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The online world breeds extremism. It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless. This is the world we have made.


> It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless.

It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.

If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.


The implication is that you are attacking the defenseless. There is none more defenseless than the dead.


Not true.

1. Plenty of living people defend the reputations of dead people.

2. There's no proof that anything we say or do has any impact on dead people.


Well, if you think of person as a bunch of ideas, maybe with a mind attached, then by attacking a dead person you're attacking a bunch of vulnerable ideas that no longer have a mind to defend them. You can still call it a person, if you like.


>You can still call it a person, if you like.

No thanks, because a person is not a group of ideas + a mind.


You didn't say what you mean, so I'll guess you mean souls, and you didn't say it because you're embarrassed.


No one cares less about defending themselves being attacked than the dead.


No one is less tolerant of attacks than the dead.


Godwin's law approaching


[flagged]


Uh, leftists were throwing fireworks at the memorial of Charlie Kirk? Leftists called Renee Good names? Sorry I might confuse the sides here.


Completely agree. If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.

The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.


Heh... do you realize that your comment undermines itself?


> If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.

> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.

And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.


Unwillingness to engage with others breeds extremism. There are many who are silenced if they do not fit into the social dogma. Those people eventually lose it if they can't find a productive outlet.


The full saga is humourous. from wiki.

Gary Larson cartoon incident

One of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"[114] Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste and had its lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which they described the cartoon as an "atrocity". They were stymied by Goodall herself: when she returned and saw the cartoon, she stated that she found the cartoon amusing.[115]

Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have gone to the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5, detailing her version of the controversy, and the institute's letter was included next to the cartoon in the complete Far Side collection.[116] She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals. In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.


Always amusing when a bunch of lawyers over-react to something, supposedly on their client's behalf, and then when the client finds out about it, they have to talk the lawyers out of it and tell them to chill. I've always wondered if lawyers are born without a sense of humor or if they lose it during one of the semesters of law school.


You appear to have misunderstood what happened. It was her management team that thought it was in bad taste. They then got the lawyers to draft a letter. The lawyers weren't acting "supposedly on their clients behalf", they were doing exactly what their clients asked them to do - which is their job. In this case, it was the management team that was acting "supposedly on their clients behalf" and who needed to chill out.


> She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals.

I like the strip that shows a scientist who has invented an animal translator learning that what dogs are really saying is "Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!"


> In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.

That last sentence is missing from the Wikipedia page. What is the source on it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side#Jane_Goodall_cart...




Jesus! Frodo sounds like a bastard.

> Frodo's aggression was not limited to colobus monkeys and other chimpanzees. In May 2002, he killed a 14-month-old human child that the niece of a member of the research team had carried into his territory.[61] As a result, the Tanzanian National Parks Department considered killing Frodo.[61] In 1988, he attacked visiting Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, leaving him bruised and scratched.[61] Frodo had a history of attacking the researchers observing him; Goodall was attacked by Frodo on multiple occasions and, in 1989, the ape beat her head so violently her neck was nearly broken.[61]



How did they not put him down after he killed an infant? That's crazy


They were going to, but ultimately he was just exhibiting natural behavior and unfortunately the person broke the rules - only 12+ year olds were supposed to enter the park


Those with organs for judgement are found as liabilities when said judgement structure is faulty and they can be responsible for damage.

Those which are structurally whimsical - well, if you had to deal them as liabilities, then you would have to do it preemptively (it may not be that it's Chimpy that is so brutal - they just can be brutal).


> In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.

This just made the whole story so much funnier. I'm really glad to have read it. Poor guy, but hilarious to read about.


I mean, Goodall liked the cartoon but that doesn't mean everyone likes it!


And that, to all you aspiring entrepreneurs, is how you deal with shit. Please don't take your cues from our current industry and political "leaders".

Tech (and business, and politics) tends to attract a lot of people who are convinced they already know everything and who could probably benefit from a little more confidence and perspective.

That combination makes for a lot of thin-skinned bullshit. I could name names, but you all know the people I am talking about.


