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Comment by mdhb | Hacker News Reader

The part where he tries to point to a handful of exceptions to refute the idea that discussions about Musk are getting flagged en mass. It’s really not a difficult bit of text to parse.

Edit: I have to reply to the comment below by editing this comment because I’ve now been banned from making new comments but I couldn’t help but notice you managed to take the original quote and literally remove half of it which would have made your argument look very silly. To be fair Dang did the exact same thing.

Second edit: oh and would you look at that… it’s flagged. Exactly as predicted.

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But the claim was "No discussion of this sort shall be allowed on hn", and his data shows that significant discussion is happening. Mass flagging doesn't change this.

That is despite violating HN's "intellectual curiosity" rule.

It's not violating HN's "intellectual curiosity" rule as many people are genuinely curious about this.

> Mass flagging doesn't change this.

It literally does. The majority of posters won’t ever see flagged posts.

You know perfectly well that the original top comment was expressive and hyperbolic in nature, stop trying to analyze it as if it were a dry quantitative claim. The point, which is extremely obvious, is that many posts are being systematically flagged for reasons of favoritism.

They're clearly HN relevant, given that they relate to a tech titan effecting drastic changes in government structure, with significant security and other, by technical rather than legal means. Systematic flagging of posts about the activites of the Biden administration would have been equally questionable.

Please don't cross into personal attack.

I haven't. It's a critique of the argument.

"You know perfectly well" is a way of accusing another person of being disingenuous and this is a step into personal attack.

We don't know what others know—that would require being a mind-reader—and it's against the site guidelines to be aggressive about it.

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

We have a good idea because other people have comment histories and have demonstrated their own linguistic analytical skills on many occasions.

I don't believe that's reliable, but more importantly, you seem to be denying the emotional thrust of what you wrote. "You know perfectly well [etc.]" is an aggressive trope to begin with, and you followed it with other similar thrusts ("Stop trying to", "which is extremely obvious").

Your comment would have been just fine if it started at the "Many posts are being [etc.]"

Weird you are able to characterize 'you know perfectly well' as an aggressive trope without having any special insight into my mental state, but when I characterize something someone else wrote, you want to be all philosophical and say that we can't make any inferences about other people.

My original comment expressed skepticism about the idea that an expressive remark should be interpreted as a formal assertion of fact. I think your efforts at semantic policing are misplaced.

I see how it came across that way, but I was talking about the effects that language like that tends to have, whether it was your intent or not.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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