You're being downvoted due to being needlessly divisive and partisan. We should be able to discuss individual political events without turning it into an "us vs them" shitflinging contest.

As usual, completely baffling downvoting on HN.

I found this remark very appropriate. I didn't expect this from Gorsuch at all. If anything I would like this comment to be expanded (e.g. by adding context about the Federalist Society which I've never heard of)

I didn't vote but I'll venture to guess the comment's sort of cheer leading a cause / for / against various groups was the reason for the votes.

HN users tend to like things "distilled" a bit more, although maybe that's not the case and I just feel that way.

> I didn't vote but I'll venture to guess the comment's sort of cheer leading a cause / for / against various groups was the reason for the votes.

The way I read it, he's just saying that conservatives didn't expect Gorsuch's decision. That is not cheering anything.

The comment is gone now but I think it cited some specific groups that to me weren't obviously part of the case / didn't note their opinion, and outside that I'm not sure they really said much about expectations... more so cheer leading that disappointment those groups might feel.

Granted the more we parse a comment the less nonsensical this all gets ;)

I read it the opposite way. It looked like a comment celebrating the conservatives' loss more than one celebrating the progress made today. The edit confirmed it. A lot people here - regardless of political orientation - don't appreciate those types of comments, because they're not really about furthering discussion at all, but rather 'rubbing it in' to the side of the argument you don't like.

> It looked like a comment celebrating the conservatives' loss more than one celebrating the progress made today. The edit confirmed it. A lot people here - regardless of political orientation - don't appreciate those types of comments, because they're not really about furthering discussion at all, but rather 'rubbing it in' to the side of the argument you don't like.

Ah, I see what you mean. Thank you for explaining.

And now it's even flagged.

If you mention 'him' in a negative light, lots of downvotes.

> Federalist Society

They basically vet judges to serve as movement conservative activists on the Supreme Court. Looking for the "right" (and right-wing) stances, and complete absence of left-leaning progressive talk. Also kow-towing to corporate interests and displays of extreme loyalty to right-wing, corporate, "old boys", or evangelical thought are bonuses.

No critical comments of these topics is allowed on this site. It's the only tool that is left.

So, Trump gets the blame for appointing Kavanaugh, and not credit for appointing Gorsuch?

He would get credit if an outcome like this were his intent with the appointment — which it certainly was not. It would surprise nobody if words like "traitor" or "turncoat" were echoing through the White House halls this morning.

McConnell refused to allow the Senate to consider Obama's nomination for the Court, so, were one to assign "blame" and "credit," I would say one should credit McConnell for Gorsuch, and not Trump.

Trump's intent was clear.

I think this has to do with the fact that the groups you mentioned are not necessarily against anything LGBT. Perhaps classical conservatives, but I don't think that would fit Trump voters. There is a large faction of LGBT that hate the politicization of their issues.

Politics = morals.

There is not a "large faction of LGBT that hate the politicization of their issues". In fact, I've never even heard of such a thing, or from my circle of LGBTQ friends and acquaintances.

Correct, that is why I believe this comment was downvoted. And of course it is politicized. Whole countries have declared their opposition just the last 5 years.

Roberts is a chief justice, and will be talked about for decades, centuries even. He doesn't entirely want to be on the wrong side of history.

The Court’s job is not to try to be on the right side of history. It’s to interpret statutes and the constitution fairly, impartially, and reasonably.

If a policy change is needed, that’s Congress’s job.

Sure. But Roberts is a human being. He has an ego, ambitions, and feelings. So who knows.

Cool story bro, but it has been decades since the court has even pretended to live up to that fairy-tale example we tell little children about it being an impartial body of judges. The court is nine politicians in black robes who are competing to enact their tribes policy objectives while striving to avoid infamy.

Could you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? It's entirely possible to make your substantive points without it, and we're trying to stave off the self-destruction of this forum.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

Also, we've had to ask you numerous times before.

Ok.

Please see my response downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23530467. You're running into the classic cognitive biases that distort perceptions of this forum. People with opposite leanings have exactly the opposite perceptions of HN, ironically because they have the same cognitive biases. It seems we all have those.

>However HN seems to have rabid conservatives and also conservatives pretending to be independent with narrative of false equivalency.

Examples of this?

I wish I had saved all the comments and downvotes to comments leaning progressive, but I never did.

