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If you want to have curious conversation, you're welcome here, along with all of your opinions and views. If you just want to smite enemies, please go do that somewhere else.
We don't need you to tow any ideological line (trust me, we really couldn't care less, besides which I'm all in favor of having well-read communists in the conversation) but we do need you to stop it with the generic flamewar tangents. They're predictable and uninteresting.
Also, you've been crossing into personal attack regularly and that sucks and is not ok. It's also beneath you, or at least I would have thought so.
It would be helpful if you would take to heart that we want HN to be a web forum where people don't make habits of such things.
Why so much self-delusion? Just let it be, ban if it makes you happy, you know just as well as I do that this place is crawling with fascists.
If possible, though, I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone. My MO is always the same: keep cool, cite quotes that upset people because they tarnish the images of their idols. You keep saying I'm breaking the rules and attacking people, and I don't see where?
You're not just "simply saying well-founded things" and "keeping [your] cool" - you're inundating the threads with provocation and snark. The effect of this is predictable and we have no choice but to moderate it. HN's survival depends on not burning to a crisp, and you're starting and feeding flames all over the place. I'm not saying it's arson, but it's negligence, and the flames are just as damaging either way. The fact that other people lose their shit in response is not only not an excuse, it's an effect you're co-producing and are therefore co-responsible for. That doesn't make what they're doing ok, and we'll moderate it whenever we see it, as usual.
There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views. You can't just drop them like bombs in the threads without deranging people and destroying the environment. No doubt the majority is wrong, but it's your job to know who you're dealing with and to persuade them, not troll them. Otherwise you end up discrediting your own views and re-entrenching others in their errors (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you want to keep posting on HN, you have a responsibility to protect it for its intended purpose. It's only because most of the community does so, and moderators work hard to mitigate the rest, that HN has any value at all. You're benefiting from that, since you find it valuable enough to spend your time here. Trashing the place in return is a poor way to give back—and I'm sure you wouldn't do the equivalent in other cases (such as littering in a city park, or starting fires and leaving them to others to put out).
> I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone.
You needn't look far; you did it two sentences before your question ("self-delusion"). Here are some other places where you crossed the line:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35732710
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35676153
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35653632
1) Calling someone a bad writer isn't an insult, it's an honest appraisal of their literary talents.
2) Where's the insult? They themselves said they're the child of a CIA agent and that they think Russian culture is stagnant and worthless. I simply repeated exactly what they said but emphasizing how vile it was.
3) Again, where's the insult? They accused me of delusion, I said that they can choose theirs.
4) I told someone that they have a wrong theory of statecraft. Again, are you saying that telling someone they're wrong crosses a line? Is this a safe space for... being wrong?
5) Again, I fail to see the insult.
From my perspective, you seem to be arguing that all my engagement should take on the superficial form of "civilized engagement", even when people are saying rancid or provably incorrect things, attacking me, and mass downvoting me. I don't swear, I don't insult. This place has a problem with ad-hominem, as shown by the funny reactions to this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32213156
Regarding this:
>There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views.
I think this is very much what's at stake, but I have the opposite view: contrarian views deserve a little support from neutral parties and authorities if they are valid and the prevailing challenge to them is subpar, not additional responsibilities to coddle those who dismiss the unfamiliar from a position of smugness. Other than simply kowtowing to "might makes right", why should the members of the numerous and overpowering status quo have less responsibilities than challengers to it? You can say that them's the breaks, that's how things are, but it's a construct just like everything else on here.
You probably think that I "generate work" for you with my posting, but what you'll find is that in the absence of communist types (ideally many and more belligerent ones than me), this place will continue to descend more and more into people talking about the need to exterminate the Chinese, the importance of appreciating the fundamental IQ differences between races, the need to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco at the human level, the celebration of war as a cult of death. You'll find that, as a mod aspiring for "neutrality", you'll have banished anyone who might care to "organically" oppose those views, and that suddenly upholding "neutral" law and order will mean enforcing fascist takes.
But this is just HN, so it will be a farcical and goofy version of what you'll be witnessing happening everywhere else in society. I don't expect you to do anything differently, but at the very least you should stop blaming me for people finding Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin quotes scandlously upsetting to their own poor understanding of history.
But they seem pretty racist to me based on their frequent dropping of n-bombs in their writings [0].
I think the reason we don’t have 19th century racist essays by Marx and Engels is that they wrote almost always about Europeans and European culture.
Agree on Churchill. But does that surprise anyone? England was still literally colonizing India and South Africa during Churchhill’s time. It would be weird to find a non-racist world leader from that time period. Even LBJ, decades later, held pretty racist beliefs even while passing the civil rights act.
[0] https://medium.com/@robertpannier/karl-marx-friedrich-engels...
I seize upon what I find interesting and leave the rest to dry.
I can’t think of a reason why people would write n-word used in a diminutive and insulting manner and not be racist. And it’s really common too. Not just a single instance but many times and seems like it was in their regular vernacular.
The next fallacy would be to say something “why are you angry about this?” In response to a simple question.
I blame kids growing on YouTube screamer shows.