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Comment by crassus | Hacker News Reader

I admire him for sticking up for his principles[1]. You give the thought police and inch and soon they'll be back for another. There is no theoretical limit to how warm and fuzzy they can make the world.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

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Who is the really the "thought police" here? You're the one trying to ridicule people whose opinion you don't agree with while hiding behind some "warm and fuzzy" sarcasm.

WTFPD is about people forbidding ideas because they are offensive, rather than having an honest debate about them. I'm perfectly willing to debate any idea with an honest opponent who's not going to get offended and start calling me names like "xenophobe" and "racist".

Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

>Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

So you repeatably referring to those you disagree with as the thought police is different in what ways?

Paul made a factual statement about the world in the spirit of helping others and his opponents responded with emotionally-charged labels[1]. This is dishonest bullying. I am responding with a label designed to attack labeling. So yes, it is hypocritical. But it does have a definite purpose in mind.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html

From what I can find there's been around a thousand comments on the subject over the last week. Three comments called someone xenophobic, all of those where directed at pg. No comment called anyone else on HN a racist. So either I'm missing something or you're doing the exact same thing you accuse others of, making false accusations and overreacting.

I don't understand why people are engaging crassus instead of downvoting and flagging him into oblivion.

It's a brand new account that's posting deeply hypocritical crap, and the only "real" identity tied to it is a new and spammy twitter account.

Let's not pretend he's here for a conversation when every single available signal indicates that he's full of shit.

I love you too. Cheers.

PG said both accusations had been made in his follow up column.

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