This is both off topic and a flamewar topic, which the site guidelines ask people not to introduce.

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

To give this article a fairer chance at having its actual content discussed, I'm going to collapse this subthread.

How is a simple question and reference to an event a flame war?

Because of the associations to pre-existing intense controversy. Those act like magnets pulling discussion in their direction, away from the topic at hand.

On HN, we're trying to open up a space to discuss new things, unexpected things, curious things. Those exert a weaker force on attention than the sensationalized hot topics that already exist in people's minds. When comments hop from a new topic to an intense pre-existing topic, that creates a path to flamewar hell. It's moderation's job to restrain and undo that, so that the more curious, weaker topic can get attention again. Does that answer your question?

Yes, thanks for clarifying.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

I see you’re still censoring to shape the narrative and silence wrongthink discussions.

Have you considered you’re not in the right, when both Congress and the Whitehouse have investigated social media censorship?

It's not about silencing wrongthing so much as allowing other topics not to get drowned out by the ragey usual. Snail farming in Ghana is surely not as important as murder in South Africa, but what attracts curiosity more? That's the core question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the unlikely event that Congress or the Whitehouse take an interest in HN moderation, I'll be happy to share with them how we approach this.

> In the unlikely event that Congress or the Whitehouse take an interest in HN moderation, I'll be happy to share with them how we approach this.

“I’m doing the same things that triggered Congressional and Presidential investigations, and plan to continue until they harass me directly.”

You’re such an upstanding member of society.

I sincerely hope they do investigate you, because I believe your authoritarian censorship has infected other technology websites, and is the place many people at Google et al learned to censor for “civility”.

The exact thing that is under investigation.

And to anyone who feels silenced by dang, I suggest you reach out to your congressional representatives — and report the instances of censorship for narrative control you observe. This is an issue, and dang’s pretenses aside, it is being investigated as a serious social problem.

It’s time to standup to leftwing bullies silencing people who don’t agree as “offensive”, because those same leftwing bullies devolve into angry shouting when confronted by opposing views.

You're overestimating HN's influence by quite a bit.

Africa is a fairly large continent and its countries are varied in their cultures, languages, government institutions and politics. Ghana is among the safer, more developed and faster growing African nations, and is far, far safer than SA.

This is both off topic and a flamewar topic, which the site guidelines ask people not to introduce.

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

Please do not use such generalizations on HN.

Since you're clearly not interested in using HN as intended, we've banned this account. If you change your mind, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but this is largely a conspiracy theory concocted by the far right:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/23/white-farmers-...

The article doesn't really seem to back that up. Lots of the people pushing that theory are definitely alt-right types, but when the article doesn't present any facts to contradict them it doesn't make it seem like they're actually wrong. For some "conspiracy theories" it can be impossible to prove someone wrong, but there should be some pretty straightforward statistics to help figure out if this is bogus or not. FWIW it seems to be a commonly held belief by South Africans. The ones I know told me that in SA they won't stop at a red stoplight ("robot") in certain areas. The risk of getting carjacked and murdered is higher (or perceived to be higher) than the risk of getting in a deadly car crash when running a red light.

> but there should be some pretty straightforward statistics to help figure out if this is bogus or not.

Sometimes they're not: https://www.thelocal.se/20180508/why-sweden-doesnt-keep-stat...

Thanks for that, quite an interesting read.

That article is heavy on how "the other" is talking about this, but light on facts about the situation on the ground.

Here is an article about the farm attacks https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/south-africa...

Even supposing that it's not happening in South Africa (ANC leaders are just singing about doing it [1]), land appropriation very much happened in neighboring Zimbabwe: "By 2013, every white-owned farm in Zimbabwe had been either expropriated or confirmed for future redistribution." [2]

To bring us back to OP's question, property rights in Ghana are listed here [3] as "weak".

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/ozatp-safrica-racism-2010033... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe [3]: https://www.propertymarketsscorecard.com/countries/ghana/pro...

The story about violence against farmers is mostly a white supremacist myth.

“Mostly” because there obviously are some cases, but those do not statistically differ from crime in general.

Also strange to immediately think of South Africa when reading about Ghana. Ghana is closer to Brazil and Spain than it is to SA.

"Since the early 1990s, there has been a marked increase in assaults and murders of the owners and managers of commercial farms and their families, disproportionate to general crime trends in South Africa." [1]

Which does not say farmers, or white farmers specifically, are targeted disproportionately - I was unable to find statistics on this. But they are targeted:

"Yet the available research shows that most crime against white farmers is criminally motivated, the perpetrators seeking firearms, money, or vehicles, and that the violence used is instrumental to these purposes. Farms, remote and scattered, are seen as easy targets. In a small number of cases, the motive may be revenge for eviction or past ill-treatment." [1]

Note that South Africa has 6x the murder rate of the USA, so saying farmers are under attack is certainly true, even if they're not disproportionately under attack.

Edit: I looked around some more, and there does not appear to be very reliable data, but depending on how you slice the numbers, farmers may be disproportionately under attack by a factor as high as 6 [2].

Let me also remark on how curious it is that the media would so confidently call this theory 'debunked' (and racist!), when by their own admission, there is insufficient official data (gathered by the majority black government) to conclude either way [2]. I do not recall this level of skepticism being so widely applied to the Black Lives Matters movement.

Edit 2: User angersock (whose post is dead) did find what looks to be official statistics: "According to the South African Institute for Race Relations, commercial farmers, who are predominantly white, were twice as likely to be killed as the average citizen." [3]

I am confident that, should this be brought to the BBCs attention, they will run a front-page story correcting their earlier claims that this is a racist myth.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/safrica2/Safarms1.htm#_1_1

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41807642

[3] https://www.refworld.org/docid/5283411d4.html

That is almost 20 years old, and still doesn’t support the racist theory that white farmers, specifically, are attacked that started this thread.

See the Wikipedia article someone else linked for more recent sources of data, and the observation that farm attacks today are actually decreasing.

Hey hey,

I’m reading this thread with no context or agenda and I don’t see the first commenter saying anything about white farmers.

When you say “started this thread” that seems misleading because you brought an interesting perspective about allegations regarding the victimizations of white farmers in to this. But it didn’t seem to be at all what the original commented was elucidating.

Actually the vulnerability of farmers to violent depredation in contrast to hunters or herders has been proposed as a huge factor throughout history and prehistory guiding physical and social evolution.

That was my first association.

So, I don’t know what the original commenter meant but I’m not certain you do either.

This is simply not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks

Your Wikipedia article says exactly the same in the very first graph?

Quote: “it is unclear whether farmers are at greater risk of being murdered than other South Africans”

Later: “Fact-checkers have widely identified the notion of a "white genocide" in South Africa as a falsehood or myth.[12][17]”

If you follow the source into the BBC and then a study that they quote in the BBC as well, you’ll see that farmers regardelss of skin color are at greater risk: https://irr.org.za/reports/research-policy-brief/Farm%20atta...

> Unsubstantiated claims that such attacks on farmers disproportionately target whites are a key element of the white genocide conspiracy theory and have become a common talking point among white nationalists worldwide.[11][12][13][14][15][16] However, there are no reliable figures that suggest that white farmers are being targeted in particular or that they are at a disproportionate risk of being killed.[1][4][12][17][18][19][16] In fact, while South Africa has more white farmers overall, black farm workers are more likely to be killed.[2][3] Fact-checkers have widely identified the notion of a "white genocide" in South Africa as a falsehood or myth.[12][17]

Ghanese farmers aren't white so I think it's unlikely.

""Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.""

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