Everyone's fighting for Jane Goodall but Jane Goodall apparently


Why do you say that? I'm not sure how that follows.


It's a joke about both Frodo the Chimp and the Jane Goodall institute were defending her more enthusiastically than necessary


Yes, it's the typical behaviour of "those who saw the Master" (which they may have forgotten "came to see the sick") - a pretty well known tendency in humanoids.

Re-watch "Life of Brian".


I do not like the Trump administration, but they don't exist in a vacuum.

It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".

Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.


    > Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
While I won't defend corruption, there are orders of magnitude of difference in the intensity and harm caused by the current US government's corruption vs the type most people have grown accustomed to. Both sidesing this is insane.

And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?


> in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11

A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.


I need to the left's version of starting your own memecoin and openly taking bribes from officials and foreign countries.

I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.

Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.


memecoin scams: I offer up a President wearing a tan suit in exchange, and depths of depravity

taking bribes (planes) from foreign countries: I offer in exchange, a former President who dared to use Dijon mustard instead of plain yellow mustard, the monster.


In all fairness it wasn't the greatest shade of tan


I find it interesting (in a dismaying sense) how many people are perfectly comfortable or even in favor of government oversteps by “their” team that are aligned with outcomes they like but act shocked and indignant when the “other” team does it.

IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.


>the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams

This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.

Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.


Russia perfected the ethics of "you don't need to be good, you just need everyone else to be bad", Americans are just bringing the state of the art home.


Well, it helps that Russia has captured and helped pump propaganda over well more than 50% of US information channels.


This is what the system of checks-and-balances was supposed to enforce. Turns out that system is not effective if you vote the same party into power in each aspect of the government.


Yes, all political parties and organizations must be accountable to the Constitution and the law.

We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.


Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.


Here's the hilarious part: When you say "previous admins" you're almost certainly talking about previous Republican admins.

https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/have-there-been-significant...


I don’t know if it falls into the strict definition of “corruption”, but definitely falls into the broader category of “shitty”, but democrat politicians don’t seem to be above abusing their power to enrich themselves with the stock market.

There’s an entire (successful) ETF exploiting it. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NANC/

I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.


I'm sorry to break the news to you, but if you're using the phrase "democrat politicians", you're extremely conservative. This phrase does not exist and is never used outside of deeply partisan conservative circles. If this doesn't align with your understanding of who you are and what you believe, I'd urgently reevaluate your media consumption habits.


I’m on the left and I use that phrase. It took me forever to figure out what was “wrong” with it. They’re democrats, democrat politicians.

Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window


Yeah, that’s the thing.

I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.

I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.

To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”


I have personally known people to be offended by the term and the broader war on Christmas they feel it represents.


I know a bunch of people who say they’re offended by it. I don’t believe them, they’re lying to me or themselves, but I think the former.

I could be wrong, it’s likely even, but it’s just not something I am going to be convinced of. I think they’re pretending to be offended, because if they act offended then it’s easier for them to “both-sides” stuff, or they think it shows how good of Christians they are.


It’s actually not conservative at all, they run under the democrat sticker, this is the self-prescribed label.

We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

You're wrong on both the history and modern usage.


Fair enough. I meant to type Democratic but I guess I typed Democrat by mistake and didn’t realize it had baggage. I was typing on a phone.

It does seem like a pretty easy mistake to make regardless and I don’t think it’s reasonable to call me “extremely conservative” for making it. It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”, so someone who isn’t terminally tuned into semantic games might not realize it.


> It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”

Yes, this was the Republicans being successful in their efforts.

I appreciate you acknowledging the term has baggage.


Sure, but at this point it just kind of feels like splitting hairs and just a means of getting offended on purpose.

Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.


The commonality of the term is the result of intentional usage over a long span of time by right wing politicians, media, and personalities.

If you've ever disregarded or downplayed the power and reach of right wing media and propaganda, think on this conversation and how a derogatory term for members of the Democratic party entered common usage.

You don't have to actually watch or like right wing propaganda to be influenced by it because it is pervasive in the United States and has been for decades.


