Hacker News has become a bizarrely censored place on the internet. This is a huge hacking story and it’s been flagged and removed from the front page all day.
HN is trying to be a place for thoughtful discussion, mostly about tech or tech-adjacent topics. Flame wars about political things are about the opposite of that.
Now, when tech intersects politics, then it's on a razor edge - is it going to turn into a tech discussion, or a political flame war? There is a tendency (mostly from readers rather than admins) to presume it's going to turn into a flame war and flag it to death.
Again, that's not laziness. That's trying to maintain a site where sane discussions can happen.
Serious question, how should we be able to have a sane discussion during a genocide? The whole situation is extremely insane. The amount of death and destruction we are witnessing is anything but normal, and the fact that people are responsible for these horrors, that people are participating and contributing to it makes it all infinitely worse, very likely even a non-insignificant amount of people with accounts here on HN are contributing in one way or another.
I feel like letting discussions devolve into a flame war is the morally superior choice then to simply ignore it. When there is a genocide, we as humans are supposed to do everything in our power to try to stop it, no matter how performative and futile those actions actually are.
Nothing anyone says here is going to have any effect whatsoever on any matter of great political import. This forum is not the UN, or the White House war room, it's just a place for nerds to waste time talking about nerd stuff. Political discussions here are simply entertainment and intellectual diversion like everything else. And realistically unless someone has actual direct experience in the matter at hand, which most of us will not, their opinions likely aren't even worth the cost of the pixels they're rendered with, and the best thing they can do is STFU and let other, more qualified voices speak.
If you want to "stop genocide" get off of HN and do something practical. What? I don't know. Or accept that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and don't waste your time in yet another Hacker News hell-spiral of political nonsense, pretending like it matters. It never will.
See, that's exactly the reason we can't have mature reasoned political discussions here. You ignore my comment in its entirety and seize onto one tiny detail to make bad faith assumptions about and blow up into hyperbole. Everyone does that, and after a while it becomes clear there's no point in even trying to engage in conversation with people.
The reason I put "stop genocide" in quotation marks is that my comment was not specifically about Israel but politics in general, and I used "stop genocide" as a placeholder for any similarly controversial political topic one might encounter here. Now do please unclutch your pearls and descend from your soapbox.
My argument was that we should much rather have "immature and unreasoned" discussion here, than to stay silent. The situation is insane, so emotional reaction is to be expected. Experiencing a genocide should trigger emotions, we are human after all.
The alternative of staying silent, or worse, being silenced, is not the sort of thing history looks kindly on. The most charitable interpretation of HN is that we are afraid to have this discussion, and are finding excuses not to have it. A more realistic interpretation is that we can’t be bothered to have this discussion. We should focus on our jobs (some of which is contributing to the genocide) and pretend no genocide is happening. In either case, HN is on the wrong side of history.
Staying silent on Hacker News is not the same as staying silent altogether. There is an entire world and society with which to interact beyond this forum. Donate to causes. Talk to your senator. Protest in the streets.Get on Twitter or Mastodon and bump up real news from real activists.
>A more realistic interpretation is that we can’t be bothered to have this discussion.
Yes. Hacker News is a place for nerds to distract themselves, nothing more. Political discussion even with some technical dimension often amounts to little more than an excuse for intellectual exercise and sophistry, a chance for people to demonstrate their worldliness by lecturing on realpolitik or self-righteousness by denouncing the assumed immorality of their peers.
Most people here aren't experiencing genocide. For most people here it's just more content to be consumed and transformed into endorphines and internet points, no more real than the battle of Yavin from Star Wars. Once you understand that dynamic you'll realize there is no praxis to be found here, only catharsis, and catharsis can be poison.
I'm not telling you or anyone not to care, just to not waste their time shouting into the void here.
Some believe that quite a few of these articles might have been in bad taste.
For internal change in Israel this was a bad move, since all officials immediately stood behind Netanyahu in this case. Of course the court should not make judgement on political considerations, although I do believe those influenced their latest move.
> The intelligence was also used by the Israeli military to retroactively open investigations into incidents that were of interest to the ICC, to try to prove that Israel’s legal system is capable of holding its own to account.
This alone is an extremely noteworthy revelation. The ICC has a principle of “complementarity” where it will defer to local prosecutors, if they’re robust and vigorous in prosecuting crimes. This severly undermines the Israeli narrative that they have such a system.
18 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadAny tech + political thread is auto flagged + deleted because the mods don't want to manage flame wars.
So it's completely by design and also literally because they are lazy and don't want to fix anything.
Pretty simple actually. Not that deep. Just pure laziness
HN is trying to be a place for thoughtful discussion, mostly about tech or tech-adjacent topics. Flame wars about political things are about the opposite of that.
Now, when tech intersects politics, then it's on a razor edge - is it going to turn into a tech discussion, or a political flame war? There is a tendency (mostly from readers rather than admins) to presume it's going to turn into a flame war and flag it to death.
Again, that's not laziness. That's trying to maintain a site where sane discussions can happen.
I feel like letting discussions devolve into a flame war is the morally superior choice then to simply ignore it. When there is a genocide, we as humans are supposed to do everything in our power to try to stop it, no matter how performative and futile those actions actually are.
If you want to "stop genocide" get off of HN and do something practical. What? I don't know. Or accept that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and don't waste your time in yet another Hacker News hell-spiral of political nonsense, pretending like it matters. It never will.
The reason I put "stop genocide" in quotation marks is that my comment was not specifically about Israel but politics in general, and I used "stop genocide" as a placeholder for any similarly controversial political topic one might encounter here. Now do please unclutch your pearls and descend from your soapbox.
The alternative of staying silent, or worse, being silenced, is not the sort of thing history looks kindly on. The most charitable interpretation of HN is that we are afraid to have this discussion, and are finding excuses not to have it. A more realistic interpretation is that we can’t be bothered to have this discussion. We should focus on our jobs (some of which is contributing to the genocide) and pretend no genocide is happening. In either case, HN is on the wrong side of history.
>A more realistic interpretation is that we can’t be bothered to have this discussion.
Yes. Hacker News is a place for nerds to distract themselves, nothing more. Political discussion even with some technical dimension often amounts to little more than an excuse for intellectual exercise and sophistry, a chance for people to demonstrate their worldliness by lecturing on realpolitik or self-righteousness by denouncing the assumed immorality of their peers.
Most people here aren't experiencing genocide. For most people here it's just more content to be consumed and transformed into endorphines and internet points, no more real than the battle of Yavin from Star Wars. Once you understand that dynamic you'll realize there is no praxis to be found here, only catharsis, and catharsis can be poison.
I'm not telling you or anyone not to care, just to not waste their time shouting into the void here.
Trolls won
Account immediately sent to hacker news jail. Creating new accounts auto blocked. article downvoted. Locked + deleted. + IP banned and didn't say why.
Looks like some angry Zionists control hacker news.
For internal change in Israel this was a bad move, since all officials immediately stood behind Netanyahu in this case. Of course the court should not make judgement on political considerations, although I do believe those influenced their latest move.
This alone is an extremely noteworthy revelation. The ICC has a principle of “complementarity” where it will defer to local prosecutors, if they’re robust and vigorous in prosecuting crimes. This severly undermines the Israeli narrative that they have such a system.