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Comment by gitmothrow | Hacker News Reader

I think it's funny that you vote for Obama because you think he's a good guy with a good vision for America, then when he gets into power and makes a decision you think is morally contemptuous, your first though is that 'he wasn't who I thought he was'.

What the fuck do you know about national security, SoftwareMaven? You're a programmer on Hacker News. You're not privy to the shit that Obama is privy to.

How do you know your idea of what is moral is also what would be good for society as a whole? How do you know that Obama isn't simply responding in a reasonable way to the reality that you have no conception of.

Also, throwaway so I don't get called a fascist nazi or whatever.

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> Also, throwaway so I don't get called a fascist nazi or whatever.

Don't worry, I just consider you a coward for that.

If you seriously want to call someone out, do it from your account and stand by your words.

If only I could be as brave as you.

It's not being brave, it's being responsible for your own actions.

If you didn't use a throwaway, I'm sure you'd also do a much better job at making your comment a little more eloquent instead of just aggressive and angry.

Posting with a throwaway shows me that you probably don't even 100% believe what you just said.

This is stupid. There are plenty of reasons to post potentially controversial things anonymously, the same reasons against placing a darwin-fish on your car in overly religious regions. None of which have to do with cowardice.

I absolutely agree there are reasons, however this situation has someone acting more belligerent than rational. I personally find hiding anonymously when making such aggressive comments cowardly.

There was a perfectly fine point buried in his original comment, and I personally believe if he had posted with their own account, then they would have taken the time to proof-read and remove the unnecessary emotion and ire from the comment.

(I'm not gitmothrow.) I did that back during the Scwartz debates on HN, right after he died, using my primary account, which had thousands of karma at the time. Within a week after the incident, most of HN had calmed down and was saying the same things I had been saying.

But by that point my account had been super-ultra-hellbanned. I couldn't even post. It wasn't until another user's complaint about being hellbanned made the front page that my primary account was promoted to merely being dead.

The point is: people use throwaway accounts because the HN community has demonstrated that it is simply not safe to use your primary account to say something controversial unless you have tens of thousands of karma.

I understand that concept, except that the tone that was taken in his post and subsequent response to mine was just made to be snide. Instead of making an opinion and standing by it (which I would gladly upvote even if gray and it disagreed with my own personal opinion), he attacks the knowledge of a commenter via a generalization.

Making anonymous statements is essential in some situations, but in my personal opinion, I find it completely unnecessary in this particular one. If they had just gone with paragraph 1 and 3, then it'd be a perfectly fine comment. Instead it has a decidedly different feel and attitude which is then 'shielded' via a throwaway.

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