Comment by sltkr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sltkr | Hacker News Reader

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> For a decade, reddit's message to mods was that this was our community.

I think that era died with Aaron Swartz, which is more than a decade past. In the past decade Reddit admins have been banning thriving communities for not toeing the party line.

Where were you when Reddit banned /r/the_donald and all the lesbian subs? Probably cheering them on for enforcing a political agenda you agree with? Then what made you think you would be spared from the admin's wrath when you turned against them?

It sounds like a typical case of “I can't believe the leopards would eat my face!”

> The fuck? [..] Just wow.

Stop it with the rhetorical pearl clutching. If you have something intelligent to say, make a rational, coherent, dispassionate argument. Nobody benefits from this type of emotional outburst. Imagine I would respond in kind, saying: “Omg! Wow! Wow! Wow! I canNOT belIEVE you would SAY something like this! What the fuck??? Wow! Geez! Golly!" This is just meaningless word vomit.

> Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board?

Do you seriously not understand what an analogy is?

I've seen a lot of this reject-all-analogies behavior on the Internet lately. I've been interested to find an underlying cause beyond just more kids online lately.

on the contrary, I don't think borderline invoking Godwin's law is a reflection of maturity either. Sure, you can compare everything to nazis if you want, but in 99% of the cases people making such exaggerated comparisons to the worst tragedies are probably derailing into something frivolous.

Hence, the "law".

I'd argue, that with more polarized disussion and team politics, there's more cognitive disonance simply because people have strong beliefs about topics they are less informed (or disinformed) about. As analogies are great for highlighting discrepencies in belief they are more offensive (in that they cause negative feelings) to a person considering them.

A more noble alternative is that the level of internet discourse has become so much more refined these days that if you simplify a new position to an old analogy you're just retreading old "solved" ground rather than discussing the nuances that make this particular topic business as usual/the end of society. To be fair most people are anti shooting babies and pro killing harmful parasites but neither of those analogies are particuarly novel or useful in an abortion discussion unless it's the first time you've considered the topic.

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