For context, I'm neither for nor against Obama - I just think people who take a position of "It's an idea from the other political party so I don't like it" cause more harm than good. (See belief in vaccination, evolution, and global warming as other examples)
I was speaking specifically about the issues mentioned in the parent post. Namely vaccination[1], evolution, and climate change. The Republican positions are objectively wrong on these issues. Projecting from there, it's not unreasonable to assume they're wrong on other issues that I know less about.
To be more explicit, I was disagreeing with this:
> I just think people who take a position of "It's an idea from the other political party so I don't like it" cause more harm than good.
If one party is consistently wrong on many, many obvious issues, I don't see much of an issue with dismissing their views on more nuanced issues. If you can't figure out something relatively simple like evolution, I don't have much faith in you figuring out national economics.
[1] See Christie and Rand Paul's recent statements
- Shortening unemployment insurance from 99 weeks did help nudge some folks back to work. - Encouraging housing development is better than rent control.
Perhaps I just agree with the Democrats more on hard science, and the Republicans on the dismal science. The latter is (of course!) less amendable to hard and fast truths.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up/oklfoejikk...
Basically hides the comments on every site unless you enable them. It's a little aggressive and sometimes if you notice something weird on a site you just need to disable it for that site.
But it honestly improves the entire internet experience exponentially.
127.0.0.1 disqus.com
Do you folks always avoid the comments section? Obviously not, because you're here :) and the idea that this is such a generalized "Internet Rule" is contradictory to being here. If you're disgusted by other people's abrasive comments (on Wired or wherever else you're avoiding the comments section), can you offer your own respectable perspectives and steer the conversation that way? Or have you completely given up? A reasonable (but unfortunate) situation. I dislike the hair-on-fire knee-jerk screaming too. I hope we can change that.
I wrote more about this[1] after thinking a while about Jeff Atwood's piece[2].
[1] http://www.netinstructions.com/please-read-the-comments-sect... [2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-read-the-comments/
As such, those comments are liable to attract a wider variety of people, some of whom are crazy, some of whom are trolling, some of whom are trying to push some arbitrary agenda. Here, there are rules and a culture that (it seems to me) rewards interesting conversations.
Plus, most random commenters are anonymous, whereas most people on HN are pseudonymous. I consider what I write here much more strongly than what I write on reddit, or 4chan.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
Perhaps we should take a more subjective look at comments on Hacker News and ask ourselves if a genuine 'hacker' (by PG definition or otherwise) would applaud new regulations for the internet.
Like you said, Rule #1. I suppose the Wired readers savvy enough to have an interesting voice on this issue are also smart enough to not voice it there.
> I see the telecoms have sent their minions to the comment sections.