Lots of etymologies have depressing origins, I do not think it makes someone “extremely conservative” just because they’re not fully aware of all these etymologies.

For example, the term “grandfather clause” originates due to racist laws designed to prevent black people from voting, but I don’t go around calling people who say they were “grandfathered in” are huge supporters of slavery because that would be fucking stupid. They clearly are just using a colloquialism and pretending you are offended by something that you’re actually not offended by as some kind of bizarre justification of your terminally online persona is weird.

But that’s just my opinion; apparently I’m extremely conservative, which is news to me. Maybe I should hang out in leftist circle jerk discord servers.


To be clear, I never called you a conservative. That was someone else.

You appeared misinformed about the origin of the term and how it came to common usage, so I filled you in.


The reason it seems like an easy mistake to make is that you've been consuming conservative media that uses it routinely. Presumably this is the same media that told you about this ETF whose ticker is a joke about Nancy Pelosi, and suggested that it proves some fact comparable to the current administration's misconduct. Again, I'm not saying you personally consider yourself to be conservative - but if you don't, you've been tricked, and you need to urgently reevaluate how much you listen to the people who tricked you.


Which “conservative media” are you referring to? I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t watch Newsmax, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, I don’t watch CNN, I don’t watch MSNBC, I don’t listen to any political commentators.

The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.

I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.

Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.

ETA:

I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.

That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.


Hard for me to know what you watch and listen to. Stereotypical "podcast bros" are one big thing I've seen - there's a lot of political content out there that gets cast as "apolitical" because the nominal topic is something else or the hosts are sympathetic to Bernie Sanders. (And this is something I'd absolutely is a both-sides thing, a lot of the content creators I follow do take broadly left-wing themes for granted.)


Well good news! I also don’t listen to podcasts! I think Joe Rogan is a big stupid idiot, and may have singularly caused more damage than nearly anyone currently alive. I used to listen to a lot of NPR podcasts but I haven’t in years.

I guess I do read The Onion so I am not divorced from politics, but I try to mostly avoid consuming much political shit.

Yeah yeah I know everything is political, I promise you that you don’t need to lecture me on that fact. I am just saying that most of the shit I consume now largely boils down to videos about how video games work or “documentaries” about lolcows on YouTube. I have tried to unplug from everything that gravitates around the political news sphere. The only place I get any “news” is HN nowadays, and I mostly try and read the tech shit.


It's an explanation, not a justification.

You're letting past gov'ts away with a lot apparently but overall i agree.

The Overton window shifted too far and now an egomaniac is in charge of its reset.


> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:

- taking direct bribes from Qatar - the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering - demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel - directly taking cash from randoms for pardons

etc etc etc


Such is dialectics, but if you are going to apply relativism to comparatively very different movements you are in for a really bad time.


> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left"

"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.


> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".

lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.


95% of the time they are talking about the vaccine mandate and lockdowns in response to a fkn pandemic that provable killed hundreds of thousands, easily shown with the dip in average lifetime length stats of Americans for a while there. I think we're observing false equivalency here to protect a felon who currently holds the office of the Presidency.


It's an explanation not a justification.


It's an excuse, not an explanation.


It's an explanation, as much as you wish it isn't.


It isn’t an explanation, because it has causality backwards. The Trump Administration wants to do some things, and so they come up with excuses to why they should be allowed to do them. Their actions aren’t the response, they’re the initial desire.


Destroying democracy has literally never been a goal of the democratic party, unlike the well laid out plan in project 2025, which is really just Stage 1 of their plan.


This is such utter BS. And also, btw, also doesn't exist in a vacuum.

The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.


The left does not equal the democrat party. The right does not equate to the republican party.

My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"

Relax guy, politicians are not your friends.


> My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps

What do you mean?


Twitter Files, the FBI @ facebook

This case just doesnt sit right with me.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/26/biden-admin-cant-be...


Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people, so it makes sense for FBI and others to let American companies know when their platforms are being used for these things.

This is especially true when such content is already against the policy of those services.


"Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people" - says the government at the time, therein lies the concern.

