Love how “some employees” at Google are bent out of shape that Google would help the DoD. To those employees: it’s cool, just sit back, write code, drink your fancy coffees and be self absorbed while patriots defend you and do the hard work of defending freedoms.
Whatever you think of civilian deaths, don’t forget that we assasinated 6 US citizens without a trial. Freedoms my ass. What about the freedom of people attending a wedding or receiving medical treatment not to be killed? If this was another country doing the same to the US, would your non-argument hold water?
In fairness, can you name a time in WW2 where the US government intentionally killed US citizens without regard to due process? There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states. We have the national guard for a reason. Capturing those targets wasn't an objective, the government wanted them dead and it didn't afford any of those American citizens the rights laid out in the constitution.
Japanese internment camps? I’m sure at that scale people died that would not have.
Next given the scale of wwii I’m sure there were us citizens fighting for the axis powers. The main difference is we lacked the ability to track, research, and target individuals like we do today.
While those camps were morally reprehensible and constitutionally indefensible, the goal was not to kill people. Can we at least agree that the whole , “A secret court has ordered your death from the sky,” thing is a lot more purposefully murderous? Not capture, not detain, just kill.
Well that's the whole problem with the War on Terror, isn't it - the designation of who's an enemy is rather unilateral. At least in Al-Awlaki's case he was advertising his ultra-militant intentions about as clearly as possible.
> In fairness, can you name a time in WW2 where the US government intentionally killed US citizens without regard to due process?
Not off the top of my head, but the Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Quirin, From WWII, makes entirely clear that enemy combatants who are US citizens are not entitled to special treatment as compared to enemy combatants who are not citizens.
> There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states
There is no legal or historical basis for this claim; in fact, the Constitution explicitly envisions the use of military force to suppress insurrection, which is ordinarily carried out by civilians; it is clearly intended that the government not act extrajudicially against persons (not just civilians) within the jurisdiction of the US when access to the civilians justice system is available, but enemy combatants, regardless of citizenship, at least when outside the practical reach of the US civilian justice system, don't seem to have any protection from the application of military power at any time in history.
Most of the people targeted, individually or generally, by the US military in the Civil War were US citizens, for instance.
There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states.
Due process and judicial process in a courtroom are not the same thing. Your citizenship isn't a bubble you carry around with you that gives you enhanced protection from your government under all circumstances; if you choose to put yourself in a kinetic theater of operations then it doesn't act as a bullet proof vest.
In the case of Al-Awlaki, his due process was people in the executive branch (specifically the National Security Council) looking at the fact that he was running around on battlefields with people the US was fighting with, and deciding that he'd chosen to become an enemy combatant. You can certainly critique the general conduct of war by states, and whether the US should be engaged in asymmetric wars in general or in that theater in particular, but I am no more or less exercised about al-Awlaki's death than I am about any of his Yemeni/Al Qaeda associates that were blown up at the same time.
Put another way, if you were OK with them being killed, then you should be OK with him being killed because he chose to affiliate with them. If you're not OK with it, then I'd say the problem is the War on Terror as a whole, since it effectively functions as a blank check to target any group that can be designated as a military threat.
> Wars always have casualties. Technology helps to reduce them. In WW2 it was normal to wipe whole cities using bombs.
Large scale aerial bombardment of cities in WWII was enabled by advances in technology in the period shortly before that period, so it's really not a good thing to bring up to support a blanket “technology helps reduce them” claim about casualties.
Oh for sure, you can get much more bang for your buck out of a swarm of MIRV’ed ICBMs carrying megatons of hydrogen bombs than bayonets and muskets. I mean, just try ignoring intersecting blast waves and thermal pulses! And chlorine gas? Pffft, piss on your socks and you can breathe through them but try that shit with VX!
That’s tens of millions, and I’m being generous in ignoring how you’ve moved the goalposts. Your thesis is simply unsupportable, sorry.
Besides, we don’t know what the future holds, but in terms of raw possibilities we can now end all human life on Earth thanks to technology. That’s also new in the last 70 years. Hopefully we’ll never do it, but we could. Thst also flies in the face of the “technology reduces casualties” business. Of course, so does all of human history for thousands of years, but hey, let’s keep it simple.
It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens".
Now imagine death toll if US would directly fight war with USSR over Europe.
And yes, it includes Vietnam and Korean wars, where high precision weapons weren't used yet.
> It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens".
