"We Bring Fear" | Hacker News Reader

"We Bring Fear"

motherjones.com

56 pointssho15 comments

Open articleView on HN

Unfortunately, discussion about this article seems to have fallen into the meta-wastebin.

It is a good submission.

Its an enlightening article, but I don't see how its appropriate for HN.

The first half of your sentence answers the second half.

If you don't like it, the better approach is to flag it. "Not Hacker News" comments aren't Hacker News either.

I know you're just quoting the standard line, but without "not hacker news!" postings, how do we, as a community, transmit a sense of what is and what isn't? Just let people guess why articles are killed - if they are? Thinking about it a minute, I'd rather have a loose rule along the lines of "not hacker news" comments should be relatively verbose in terms of what is wrong, rather than a simple, dismissive "not hacker news!".

I think the appearance of articles like this is a good indication that this sense of what's appropriate hasn't been transmitted (or at least my sense of it:-). This article is blatant politics/reddit bait, and is certainly not something that would be of more interest to hackers than to the general public.

The NHN comments are well intentioned, but boring reading, and bad for the signal-noise ratio. I think the guidelines are fuzzy enough that reading a debate about every edge case is tiresome. Your NHN is another person's "of interest to hackers" so I'd rather flag and let the mods decide.

I agree on your ideas about feedback, but maybe more elegant and help the community grow is if mods left "why killed" comments on the edge cases, but volunteering other people to do more work is easy, so I try to avoid it on principle :).

From the site guidelines...

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."

It's not enlightening at all, this is exactly the kind of thing that puts me off about the media. Like noticing terrible mistakes on a note on some technology you really grok, reading articles like these makes me reconsider what I've read regarding other international issues (e.g. Iran). There are many things stated as fact here that are simply not true. Freedom of the press, for example, is very much alive. Reporters are not afraid of the police or the government, just pick up any random national newspaper.

Apparently some reporters are. Maybe just more local to Juarez? How can you state that there is no problem on basis of a few positive samples (I'm guessing you mean articles critical of the military)?

Are you saying there is no problem with army suppression of dissent? press or otherwise? Just wondering how you are more qualified than the author of this article to say one way or the other.

Yes, I'm saying there is no problem with suppression of dissent. I can't say no reporters have ever disappeared in Juarez, as I can't say no bartenders have ever disappeared there either. Juarez is a dangerous town ruled by narco-gangs. I'm saying it's not something common in Mexico; reporters aren't normally scared for their life or anything of the sort. As I said, just pick up any random Mexican newspaper, there is a fair chance you will read criticisms of every government branch, the police, and the military. The part at the end where the reporter explains how the military is in control of the government is especially ridiculous.

What are you trying to say? That the reporter is lying?

If you have information that the article is fake, I am sure the publisher would be extremely interested. Mother Jones is not to everyone's taste but I'm sure they would never knowingly publish false information.

Based on your skepticism I did look around a bit and the journalist has indeed now been granted asylum in the USA. One would presume that as part of that process his story had been checked out by the US authorities and determined to be genuine.

And if the reporter is not lying, then it implies the situation is real and probably widespread. If they do it for one guy, they can do it for anyone, unless you have some theory as to why this guy was made the exception.

I'm no Mexico expert but the brutal suppression of free press by the military is not new or rare, and is characteristic of corrupt or collapsing states. I find the story very believable, unfortunately, and thought that its dramatic writing style was very effective in driving home the seriousness of what is going on in Mexico.

There is no suppression of free press in mexico by the military of otherwise. The state is in no way collapsing, no one here seriously thinks that, you are being misinformed. I have no love for the military, I think the drug wars are a terrible thing and I have no particular reason to defend the current government but the situation is nothing like what's portrayed on this article.

I'd substitute exciting for enlightening. The writer is obviously a frustrated novelist, and I don't appreciate being told what I'm supposed to feel about the facts I'm reading, or the tease-and-reveal storytelling. This is not journalism, it's dramatization.

the number of people whom can make these distinctions is dwindling.

yet, in my humble uneducated opinion the writing is more engaging than CNN or similar factoids, and is an example of what journalism could be, without pretentious objectiveness (which is impossible to achieve, to most journalists-reporters, at least).

Please recall the hacker credo "Information wants to be free," then re-read the article.

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