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

Let alone the mother of all unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

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

i think it is directly related - some people stand up to (including with a risk to themselves as one can only wonder what painful consequences may come from obstructing a federal officer), some take money from.

For some reason mentioning obvious and strong historic parallels to the Nazi Germany is considered controversial here in the US - well, i come from USSR, a country which lost close to 30M of people due to the Nazi Germany, among them millions of Slavic (my ethnicity) and Jews (both are "subhuman races" with Slavic slated for 90% extermination with the rest to be enslaved, Jews - for 100%), my grandmother was a highly decorated veteran of that war, and a number of the members of extended family fought in the war too with some getting killed, and i see no reason to forget the history. If anything, i think we have to be vigilant in discovering, highlighting and fighting today anything and everything (like the complacence and cooperation with sub-humanization of a whole class of people) that back then resulted in such a catastrophe. Identifying the historic parallels is among the main tools here.

It isn't about forgetting the history. I honor your family history that you've just described.

It's about the cheap and trivial dynamics of internet flamewar, which will flood everything if you let it and which has nothing at all to do with the noble things you're describing. Your comment upthread was guaranteed to provoke that, no matter how sincere your intention and how significant your reason for holding it.

If ever there was a case of "the medium is the message" this is it. No matter how elevated the material you put into that machine, you're going to get garbage out. We have many years of experience with this medium and others had decades of experience before us, and this experience teaches that if you throw Nazis into an arbitrary internet topic—especially one with any emotional charge, and especially if you do it quickly and glibly, as in your comment upthread—the forum will react like a chicken with its head cut off. What good or what honor does that do anyone? We need to be wiser about how we approach these things.

>quickly and glibly

and here i hoped it was short and to the point - contrasted the 2 behaviors and pointed to the context which historically shown the critical importance of that difference and its consequences. Seems to be another case when we'd perceive ourselves in one way, and the world would do it in a completely different way. Among many things on HN i find extremely valuable is that exposure to completely different, including critical, opinions/views/etc. I see your point and appreciate your detailed explanations in this case and the effort you put into your role here on HN in general.

I believe you. Short and to the point is usually a good quality for a comment to have. But in flamebait territory, the opposite is unfortunately the case—one needs to pack one's comment with enough flame retardant to disambiguate it from the cheaper sort of comment which is so much more common. It's extra work, but the burden is on the commenter to do that.

Thanks for the kind response. I appreciate it.

Please respond to trhway’s response. You’re being the generic HN person that misses historical understanding here. It’s not flamebait to be highly concerned about political developments, please try to understand.

I'm sorry, but everyone who's been around the internet for long has seen how disastrous such single-hop digressions from $very-important-topic into Naziland end up being. The guideline I quoted is written that way for good reason. It's guarding against the blight that most commonly destroys a thread.

I don't mean this personally; I'm sure that trhway is sincere. Sincerity isn't enough. The burden is on the commenter to distinguish the comment from flamebait, and when it comes to Godwin effects the bar for that on HN needs to be high. Otherwise we'll end up with the nastiest, most repetitive and stupidest of flamewar. (The GP comment failed to clear that bar. The response downthread is of course more substantive.)

I'm not denying what you say about political developments. I'm saying that such important things deserve better. There are constraints on what the medium of an internet forum can bring to them, and to maximize what's possible we must respect what is known not to work.

Are you implying that sending people from Mexico to Mexico is the same as sending them to a death camp? Mexico may not be 1st world but damn... that's a pretty harsh claim.

1. https://www.pbs.org/video/harsh-detention-1561160200/

"The Associated Press details grave conditions inside a Texas migrant detention facility where 250 infants, children and teenagers were being held without adequate food, water or sanitation during a recent visit"

2. not many knew back then that it were to become death camps, at least not at the beginning. For typical citizen back then it was presented and looked like a detention/concentration camp, and the citizens were ok with the people being taken there just on the mere basis of being some "other" people. It became death camps in the process and the populace complacence was a major factor here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps#Pre-w...

I know your trolling since your username is literally throwaway but I’ll still bite - these facilities are for people who are fleeing the poor conditions in their countries for a better life in the USA. The poor conditions are a product of inadequate resources to deal with an influx of people not systemic desire to exterminate. Not to mention your fallacious slippery slope fallacy this is a problem all countries face when dealing with larger than baseline immigration (see Southern European countries a few years ago with Syria).