It's both of your awful political parties. The Democrats embrace mass deportation, drone bombings, surveillance, arms dealing and regime change, and so-called "smart power" which excels only in increasing the cost of killing thought criminals, average civilians, and a tiny minority of actual terrorists abroad.
I agree that the language Republicans use is more alarming, and tends to appeal more directly to fears that most Americans have. But at the federal level the two political parties have been essentially the same for 30+ years, with the exception of a few social causes that are very important but don't have much to do with the actual day-to-day operation of the US government.
Yeah, remember that part where we declared war on Iraq for no fucking reason? Oh wait, no... that's not correct... we did have a reason...
“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb
Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said
no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need
to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there
aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And
there are lots of good targets in Iraq.
Put another way, there was never any rationale for anything we ever did anywhere. All of this is bullshit. Don't even bother trying to make heads or tails of it.
Nothing was ever supposed to get fixed, made right, redressed.
The travel ban? Why does it exist? Because they're fucking assholes. Not because anything matters.
So this gets unflagged, but it's still completely gone from the front page even though it has a very good upvotes / time ratio. I really dislike that about HN. This is clearly an important discussion.
Have you read this thread? There is no important discussion going on here, only lazy barbs about the US military and Republican party which, while true, are neither intellectually interesting nor particularly germane to the posted article.
If there were something worth saving here, I'd agree that the downvoting and flagging were a problem, but in this case it's just garbage and it gets what it deserves.
There's separate flagging for comments and articles though, you seem to have those confused. Should we flag front page articles every time the first two comments are terrible?
The article seems close enough to being mainstream political news to be flag-worthy to me.
I'd agree that an article shouldn't be flagged because of the comments alone, but either way it's going to vanish from the front page quickly considering how heavily HN weighs downvoting and flagging.
Anything mainstream should get flagged unless it presents some "new and interesting phenomenon," or satisfies some intellectual curiosity. You could replace the robotics in this story with anything else and it wouldn't change it at all, so it's really just three brief paragraphs a subject which has already been covered. I can see why people would flag it.
If you want the topic of America's visa policy as it relates to science to be discussed in depth, then someone can post a better article with substantive content. Most people are only going to read the title and vent their spleens anyway, so the bar has to be set higher for articles which touch on certain topics.
18 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadI agree that the language Republicans use is more alarming, and tends to appeal more directly to fears that most Americans have. But at the federal level the two political parties have been essentially the same for 30+ years, with the exception of a few social causes that are very important but don't have much to do with the actual day-to-day operation of the US government.
Put another way, there was never any rationale for anything we ever did anywhere. All of this is bullshit. Don't even bother trying to make heads or tails of it.
Nothing was ever supposed to get fixed, made right, redressed.
The travel ban? Why does it exist? Because they're fucking assholes. Not because anything matters.
If there were something worth saving here, I'd agree that the downvoting and flagging were a problem, but in this case it's just garbage and it gets what it deserves.
I'd agree that an article shouldn't be flagged because of the comments alone, but either way it's going to vanish from the front page quickly considering how heavily HN weighs downvoting and flagging.
If you want the topic of America's visa policy as it relates to science to be discussed in depth, then someone can post a better article with substantive content. Most people are only going to read the title and vent their spleens anyway, so the bar has to be set higher for articles which touch on certain topics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674734
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673603