No Government should regulate the internet.


Telling a site that it has content on it that is against that site's own policy is not regulating the internet. Especially when there is no real or implied threat against the site if they do not remove that content.


That’s all well and good if you live in lala land where nothing bad is ever happening that isn’t the current government’s fault, but here in the Real World, the impacts of foreign governments engaging in an information war need to be dealt with. Part of that begins with acknowledging the objective fact that foreign state actors are engaged in such an information war.


Covid was created in a lab funded by the Chinese and the NIH, that's accepted as fact at this stage.

I don't think I'm living in lala land if i say the US Gov't has any stake in avoiding blame.


Accepted by whom?


You can believe that. But "FBI tells social media companies about an interference campaign" is not anything resembling "Trump demands direct payments in the form of settlements in exchange for favorable treatment in M&A regulation."


It's probably a reference to the twitter files which showed coordinated efforts between Trump term1 and Twitter.


The “Twitter files” showed almost nothing of substance, to my knowledge. What are these coordinated efforts you’re talking about?


The Twitter Files, much like the Mueller Report is useful to determine who the disingenuous or ignorant are. The people most likely to bring them up make claims completely opposite to what is actually contained within the documents because that's what they were told was in them. They can't ever be bothered to actually read the things they are using as "evidence". They just have to point to them ominously.

To them the Twitter files proves that Democrats and Twitter collaborated to suppress conservative voices and boost liberals despite showing nothing to that effect.

To them the Mueller Report fully exonerates Trump and proves it was nothing but a Democratic smear campaign. Despite it showing the opposite.

Reality doesn't matter anymore. These are "facts" to roughly 1/3rd of the US population.


Tarrif's will do that...


Jagmeet Singh (NDP Leader) has done more to raise then anyone?

You don't have to shoehorn Donald Trump into every political discussion.


I’m not shoe-horning. The Conservative Party of Canada is leveraging the same right-wing populist rhetoric as Trump’s Republican Party. By contrast, perhaps Trudeau’s failing is that he isn’t playing the same game, preferring to continue with a mostly technocratic style that is increasingly disliked by low-information voters. I suppose if they can squeeze out another 18 months to get a few more things done before it’s all burned down, it will be a victory of sorts. And then the Liberals can go into hiding again for 8-10 years until Canadians get tired of the Conservatives.


Websites are international, i am currently in Canada.


Indeed, but HN is supposed to be pretty much a no-politics zone. In practice it doesn't seem to stop people poking at foreign politics, just US politics. And in this case, the irony is so thick you'd trip over it.


Then flag the article as politics. If n people do that, the article is flagged. (With n = maybe 5?)

(And behold, the article is now flagged.)

To me, I think it's at least a bit interesting, because of the "maintain their privacy, at least until charged" vs. "stop the treason" issue. I can see no way to proceed that doesn't fail to satisfy one demand or the other.


I believe i have heard they were from numerous parties? I Believe the CPC was implicated as well?


Thanks for the link. I knew i was ignorant on the subject, Just seemed like a great deal. Apparently too good to be true.


So, i unboxed a $2000 item on counterstrike, and because of their ecosystem, basically had to keep it in the "Steam Economy" so, i purchased the top end model.

Its been great.

I'm really happy with the antiglare screen. I can't always play in the dark.

It is possible to replace the SSD although i am pretty sure it voids the warranty. Valve's recommendation is that you add an SD card, which is a lot more reasonable these days.

Sorry my answer has been kinda rambling yet non descript. tl;dr i don't think storage is the biggest concern, but the anti-glare glass is great.


Seems like there's always been a boom and bust in the tech world though? In all markets of course, but i am old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble?


Yeah, maybe this will have the same impact as well and we see a decline in people getting CS degrees and going into other (much-needed) professions.

I know some older people who started off in software and after the dotcom bust switched to a trade for more reliable work.

And I know I'm a big hypocrite for saying this but I really feel like a lot of places need less software developers building social media or video chat code and more nurses/teachers/trades-people/etc .


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