This comment breaks the HN guidelines badly by bringing extraneous flamebait into a substantive and interesting thread, turning it into a political flamewar. That may not be arson but it is criminal negligence. Please don't do it in HN threads.

It's up to each of us to prevent this, just like we don't light cigarettes at gas stations or let campfires smolder in dry forests. That's not hard. I feel like Smokey the Bear.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

May I suggest ten close readings of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374168 (once for each comment currently in this off-topic subthread) as a good example of what we do want: substantive, grounded in experience, civil, teaching something new.

Edit: I want to add something about the mechanism at work here. Not to pick on you, but as an illustration for everyone.

If we look at the path taken by this subthread, what can we say about it? It gets consistently more generic. That is, it starts with something specific (a self-observation of Scandinavian culture), swaps that out for something much more generic (small towns: good or bad?), goes to more generic and inflammatory things (gang violence) and then to informational heat death ("Religions can inspire peace or war").

So we can sum up how to avoid the unwanted this way: Don't go generic. Note that that's not the same thing as "don't go off-topic". Going off topic can be fine if the direction is interesting. The trouble with the generic is that's predictable and seductive, producing not only the uninteresting but a lot of it.

(I might come back and add more here. If there's one point I wish I could effectively communicate to the HN community this thing about not going generic is it, because it makes the difference between interesting and lame discussion.)

If you oppose genercism, you cut the thread too late; it's the previous one that discusses large vs small communities ...with zero support or examples. The comment you refer to was the more specific one on that subject.

I considered that, but your comment was the one that really unmoored from the specifics. The parent comment was still tied to the topic, and pretty obviously not intended as an attack on small towns.

The site guidelines say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Had you followed that, I bet you wouldn't have reacted the way you did. It's doable but it takes a conscious effort, one that many users (including me) have had to make.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If those generalizations don't apply to your small community, fair enough. But what then makes it okay for you to state generalizations that don't apply to my urban area?

> What voters vote for wealth redistribution? Mostly urban areas.

What do any of those examples have to do with Jante? You think gang violence is because people are trying to stop other people from rising out of poverty, rather than someone trying to rise out of poverty through crime? Please tell me you don't think gang bangers are out there telling kids not to go to school because of Jante. That's hilarious.

> What voters vote for wealth redistribution?

1. You're not to think you are anything special.

6. You're not to think you are more important than we are.

> Where does Antifa corner someone with bad speech and beat them up?

4. You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.

> Where does gang violence (epitome of contrived us vs. them) happen?

2. You're not to think you are as good as we are.

8. You're not to laugh at us.

9. You're not to think anyone cares about you.

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> You think gang violence is because people are trying to stop other people from rising out of poverty, rather than someone trying to rise out of poverty through crime?

Tomato, tomato. First, gang activity is perceived to be zero-sum; a gang protects its territory. Second, vengence is primarily about hurting the other guy, not helping yourself.

Suburban violence rates are almost as high as urban rates. Rural violence rates reported to the police are significant, but may be lower than urban and suburban due to lower reporting rates. When you look at victimization rates of violent crimes not reported to the police, there are nearly as many rural victims of violent crimes as there are urban victims. And note especially that the rate of aggravated assault victimization is higher in rural areas than urban. This doesn't prove you're wrong, but it is fairly suggestive evidence that the idea that violence happens in mostly urban areas is off the mark.

https://ovc.ncjrs.gov/ncvrw2016/content/section-6/PDF/2016NC...

As far as wealth redistribution, which kind are you talking about, the kind where the rich take from the poor, or the kind where the poor take from the rich? This seems like a political troll unrelated to the Law of Jante, but it's safe to say that all voters vote for wealth redistribution, it just depends on which direction you believe it should go.

> which kind are you talking about

Sorry, that was vague. I meant the way it is most often used: wealth redistribution towards equality.

> It is frequently heard in politics, usually referring to perceived redistributions from those who have more to those who have less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_of_income_and_w...

Not just vague, but wildly and needlessly politically charged. Capitalism is a system that redistributes wealth away from equality by definition, and it highly encourages and favors individualism, by definition. Suggesting that the Law of Jante would judge social programs that aim for the common good to be individualistic seems misguided and blind to the economic realities of the growing inequality we actually have.

> Second, vengence is primarily about hurting the other guy, not helping yourself.

What kind of romantic world do you live in where you think crime is motivated more by "vengence" than economics? You've been watching too many gangster movies or something where you think it's all about vendettas and less about fighting over highly profitable criminal enterprises like drugs. Have you heard of the war on drugs? This Jante reading of urban violence is preposterous.

so, jante's 'be humble' is actually coded rationalization for violence. what a world.

for some reason this reminds me of a time when a few internet eccentrics were trying to suggest that hegel's dialetic was some kind of freemason/illuminati conspiracy theory.

in some ways jante isn't all that different from japanese wa, or really even the attitudes of many rural americans.

> jante's 'be humble' is actually coded rationalization for violence

It can be, yes.

Religions can inspire peace or war, depending on how strongly their followers need others to agree.

is jante a religion, or really anything very similar? is there a 'holy book'?

Not sure what you mean. How is it related to Jante?