> just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not real.
This style of commenting is not allowed on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's a clear breach of the guidelines that ask us to avoid swipes and name-calling.
We've had to ask you several times to correct this kind of conduct here. If it keeps up, we'll have to ban the account.
It's deeply unhelpful to try and discuss something as complicated as slavery if you insist on whitewashing it as a simple, binary case of good and bad.
Please include links here so we can all see whether your claims are on solid ground rather than an attempt to deflect from your own conduct.
Without expertise on the topic (and I am Australian, I don't have deep expertise on these topics, and it doesn't seem like other readers do either), the merit of those comments seem like a question of historical accuracy. If there's a way in which the content of these comments breach the guidelines (and no, the guidelines don't permit people to, say, support fascism or genocide as long as they're polite about it as it's been facetiously put in the past; anything that is unkind or abusive or oppressive to other people is against the guidelines here), you or anyone can explain that in a reply or an email to us. We understand that sometimes comments break the guidelines in ways that aren't obvious at face value (as you put it "dog whistles"), and in these cases people can, point this out in comments or emails to us. Positive contributors to HN do this all the time. Nobody has done that in this case, but you're welcome to do so, now or in any other similar situation.
Edit: I was reflecting as I took a walk that this discussion is almost a mirror image of one I had about a week ago with a user who seems to be on the other side of the political spectrum. Like you, their belief was that HN's discourse and moderation is biased against their political persuasion, and that this entitles them to disregard the guidelines and engage in battle against what they perceive as malevolent actors on the site. We've seen this effect forever here: the more strongly someone is focused on a particular ideological issue, the more keenly they notice anything that breaches their sensibilities about that topic. Dang has written about it and cited examples of it many times over the years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And in this subthread just three months ago, a banned user insisting that there's a “hard liberal-progressive tilt to comments and post flagging”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43136198
The truth is we don't – and can't moderate in support of any particular ideological agenda. We just don't have time to pore through all the comments and manoeuvre things in a way that pushes things one way or another. All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
....
> Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Am I taking crazy pills? I directly linked you to both comments, you concede one of them crossed a line, and yet this morning I wake up and they're both still live simply because I didn't hit a specific button?
And no I'm not gonna hit the button. Because my point isn't actually about political bias or whatever - it's that you people are weirdo hall monitors that tone police instead of actually encourage discourse (as I've said many times now in this thread, despite your claims that I'm complaining about bias).
This is such a weird false-dichotomy you're portraying. No one is expecting you to weigh in on arcane/abstruse things. This is about a current holiday in America that commemorates freeing of slaves ~150 years ago, not slavery in the Mycenaean civilization of 1100BCE.
You said you're not American - ok then maybe you should've stayed out of the thread entirely? But since you didn't, then you should realize it is your responsibility to educate yourself. Like just plain and simple: can you imagine a police officer policing a foreign people being unaware of their history/culture/etc?
Like can you imagine the same thread about mistreatment of aboriginals in AU - would you similarly blithely claim ignorance? Indifference?
The whole reason we're having this discussion is that you expressed your points – which I acknowledged were valid and valuable – in inflammatory ways. And ever since you've been rejecting my appeals to you to avoid inflammatory commenting, by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
I'm telling you that it's not obvious how those comments are so egregious. Other community members haven't called them out as egregious. They didn't set off flamewars. I've acknowledged that dog-whistles exist and sometimes comments can be egregious in ways that aren't immediately obvious, and asked for you to explain how these ones are egregious, and you keep refusing. I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
The egregiousness of other comments doesn't excuse you from observing the guidelines. That's a very well established norm here.
no man i keep claiming the same thing over and over: that you have done nothing about any other comment in this thread except mine. i've literally said this same thing like 5 times. and what's happening is you keep reasserting some kind of lattitude to ignore them.
> I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
you can't have your cake and eat it too: if my comments are obvious enough given a particular value system that you can scold and censure me, then there can be plenty of others that are just as obvious.
edit:
> rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines... take responsibility for your own conduct
please point out for me (by using links) where i didn't "take responsibility"? at multiple points i admitted to being sarcastic/flippant. how would you like me to further take responsibility? would you like me to apologize to those people? would you like me to delete my comment so that they continue fly under the radar? would you like me to commit hari-kari?
Edit: To be clear, the reason your comments were acted on is that they were flagged and commented on by other community members. We act mostly on what we're alerted to, which is why I keep telling you that we need you to alert us to things if you want them acted upon (and not just as a way of deflecting from the conduct you're being called out for). It's also false that we hadn't acted on other comments in the subthread.