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> In one surviving letter to a friend, he joked that his rereading of the Bible had finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished the inhabitants of

> In one surviving letter to a friend, he joked that his rereading of the Bible had finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah was not in fact buggery, but the taking of snuff. He and his secretary had consequently taken a solemn oath to hide their snuff-pouches and nevermore to indulge "that anti-Christian and really unnatural practice" in front of one another. Meanwhile, they were now both happily free to enjoy "the liberty of taking in the churchyard or in the market place, or in any more or less public or retired spot with Man, Woman or Beast, the amusement till now supposed to be so unrighteous, but now discovered to be a matter of indifference". This got a snicker from me. I guess sex jokes really do never get old.

lotharbot 12y ago
"Sodom's real crime was _____" is considerably less funny when you realize a rape gang surrounded Lot's house in the Biblical story. That's not the sort of thing I'm inclined to brush off with a joke.
- dang 12y ago
  This comment and a couple of others in the thread seem destined to provoke a religious flamewar. That would be off topic.
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious (or possibly political) flamewar. That's probably why it's been flagged way down to the second page. I was honestly surprised that you were the one who posted it; I'd have thought you'd have foreseen it being problematic. I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.
    - dang 12y ago
      > The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious flamewar. This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because everyone did. That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than mine does. That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if not more so.
      - lotharbot 12y ago
        > "rape isn't funny" is entirely off topic. ... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah? Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments show, the article left the door wide open for it. > "The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history" It presents that finding in a very poor way.
        dang 12y ago
        I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread. I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles. Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker. The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time. As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar. An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN. So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  It's possible that your instinctive sense of horror is exactly Bentham's point and the joke: something is not only bad because it's what the Bible says is bad. If we discover that we had all missread that part of the Bible, would forcible sodomy be OK now? It's absurd!

lotharbot 12y ago

"Sodom's real crime was _____" is considerably less funny when you realize a rape gang surrounded Lot's house in the Biblical story. That's not the sort of thing I'm inclined to brush off with a joke.

dang 12y ago
This comment and a couple of others in the thread seem destined to provoke a religious flamewar. That would be off topic.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious (or possibly political) flamewar. That's probably why it's been flagged way down to the second page. I was honestly surprised that you were the one who posted it; I'd have thought you'd have foreseen it being problematic. I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.
  - dang 12y ago
    > The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious flamewar. This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because everyone did. That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than mine does. That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if not more so.
    - lotharbot 12y ago
      > "rape isn't funny" is entirely off topic. ... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah? Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments show, the article left the door wide open for it. > "The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history" It presents that finding in a very poor way.
      - dang 12y ago
        I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread. I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles. Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker. The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time. As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar. An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN. So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
It's possible that your instinctive sense of horror is exactly Bentham's point and the joke: something is not only bad because it's what the Bible says is bad. If we discover that we had all missread that part of the Bible, would forcible sodomy be OK now? It's absurd!