Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years. Here are some quotes from what used to be a pretty interesting and thoughtful community:

> Ah, the Elon manoeuvre: trying to make would-be assassins hesitate by using your own child as a shield.

> the words and narratives that Sam Altman promoted caused so much fear and uncertainty and anger that someone thought their only option was to attempt a horrific crime.

> Sociopath who rides high ego wave and drinks his own kool aid, acting highly amorally and then complaints that his actions have some (benign) consequences.

> A cavalier attitude and allegiance to nothing but capital doesn't make you immune to basic human morals, and humanity will, rightly in my opinion, punish you whether you like it or not.

These comments are disgusting. The people who made them should be ashamed. But they are probably too stupid to be, assuming they are people and not bots, which I no longer feel certain of for all too many comments here.

In my time in HN I have seen numerous people advocate for the following

* ending all covid measures to achieve herd immunity, accepting that this condemns hundreds of thousands or even millions to die

* ending foreign aid that goes to tuberculosis treatments, condemning hundreds of thousands or even millions to die of a treatable disease

* accepting the deaths of iranian, palestinian, or israeli children as collateral damage because of the evils of their governments

Or go read any thread involving the Jordan Neely story.

Somehow it is vastly more evil when violence is acute and focused at a single wealthy person.

a single wealthy white male person

Yep. Tons of comments here justifying the murder of Jordan Neely when that happened,

First time I hear about that, reading the Wikipedia page it very much doesn't sound like murder: the victim was threatening people on the train with killing them, specifically also a mother with a stroller. The aggressor applied what they were taught as a non lethal hold.

Why a person died during a supposedly non lethal hold definitely needs to be investigated very thoroughly. Either it wasn't non lethal, was applied the wrong way, or there were some other contributing factors.

Yikes.

That choke hold was vastly vastly vastly more dangerous than what happened to Altman here.

"Scary people on the subway deserve to be put at extreme risk of death" is what I'm talking about. Somehow that violence doesn't bring out the "violence is never the answer" crowd.

Have you asked yourself why someone went as far as hurling a molotov at his place in the first place?

I would never, but you have to understand that serious pain and harm is being inflicted on people, AT SCALE, by the advent of AI. I'm not even talking about Israeli, Palestinian, or Iranian kids. People in America with terminal illness are losing healthcare.

I don’t think they’re bots, the strength of feeling is real.

Rightly or wrongly people feel cut out of society at a time when the tech elite are not only making billions but seem to be actively trying to ruin everyone else’s lives, they are legitimately hated.

And when you’re that hated you do need to be careful, money can’t protect you from everything. At the end of the day we do all have to live in the same society.

(I don’t have this strength of feeling personally but some people do)

> I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years.

I'm finding a lot of the comments here pretty reprehensible, but no more reprehensible than the collective shrug the community gave towards murdered Palestinians, or threads about dead Iranians as a result of American bombs that get flagged off the front page. That doesn't make them acceptable or okay.

Those people's lives are/were valuable, too. It's disgusting that we try to keep HN "clean" of those horrors and the people that flag those threads should be ashamed. Ditto those who think the killing of innocent civilians is okay.

Well, you know, dead palestinians aren't paying their salaries or investing in their companies, so they aren't as important as a accelerator that in the last batch had 90+% of 'AI' companies.

Think of the investments they may lose. We can't have any of that can we?

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