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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

HN will flag you for being stupidly confrontational or promoting known conspiracy theories; you can introduce facts provided you back them up with non-insane sources.

In two of these posts, people might take issue with some of the sources. The rest should all be considered trustworthy by anyone. All flagged:

Posts flagged for showing how politics has meddled in science (unfortunately one of those facts was overstated, as a commenter kindly alerted me to. Including the correction did not prevent flagging):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434589

Demonstration of NYTimes bias, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242

Showing how an article omitted any links to Israel in its discussion of the Iran war, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076950

Citing a Dutch study on economic impact of immigrants, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070799

Showing how a study omitted data that interfered with its conclusion, only revealed due to FOIA'd emails, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281899

Elucidating on the nature of social media censorship, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47016171

Providing relevant context to UK's complaints about officials being banned from the US, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615611

Showing the racial bias of a hacktivist, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509295

Citing a Pew survey about the expressed importance of racial identity, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575489

Correcting a misleading statement in an article, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44932696

I did a sampling, and in my opinion all of those were correctly flagged (or at least, I can understand why).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344 is being deliberately obtuse; it's not engaging with the parent's statement at all, just claiming false equivalence and expecting other people to know what you actually mean.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242 is like a powerpoint slide with too many bullet points. It's a list of article titles without making any effort to explain how they show bias and in what direction. Again, you are expecting other people to fill the gaps in your own story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049 already opens with a childish and illegitimate claim. I didn't even bother to read the rest, if you open with such a bad assertion you are just asking to be flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615611 is yet again not an argument. There is a hollow claim and a link. Why are you expecting others to make the effort to read an article and make your argument for you when you can't even be bothered to articulate your own thoughts on the matter?

Nothing you're claiming seems worthy of being flagged, sounds more like you're personally bothered by the content of those comments.

1. There's no "false equivalence", just dispelling the false impression that attacks on science are remotely new. The parent's statement claimed this was a change, so yes it does engage with it.

2. Only someone actively trying not to understand, can't spot the double-standards. If reading 1-2 sentence titles and comparing them is too much, then I simply can't help you.

3. If by "a childish and illegitimate claim", you're referring to the part about trying to claim credit for destroying science, that's just a (very obvious) rhetorical flourish. If you mean the part about academia destroying science itself, the rest, that you didn't bother to read, are all sources showing how exactly it's doing that.

4. I'm not expecting them to read the whole article - the title and subtitle would suffice. What makes the claim hollow? And yes, I did articulate my own thoughts - that's what the "hollow claim" was.

In essence, you're demanding that my posts should do the thinking for the reader. Not just lead them to water, but force them to drink too. Since you're clearly being deliberately obtuse, I'll spare you from further replies.

people flag things that are obvious and boring, or that are very incendiary, technically dense, and not easily argued (and thus it's not the place and time to discuss it) topics. eg. migration politics and economics (and crime and so on)

and some of those comments are just incorrect (like the last one about Loomer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National... )

So now the goalposts have moved from "stupidly confrontational or promoting known conspiracy theories" to the vague "obvious and boring, very incendiary, technically dense, and not easily argued" (flagging purely factual statements as "very incendiary" is, of course, the original complaint!).

But I'm genuinely confused - you say my last comment was incorrect. Can you explain how saying that someone would have tried to stop Jews from fleeing Nazis, doesn't create the impression in the average reader that that someone isn't Jewish?

The claim isn't even grounded in any kind of reality - Loomer frequently advocates for Jewish and Israeli interests - i.e. for her own people:

According to Loomer, she was banned for a tweet about Omar in which Loomer called her "anti-Jewish," [..] According to Media Matters, Loomer has said that "if you don't vote for Donald Trump, then you just hate this country." Loomer claims that the Democratic Party is supportive of Jews "getting wiped off the face of the Earth" and that Jews who vote for Democrats "might as well just go put yourself in a gas chamber yourself if this is how you're gonna behave." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and Zionist Islamophobe, denies Israel's genocide in Gaza, spreads dehumanizing narratives that frame Palestinians as inherent terrorists, and calls for their ethnic cleansing to bolster Israel's settler-colonial project and genocide. - https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/laura-loomer

Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, has emerged as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/politics/israel-maga-r...

Why would we think she'd switch sides in 1940? Nor do I see how the existence of an extremely niche ("Contemporary estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000 members.") organization changes any of this - can you walk me through your logic?

The longer things stay vague, the more I become concerned that this may be a scenario that is so common that it has an enduring meme [0], where:

1. The person claims that a broad swathe of facially reasonable and views are being rejected or forbidden in a way that is an unfair overreaction.

