preferences in this particular case.

I think the free speech issue may be a little overblown here. I would be really concerned if cable companies stop carrying Fox News, but I get that this is a slippery slope. However, I think at the end of the slippery slope is not really the end of free speech, but rather two completely separate echo chambers each with its own mega distribution channels.

The government has been shutting down death threats and open sedition since the birth of the United States. There's a difference between free speech and saying "i'm going to go down to the capitol and put _______ head on a spike" . That's not free speech that's a threat. "Let's blow up ____________" is also a threat and not free speech. Also facebook, twitter, etc should not host such things, and they decided not to, thus this really isn't about free speech in the Constitution and no one really has ever had a right to post such things anywhere unless they have a contract that says it, and such a contract would be illegal anyway. The government didn't force AWS to remove Parler.

Not an American as well. Regarding alternative solutions, maybe people should try to soothe trump supporters in order to rid the extremists among them of grounds for committing violent crimes, and it should be done as soon as possible to avoid the impression of conceding to violence.

For example, Democrat leadership could promise to hold another election immediately after the vaccination is complete. In addition, to persuade trump supporters, they could consider getting rid of mail-in ballots, and legislating a Democratic version of voter ID law.

It's the democratic solution as well. Democracy should be about appealing to the largest possible percentage of population, and shutting up the other side is not a democratic solution to the current US crisis.

These are terrible ideas IMHO.

Republicans don't like mail-in voting because it makes it a lot easier for the entire population to vote, and they have been spending the last few decades making it a lot harder for people who are not rich white suburbanites to vote.

What we need is a blockchained using name, DOB, address, and ID. At that point, most issues go away and where you vote becomes much less important.

Neither the Democrat nor Republican establishments want that either. After all, rigging primaries or engaging in other dubious activities would be much too hard.

The changes need to still allow for anonymous voting. Nobody should face repercussions for how they vote.

And equally important, no one should be able to prove to someone else how they voted (because if they can prove it, coerced[1] voting could be a thing). "Secure voting" is a complicated beast, at the best of times.

[1] I am using "coerced" a bit loose here, I am including both "vote X, or else" as well as "if you vote X, I will give you this $SUM money". If it is by structure impossible to show that you complied, it is less likely that either will happen.

The actual votes on a block can be encrypted separately.

The chain makes the system completely and easily auditable. You can't easily game the system. Votes can be easily tallied and randomly sampled to ask voters if the votes match up.

As to repercussions, you already sign your ballots and register to vote. Because of this, there's pretty much no stopping government repercussions if they chose to take action.

Most importantly, it gets rid of all the election fraud debate.

But then someone has to decrypt the vote, and the vote has metadata about its source. You have to operate under the assumption that a gov actor would take that information and punish you if it was not the vote they wanted (however unlikely, that’s what we’re protecting against)

I am an Independent. I don’t like mail-in voting, at least as it exists today, because it opens up extraordinarily easy avenues for voting fraud. In the run up to the 2020 election, Democrats at the state level (where most election regulations are actually decided) opened the mail-in voting laws so far and wide that anyone with a pen could send in as many votes as they wanted in different names and nobody would have any proof of which were valid and which weren’t.

Note that I am not saying that widespread fraud actually occurred in this election...there was no evidence of it, in large part because the laws were setup so that there wouldn’t be. But that isn’t really the point. It could have occurred and nobody could ever prove it, short of the perpetrators themselves coming forward to admit what they did.

Unless something changes before 2024, there is no longer any point in bothering to cast your vote. When anyone can vote without having to prove that they are eligible, and can do it remotely, it renders all votes meaningless.

I generally agree with you, and would prefer we move toward in person voting on paper ballots in as many jurisdictions as possible. With easy exemptions for people with mobility impairments, etc.

However I think any pressure towards in-person voting MUST be accompanied by an expansion of rights in terms of how far polling places are from you, a national holiday where everyone gets the day off work, sizeable transportation stipends, etc. Without all of that, requiring people to vote in person is de facto disenfranchisment.

And furthermore, with regards to 2020, I disagree with you wholeheartedly. I think everyone had a right to no-contact voting this year due to COVID. It was a special set of circumstances.

I agree with you that voting needs to be as accessible as possible, as long as we have steps in place to ensure that only eligible voters are voting, and that they are only able to do so once. I don’t know how you do that with the hard push against voter ID laws, however.

With regard to 2020, the changes to the laws that occurred could have been entirely well-intentioned. They probably were. But those changes have led to the current crisis of confidence in the election results, and rightly so.

> anyone with a pen could send in as many votes as they wanted in different names and nobody would have any proof of which were valid and which weren’t.

I can't find any evidence for this. Further, at least where I live, ballots are mailed to voters and include a control number that ensures only one vote is counted for that person.

Well that’s the issue. There is a patchwork of state and local laws that determine who can vote, what (if any) requirements there are for voter registration, how deaths of registered voters are handled, etc. Even where you live, you might be surprised by how easy it might be to register to vote, and that process might be open for large amounts of fraud. It becomes a very murky issue when you allow each state to set their own rules, and then each state can allow each county flexibility within state law.

Then there is the issue of dead people that have not been removed from the voter rolls. We know for a fact that in 2020, many of these were returned, filled out, likely by family members. That alone is an issue (example: https://youtu.be/CINHx-z9cbk ).

Here is an article with an overview of some of the laws that were changed/relaxed in 2020. Generally speaking, each relaxed restriction opens up more and more avenues for fraud:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/states-changed-rules-voting-...

Registering to vote and voting are not the same thing.

You claim fraud and offer a video as proof. The video contradicts you. In it they explicitly say, a few times, there wasn't any fraud.

