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A comment on Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return for spring semester. Parent comment

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Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by grzm on Saturday January 28, 2017 @06:31PM (#13510316)
It's shameful HN doesn't flag posts calling Trump and his supporters nazis, homophobic and other names. While any dissident about liberals is flagged/downvoted to oblivion.

Every group on HN notices things that appear to be against them. It's normal human bias. I've seen plenty of flagging/down-voting going on all sides of various issues.

If you legitimately are interested to dig into this more, there are at least two different HN APIs available for you to mine the comments on the site. I'd be interested in the results if you chose to do so.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by realusername on Saturday January 28, 2017 @08:45PM (#13511202)
I did not downvote you myself but Trump, as a political movement, is really close to fascism. Look yourself at the definition of fascism: http://www.favreau.info/misc/14-points-fascism.php, Trump checks almost all the marks there and it makes a lot of people afraid. It does not mean anything bad is going to happen and it does not mean anything either on Trump supporters, but it's still very concerning.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by grzm on Saturday January 28, 2017 @07:12PM (#13510626)
I agree that it's not right or helpful to mislabel people or call names. Please don't read my comment as supporting that in any way. What I was addressing is the perception that it's one-sided.

I don't think looking at a single submission is adequate in dealing with the perception issue, but for the sake of argument, I looked at all of the references for "nazi" (as it was the first on your list) in the comments for the submission you referenced. Only one of them in my opinion can be construed as name-calling, and that is nuanced in that it explicitly says "not all". Still not great, admittedly, but not the blanket name-calling you imply.

This is all the effort I'm willing to do for you on this front. I think this shows good faith. I encourage you to take a step back and look at everything as a whole as objectively as you can. I know this is hard (it's hard for me), but it's increasingly important lest we increase the polarization we already have. We can't control how other people behave directly. All we can do is do our best to control our own behavior to encourage others to do likewise and move forward constructively.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508902

popular support for Nazism has been purged from German culture.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13509130

Trump voters are not 100% made up of nazis, in essence.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13510141

Germany wasn't 100% made up of Nazi supporters either. That didn't stop disaster.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508404

I've sen a lot of angst over the last week about people on the left expressing approval for 'punching nazis' following Richard Spencer suffering a whack on the ear during a TV interview. It's true, someone, probably form the left, carried out an act of physical violence while he was just standing there talking.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508941

I am even wiling to defend the concept of free speech for people like neo-nazis and the kkk - but only up to the point where they endorse violence against others as opposed to merely asserting their own superiority.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508852

Punching nazis is OK. The left gets to decide who is a nazi.

Punching commies is OK. The right gets to decide who is a commie.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13509038

We restricted Nazi immigration, we restricted communist immigration, and we should certainly restrict Muslim extremist immigration.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508999

If you mean Nazi Germany, my opinion is that there aren't actually that many parallels.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508593

For some reason I'm thinking of a parable that goes like: "First they came for the Nazis"...

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508879

And Obama was the biggest nazi of all times

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508763

I'm not saying it has not errupted (it has) I'm saying violence and the glorification if it (as in people sharing the punch a Nazi video) is a dead end and will definitely strengthen trump support.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508587

It is not possible to really invoke Godwin's law regarding Trump, he already opened this door when he accused the CIA of being like NAZIs for reporting he facts.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by grzm on Saturday January 28, 2017 @08:02PM (#13510923)
You don't appear to be engaging in good faith yourself. You accuse HN members of name-calling, yet when presented with evidence that the first name you list wasn't actually being used in the way you imply, you backpedal and say "oh, no, look at this other one". And you still use the nazi example as the majority of your comment.

Good faith means doing that work upfront to ensure that what you're saying has some basis, and in the case of contentious issues, strong basis. Good faith also means backing down when you're called out on something and found to be lacking that strong basis, not continuing to push it forward.

Most people's good faith doesn't extend infinitely. They're fools if they do continue to extend it when repeatedly shown that the people they're engaging with aren't doing so as well.

And you still don't seem to have gotten my original point: I agree that name-calling is uncalled for and actively unconstructive and uncivil. The perception that "your side", whatever that may be, is being treated unfairly pops up on all sides of contentious issues here on HN. Go out and do some real stats work if you think there's something pernicious about some particular behavior. The data is out there. Just anecdotes don't cut it. Your bias (and mine, and anyone's) isn't going to let you see the picture clearly on its own. And when you're done, share the data, methodology, and results with the rest of us. I know there are a lot of people besides me who would be interested in seeing it, regardless of the actual results.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by crgk on Sunday January 29, 2017 @08:22AM (#13513999)
Hey, thanks for writing these comments. I think these are great examples of how to talk about these topics without inviting more conflict or devolving into condescension.
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Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by pmyteh on Saturday January 28, 2017 @07:16PM (#13510650)
People (re-)coming in with green cards, or the Iranian PhD student mentioned in TFA are hardly without knowledge of who they are. They've been vetted by the INS and already live in the country.

Even for those strongly against Muslims, or immigration in general, it seems difficult to believe that this kind of lame-ass shit is what they had in mind when voting Trump.

And for those few with enough animus to want to screw over some innocent PhD student because of where she was born? Fuck those guys.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return f... by Mz on Saturday January 28, 2017 @06:30PM (#13510309)
Get enough karma to downvote and flag, and then flag what you think needs to be flagged. That's how the process works.
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