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Comment by TrevorJ | Hacker News Reader

140 characters does tend to create the danger that your comments will be less nuanced and devoid of context. That's fertile ground for inviting criticism right there.

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On the other hand, as one who has dealt with Mr. Hoekstra and his staff before, nuance and context are not their strongest suits.

"Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."

Do you think any amount of nuance can really save that?

I guess the syntax just makes it tough for me to determine what, precisely he is saying.

I think nuance and charitable reading -- which should be granted to everyone in online forums, especially forums with constrained context -- can save it. For example:

It's not clear exactly what "Iranian twitter activity" Hoekstra's talking about. Is it the activity of people in Iran, or their outside supporters, or of dilettantes just cheering from a distance?

He says 'similar' not 'the same as'. And both do involve a partisan group, locked out of a political process, using Twitter to coordinate a response. That aspect may be a tiny dimension of what's happening in Iran, but it is one dimension.

And he's not implying his analogy gives him any special empathic insight into what's happening in Iran. He's talking about "twitter activity", which is not the same thing as mass protests against a repressive state (as much as Twactivists would like to think it is).

So those who mock Hoekstra have changed his tweet in their own minds into the least-charitable reading possible: "Iran's protests of repression facing violent crackdowns, I understand because it's just like a challenging parliamentary maneuver we faced." But that is not what he used his <140 characters to say; that's only what people already predisposed to hate him chose to hear.

When a Zen Master says something perplexing, comparing things completely of a different scale, or things that don't seem to be comparable, the proper response is not "U R dum ha ha!", but to try to understand those ways it might be true.

Hoekstra may not be a Zen master -- he may very well be a gaffe-prone idiot, I don't know -- but it's never fair to any speaker to rip a statement from its context, interpret every word in the worst possible light, and broadcast it to others hungry for things to be enraged about for partisan advantage. That cheap maneuver is one of the worst things about both politics and the speed/atomization of online communication.

True; the larger problem here is with the medium itself: Twitter does not provide room for context or nuance.

I think the larger problem is the nature of current political discourse is to assume the other person/party is an evil idiot and do everything in your power to spread that idea, without addressing the content of what they say or proposing any details better solution yourself or working together to for the good of the country instead of infighting.

Good point. I wonder how much of that is due to the long period of peace and prosperity that the U.S. has experienced; in the absence of any serious external threats, it becomes easier for partisans to squeeze their political opponents into that role.

9/11 was an anomaly. Following the attacks we saw a time of genuine good will between the parties. The further we get from that date, the more our politics is descending back into petty partisanship.

I'm quite certain that both I and you have said at least one thing dumber than this in the past year, but you and I didn't have 10,000 rampaging political partisans to jump on our mistakes.

I'm sure I have as well, but I didn't publish it.

If you can't stuff it into 140 characters, then don't post it on Twitter. It should be that simple, but for some reason it seems that everything just has to be on Twitter ;)

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