4 ms·

So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows s

So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked? Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing. I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.

dang 2y ago
Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- mindslight 2y ago
  It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away. I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
  - dang 2y ago
    Looking it at again the next morning, I think I just misread your opening sentence. Sorry! (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347) On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response. This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20guesswork&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - mindslight 2y ago
      Well, thank you for looking again! I'm curious how you interpreted it? I thought about swapping around the two parts of the sentence to put the familiar context first, but thought it landed better the way I said it. On the original topic, because I will acknowledge that my comment did have several bits of dry tinder in it - the sin of my lead in sentence was that it was irreverant. It would have been inappropriate if it were responding to another comment. But I think there has to be more leeway in initial comments so that there is a chance of moving past the politicized pit of arguing about whether something even exists, and towards a less-widely-shared but larger understanding such that we might actually do something about it. I think the fundamental problem here is that we as a country now have something that can be straightforwardly referred to as a concentration camp. There are probably other terms that are more technically accurate, but not so much as to forgo the cultural touchstone of what we're actually really close to. I'd say you are in a similar position to maybe 2016ish or so (my own mental timeline is a bit hazy), when the tide had just started to turn against the prevailing "woke [0] brigade", and insightful but not-completely-defensively-worded comments would get jumped on by a bunch of reasonably-phrased but inflammatorily-framed comments, making it seem like the original comment was starting the flamewar. [0] I personally hate this term like others hate "concentration camp", but it's awfully hard to argue against its current utility, regardless of how far from its original meaning it is.

dang 2y ago

Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

mindslight 2y ago
It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away. I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
- dang 2y ago
  Looking it at again the next morning, I think I just misread your opening sentence. Sorry! (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347) On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response. This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20guesswork&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Well, thank you for looking again! I'm curious how you interpreted it? I thought about swapping around the two parts of the sentence to put the familiar context first, but thought it landed better the way I said it. On the original topic, because I will acknowledge that my comment did have several bits of dry tinder in it - the sin of my lead in sentence was that it was irreverant. It would have been inappropriate if it were responding to another comment. But I think there has to be more leeway in initial comments so that there is a chance of moving past the politicized pit of arguing about whether something even exists, and towards a less-widely-shared but larger understanding such that we might actually do something about it. I think the fundamental problem here is that we as a country now have something that can be straightforwardly referred to as a concentration camp. There are probably other terms that are more technically accurate, but not so much as to forgo the cultural touchstone of what we're actually really close to. I'd say you are in a similar position to maybe 2016ish or so (my own mental timeline is a bit hazy), when the tide had just started to turn against the prevailing "woke [0] brigade", and insightful but not-completely-defensively-worded comments would get jumped on by a bunch of reasonably-phrased but inflammatorily-framed comments, making it seem like the original comment was starting the flamewar. [0] I personally hate this term like others hate "concentration camp", but it's awfully hard to argue against its current utility, regardless of how far from its original meaning it is.