2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.

3. They are actually facing difficulty from a much much narrower--or entirely disjoint--set of view.

In this case, OP has claimed the average HN commenter is hostile to a general class in the form of "our liberty has been improperly infringed by a false appeal to security", especially national security.

I don't think that claim is credible, and I'm offering to demonstrate it by rattling off a bunch of counterexamples... However, that won't mean much if it turns out OP real grievance has some important details they are trying to keep secret.

[0] https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

yep, the very first response tweet had confirmed my immediate assumption about the kind of people that 'meme' would be 'enduring' with.

I think not in this particular case, and downvoting more than flagging, but I see perfectly reasonable things downvoted. In fact I often upvote things I disagree with because I think the downvotes were unfair. I have been downvoted for reasons that are not obvious to me, and sometimes for posting verifiable facts. Its hard to guess what a particular person's experiences might have been.

This is a pattern that exists but there's also another pattern where people downvote things they disagree with, on platforms that have downvotes. It's seen on HN and Reddit and it's thought to be the reason YouTube removed downvotes.

> 2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.

And yet we all know why that is. We have decided that certain ideologies that are ... let's call it "easy to criticize" (because they deserve some damn serious criticism and have done enormous damage. Oh and not just one such ideology). To make things worse, in many places such discussions have been legally banned. And some of these ideologies are very visible in politics or even on the street. And discussion of such ideologies immediately devolves into pinning the blame for all that went wrong in history on a particular segment of the population.

We have collectively decided such ideologies are to be considered above criticism, and you're quite right, it's not working.

It used to be commonplace to bring the horrors of certain ideologies and expose them everywhere. In movies, on the TV, exposing the blatant failures and aggression of ideologies was commonplace.

Depicting communist dissident prisons happened in children cartoons. Associating islam with slavery, including depicting how commonplace rape and open commercial exploitation of female slaves was in islamic nations was normal. The reality hasn't changed: IS/Daesh reintroduced slavery, as one of their first acts, but it is utterly forbidden to discuss why they might have done so. Frankly, islamophobia is just a word meant to shut down criticism of the very bad parts of that ideology, as well as the supremacism built into that faith, something that has no place in America, or anywhere on the planet. And on the other hand communist and ex-communist nations are still full of dissident prisons, but it can't be discussed anymore. What communism has to do with socialism also can't be discussed, or even that socialism has evolved over time (e.g. why socialism, was rabidly anti-immigration not 30 years ago, and the reasoning behind it)

And the problem is that any suggestion of going back immediately and directly runs headfirst into extreme aggression.

Hence, no discussion.

Everything you said about Islam has direct correlations in Christianity in fairly recent history. But, as you say, things evolve over time. Christians for the most part are now against slavery, as I would bet most Muslims are too. Countries that are no longer communist still have dissidents in prison, which would suggest that is not the fault of communism, but other ideologies still rampant in those countries.

I'm not sure what exactly you are saying about socialism, it has lots of proponents and implementations in different countries, it's not just one thing that I can see.

While you claim there are correlations, there is a massive difference in trajectory. Christianity has a very long and documented history of driving the movement against slavery. The abolitionist movements were rooted deeply in Christian theology and the belief that all people are created in the image of God. There are Christian abolitionist movements from the age of the Byzantine empire. In contrast, we see an ideology in Islam that not only permitted slavery but based it's economy on slavery for 1200 years, and has seen it reintroduced in various forms in modern times. As a general rule, the more religious the movement, the more it is pro-slavery. And ... where do you see any islamic movements for removing slavery out of the religion as we have seen for 1500+ years in Christianity? You know, where do you see these muslims countering the "extremist" pro-slavery camp in islam?

I wear glasses, so perhaps that's the reason I have so much trouble finding them?

(btw: yes, I know that such movements exist, like the Ahmadiyya sect. The majority sect of muslims is attempting to eliminate them, which is even worse, imho, than them not existing at all)

And given the values of liberty and human rights that Americans have, I would expect people to have a significant problem with any ideology that continues to leave the door open for slavery.

This is nonsense. HN is very lightly, and fairly, moderated.

Lightly and fairly as in: removing anything that gets 4 flags no matter what it is

What gets 4 flags? Certain things. Such as inconvenient facts

You won't get flagged if you state facts without insults. Just spit it out. Even if it did get flagged because you broke the guidelines, we'd still be able to see it. Id vouch for it even if you broke the rules so you can understand better and we can see the facts

Just say the facts bro

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