Elon Musk has "peaked in his career"? I understand that we need to rudely dismiss everyone who left NorCal, but maybe let's try to maintain some semblance of connection to reality?
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Between that case and this one, it seems like it would be good to calibrate your sense of what we're trying for here.
My own comment got abusively flagged by the same brigade which upvoted the Antisemitic comment I was pointing out. And you are justifying this.
Now I made this comment, which is entirely innocent. Is there a rule against refuting the claim that Musk's career is in some sort of terminal decline? Are we only allowed to state that it is, like OP has done?
My innocent comment, the first one I made since that last discussion, gets an uncalled-for response by a mod. Seems I'm either being flag-abused again by the same brigade, or it's just your dislike for opposition to Antiemitic comments. Opposition which you condemn as "nationalistic".
Everyone underestimates the provocation of their own comments by (say) 10x and overestimates the guilt/provocation of others' comments by a similar factor. That leads to a 100x distortion, so it feels everyone else is getting away with outrageous shit while the rule-enforcers are picking on you completely unfairly. This is a standard bias—I assure you that the other side feels exactly the same way. If we stay in that perspective, the forum will burn to a crisp and that's not an outcome which serves anybody.
The only way out of this is to recognize the bias and work to overcome it in oneself. I think if you re-read your posts in that spirit, it's pretty easy to see how they weren't as coherent and innocent as you say—from my perspective they were very similar to the other unsubstantive/inflammatory/flamewar comments and all that is happening here is routine moderation.
Let's take your above post as an example. No doubt you have very coherent, cogent thoughts about this topic but what did your post actually say? First it repeated what the other person said, then it went straight to snark ("I understand that we need to rudely dismiss everyone who left NorCal") and then to personal attack ("maybe let's try to maintain some semblance of connection to reality?"). If you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it should be easy to see that this is not the sort of comment that we want on HN. I'm sure that if a third party had posted that, this would be obvious to you, especially if it were about some unrelated topic that you don't feel so strongly about.
It's common for people to assume that their comment expresses their thoughts—their solid, substantive ideas on an issue—when in reality their comment has done nothing the sort. This is an easy mistake to make because to each of us, our own thoughts are transparently present, and we can just assume them. However, nobody else (with the possible exception of any gifted mind-readers among us) has any clue what those thoughts are unless you express them explicitly, and it doesn't matter how insightful or clever or right you are if your comment consists of snark and attack. To be a good HN contributor, you should therefore (1) express your solid thoughts explicitly, and (2) drop any snark and attack.
As for Antisemitism, you've made a pretty dangerous and damaging claim here, which is neither true nor fair, nor does it serve the cause you're supporting. I'm not going to take it personally, but in my view you should try to be more careful about throwing such grave charges. When you do it casually or unjustly (and you did both here), you cheapen them—and you can also really hurt people.
> The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who have left have all peaked in their careers.
That is very dismissive of a long list of entrepreneurs who contributed so much to the Valley. I'm not even a Musk fan (I'd never work for him, for example) but he came up as a clear example of someone on that list who is objectively still in a very strong phase of his career and could easily have more and greater impact for years to come.
I did find OP's dismissal rude to these entrepreneurs, but considered my stronger argument to be the counterfactual nature of the claim that Musk has "peaked".
Thus I pointed out that claiming Musk has "peaked" is factually detached from reality. Even if you disagree, my argument clearly pertains to OP's claim (i.e. that all these entrepreneurs have "peaked") and not in any way to OP as a person.
Finally, I've been contributing here for two years now. In this time, I saw many, many snarky comments, and made a few too. I've never seen a comment flagged for snark.
Then I participated respectfully in a discussion, where I spoke out against Antisemitism, and my comment got flagged. It was the first time I got flagged in two years. Then almost immediately multiple other comments of mine got flagged.
Then I made this comment, which seems normal based on all the comments I've seen here before, and it got flagged, and you got involved.
The only reasonable way to interpret this situation: the same people who started frivolously flagging me before are still flagging my comments. You noticed a flagged comment, get involved, and tried to backward-rationalize why after two years I'm suddenly a troublemaker. First because I mentioned Musk (no rule against that). Then because I used snark (very common here, and again not forbidden by the rules). Then because I supposedly made a personal attack (I didn't).
As for Antisemitism, I only ask you to imagine yourself as a Jewish person reading multiple comments about how Israeli Jews are using "many dirty tricks", constantly and intentionally war mongering, mocking and insulting other nations and their people out of wicked spite, are universally murderous and blood-thirsty, "steal land", have no rightful place in this world - all echoing classic Antisemitic narratives about Jews.
And these comments aren't just downvoted and flagged - they are often upvoted and visible. Then you speak out against that racist bias, and you get flagged. Then you try to continue to use the site as you've done before, and suddenly 2/3 of your comments get flagged and mods start addressing you as a troublemaker.
How would you feel?