You've been spreading the toxin you're deploring, which is generally how it spreads on HN. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong someone else may be. If you think you see abuse, you're welcome to email us about it so we can take a look and take action if we find it. But you're not welcome to bring the site down in flames in your own right.
Here, I made a new post for you for your derail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105121. Please take it there.
Why is it that your account is only 67 days old and >75% of your comments are about China? Do you even comment on normal Hacker News topics that aren't related to politics?
No. Please take your points to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105121.
> in order to push your own agenda?
My agenda is to stay at least vaguely on-topic.
> Why is it that your account only 67 days old yet >75% of your comments are about China? Do you even comment on normal Hacker News topics that aren't related to politics?
Because you didn't look past two days of comments? Most of my comments over the past two days have been in this article and the other about Xinjiang, which are both about China. But you're right, I have an interest in it.
Anyway, this thread with you is clearly off-topic, so I'm going to stop it. If have further questions for me, you can study my other comments or figure out a way to privately message me.
Ok, I'll bite. Here's my response:
You need to go outside and take a walk, because your "points" have been off topic, literally paranoid, and bizarrely personal. You're accusing me of being an "agent provocateur" and either a Chinese or Russian troll. That's crazy talk and utter nonsense.
Ignoring you isn't "telling," it's frustration and a lack of better options.
The truth is I'm a guy who was frustrated by a thread yesterday that was totally ruined by people who derailed it, perhaps like the 50 Cent Party would. Just to make it super clear: I don't think it was disrupted by the actual 50 Cent Party, but by people who maybe should consider learning to not act like it.
Edit: I apologize to everyone who reads this thread (or the dead comments below). In situations like this, the correct action is to ignore someone like my interlocutor, but that's difficult when he makes personal attacks. I should have held firm despite them.
You need to re-read my comment, especially the sentence after the one you partially quoted. What I was getting at was that someone who inadvertently behaves like a propagandist should re-evaluate their behavior and modify it, because it's destructive (if it wasn't destructive, why would the propagandist do it?). For instance, someone pushing hyper-partisan memes on Facebook should stop because Russians agents literally do that same thing as a disruption tactic.
> but I am not exaggerating when I say that I think putting these things on the record is important for everyone.
I have nothing to hide: https://web.archive.org/web/20180518222349/https://news.ycom...
Anyway, you are not acting like a stable, sensible person. You're getting too worked up. Please, take a break. Do something relaxing or fun. This is not a productive derail that anyone else would benefit from.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In case anyone is wondering: no, this is not because of your views. I don't know what they are and it doesn't matter, just as a fireman doesn't care what color a fire is.
You're not fooling anyone when you say that you're not accusing people of being propagandists, but rather that they're just "perhaps like" them.
> Anyway, you are not acting like a stable, sensible person. You're getting too worked up.
Says the guy whose two month old account has 75% of its comments about one topic, but nice try. I also wonder if you are subconsciously channeling some tactics from the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
EDIT: And of course, recalling Cato, I will end by nothing that you still have not responded to anything I've said but rather have devolved to calling people who disagree with you crazy. Gee, it's almost like you're just trying to divide people instead of actually trying to have a good faith discussion.
At the same time, I am reminded of how organizations that in hindsight we know were definitely not funded by the Soviet Union were accused of exactly that during the 50s and 60s. For example, we now know that at one point the KGB and the FBI were concurrently running smear campaigns against MLK.
In that light, I’m skeptical of Lionsion’s motives in posting this. Yesterday he was rightfully called out by some including me for writing of Chinese internment camps in Xinjiang that
> These camps appear to be the result of high-level Chinese government policy that explicitly targets this ethic group. There are no contemporary parallels in the US. If you think there are, do you think Obama was in on it? The US situation is unfortunate, but it's more the result of poverty and lower-level racism, not a policy to imprison blacks.
The whataboutism in his last statement of course goes against the consensus of US academics studying criminal justice issues, the consensus of criminal justice advocates, as well as what (again, thanks to the passage of time) we now know about the deliberate decisions of politicians leading up to the War on Drugs:
https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
I think Hacker News should place where we can have a civil discussions about issues. Thanks to the wonders of technology, we are able to have multiple (not just one!) threads and thus to discuss multiple topics. And as I have said previously, most of us can both walk and chew gum at the same time; if someone is unable to even read comments discussing US education reform on an article by an American looking at the Swedish education system, for example, without being “distracted,” I think that’s more of an issue for the easily-distracted person than for the discussants.
But the strange trend of accusing everyone who would like to discuss the relevance of an issue to the US of being funded by the Chinese government is as intellectually demeaning as it should be rhetorically suspect.
I’d be happy to prove that I’m an American citizen not funded by the Chinese or any other government, but I think that might be relatively hard to prove in a fair and respectful way over the Internet. On the other hand, it is much easier to look at someone’s public comment history and to see the unsettling trends there.
More generally, I’m getting tired of having to battle this recent uptick in China scaremongering on what used to be a much more reasonable forum. Lionsion’s account is very new, and I wonder if they are part of the recent influx of new users who have arrived with their own bad habits. Seriously, check the account creation date for users who post things that seem to be weird pro-China or anti-China propaganda. They seem to mostly have been made around 2016.