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Comment by Zanneth | Hacker News Reader

I used to like Naomi, but like a lot of intelligent people online recently, she has caught the politics mind virus and began using her platform to spread even more hate and division.

These days I find myself desperately craving an online community that just focuses on building cool projects and learning about new stuff, rather than pointless political debates that have extremely little relevance in anyone’s lives.

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That is very easy to say if politics has little or no relevance in your particular life. Understand that other people have different experiences.

That's a very presumptuous thing to say. I'm not any different from anyone else.

The greatest lie that politicians ever told was that they have power over how you live your life. The sooner people stop believing this, the sooner we can all move on from politics and start building stuff again.

"I wish this person being persecuted by her government would stop being so political"

I never said she should be persecuted by her government. You are unfairly attempting to put words in my mouth.

"I reply to comments without reading them or understanding them."

What hate did she spread?

Naomi has taken to an extreme view on COVID, claiming that policies that are any less authoritarian than the (now provably failed) “zero COVID” policy are attempts by the state to purposefully kill elderly and sick people so that survivors can apparently enjoy greater tax revenue.

https://x.com/realsexycyborg/status/1647827136416464896?s=46

This is only one of many examples where she used her platform to stoke the intercultural flamewars between China and the West.

I don't know, in the context of my own country (Brazil) there seems to be some (probably small) amount of intentionality [0] of government officials in measures that are obviously malicious, like rejecting vaccines [1] and other actions that aided the spread of the virus. We shouldn't live in a world where the incentives of government officials coincide with excess deaths of elderly or any other population group.

But the trouble with conspiracies is that they ascribe a level of competency that's unrealistic. So it's unlikely there is a government program specifically targeted to kill the elderly, not because governments are above this, but just because this kind of thing can't be made secret for too long (just like this specific remark from some specific government official in Brazil quickly became public).

Anyway I didn't find this specific tweet hateful.

[0] "Covid deaths improve the bottom line of social security", in Portuguese https://www.estadao.com.br/economia/morte-de-idosos-por-covi...

Google translation: https://www-estadao-com-br.translate.goog/economia/morte-de-...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

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