Hacker News Reader

Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer and background:

Reason isn't my favorite libertarian outlet. The pejorative commonly used is "beltway libertarian". There's a divide between the Rothbardians and the Koch, Reason and Cato types. Even today, you can find a somewhat recent crusade against Hoppe by a Koch funded academic Phil Magness. Of course Reason uncritically gave airtime to this crusade.

That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork.

Interesting that the same is not true for CNN, BBC or the New York Times articles. They all have a long history of printing horrible deceptions. We could squabble over these past misdeeds or discuss the article at hand on the merits.

View on HN

I pretty regularly see people bring up the NYT's record and don't really see a problem with context being provided.

Maybe CNN and the BBC are more often submitted here due to the actual news they are covering rather than as part of an agenda that they are continually and explicitly expounding and so need that context less?

And when it is relevant to the topic at hand, people should bring up those past misdeeds. For example, if those aforementioned sources were selling a new war, it would be relevant to recall the Iraqi WMD debacle. Comments about disgraced CNN producer John Griffin or litigation against Don Lemon would not be relevant. As you say, it is all about context.

Maybe you can elaborate on how "stoning gays" is relevant in this context?

That people only familiar with modern Reason may be a bit confused to be reading something so wacky and that says in effect ashkenazi jews are inherently a bit socialist and think 'Wow, this seems different from their usual "all government regulation is guaranteed to backfire and achieve the exact opposite of the intent so we should never regulate anything, but especially not fossil fuels and anyone who disagrees with us is just too emotional and irrational" schtick' and want some context on that.

The irony for me is that Reason mag uses the same irrational, inflammatory ID politics shtick on their opponents. Guilt by association is irrational by definition. I object to it regardless of the speaker's agenda.

Claiming an opposing bias (“Reason isn’t my favorite…”) to lend credence to your primary argument is the opposite of a “disclaimer”.

They've used similar ID politics smears and guilt by association in their attacks on their libertarian opponents. Personally I'm not a fan of Reason mag or that brand of inflammatory rhetoric.

>That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork.

Try bringing up communism and see what happens. It'll be all guilt by association with various dictators concerned more with with personal power than communism (i.e. exactly like capitalist dictators).

The libertarian movement was largely dragged from obscurity in the 80s by the Kochs during their fights with the EPA.

That's where all that nonsense about hairdresser licensing got its headwinds. It was entirely an investor driven ideology, with its roots in letting rich businessmen enrich themselves by freeing themselves from the constraints of "overbearing" environmental regulations.

What's the link? When people bring up communism, other people describe what happened in communist systems. How is that guilt by association? What aww_dang means by that is that someone will write something libertarian or conservative, and the HN comments will fill up with replies of the form "did you know that on the same website is a different article by a different author that says something libertarian?!" which is a pointless sort of post. It is a form of signalling to other leftists saying "attack!", and against the ethos of the site as it's not intellectually curious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com