The total casualties in the wars between the superpower-led coalitions substantially exceed the casualties caused by the US military in those wars. (And, in any case, yes, in the normal way terms of scale are used, a number ≥ 10^7 and < 10^8 is usually described as “tens of millions”.)
Without WW2 and Enigma, who knows when, or even if, computers might have developed? 20 years later, 40?
Technology of the airplane went from the first 200kts monoplanes, through to the hard limits of propeller aviation, and the birth of jets and rocketry by the end of the war.
Without the development of tacho bomb sights (eg Norden and Mk XIV), mass bombing would not have been worthwhile, as it was too inaccurate. They would lead to inertial guidance systems, enabling the ICBM.
Technology was the enabler of most of those deaths.
> while patriots defend you and do the hard work of defending freedoms.
You probably don't realize that there are war veterans, and active service members (e.g. National Guard, Reserves) working for tech companies like Google. But then again, such realization would be a real downer to your agenda.
Please do not post ideological flame tropes to Hacker News. They're predictable, and so do not gratify intellectual curiosity. They lead to flamewars, which destroy the container here. We all have an interest in not letting that happen. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The good things about HN are all fragile. The default forces of the internet all tend to destroy them. Everyone posting here is responsible to take care of the container—just like you wouldn't litter in a city park, or set one on fire.
I think this is a good example of how their old ethos of "Do no evil" was a narrow-minded fantasy by privileged white people who never had to face the world they were born into.
Sitting in your expensive apartment (raising rents so that the former neighbors can no longer afford to live here), sipping your Starbucks (a global commodity dependent on trade deals to somewhat stabilize paying farmers around the world about a dollar a day), eating your Blue Apron salad (sourced by illegal immigrants who have to work for peanuts with virtually no rights or social services because their livelihood is constantly in jeopardy), sitting at your desk in your clothes with your gadgets (which were all made overseas by poor people for pennies in order for them to send money back to their families), tweeting away (absorbing and perpetuating the consumer-driven media machine infused into all of our lives).
We do evil all the time. Then the military comes along and says, "Hey, remember how your silent consent helped a political machine fight wars built on lies to drive poor Islamic people to want to kill and drive out any foreigners from their countries? We need you to help us kill them now." And you say, how dare you.
Romans lived a pampered privileged life that was literally only logistically possible by an army of slaves doing everything for them. We're not so different - the slaves are just less visible now.
Your argument is basically an encouragement to participate in the tradgedy of the commons. Just because other people are already doing evil doesn't give you an excuse to do more!
None of the things you listed are fundamentally evil, they're just arenas in which the specific bad ethics of other individuals can play out. Other similar arenas include everything else in life. Is that a license to join in? No, it's all the more reason to make sure that everything you do is good.
Arguably our wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq weren't really supporting our lifestyle at all. They huge mistakes and wastes of money. Our way of life won't really change if the Taliban take over Kabul using Pashtu tribal lands as a staging ground. If we wanted oil from Iraq we could have just dropped sanctions.
"narrow-minded fantasy by privileged white people"
Apparently not wanting to be evil is now reserved for privileged white people.
I'm a liberal, and I consider this type of logical & sentiment to be the exact thing that alienates independents and right-leaning individuals.
Peace is something that is commonly desired and should be promoted. "Good" is the same.
Beyond that, I personally think you're casting a wide net of "evil." Your facts are accurate, but if something is sourced from the work of an illegal immigrant... does that make it evil? Is something made overseas for pennies evil?
It seems to me you're talking about all imbalance in the world to be "evil." We're on our way as a civilization towards more equality, and poverty lines around the world prove this. What's driving that? Markets.
In a very literal sense, "markets" are just a venue to buy, sell, and exchange goods. They are economic, not idealistic. They aren't concerned with equality, unless it's the equality of the exchange of goods and service. According to every principle of "markets" that I am aware of, none of it includes the principle that it should decrease poverty world-wide. So this was what, a happy accident?
Or perhaps the reduction of poverty is simply a side-effect of increases in efficiency. Increases which themselves sometimes hinge on things like ruining the overall health of soil so that we can produce more crops in less time, producing potentially harmful runoff that affects other people, animals and plants.
And an increase in equality - was that purely economic? Or perhaps, with the reduction in material needs, and the increase of civil rights, there's less need for dogmatic religious control and tribalism, leading to more egalitarian beliefs, as people are no longer as tightly wound to the organizations that led them before.
