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Hacker News makes me so sad sometimes. What you perceive as naïveté is a kind of world-weariness that goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. It turns out
by kragen 14d ago
Hacker News makes me so sad sometimes.
What you perceive as naïveté is a kind of world-weariness that goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. It turns out that kindness is not in fact naïve. It is the only reasonable response to the human condition, which is far more desperate than you know.
Emotive critiques can easily be hate. Hate is an emotion, so hate-filled critiques like this one are quite emotive.
The historical record of people improving society by critiquing things they perceive to be negative developments in it is not really that great. Yes, that's how we got, for example, the abolition of slavery — but the anti-abolitionists justified their own positions by critiquing the genocide in Haïti, which was itself justified by people critiquing things they perceived to be negative developments in it. For every Civil Rights Movement we have a Great Leap Forward; for every Sherman Antitrust Act we have a Prohibition.
You may not be able to avoid activism, but never forget that other activists spent their lives digging the ditches you're filling up, and others will spend their lives digging them again.
The way out of this is to spend as much of your energy as possible creating positive-sum things rather than in zero-sum struggle.
- voidhorse 14d agoYour posts make me sad. Your replies are a bunch of empty verbiage that fail to acknowledge the very basic and concrete flaws in your posts (lack of evidence for your claims, arguing past the article by completely changing the locus of analysis). > Emotive critiques can easily be hate. Hate is an emotion, so hate-filled critiques like this one are quite emotive. What are you even trying to say here? This set of statements is so general and flat as to be almost totally devoid of content. > The way out of this is to spend as much of your energy as possible creating positive-sum things rather than in zero-sum struggle. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with you doing basic things like citing sources or understanding that human beings have negative emotions and that they sometimes need to express them. You sound like a Panglossian fool. I'm not really sure what to say at this point. You seem totally immunized against reason.
- dang 13d ago> You sound like a Panglossian fool. I'm not really sure what to say at this point. You seem totally immunized against reason. I realize both sides in this argument got unduly personal, but the attack you posted in this comment is particularly not ok. Please don't! We've had to ask you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be a frequent habit but please don't post like this.
- dkxjwjxjej 11d ago> and I'll refrain from that in the future. At this point you really should’ve just banned them. Second strike and the first one was 1000x worse than this. Is this really the culture you wanna cultivate here? People wishing the worst for other families’ and all they get is a slap on the wrist and a “pretty please don’t do this again”? C’mon now.