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Comment by brickfaced | Hacker News Reader

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Regarding the Washington Post:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/business/media/the-washin...

What does the editorial decision of a newspaper's owner, which runs counter to the unconcealed biases of many who remain gainfully employed at the paper, have to do with legal freedoms of association and expression?

If you don't pay attention now it will end up there though if the course continues, hence the watchlist.

If it's true that "criminal agitators on the left" are causing chaos and intimidating voters with no consequence, doesn't that support rather than refute the point that the US is experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms? The watchlist the source article reports is describing a derivative; if you go to their site, they agree with your intuition that Pakistan is in a substantially worse civil rights tier than the US.

Yes exactly I agree with you about the rate of change.

The existence of violence doesn't mean that civic rights aren't deteriorating. In fact, it's an indicator.

Washington Post is owned by a billionaire who has gutted the newsroom and said that only pro-capitalist stances will be allowed. Reddit has recently come out with a ban on literally the word "Luigi", and has stated that you can be banned simply for upvoting comments which they deem promote violence (the criteria for this are vague). The Hacker News comments sections are usually filled with apologists for Musk and Trump, and only recently have there been more comments pushing back on the "they're saving democracy" narrative.

We're entering a new era of McCarthyism as pro-Palestine activists are being targeted for expulsion and deportation. Trump has floated the idea of moving US citizens to prisons outside of the country. Musk called unmasking DOGE employees "illegal."

> criminal agitators on the left are intimidating voters on the right

Sure. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-t...

Washington Post's editorializing is a free speech matter and has nothing to do with the first amendment, since it's a private actor, which is the story we were all told during covid and the Floyd riots.

Which wouldn't be as concerning if he hadn't gutted the newsroom first.

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Of course you can't actually engage with the substance of my argument, so you settle for pedantry. Tells me all I need to know.

Just out of curiosity how much do you happen to know about what civil rights tier Pakistan is on?

Quite a lot. There was a big news story in 2023, which I followed pretty closely, where a popular ex-PM was ambushed in a courthouse by military forces before being arrested, tried, and imprisoned. He and his supporters believe, I think reasonably, that Pakistan should be understood as being in a state of undeclared martial law.

I'm familiar with their blasphemy laws for a start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_in_Pakistan

My family is intimately familiar with them but I guess the larger point I was making is that the trends in the US have been following the Pakistani arc for quite a while. There’s not really a one-to-one comparison with the blasphemy laws. Probably a better comparison would be like child pornography, or something

Can describe in detail how you, a Pakistani, think America should relax its child pornography laws?

I’m an American of Pak origin. My point was that blasphemers there (PK) are treated judicially and socially like child pornographers here when plenty of actual child porn over there goes unpunished.

Asking people to amend those laws over there gets the exact same reaction you just had.

I have no problem with the comparison. DRC, Pakistan and Serbia are moderately good on net, with most having a good life and a minority being absolutely screwed. The idea that their average level of quality isn't similar to America's after adjusting for purchasing power is an insult to the many people living in them who are striving for good with a remarkable degree of success.

There are a great many academic data sources justifying this in all cases but if you still disfavour them and would be swayed by an informal documentary instead, I can recommend the Miracle of Pakistani Tekken as the best short-form documentary on how their people are as well-meaning as you or I:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2SQgjYmVYY

[edit] I mixed up the DRC with it's northern neighbour, the RoC. The RoC is an adequate place but the DRC is a hellhole that doesn't belong on this list.

You’ve got to be kidding. The DRC is an unfree authoritarian state and one of the poorest countries in the world to boot. It’s in a completely different tier from Serbia.

You mean the other Congo (RoC). DRC refers to the smaller, moderately good one that isn't currently being invaded by the Rwandan army.

No, that's backwards. DRC is the big one, RoC is the small one.

I feel so incredibly embarrassed at my mistake here and understand the outrage.

The DRC is two, maybe three orders of magnitude below Serbia in living standards and civil liberties and is no basis for comparison.

Don't worry, the professional civil rights NGO got it wrong too.

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