Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> And then comes the part they can't (or won't) fathom. The context shifts. The political winds change. The Overton window slams shut on a belief they once held. A book they read is declared subversive. A group they donated to is re-classified as extremist. A joke they told is now evidence of a thoughtcrime.

There are at least some people who would respond by (still) saying "I have nothing to hide." They are proud of their moral choices and confident in their convictions. Arrest them if you dare.

I wonder if the author still has contempt for them?

View on HN

I think the author is trying to say in today's world we face a sort of moral/societal vacuum of privacy. The more we try to remain private, whether by being an open book or by some type of digital way, it's basically futile or will eventually be broken.

My spin, as a recovering perfectionist, is when you've done everything you can to be "innocent" and the political or whatever wind changes, the pit of despair is a real and devastating thing. When this happens, sometimes the decisions that are made are desperate.

In many moral frameworks, inconsistency isn't the only wrong someone can commit. The argument constructed in this article is essentially utilitarian, making the claim that the mechanisms of surveillance and privacy make this behavior harmful to others, regardless of their intentions or internal sense of morality. In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all, although I suppose that's not a completely unreasonable thing to infer. From the perspective of this argument, this only lacks the harm the "deviancy signal" would itself do to the individual, though in the oppressive regime proposed they would perhaps take greater risk by openly deviating

> In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all

The article opens with:

>> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide."

Which isn't literally saying "I hate them" but I'm not sure how else to interpret "a special kind of contempt." Regardless, I've edited my original post.

Contempt is very different to hate.

It is very interesting, in our polarized times, what people read into a statement, and if they interpret it charitably or in the worst possible way. Like you, I find contempt and hate very different.

The author clarifies a couple sentences later that the contempt they feel is "the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator" - "collaborator" apparently meaning something like the very bad WWII kind of collaborator, rather than the benign artistic co-author kind. So, despite the implicit acknowledgement that there are multiple types of contempt, this particular contempt does sound fairly close to hatred.

No, it sounds like contempt and anger, which is why I suspect the author used those words.

Look up the definition of "hate". How is "cold, hard anger" like one might feel toward a N*zi collaborator not adjacent to that? Why quibble over this?

Geez, what an insane semantic debate. The author clearly has strong, negative emotions towards the people this article is about. Folks who want to nitpick the technicality of these terms are just misunderstanding how language works.

Why not interpret contempt as “contempt”, which is not “hate”?

I didn't do it consciously. When I wrote my original post, I'd hallucinated that the author had used the term "hate".

When Advael responded "the author doesn't mention hating these people at all", I went back to the article and checked. Advael was right, but I can understand where my hallucination came from. The first three sentences read:

> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator.

A "special kind of contempt" mixed with "cold, hard anger" really seems like hatred to me.

(Anyway, this really isn't the point I was trying to make.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com