You can certainly say that markets influenced these things. But that doesn't mean that these things can't simply go back to the way they were - the markets don't prevent backsliding into less equal treatment of marginalized groups. Just look at the rising wave of nationalism and populism across the otherwise stalwart symbols of freedom and democracy! Markets are doing pretty damn well, but we're electing leaders (or allowing leaders to tighten their iron fist) who sound like despots with their insular fear-driven way of life under threat.
It's possible to participate in injustice in a multiplicity of implicit, difficult-to-see ways and yet still object to participating in explicit, obvious injustices. Doing so is still far preferable to not objecting to obvious injustices, regardless of what you're up to in your spare time.
I see what you're saying, but you must see the flaw in this logic. This theoretical person objects to the explicit injustice, because it's right in front of them. But then they still do nothing about the implicit injustice, because it's not right in front of them.
It is my opinion that most of us in society are well informed enough to know about those implicit injustices. We read about it in the newspaper, or hear about it on TV, or in movies, or from our peers, or leaders. And then, as if by jedi mind-wipe, we just change the channel.
In my own humble opinion, this kind of outrage at the explicit is disingenuous. I think it stems from at least a faint idea, a possibility, that this person is complicit, but desperately wants not to be. I think that the way we live our lives proves how much we really care about the injustice. The outrage is just so much theater, and we're both the actors and the audience.
Are you saying someone has to either be a paragon of virtue or just give up on ethics altogether? No one is at either extreme. As you pointed out, even wearing clothes makes you complicit in the moral turpitude of pennies-for-the-hour overseas sweatshops. Are you committed enough to justice that you'll go naked the rest of your life? I'm not, I'd I'm wearing several things that I'd assume were made by terribly oppressed people, as I write this. But when I see the military (or police, or whatever) engaging in wanton destruction, should I just say "well, I'm wearing pants, so I guess I can't complain"? That's preposterous.
What is this privileged white people thing? Everywhere I see people get banned left right and center on Twitter for posting mere facts about crimes by people of color (not Indians and chibese mind you, we're the highest and second earning group in the us)
On the other hand, it's perfectly okay to claim all whites are racist and white race should be dead.
How does this thing work? This privilege? Do white people get stuff cheaper (because as an Indian I'd love to get a white guy to do my shopping).
Do they get more opportunities? How do? Isn't it illegal? Everywhere I see, the elite colleges seem to be going out of their way to incorporate people of color.
All I see are subversive attempts by sections of media to try and create a narrative
And I'm no fan of white myself, lots of forced conversion in Indian tribal areas by whites. But I hate subversion much more
I probably occupy a considerably more marginalized/precarious position in society than you do, but while your observations are largely well-founded you chose an amazingly pompous way to articulate them.
Would you please stop posting flamebait and ideological fodder to Hacker News? Whether you mean it to be or not, it's vandalism. This wretched subthread is exactly what we don't want on HN. It is exactly what will trash the site.
An experienced user like you ought to be more familiar with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and ought to take better care of the commons. Everything that's good about Hacker News is fragile.
Vandalism? I expressed views based on facts about the world. I mean, I don't think you can see your own overreaction.
First of all - do I really have to be the one to point out that "ideological" is not a pejorative term? Ideology is literally "a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture; b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture; c : the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program". Fodder literally means "food". You're complaining that I am posting food for a body of concepts about human life or culture.
Second, it's not my fault that my views are flamebait - feminism is flamebait for Men's Rights Activists. Do we not talk about feminism now? Is the rule basically "Don't make anyone on the internet unhappy" ??
Third (well, more part of the second) the fact that my comment pissed off so many people - even though there is nothing inaccurate about it - is probably actually constructive, because it might encourage people to think about the consequences of their actions on other people, rather than banally participate in what directly affects people around the world every single day.
Just to back up one of these things in my comment: coffee.
Coffee is the second most widely traded commodity in the world, next to oil. Most of the people on this forum have no clue where their coffee comes from. It's just sitting in their office break room, apparently for free. There is no indication which farm it came from, in which country, or how much the farmer was paid per kilo of that coffee.
It (usually) shows no indication of whether it was acquired through a fair trade agreement, or an agreement not to damage sensitive ecosystems, or whether a cooperative was involved to help the farmer obtain a fair rate, or whether a glut of coffee in one country and a drought in another will effectively cut the price paid to farmers in another country to near zero, and that they have no savings or other income, so they will literally starve for a year. It usually doesn't show these things because usually it's just about selling it for the lowest price, and all these other things are not even concerns.