The video said that votes from dead people were counted in violation of state law. Call it fraud, call it a mistake. Invalid votes were counted. I am not sure how that contradicts me. The point of this conversation is, quite simply, that the rules were changed in a way dramatically increased the possibility of fraudulent/invalid votes being counted. That makes voting pointless unless and until the rules are changed.

Further, at least in this election, voting and registering to vote were one in the same in many jurisdictions. Many states automatically sent out mail-in ballots to everyone that was registered. All that had to be done from there was to fill it out and send it in. Families of dead people sent in those ballots in many cases.

Registering to vote as someone else, or as an entirely fictional person, is absurdly easy in many jurisdictions. In California, for instance, one can skip any identity checks by simply marking two checkboxes: one indicating they have no ID, and one indicating they have no social security number [1]. Voila, you are now a registered voter. Combine this absurdity with automatically sent out mail-in ballots in many states, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

[1] https://covr.sos.ca.gov/

Utah has had no excuse mail-in voting since 2014, the 2016 presidential election in Utah was almost entirely by mail.

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

A couple of states have had vote-by-mail for years, and Oregon at least has had it exclusively for decades.

The Republican Secretary of State ran an election audit in 2016 and found that, over 2+ million votes cast, around 50 or so were "fraudulent," most of those being cast by people who voted in Oregon and elsewhere.

Vote-by-mail is not problematic, if you consider the historical evidence provided by places that have been doing it for a while.

Vote-by-mail is not problematic

That is the party line, but you have no way of actually knowing that. The election audit to which you refer has no way of knowing how many votes were cast by identities that were simply invented because of the ease of registration in many states (which has now been combined with proactive sending of mail-in ballots, thanks to COVID). Sure, they can tie together people who voted in more than one state, but that isn’t the attack vector that anyone with any sense would use. Show me a good way of identifying brand new identities used to vote in states where there are easy ways to bypass ID requirements (such as California). There isn’t.

Vote-by-mail allows pressure tactics and potentially removes the privacy of voting. For example, abusive spouses can control the ballot of their victim. It also allows payments for votes, because the ballot can be checked by the payer.

Mail in voting is fine, no one has -ever- been able to prove it widespread enough to change an election (unless you live in a town of like 50 people). This has been studied over and over. Every time they check out the supposed fraudulent votes nothing pans out. It is an empty and flawed argument. The ones saying that it lends itself to being fraudulent need to prove it.

Of course nobody can prove it. The rules are setup to be so loose that there is no way to prove any fraud. As I said below, registering to vote as an entirely fictional person is absurdly easy in many jurisdictions. In California, for instance, one can skip any identity checks by simply marking two checkboxes: one indicating they have no ID, and one indicating they have no social security number [1]. Voila - in under 2 minutes, you have invented a brand new, registered California voter. Combine this absurdity with automatically sent out mail-in ballots in many states, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

[1] https://covr.sos.ca.gov/

You're forgetting something. If someone were to check the existence of the identities, they would eventually show up as fraudulent. Here, the "proof" works by absence (which is admittedly not logically correct according to the strict classical rules).¹

Consider that an investigation (that includes said identity check), concluding with a recount happens

• mandatory by design to a random small subset of voting districts

• everytime someone reports to the voting commission an indication or outright evidence of irregularities or fraud

• everytime there is a difference between head-to-head candidates smaller than a certain percentage

If GP is right and "nothing pans out", then that means that the CA Secretary of State web site is not an effective tool to commit voting fraud.

¹ A common analogue is: "I do not believe in gods. Theists can change my mind when they bring forth evidence that measures up to the extraordinary claim. In the last couple of thousands of years, this did not happen. Thus, I will live my life as if gods do not exist."

Here, the "proof" works by absence

Absence from where? It is perfectly legal to not have an ID or social security number. Not having those things proves nothing. And nobody is going to track down everyone in the country with the same name and DOB that you selected and ask them if they are the Fred Wilson (example) that voted in California. People move all the time, so it wouldn’t be unusual if they went by the house and that person doesn’t live there.

The way that system is setup to accept voters without ID verification, there is not a way to legally disprove that the person with whatever name and DOB chosen does not exist (assuming more than 1 other person in the country shares those characteristics). Hence it would be impossible to legally prove that this invented person isn’t real.

Exceptional claims require exceptional proof. Being able to file one fake account vs 10,000 (and not get caught) to throw an election is about the level of proof you'll need and no one has ever come up with that level of proof. Until then people claiming mail fraud are just shouting into the hurricane of the rights of individuals to not be disenfranchised.

Exceptional claims require exceptional proof.

I literally just showed how shockingly easy it is for anyone to invent California voters in a matter of seconds. That’s exceptional in my opinion. I could write a script that would register 10k of those in several minutes. But the more likely scenario is that I can’t be the only one that has realized this...nobody knows how many people are doing this once or a few times.

That is the whole point of this conversation - the possibility of incredibly easy, undetectable fraud renders all votes meaningless because we simply don’t know how much occurred and there is no way to find out because the rules are so loose. Until they are changed, it completely negates any point in voting.

If we held new elections every time one side didn't like the result, we wouldn't have a democracy. As Mitt Romney (Republican senator) noted, no congressional commission or other action would restore faith in the vote while the president is actively lying to his constituency.

To capitulate to them is a terrible idea. They had dozens of chances to prove in court that there was fraud, they never produced anything substantive. These people weren't convinced via proof, they simply believe whatever Trump tells them to believe. All you can do is try to contain it, you will never convince the core of his followers that he lost fairly in the election. If he were to lose another election then the violence would only get worse. We have a process, in 4 years they can vote again. When you give into a bully he will just come back for more the next time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com