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A comment on Walgreen Terminates Partnership with Theranos. Parent comment

Re:Walgreen Terminates Partnership with Theranos by niels_olson on Sunday June 12, 2016 @11:24PM (#11891545)
Dang, I appreciate where you're coming from, and understand your sentiment. However, as a pathologist, and having sworn to defend the US Constitution for over 20 years, and having visited a number of the countries he mentioned, I'm inclined to not disagree with the poster. And I am inclined to suggest that killing people for profit is the best single basis for righteous fury.
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Re:Walgreen Terminates Partnership with Theranos by dang on Monday June 13, 2016 @03:06AM (#11892132)
Inflaming indignation like that isn't righteous. It's a mob behavior, not much different whether the target is guilty or innocent. It's just more socially acceptable when the target is (or is seen as) guilty.

Group rage is good for bonding a community—as Phil Ochs once put it, "the family that slays together stays together"—but that's not the kind of community we want HN to be. Indeed, how we react to situations where someone is (or is seen as) obviously guilty is a good measure of how well we're holding to that standard.

I realize the above may sound counterintuitive, but consider that the comments we get are the best predictor of what we'll get more of. Do we want more of those? The dynamic they lead to is people one-upping each other with fiery denunciations and getting ever more reflexive. We can't have both that and reflective discourse, and we want reflective discourse, including about bad things.

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Re:Walgreen Terminates Partnership with Theranos by delish on Monday June 13, 2016 @12:02AM (#11891659)
In my estimation (I'd like to be wrong!) righteous fury adds nothing to the pursuit of insight. And, again in my estimation,[0] we'll better distribute justice if we stay unbiased and seek to understand the situation.

The people at Theranos, especially the wrongdoers, probably want to be and feel understood. I think that's a step toward insight and justice.

Maximizing fury (I love the turn of phrase) makes people defensive, which aborts the insight-pursuit.

[0] Sorry to use so many qualifiers. Because I'm telling people how they should talk, I want to be as precise as possible.

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