Starbucks specifically has been nudged toward giving you some hint about these details, as well as trying to slowly improve conditions, but that would never happen unless someone (like myself, if I can be allowed some ego here) pointed it out repeatedly and loudly to the people who are benefitting.
Maybe I'm a vandalous flame-baiting ideologue, but I find it at least somewhat evil to take this apparently free coffee and not even once ask where this came from, or how, or whether it was acquired in a fair way. Much like sweat shop labor making cheaper t-shirts, we profit from the labor of people we will never see, and would never know about, lest someone shove it in our faces.
Perhaps this opinion I have, based on viewing the process of how people at the low end of the coffee spectrum are treated, makes me a wretched person. If so, fine, I am guilty. I am trashing the site with my horrible opinions. In which case you should definitely ban me for life, because I'm not changing my opinion just because you dislike it. I am willing to have my opinion changed by intellectual debate. But you're right, in that echo chambers for those who aspire to an elite socioeconomic class that never needs to think about the above-mentioned details, is probably the wrong forum for it.
I mostly don't disagree, but that's beside the point. The point is that flamebait and flamewars destroy HN. HN is for intellectual curiosity, not "you are a moron" and "literally fuck you". It's not like this is hard to understand.
If the food we're ingesting is poisoned, it doesn't matter whether it's also nutrient-rich.
I get that we should strive for less emotionally charged discourse. But as I'm sure you're aware, that's actually really hard for most people to do. It's very easy to get riled up and hard to calm back down. Most of the time, people don't intend to be hostile, they are just reacting to the stimuli around them.
So there's poison in our food. Are we going to keep just wandering around looking for sick people and then saying "please stop poisoning people", or are we going to try to find what causes people to be poisoned to begin with and try to prevent it? In other words, what active steps can HN or its users take other than simply telling them to be nice to create civil polite discourse?
All: we eventually ban accounts that propagate flamewars like these. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for how HN is intended to be used, and then please use it that way.
45 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] threadhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...
Whatever you think of civilian deaths, don’t forget that we assasinated 6 US citizens without a trial. Freedoms my ass. What about the freedom of people attending a wedding or receiving medical treatment not to be killed? If this was another country doing the same to the US, would your non-argument hold water?
How is that any different than murder?
Next given the scale of wwii I’m sure there were us citizens fighting for the axis powers. The main difference is we lacked the ability to track, research, and target individuals like we do today.
alleged criminals are killed on the streets almost every day. From legal standpoint, what is difference between them and terrorists in your opinion?
Not off the top of my head, but the Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Quirin, From WWII, makes entirely clear that enemy combatants who are US citizens are not entitled to special treatment as compared to enemy combatants who are not citizens.
> There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states
There is no legal or historical basis for this claim; in fact, the Constitution explicitly envisions the use of military force to suppress insurrection, which is ordinarily carried out by civilians; it is clearly intended that the government not act extrajudicially against persons (not just civilians) within the jurisdiction of the US when access to the civilians justice system is available, but enemy combatants, regardless of citizenship, at least when outside the practical reach of the US civilian justice system, don't seem to have any protection from the application of military power at any time in history.
Most of the people targeted, individually or generally, by the US military in the Civil War were US citizens, for instance.
Due process and judicial process in a courtroom are not the same thing. Your citizenship isn't a bubble you carry around with you that gives you enhanced protection from your government under all circumstances; if you choose to put yourself in a kinetic theater of operations then it doesn't act as a bullet proof vest.
In the case of Al-Awlaki, his due process was people in the executive branch (specifically the National Security Council) looking at the fact that he was running around on battlefields with people the US was fighting with, and deciding that he'd chosen to become an enemy combatant. You can certainly critique the general conduct of war by states, and whether the US should be engaged in asymmetric wars in general or in that theater in particular, but I am no more or less exercised about al-Awlaki's death than I am about any of his Yemeni/Al Qaeda associates that were blown up at the same time.
Put another way, if you were OK with them being killed, then you should be OK with him being killed because he chose to affiliate with them. If you're not OK with it, then I'd say the problem is the War on Terror as a whole, since it effectively functions as a blank check to target any group that can be designated as a military threat.
Large scale aerial bombardment of cities in WWII was enabled by advances in technology in the period shortly before that period, so it's really not a good thing to bring up to support a blanket “technology helps reduce them” claim about casualties.
Get it?
