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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Come on. Imagine a bearded Middle Eastern man with a device that's glowing red hot and looking like it's about to explode, on a passenger plane.

We live in an era where a few brown-skinned men praying on an airplane is enough to trigger passenger panic and the involvement of the FBI. Do you really think that, if the above happened and the passenger was unfortunately of the wrong race, that passengers would not immediately jump to the "terrorism" conclusion? In the last few years passengers have jumped to that conclusion for way less.

[edit] I'm not saying this would've meant throwing someone into Gitmo and throwing away the key. But you have to admit, if this happened to anyone of Middle Eastern descent, there's not a chance he wouldn't have been detained and subject to a barrage of investigations.

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There is no way anyone who's phone battery ignited on a plane would be in prison, but beyond that, I'm just watching the arc of this thread bend towards dumbness and surprised to see you on it at all.

Do I think racism is alive and well all around this country? How about, just guess, and then we can keep the discussion off HN. A few years ago, this might have been a thread about battery chemistry. Now it's about the TSA. I have to believe you think that's sad too.

I don't think that's off topic at all. Few years ago (ok there was no HN in that day) this [1] wouldn't happen either.

[1] http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2011/11/locked-in-la...

Exactly. Good post.

These kind of events can and routinely escalate just due to fear alone.

It is also often at the expense of specific colored individuals.

There's really not much meat to the topic, after all - lithium battery explodes... this is pretty much an everyday occurrence everywhere, about as newsworthy as "car crash on freeway" and "pen explodes in pocket". Spectacular and scary, sure, but this is a topic that is neither surprising nor particularly alarming to a bunch of gadget geeks.

Is it really any surprise that the bulk of the discussion is applying to meatier, more interesting/controversial tangents?

In any case, my OP is not really meant to be a lightning rod for Yet Another TSA Bash(tm), but rather just an exasperated, cynical quip.

I clicked through. You know it's "car crash on freeway". I didn't! One or two posts stabbed at clarifying --- if you could see them through the conspiracy fever stuff and the "derp derp held the wrong way derp" comments.

Anyways, I'm not trying to bag on you. My problem is with the whole site.

I find that since removing karma from comments made me less inclined to participate and read the comments here. My participation is way down.

My time is valuable and the comment scores, albeit a flawed metric, served a good purpose to filter out some of the less useful/insightful comments, I wish there was a toggle in the preferences that would allow people to turn it on per user.

I do have to agree. Traditionally HN has given token upvotes to cynical quips, jokes, etc, but the bulk of upvotes have always gone to really insightful comments. It's one of the things I enjoy about this community.

With the karma removed from comments, though, "witty joke with 7 upvotes" is now completely indistinguishable at a glance from "extreme insight with 100 upvotes".

I don't think it's realistic to expect people to stop joking about topic X, or making short quips about things... logically it makes sense to bring back some kind of way to differentiate these posts.

So go bury your head in the sand on some other site where conversations are limited to things like battery chemistry then. I don't think anyone would really care if you did that.

Don't be surprised though when the intelligent, compassionate people you're conversing with start noticing and commenting on the big bad police state that's been descending upon them.

HN would be much worse without the contributions of regulars like tptacek and potatolicious.

Still. Why complain? Continuing a back-and-forth over a couple of silly comments certainly doesn't help. It doesn't make people go away or make them change to your liking. I guess the questions to ask are "What can I do?" and "How much is it worth?"

I mean, sure you can offer the odd complaint now and then and hope others are with you or you can organize others around a complaint to see where that gets you. You could go directly to the controllers of the board and complain.

The path of least resistance is always there though. If you don't like where you're at and you have no effective way of dealing with it, the best thing to do is to relocate.

Anyway, I should not have been gruff about it earlier. It could have been said more politely. So I do apologize for that.

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