Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Because you wrote this, and I generally like the people who take the time to comment on HN, I re-read the post, carefully. I'm sorry I did.

I don't know what you see in this post.

It has a thesis, buried in the 5th? graf, which is that Fascism means "a dictatorship of corporations". Then it uses a rhetorical sleight of hand to tar all corporations with the brush of syndicalism, equating Mussolini's psuedo-nationalized sham companies with (I guess) the S&P 500, and pronouncing the WSJ Editorial Page as a bastion of fascist thought.

It concludes by suggesting that people who disagree with the author are --- well here I'll just quote: "you support dictatorship in any form, and oppose democracy, you are anti-american, a traitor, and scum. Period."

I'm a socialist-leaning liberal (and an entrepreneur), not a Mises Institute libertarian, and even I think this is over the top.

Can you either tell me how I'm misreading this, and what value this article adds, or can you flag the post too and acknowledge you did? Because I feel like right now all this post is doing is wasting people's time.

Well, it certainly is a polemic, and it does try to make too many points in one post.

I'm also a left-leaning liberal -- in most areas -- but the value of the post was that it attempted to elucidate the links between the persistent corporatism of our society and the fact that the corporatists truly did intend at one time to take over the government.

I have no doubt that they would (and in many ways, already have, through direct purchase) attempt to do the same again.

All in all, the piece could use some more research and fewer ideas all jumbled together, but it rebuts pretty well the too-rosy view of corporations as beneficent angels that all too many here seem to have.

And also, I've had a problem lately as well with the attempted historical revisionism towards Nazism, and have been wondering what's responsible for this as well.

As for being intellectually interesting, I think that fits that particular criterion for HN pretty well.

The bar for political posts on Hacker News is higher than the bar for other topics. Off-topic: "most posts about politics".

It should be the case that when a political post on Hacker News survives flagging, that post is of exceptional quality.

Most of Nate Silver's 538 posts are like that: they're interesting not just because they advocate a sensible position, but because they use interesting methods to do that, methods that hackers find congenial.

Even though right-leaning libertarianism makes my skin crawl, a lot of libertarian posts find a good home here too. They advocate a vision of society that is nurtures entrepreneurialism, and even assigns it a central role in the social contract.

This post doesn't live up to either standard. It takes a viewpoint that any college freshman selected off the UMich campus at random could be expected to have, and articulates it using a rhetorical and logical style that any college freshman selected off the UMich campus at random could be expected to use.

Meanwhile, the post has managed to spark a vigorous debate on HN about whether it's fair to compare the WSJ to Nazis.

Posts like this suck the air out of Hacker News. It's one of the great features of HN that we tend to reject them. I hope you'll reconsider whether material like this has a place here. There are many other communities on the Internet that are better suited for it.

[edit no offense to college students --- I think my point is clear, if clumsily written]

Even though right-leaning libertarianism makes my skin crawl

Ouch. I think I just became collateral damage.

I thought political polemics were clearly not HN material.

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