The most recent interaction I had was a user saying CNN and Fox news are equally bad because one of CNN anchors once said "we" in the context of democratic party.

Also my original comment is at -5.

Well, I think I may have you beat. My comment stating that you can't criticize capitalism even a little bit on HN hit 0 after 7 minutes and is now flagged.

If the majority disagree with you, you lie and say you're neutral to fit in or not get too downvoted, while anonymously downvoting things you disagree with.

Please stop posting dross to HN.

I would say the majority of /Coastal/ engineers are progressive. I'd say the average engineer elsewhere in the states leans mildly conservative/libertarian.

I was shocked to see the other post that was “flagged.”

The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance.

You guys are assuming that downvotes and flags are only because of political disagreement. That's part of it, but plenty of downvotes and flags are because users feel a comment broke the site guidelines and they're trying to protect the community for substantive discussion. I routinely downvote and flag comments that I agree with politically, because protecting the commons comes first. What good does it do to strike a fiery blow for your cause if you crack the container in the process?

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

> The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance.

The perceptions of 'skew' that you're experiencing are fraught with cognitive bias. Whatever side you're on in any divisive topic, I guarantee you that the opposite side has exactly the opposite perceptions—that is, they strongly believe that HN and its moderators skew the other way. Here's a small sample from a long list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676

Ironically, the reason these commenters have exactly the opposite perceptions is that they have exactly the same cognitive biases. It seems we all have them. In fact, they're so powerful that one can basically infallibly predict someone's political leanings from the complaints they post about HN skewing the opposite way.

What are these biases? There are at least three.

One is that we are more likely to notice and assign greater weight to things that we dislike. Pain makes a deeper impression than pleasure. A bee sting is more memorable than a field of butterflies. Two or three bee stings and you will be convinced forever that the site is skewed toward bees. I've written about this many times—it's really the dominant dynamic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Unfortunately nobody realizes that it's the dominant dynamic, so nobody questions their own perceptions of skew, so they come into the commons feeling surrounded by enemies, regardless of what's actually going on there.

A second bias is that people assume that HN is like the rest of the internet when in fact it has the unusual property of being non-siloed, meaning we're all in one big room together. This has the effect of making a site which is in reality more coexistent feel like instead like it's worse and more conflictual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

A third bias is that we have so little information about each other from small blobs of internet text, so we connect the dots and fill in the blanks to create a picture of who we're dealing with. Unfortunately, because we curve-fit the picture with material drawn from our own imagination, we end up recreating our own demons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

I puzzled over this for years: why do internet commenters have such a perfect ability to push all my buttons and drive me crazy? Eventually I realized: the only person who knows where all my buttons are is me. I'm experiencing other people as an evil-genius button-pushing nemesis because I'm creating that picture of them. Everywhere we encounter opposition or conflict, and lack objective information to check our perceptions, we're prone to recreating and re-experiencing our own shadow. Other people are doing exactly the same. What does this mean? It means that we're a forum of demons experiencing other demons.

Thus it's a wonder that this place survives at all, and it may destroy itself before long. The intention on HN, from the beginning, has been to try to stave that fate off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

I don't know what to do about this, other than try to clearly explain the dynamics to people. I guess the model is that if enough of us can gain enough awareness of how these biases are at work in ourselves, we can get a little freer, and a little more able to help fellow community members with that same process. At that point maybe one would start to see a social effect. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of this model actually working, as of yet.

I’m aware of these biases. However, I still believe there to be a gentle conservative / libertarian slant here. It’s not just downvotes, it’s also the volume of content with that slant.

I still think it’s a great place, fwiw. It’s not intended as wholesale condemnation. Every community is bound to have a leaning, and I’m part of some others that lean more progressive / leftist.

Maybe, although they might just be trying to keep the site apolitical.

It's just that, given the circumstances, staying apolitical can almost seem like a deeply biased thing to do.

But having rowdy political flame wars on a computer-focused site isn't super great either... tough choice for moderators I guess!

That's me. I can go almost anywhere on the internet for politics. On HN, I want news about hacking.

I think most of the Chinese Communist Party support is Chinese gov directed, not native to most membership in HN, though there is definitely a subset of those with significant investment in China who would possibly let that influence their moderation.

I'm afraid that's deeply inaccurate. The truth is that the HN community is much larger than people assume or feel like it is, and much more varied in users' backgrounds. This means that many readers have views that are more than a standard deviation away from whatever you're assuming the norm should be—and unfortunately this creates suspicion, outrage, and accusations of astroturfing/shillage/manipulation/spying.

