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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Belittling or trivializing is exactly what the word "just" makes the comment look like. If you can't see it, maybe try it with phrases like "it's just another case of harassment" vs. "it's another case of harassment".

It's not made any better by describing it as "gamers taking the competition offline". Two problems; first, it's making it appear as some kind of a natural extension of playing a game / watching a game stream. Hey, it's just some competition, boys will be boys! Second, it's too symmetrical, basically spreading the blame between both the perp and the victim. Again if you can't see this, what would you say about describing this case as "some Twitter users taking their gender politics discussions offline"?

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There's some context that you're omitting in your analysis. cperciva says:

"It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days."

(Emphasis mine.)

Asshole gamers calling in real-life SWAT because they can't handle feelings of inferiority is the most common reason for SWATting that I hear of.

I hold the opinion that giving police fraudulent information in order to summon SWAT on someone's house is HIGHLY inappropriate and -often- very dangerous[0]. While cperciva doesn't explicitly express his opinions on SWATting, the remaining 'graphs in his comment would lead one to believe that he also thinks that SWATting is serious business, regardless of motive.

[0] Not to mention, yanno, illegal.

I find it interesting how much analysis has been given to the tone of cperciva's comment. There is an awful lot of this going around lately.

What is the goal commenters in such threads are pursuing? To correct a wrong or misunderstanding? To show someone as biased or bigoted (or to advocate the other way)? Who are we training, and what is it we are teaching? Could it be done a better way?

Is the error cperciva may have made large or small? Does it have an impact? If insignificant, why does so much effort need to be expended? Otherwise, why are there not articles to reference on the issue? (Or are there?)

To be completely blunt, this all seems incredibly passive aggressive to me. I'm not talking about sexism--again, I'm simply referring to all of the meta analysis on communication and tone.

I am honestly curious, and my questions are not for dramatic effect. Could this all be short-circuited by a "I doubt the OP meant to trivialize XYZ, [...]" and be done with it?

I made what looked like to me as an obvious interpretation, and then others made the opposite interpretation and said theirs was the obvious one.

Some discussion about the words in the comment is thus nice, as it hopefully helps everyone to understand why both interpretations are valid (or in extreme cases, reach a consensus on a single interpretation). I find in particular jsnell comment interesting, as it let me know how much value I unconscious applied into the phrase "just another".

I'd suggest it's a case in point for why the principle of charity is so vital to useful communication.

The trouble is that people's standard for whether or not a post is awful (belittling/sexist/etc..) tends to be whether or not they feel it can plausibly be interpreted that way. This is the wrong standard - we should judge a post awful when there's no other way to interpret it.

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