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Comment by frumplestlatz | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

How is this emotionally driven? It seemed like a dispassionate presentation of factual material to me.

Of course, no presentation of facts is without bias of some sort (if only via their choice of which facts to present), so don't ever stop thinking critically. But flagging/censoring any presentation of facts (even biased) never helps, regardless of your viewpoint. If you disagree, write or promote a thoughtful take that explains why.

I'm politically very conservative, and I'm super grateful for this. The intense political polarization in the US tends to allow party-line adherence on either side to substitute for accountability to the truth, and that is a disaster regardless of which side is currently in power. Whatever side you're on, please have the guts to hold your side's leaders accountable to the truth, not just the opposite side's leaders. We will all suffer if just one side fails to do that.

How exactly is reporting on CECOT hysteria?

I guess you have no problem with erosion of liberal freedoms as long as you’re not affected.

I strongly disagree with your assessment. Are you unhappy that it's discussing how the wealthy people are getting control of the us? Please make dispassionate arguments to support your views.

That's a dumb take. Burying your head in the sand won't change reality.

If you cared to even watch the content you flagged, you'd have seen one of the former prisoners was a young college student with no criminal ties. I'm from south America and also went to college in the US. It could've been me.

Note that the accused TdA member claimed to be a college student in Venezuela. He was not enrolled in any US school.

Not saying he deserved to be deported to a third country, just that there's nothing publicly available that substantiates his side of the story. Part of not burying one's head in the sand is acknowledging when someone might not be the most reliable narrator.

Could you tell us your position on CECOT? Do you believe El Salvador has "made a case for it?"

How is that germane to this discussion? I already made it clear I didn't think the Venezuelan migrant in the segment should have been deported to a third country under those conditions.

This feels like an attempt at a setup instead of an actual discussion of the thread's subject. That's especially glaring since you went trolling through my post history, a signature of Reddit users looking for a 'gotcha' moment more than HN users engaged in dialogue.

It's off-topic, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This submission is literally a TV news broadcast.

There are lots of other places on the internet where this is on-topic, I wish people would have their debates there instead.

Since it was censored in some significant parts of the world, including Silicon Valley, it could arguably be on-topic.

Strong disagree.

Gay porn is censored in a lot of Muslim countries, that doesn't make it on-topic for HN.

Generally, porn isn't included in "anything that good hackers would find interesting". Censored news arguably is.

Lots of hackers find porn very interesting. In fact, my first "real job" as a hacker was for a company with ties to the 1-900 industry that had decided to expand out onto the internet (not just to sell porn). Stories about porn would be interesting, submissions of nothing but pornography itself ("because it's censored!") are not.

I would be more sympathetic to the argument that this is relevant if the submission was an article about media censorship, or CBS's audience or leadership, and how said censorship, audience, or leadership relates to technology or emerging trends in media.

But this is literally just a controversial TV news broadcast, that people of one political persuasion say was "censored" and people of another political persuasion say was held off the air "temporarily" until it met network fact-checking standards. That sort of political bickering is most uninteresting, and is most definitely not why I've been reading HN for the past few decades.

Hackers generally appreciate links to hard facts and analysis that are not available through popular channels.

This seems similar to the "Is Github Down?" submission problem, where the submitter simply links to github.com.

That's a poor submission, because by the time most people click on it, Github will no longer be down.

There might be an interesting discussion to be had about outages at Github, but the better submission would be an article or blog post about the outage, not just a link to the site and a three-word title.

If someone wants to write an article or blog post about this news broadcast, which links to "hard facts and analysis not available through popular channels," that seems like it might be a worthwhile submission. But just a link to the broadcast by itself is not leading to interesting or on-topic conversation—the top comment right now is an ad hominem attack against Larry Ellison, without any supporting facts or analysis that he had anything to do with this story at all.

The HN guidelines don't mention a submission's suitability for discussion, only comments.

The very first subheading is entitled "What to Submit." I quoted it in my initial reply as rationale for why the people flagging this submission as off-topic were justified.

"On-topic" and "suitable for discussion" are partly overlapping sets.

That's why the Submissions guideline section addresses being on-topic but not suitability for discussion.

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