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Comment by temp8964 | Hacker News Reader

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Taking HN threads into nationalistic flamewar or ideological flamewar will get you banned on HN. No more of this, please. What you posted here was particularly lame and shallow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262618.

I didn't want to make any flamewar, nationalistic or ideological. I was simply pointing out the fact that he had nothing to do with the great famine. The back and forth from others was not my intention. Anyway.

If you really just meant to point out that he had nothing to do with the great famine, then I definitely did not understand your intention, and I dare say almost no other readers did either. That was super unclear!

This comes up a lot actually. Intent does not communicate itself on the internet—especially not on divisive/flamewar topics. Therefore the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

As for the back and forth, I understand completely how when people start feeling mutually provoked, the discussion tends to spiral downward in a tit-for-tat way that is incredibly hard to resist. We all need to work on that (me included).

Thanks.

So what? Famine has been a thing long before and long after the birth of any modern day ideology. (I say “modern day” because I’m not sure if the very first hunter-gatherers had ideologies.) Even if famine was never a thing, increasing crop yields is still worthwhile research that directly benefits mankind, and it goes beyond boundaries.

A scientist who devoted their entire life to ending hunger just passed away and all you can do is post some generic ideological bait. Somewhere along your ideological quest a line of basic human decency is crossed.

I was responding to this: "Many people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. "

And is that not true? Are those people not grateful? What is your point?

Ever since introduction of potato to China large scale famines disappeared in China except for those caused by war, and by army and government seizing foods. Those modern famines are notable for their scale, duration, and entirely man-made political causes. CCP absolutely insists on calling them "natural disasters," precisely because they are unnatural. That is what!

Not sure what you are trying to say here. As mentioned in the tweet, he is revered because his research truly did improve agriculture. As opposed to the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine.

"the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine"? What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean "agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward"?

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

> What the hell are you talking about?

Don't talk to people like this on HN. Thanks.

Yuan Longping's breakthrough happened in the 70s. The great famine happened in early 60s.

I'm not sure what your post is about.

I was responding to this: "Many people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. "

And? Should people hate him for what he did? What is the dispute here? Would you not feel grateful for his contributions, regardless of what end of the political spectrum you're on?

Take your ideology crusade elsewhere.

What? "Yuan Longping's breakthrough happened in the 70s. The great famine happened in early 60s." This is your own words!

I'm totally lost. Are you implying he's responsible for the great famine somehow?

"Fighting famine" is a generic term. His contributions prevented future famine. That does count as "fighting famine", doesn't it?

Are you aware that there has been more than one famine in history?

The OP said "fighting famine", not "fighting the famine". Without the definite article "the", their sentence can (and arguably should) be read as referring to famine as a class of calamities, not to a particular one.

As a further example, the job of a firefighter is to fight fires as they happen, not to help the UK forever recover from The Great Fire of London.

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