It seems that, up to one standard deviation away from their own views (or sense of the norm), people's response to a different view is "huh, that's interesting". But when you get to two or more deviations away, the responses start to become "that's disingenuous", "who paid you to write this", "you're a communist party shill", and worse. (I'm using 'standard deviation' metaphorically—I haven't measured this. But I bet one could.)

In reality, though, there isn't a norm, and there are many more deviations than expected. HN has the look and feel of a cozy forum, not a public square, let alone a network of public squares all over the world. This perception gap between what people expect and what's objectively happening is the source of nearly all the perceptions of astroturfing, shilling, manipulation, brigading, botting, and spying that I've personally investigated on political topics—especially when it comes to accusations of government manipulation.

How do I know this? First because I've spent countless hours studying the data and countering abuse and manipulation on HN, and I've basically never found anything that looks state-directed. Of course it's possible that governments are clever enough to fool us whilst leaving no traces in our data (even while posting comments that some users consider obvious propaganda). But we can only go by what we can objectively look at. If we just toss out the need to have evidence or data, all that's left is imagination, which is what dominates internet discussions about these topics.

Second, the users that other users make accusations against turn out to be real people, often with long histories on HN, who simply have opposing views. Often those views are because they grew up in a different country or their families come from there or they spent time working there, and so on. I've looked into many of these cases personally, and what I've found is that the accusations were deeply unjust and that the accusers, unintentionally, were behaving like a mob. This is distressing. I don't have to agree with the users being attacked, or support whatever side they may belong to, in order to feel like they don't deserve this. Indeed, I'm sure you and basically every other HN user would agree and feel the same way. Nevertheless, it happens anyway, because these things happen unintentionally and collectively. It's an ugly dynamic, and people have actually been hounded off of Hacker News because of it. This is how we turn ourselves into a community that none of us would want to be part of. The only prophylactic I can see against this is for us as individuals to become more conscious of how these dynamics work, and what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like.

I wrote about this extensively when this came up the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495490. There are a lot of links there to past discussions of this topic.

On the matter of "what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

First of all, thank you for the detailed response.

I will say that from my own experience (by definition anecdotal) on HN that there seems to be a quick, reflexive downvote for anything mildly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, that then sometimes then gets voted back up, sometimes not.

Since, by the nature of the platform where anything downvoted becomes less visible, comments so downvoted quickly may never even get the chances to be upvoted back to visibility, unless readers go out of their way to look for and correct the issue.

Speculating on why that is, is necessarily low-data in an anonymous setting, but I wish mine had been true, that it was state sponsored. The alternative that HNers are deliberately siding with the Chinese government in relatively large numbers is sad.

Trump is not anti-gay:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/2/donald-trump...

https://www.advocate.com/2016/10/31/donald-trump-waves-lgbt-...

The media didn't publicize the historic event at the time because they hate Trump and want the voters to be misinformed.

Oh my, this point again. It is entirely possible to wave a flag on the campaign trail and then engage in a pattern of actions once in power that repeatedly and systematically materially harm the group whom that flag represents.

What do you call banning transgender people from the military and rolling back healthcare protections for the LGBT community if not anti-gay? Among many other decisions made by this administration.

Trump is absolutely anti-gay, and I say that as a gay man who voted for Trump and has since come to recognize that decision for the error that it was.

On the campaign trail, it was useful for him to pretend (sort of) the same concern for LGBTQ* people as for working-class people. Since winning the office, he has apparently found little utility in that pretense, and it has largely ceased to be maintained.

Granted, to say that Trump's "anti-gay" doesn't really capture the issue. It's not like he has it out for us in a special way, particularly. He doesn't seem to like anything or anyone who doesn't make him look good and feel good, and given the man's myriad deficiencies, that's just about everyone at this point. Without power, he'd be merely pitiable. It's a shame he is not yet without power.

Trump had lawyers involved in this case that were pushing for these protections to be denied to LGBTQ people.

From the article: "Trump’s administration and employers accused of discrimination in the cases argued that Congress did not intend for Title VII to protect gay and transgender people when it passed the law."

> Trump is not anti-gay:

Which was asserted where?

It was implied here:

> And it just got a lot harder for Trump to brag about his SCOTUS picks.