“Political Views” | Hacker News Reader

“Political Views”

marco.org

18 pointsdirtyaura11 comments

Recent articles defending Eich are being flagged from the front page, sending them to the fourth page, effectively censoring people from expressing one side of the issue here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533362 (56 pts) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533055 (26 pts)

It will be curious to see if this thread gets censored as well, since it seems to take the "approved" side.

(Wow, that's impressive -- I've been downvoted within seconds!)

(2nd edit: this is the first time I've ever seen an HN thread where all of the root-level comments have been downvoted. This is just getting bizarre, really.)

Lots of items about it have been moderated off the front page in the last couple weeks, taking various viewpoints on the issue. You aren't being silenced, HN mods seem to think this is either not worth talking about or outside HN's scope for some reason.

Given how these threads tend to go, I can't really fault the mods for wanting it off the front page.

But what about free speech??!???!?

Most pure opinion-pieces on the controversy du jour—as opposed to actual news—don't count as on-topic for HN.

If everything in the world turns into a political boycott, you effectively don't have free speech either. There is always some cause people feel strongly for or against, and consider it a violation of their fundamental rights. It's completely valid to not go nuclear on every single political issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526663 "I keep hearing people saying that gay marriage is more than just a political view, but so is every other political view. Don't support welfare? You're against poor people. Support welfare? You're against the working man. You're pro-choice? You're against babies. You're pro-life? You're against women."

You know what's different? Because this particular issue has a clearly decisive split in this country.

If you want to play the ostracism game, don't ostracize a majority of a society (a majority of Californians back then).

Ultimately it's all about fitting in to your tribe - if you had donated to Planned Parenthood as the CEO of a Southern family restaurant chain, people would say it's the exact same thing. Abortion is not a "political view", it's murder of unborn children, and you deserve to lose your CEO-ship because of it. If you disagree, you are "completely wrong" and unworthy of time.

The lofty rhetoric about unacceptable and "political views," bigotry, offensiveness is the same as tribalism - the Silicon Valley tribe agrees that you must accept gay marriage, the United States tribe in 2014 agrees that you must accept gay marriage. At a different culture in a different country in a different time, the standards may be completely different.

It's actually perfectly understandable to feel loyalty to your tribe. Just understand that some principles are in fact not universal.

In the end it might be about lines in the sand and certain things crossing from the realm of acceptability or unacceptability, depending on tribe. The winning group CAN ostracize Eich for it, in 2014, so they are. The winning group couldn't do a thing like that in 1999 when Eich was busy founding Mozilla.

Anyone can play the game and Paul Graham's essay deals with precisely this form of thought limitation: http://paulgraham.com/say.html

Against Gay Marriage does not equal the ban of marriage to blacks. That is a false comparison.

This is Classic Straw man Logic! Only attack the position not a substitute position!

The logic is meant to refute the idea that "personal opinions" should not affect business. Changing the issue shows that business is indeed political -- that for each of us, there indeed are issues that will cause us to refuse doing business with another. To paraphrase Churchill, we already agree on what we are, we are just haggling over the price.

If you think gay marriage shouldn't be such an issue, well, sorry but the rest of us have spoken. That's how it has always worked, it's just a different group of people who are now experiencing the other side of the table.

I guess Open Web = My belief on this one subject!

I am done with Hacker News and Mozila.

This is so illogical and anti-web. No one share anything or else!

Should the Dalai Lama be the next Pope? Should the Roman Church accept an Anglican instead? Should we ask Steve Ballmer to be the next president of the Linux Foundation?

If your job is to lead a group of people, you have to share values cherished by them. You cannot have values they despise.

He made a donation there is not one word or action ANYONE can say he did that was inappropriate.

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