> yet-another interchangeable flamewar
You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar".
What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.
You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar".
What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.
Often, a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ..., Sn) produces threads that are more or less the same as their predecessors, rather than focusing on the specific new information introduced by any Si. This particularly happens when the topic is a major and divisive one, like the current one.
What happens in this cases is that people tend to post their generic views about $Person or $Topic, often in vehement terms and without much curiosity about the specific details of what's happening. In this way we get threads that don't differ very much from one discussion to the next. That's what I mean by "interchangeable".
I guess it's similar to what you do here when you "move" comments from one submission to another. A downside is that it can be hard to know which comments come from which submission. Perhaps top-level comments need a small marker indicating which link they originally commented under?
Comments from merged stories do have a label showing where the came from... but only before the merge; afterwards top-level comments are always attached to the primary story which is when things get especially confusing.
For this and other reasons, I'm in the middle of revamping UI for the feature and the database model: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/1456
If anyone is real curious about the fine details, I've done almost all of this feature work on Lobsters office hours streams: https://push.cx/tags#story-merging I plan to continue that work in about four hours on today's stream so it's a great time to ask questions: https://push.cx/stream
As a (much) smaller community, story merging has been valuable for allowing us to build the critical mass of a good discussion. We also avoid rehashing the basics/easy misunderstandings. It's a pretty similar to dang's motivation about wanting to promote novel discussions. I have joked for a couple years that I'd love to see HN copy the feature so that HN can teach everyone how the feature works.
But conceptually-linked ones of course don’t.
Not always. There seems to be some issue with the exactness match. I haven't reported it because I presumed it was intentional. Well, that and there's no obvious bug submission process.
Maybe if submitters see something was already submitted 800 times, they'll get the message; though, I have my doubts.
Doesn't solve the sameish story being posted from multiple sources, though.
We can be civil until the very end of the world, I guess. I’ll make sure to hold my knife and fork correctly while civilization falls apart.
But yes, I do intend to be civil and thoughtful right up until my death, no matter what happens in the world.
That's how I want to live my life, and I'm glad to be part of this community which has clearly stated goals that align with mine, and a moderator team that does as good a job as I'd expect while maintaining a fairly light touch. There's almost nowhere else like this on the internet.
It's also important to state clearly that being civil and thoughtful does not equate to being passive. It does not equate to failing to take action to defend your ideals and way of life. You can be a highly active and passionate person taking strong actions everyday to guide the world (back) onto the path you believe in, and you can do so while striving to remain thoughtful and civil.
Why not? Do you think a violent discourse would work better?
(also I have not seen dang making any concrete statements about the topic)
Now you want this poster to believe that if they were to just bring examples, you would be interested for reasons other than arguing against their validity.
If you're going to mention a "plain and obvious" example, you should link to it so users can make up their own minds about how plain and obvious it is.
Re contradictions: there probably are contradictions in the principles I've been describing, because the problem we're trying to solve is complex enough to involve tradeoffs. Perhaps this is what whalesalad means by "You can’t have your cake and eat it too bud."
I find it hard to compare the two men in question. They will have their similarities, being humans and politicians. But Andrew Jackson lived two hundred years ago. The modern era has seen the USA become a "superpower" with brokering influence (political, financial, military) all around the world.
The current administration appears intent (despite its slogans) on dismantling its own influence in the world... as well as Democracy. Nations and economic zones that considered themselves long-standing allies only a month ago now openly express distrust.
He engaged in a conflict with the central bank overseeing national finances and banking and vetoed the bill renewing its charter, in part because he perceived the bank as supporting his political opponents. It still had four years to go, but the next year he unilaterally pulled all federal deposits from the bank, putting them in smaller state banks. This crippled the Second Bank of the United States with no Congressional approval or oversight. In fact, he was officially censured by the Senate for doing it.
Some other similarities in tone or type:
Jackson wasn't initially taken seriously as a presidential candidate - he was a political outsider and "a man of the people." He thought the federal government was corrupt and against him. This feeling was not helped by his winning the popular vote in the election of 1824 but it being taken away by the electoral college and ultimately decided by the House of Representatives in a "corrupt bargain."
He basically replaced his entire cabinet because of a conflict between the wives of his cabinet members and the wife of his chief of staff, who had married the widow of another cabinet member after a rumored affair and that member's subsequent suicide.
He had a "kitchen cabinet" of unofficial and unappointed advisors who had extremely significant power in the Federal government, such as Martin Van Buren (who would later become VP), John Overton, and Francis Blair (Editor of the Washington Globe), including some of the richest people in the country at the time - some of whom were bankers, by the way, and directly benefited from the destruction of the 2nd National Bank.
He criminally investigated his presidential predecessor's staff, alleging (and allegedly finding) corruption.
He was accused of being a dictator and a despot, and rattled his saber against Europe, almost going to war with France.
He nominated and successfully appointed completely unqualified judges.
We didn't have the current system of executive agencies until the latter half of the twentieth century, but if we did Jackson would probably have dismantled it.
A couple of books I liked about this era are: The Birth of Modern Politics - https://archive.org/details/birthofmodernpol00lynn
American Lion by Jon Meacham