dang wants hacker news to be a curious place and politics is generally not a very curious topic. The first 70% of posts on this thread were anti-intellectual tr

dang wants hacker news to be a curious place and politics is generally not a very curious topic. The first 70% of posts on this thread were anti-intellectual trump supporters. He's worried HN will become a battlefield, and it will be, just like businesses and universities will also be a battlefield as people are coerced into supporting systems they don't believe in. Where he's wrong is that once authoritarian regimes are done replacing societies enforcers with loyalists, such as the military and police officers, what comes next is sources that influence disobedient thought, and curiosity is fundamentally disobedient. Curiosity has no meaning without objective truth, and curiosity can't be practiced without questioning authority. HN is oligarch owned and funded, so neutrality implicitly supports HN's patron. dang has to make the choice all liberal people have to make (and curiosity is a very very liberal goal), and that's to participate in a system of loyalty towards PG and let HN be a place that implicitly supports this coup through inaction, or to dissent and instead support the value of curiosity in the long term, by letting hacker news be a platform that propagates dissenting news, rather than a platform that limits it and keeps the platforms users inside of the "approved" bubble of thought. It's always easier to do nothing, and it's always hard to fight for a world you want to live in. No political system exists without cercion, you just have to make sure the coercion serves a higher purpose, like curiosity, rather than a man.