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Comment by gumballindie | Hacker News Reader

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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we had to ask you this pretty recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636566. If you'd please review the site guidelines and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.

My apologies, will take a break from commenting as to better understand the guidelines. However, it would be great if there was higher tolerance for calling content such as this out. The article at hand and research behind it do nothing more but to perpetuate a false image of east europe being a monobloc of cultures, ethnicities, and genetic structures. Defending that while censoring critique is far from ideal.

The moderation point here is in no way "defending that", nor was this the issue with your comments. The issue is that when people get into the frame of "calling out", they're already usually over the line into flamewar. That has nothing to do with this particular topic, as the second link in my reply makes clear (as the topic of that previous flamewar was unrelated).

If you want to provide thoughtful critique, answering bad information with better information and bad arguments with better arguments, in a respectful and curious way, that's of course fine. If you call names, or take swipes, or post flamebait or high-dudgeon rhetoric, that's going to lead to getting moderated and/or penalized and/or eventually banned, regardless of the topic.

Thanks for clarifying, duly noted.

> perpetuate a false image of east europe being a monobloc of cultures

I don't really agree with that claim at all. It's pretty obvious the article is talking about the migration of Slavic people which was a relatively monolithic group at the time. Seems that you just pulled a few words from the article for the sake of outrage.

The article didn’t say “race” at all. Its wording tries to simplify, for a mass audience, the research that found at this Balkan site DNA that is mainly associated with sites in the east of Europe. Across archaeology and linguistics, there has been an archaeogenetics revolution in the last 15 years or so that enables tracing historical migrations like never before.

I don’t know why you think “attracted to the wealth Rome invested in its frontier zone” is a wording that implies jobseekers. It can obviously mean opportunities for pillaging, which peoples of the Eurasian steppe did for centuries. It can mean making use of convenient infrastructure left behind when the Roman military retreated from certain holdings.

> archaeogenetics revolution in the last 15 years

Unfortunately none of that is passed on to said audience, as can been in comments that claim ancient europe followed burial or genetic patterns aligned with a cold war era political classification of the region.

It would be comical if not tragic that we actually fund people producing such “research”. I am less and less surprised that some think we can replace them with chat bots given how low quality the output is.

Your posts here are so incoherent, it’s not clear what you are complaining about. Is it the term "Eastern European"? That isn’t a “Cold War-era classification” at all. The use of “Eastern European” in the archaeology and linguistics of the region goes back to the term Osteuropa in the foundational 19th-century literature.

If you lack any familiarity with this field enough to know that, then it would be wise to refrain from making pronouncements on the worthiness of this research. Also, the HN submission is a pop-sci article created by that university’s PR, it is not the actual research. The actual research can be found in the mentioned journal.

This is an incredibly ignorant take. Tracing these lineages has implications on everything from climate, geography, history, politics etc.

Yup, and this “research” mis traces it. A low quality piece aimed at ignorant readers that project their’s upstream.

> Unfortunately none of that is passed on to said audience

I'm sure most people reading it understood that.

> It would be comical if not tragic that we actually fund people producing such “research”.

Could you actually explain what's wrong with it? Maybe we're reading a different article?

100% agree with this.

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