That’s tens of millions, and I’m being generous in ignoring how you’ve moved the goalposts. Your thesis is simply unsupportable, sorry.
Besides, we don’t know what the future holds, but in terms of raw possibilities we can now end all human life on Earth thanks to technology. That’s also new in the last 70 years. Hopefully we’ll never do it, but we could. Thst also flies in the face of the “technology reduces casualties” business. Of course, so does all of human history for thousands of years, but hey, let’s keep it simple.
It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens". Now imagine death toll if US would directly fight war with USSR over Europe.
And yes, it includes Vietnam and Korean wars, where high precision weapons weren't used yet.
The total casualties in the wars between the superpower-led coalitions substantially exceed the casualties caused by the US military in those wars. (And, in any case, yes, in the normal way terms of scale are used, a number ≥ 10^7 and < 10^8 is usually described as “tens of millions”.)
The long amorphous war(s) in Indochina alone seems to likely be on that order of magnitude.
Without WW2 and Enigma, who knows when, or even if, computers might have developed? 20 years later, 40?
Technology of the airplane went from the first 200kts monoplanes, through to the hard limits of propeller aviation, and the birth of jets and rocketry by the end of the war.
Without the development of tacho bomb sights (eg Norden and Mk XIV), mass bombing would not have been worthwhile, as it was too inaccurate. They would lead to inertial guidance systems, enabling the ICBM.
Technology was the enabler of most of those deaths.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You probably don't realize that there are war veterans, and active service members (e.g. National Guard, Reserves) working for tech companies like Google. But then again, such realization would be a real downer to your agenda.
The good things about HN are all fragile. The default forces of the internet all tend to destroy them. Everyone posting here is responsible to take care of the container—just like you wouldn't litter in a city park, or set one on fire.
Sitting in your expensive apartment (raising rents so that the former neighbors can no longer afford to live here), sipping your Starbucks (a global commodity dependent on trade deals to somewhat stabilize paying farmers around the world about a dollar a day), eating your Blue Apron salad (sourced by illegal immigrants who have to work for peanuts with virtually no rights or social services because their livelihood is constantly in jeopardy), sitting at your desk in your clothes with your gadgets (which were all made overseas by poor people for pennies in order for them to send money back to their families), tweeting away (absorbing and perpetuating the consumer-driven media machine infused into all of our lives).
We do evil all the time. Then the military comes along and says, "Hey, remember how your silent consent helped a political machine fight wars built on lies to drive poor Islamic people to want to kill and drive out any foreigners from their countries? We need you to help us kill them now." And you say, how dare you.
Romans lived a pampered privileged life that was literally only logistically possible by an army of slaves doing everything for them. We're not so different - the slaves are just less visible now.
None of the things you listed are fundamentally evil, they're just arenas in which the specific bad ethics of other individuals can play out. Other similar arenas include everything else in life. Is that a license to join in? No, it's all the more reason to make sure that everything you do is good.
The excuse is that you're at a disadvantages if you don't. In a world of 99% cheaters, the 1% who follow the rules and suffer are acting irrationally.
Apparently not wanting to be evil is now reserved for privileged white people.
I'm a liberal, and I consider this type of logical & sentiment to be the exact thing that alienates independents and right-leaning individuals.
Peace is something that is commonly desired and should be promoted. "Good" is the same.
Beyond that, I personally think you're casting a wide net of "evil." Your facts are accurate, but if something is sourced from the work of an illegal immigrant... does that make it evil? Is something made overseas for pennies evil?
It seems to me you're talking about all imbalance in the world to be "evil." We're on our way as a civilization towards more equality, and poverty lines around the world prove this. What's driving that? Markets.
Or perhaps the reduction of poverty is simply a side-effect of increases in efficiency. Increases which themselves sometimes hinge on things like ruining the overall health of soil so that we can produce more crops in less time, producing potentially harmful runoff that affects other people, animals and plants.
And an increase in equality - was that purely economic? Or perhaps, with the reduction in material needs, and the increase of civil rights, there's less need for dogmatic religious control and tribalism, leading to more egalitarian beliefs, as people are no longer as tightly wound to the organizations that led them before.
You can certainly say that markets influenced these things. But that doesn't mean that these things can't simply go back to the way they were - the markets don't prevent backsliding into less equal treatment of marginalized groups. Just look at the rising wave of nationalism and populism across the otherwise stalwart symbols of freedom and democracy! Markets are doing pretty damn well, but we're electing leaders (or allowing leaders to tighten their iron fist) who sound like despots with their insular fear-driven way of life under threat.
