Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

What's the difference between https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/24/former... and what happened here? Why are so many people happy about that but upset about this? It seems like a double standard.

View on HN

I don't know what you see the double standard to be. Do you expect "tricking people into going somewhere" to be the kind of action where the only acceptable positions are to either be always against it, or always for it, regardless of the reason for doing it, or whether they agree or disagree with the target, or what the disagreement is about?

It's not a double standard to support tricking a pro-gun figure into appearing in a gun control ad, while also opposing Google leading people seeking an abortion toward organizations that will misinform them about abortion; it's just a standard. People who hold morally wrong positions are entitled to less courtesy and respect than those who hold morally upright positions, and many people believe being a pro-gun politician to be wrong, and seeking an abortion to be acceptable.

I see questions like yours a lot on HN, and I have a hard time imagining what system of belief might lead to someone asking something like that.

The double standard is "it's okay to trick people into going somewhere for political reasons I agree with, but not for political reasons I disagree with".

Ok, I'm arguing that that's not a double standard. You are not obligated to treat the opposite side of a dispute the same way you would treat your own side of a dispute, or would like them to be treated by others. This is just how disputes work.

how are they the same

They share an element of deception.

One of these is a one-time stunt, the other is thousands of storefronts that hope a women seeking an abortion will reach them first and they can talk them out of it.

I live close to a very liberal city (we call the high school ‘Evergreen State High’) that has 1 abortion clinic and 2 crisis pregnancy centers.

I don't think the differing scale explains this. It's not like people said the "one-time stunt" was wrong but they weren't going to get upset because it wasn't a big deal; they instead actively supported and condoned it.

This isn't a 1700s philosophy discussion. People aren't upset about this because of 'the element of deception'. It seems to me that someone playing a joke on a guy is very different from systematically trying to stop desperate people from exercising their right to bodily autonomy. Maybe that's just me though,

A closer example might be gun control activists running fake gun shops that sell fake guns and ammunition, possibly jiggered to endanger the user.

But crisis pregnancy centers don't perform fake abortions. It'd be more like a fake gun shop that didn't actually stock any guns, and instead just tried to talk anyone who showed up out of buying one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com