Does the edit fix the problem?
I know it's not always clear in moderation comments, but the reason we emphasize this is not so much about right or wrong, as about the effects on discussion of certain kinds of comments compared to others—so it's both more empirical and less divisive than it looks. It's hard for a community this large and uncohesive to agree about large things like right and wrong, but a bit easier to find some shared interest in the kind of site HN should be. That's the hope anyway.
As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was.
I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.)
Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House).
My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to.
> In 2014, a group of 15 white schoolgirls blacked up their faces for a game of football. A few months previously, as riots blazed in Ferguson after the police shooting of Michael Brown, a group of Sullivan residents, Wehmeyer’s neighbour among them, staged a KKK march through town.
In as much as his comment makes an observation from his own experience that is congruent with the thrust of the article: the American South continues to be flush with cruel, unabashed racists, I'm not sure why it is being censored. Does it cross the line to say in plain language what the article says circuitously?
Excessive generalization is the problem, by the way. It's important to be careful to criticize a particular behavior without criticizing everyone in the region.
Yes, and it effected the desired result: the speech was altered.
But I have been shocked at the number of people from Missouri who have actively responded to news of the suit on social media not on the merits of the request whatsoever, but by saying that I shouldn’t win because I’m “not from there” and therefore this is “none of my business”, or that I’m “some California coastal liberal elite” (practically an exact quote), or that it doesn’t matter that many other states routinely make this data freely available (including Oklahoma, right next door) because “well, that has nothing to do with Missouri”, and so on. At least one of these people has a giant Confederate flag as her primary Facebook banner image. Some of these people have open-to-the-world Facebook posts about family involvement in white nationalist groups, discussions of the “Seth Rich cover-up” and how Obama will be indicted any day now, and use of language that would indicate close familiarity with alt-right fever swamps.
It’s been...enlightening.
You have to understand that these people are unhappy (mostly due to economic reasons) and are being spoonfed media bullshit all the time. Some of them are legitimately hateful, but a lot are just not very bright and have terrible bullshit filters. It doesn't help that the South's culture is pretty generally reviled elsewhere in the US and that they get brain-drained pretty bad.
As impersonal as it may be I don't blame them for being distrusting by default of outsiders from the coasts. Look what happened to Colorado.
I cannot say I share your concerns for a number of reasons. Locally, as in at the city level, we fight the old guard regularly just to pass enough taxes to keep our infrastructure from crumbling entirely. We have to fight the old guard just to have enough taxes to keep the street lights on in the summer, to put our police officers in cars newer than a decade old.
The new folks, us young folks, don't have a problem with a lot of these, we see the value in our police officers having modern vehicles, in our streets and storm water systems being maintained (and avoiding costly lawsuits in the latter case), in the value for my community safety and other people's families to have lights on in neighborhood past 6 PM during the summer for Pete's sake. We're the ones at the city hall meetings fighting grandma, and her racism, and her NIMBYism, and her staunch refusal to pay for any of the public services she takes advantage of. So I struggle to see what politics have been changed for the worse.
Oh, Oh, and after a few record breaking years for wild fires, guess if it was the old guard (who wants to bust up the state forests and lands for fracking) or the new guard (who are generally more conservationist) who voted we shouldn't allocate more budget to fire fighting@. Gosh, that certainly will not bite us after a dry winter when the US forest service predicted an even worst wild fire season this year. Oh no how the budget will suffer and the old guard will make it seem like this was completely unavoidable and unpredictable. @edit: at the state level
I take a personal ire with your baseless comment since I live in what's historically been known as the hate capital of the west; located right here in friendly Colorado. So, in my opinion, if the KKK and some of these rather bigoted church congregations have their ideals and their politics dragged out into the light of society and can't survive it good riddance.
So please, please tell me what politics the Californians (and somehow I hear; Elite West Coast Liberals in there, if not Libruls) have brought us that made our state oh so terrible over these past few years.
There is little comfort to be had when you're losing your home and car because someone tells you that at least the homeless shelters and public transit are much better now.
They hate you, because they see you as a giant economic jackboot stepping on the face of the poor forever.
You see yourself the same way 16th century missionaries saw themselves, you think you're civilizing the barbarians but you're destroying someone else's way of life.
You are conflating high taxes and high government involvement in everyday life with a high quality of life and that's simply not the case. It might have been the case where you came from but it's not the case where you went.
They might not be the greatest at articulating it but the people who disagree with you are disagreeing with you because they have a fundamentally different view of the responsibility of government and the individual to each other (on the local level or otherwise).
You need to learn to think in terms of value. Does X increase quality of life enough per dollar to be worth it. If you don't learn to think about value you'll eventually run out of other people's money.
For those not in the know, Troost is the major divide between the black and white regions of the city. Interestingly, these divisions seem to exist all over urban America: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html
If one studies the history of the failed campaigns to desegregate America's schools, it's apparent that segregation continues to be something imposed on black people and not the result of mutual preferences.
I feel strongly that this model does far more harm than good as a tool to understand American racial dynamics.
The model on that page does nothing of the sort. You, or others, may do that in response to viewing it.
The model simply shows how individual tendency towards segregation causes macroscopic segregation and that if there are also elements that will choose diversity, in the model, then segregation can be greatly reduced.
>segregation continues to be something imposed on black people and not the result of mutual preferences //
I was looking at school information recently in the UK [1]. The statistics strongly suggested ethnic minority groups choosing schooling based in part on race and that the choice they're making is for greater segregation.
>"The data, which was processed by Professor Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol and analysed by Demos, exclusively for the Demos Integration Hub, show that children from Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black Caribbean communities are particularly likely to attend schools with a disproportionate level of other students sharing their ethnic background." [ibid] //
Maybe you're right about USAmerica and that there are no non-white racists there. But it's clear to me that segregationist doesn't, ironically, split along racial lines.
[1] https://www.demos.co.uk/press-release/61-of-ethnic-minority-...
"Essentially, all models are wrong,
but some are useful" -- George Box