It is my opinion that most of us in society are well informed enough to know about those implicit injustices. We read about it in the newspaper, or hear about it on TV, or in movies, or from our peers, or leaders. And then, as if by jedi mind-wipe, we just change the channel.
In my own humble opinion, this kind of outrage at the explicit is disingenuous. I think it stems from at least a faint idea, a possibility, that this person is complicit, but desperately wants not to be. I think that the way we live our lives proves how much we really care about the injustice. The outrage is just so much theater, and we're both the actors and the audience.
What is this privileged white people thing? Everywhere I see people get banned left right and center on Twitter for posting mere facts about crimes by people of color (not Indians and chibese mind you, we're the highest and second earning group in the us)
On the other hand, it's perfectly okay to claim all whites are racist and white race should be dead.
How does this thing work? This privilege? Do white people get stuff cheaper (because as an Indian I'd love to get a white guy to do my shopping).
Do they get more opportunities? How do? Isn't it illegal? Everywhere I see, the elite colleges seem to be going out of their way to incorporate people of color.
All I see are subversive attempts by sections of media to try and create a narrative
And I'm no fan of white myself, lots of forced conversion in Indian tribal areas by whites. But I hate subversion much more
I cannot wait for the day that this type if language and rhetoric is rightfully considered racist and wrong in the mainstream.
Literally fuck you.
An experienced user like you ought to be more familiar with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and ought to take better care of the commons. Everything that's good about Hacker News is fragile.
First of all - do I really have to be the one to point out that "ideological" is not a pejorative term? Ideology is literally "a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture; b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture; c : the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program". Fodder literally means "food". You're complaining that I am posting food for a body of concepts about human life or culture.
Second, it's not my fault that my views are flamebait - feminism is flamebait for Men's Rights Activists. Do we not talk about feminism now? Is the rule basically "Don't make anyone on the internet unhappy" ??
Third (well, more part of the second) the fact that my comment pissed off so many people - even though there is nothing inaccurate about it - is probably actually constructive, because it might encourage people to think about the consequences of their actions on other people, rather than banally participate in what directly affects people around the world every single day.
Just to back up one of these things in my comment: coffee.
Coffee is the second most widely traded commodity in the world, next to oil. Most of the people on this forum have no clue where their coffee comes from. It's just sitting in their office break room, apparently for free. There is no indication which farm it came from, in which country, or how much the farmer was paid per kilo of that coffee.
It (usually) shows no indication of whether it was acquired through a fair trade agreement, or an agreement not to damage sensitive ecosystems, or whether a cooperative was involved to help the farmer obtain a fair rate, or whether a glut of coffee in one country and a drought in another will effectively cut the price paid to farmers in another country to near zero, and that they have no savings or other income, so they will literally starve for a year. It usually doesn't show these things because usually it's just about selling it for the lowest price, and all these other things are not even concerns.
Starbucks specifically has been nudged toward giving you some hint about these details, as well as trying to slowly improve conditions, but that would never happen unless someone (like myself, if I can be allowed some ego here) pointed it out repeatedly and loudly to the people who are benefitting.
Maybe I'm a vandalous flame-baiting ideologue, but I find it at least somewhat evil to take this apparently free coffee and not even once ask where this came from, or how, or whether it was acquired in a fair way. Much like sweat shop labor making cheaper t-shirts, we profit from the labor of people we will never see, and would never know about, lest someone shove it in our faces.
Perhaps this opinion I have, based on viewing the process of how people at the low end of the coffee spectrum are treated, makes me a wretched person. If so, fine, I am guilty. I am trashing the site with my horrible opinions. In which case you should definitely ban me for life, because I'm not changing my opinion just because you dislike it. I am willing to have my opinion changed by intellectual debate. But you're right, in that echo chambers for those who aspire to an elite socioeconomic class that never needs to think about the above-mentioned details, is probably the wrong forum for it.
If the food we're ingesting is poisoned, it doesn't matter whether it's also nutrient-rich.
So there's poison in our food. Are we going to keep just wandering around looking for sick people and then saying "please stop poisoning people", or are we going to try to find what causes people to be poisoned to begin with and try to prevent it? In other words, what active steps can HN or its users take other than simply telling them to be nice to create civil polite discourse?
All: we eventually ban accounts that propagate flamewars like these. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for how HN is intended to be used, and then please use it that way.