It's really annoying to me that Hacker News is the forum which I regard as having the highest bar for conversational civility, but sadly the community completely refuses to discuss anything besides tech news and startup cheerleading.

Bluntly, if I wanted that, I'll go somewhere else. Speaking as a non-American, American politics already takes up far too much oxygen in every dang forum I participate in. I appreciate places where I can find respite.

And I say that while commenting on HN about an American political post because when I see them, I just can't frickin' help myself... sigh

I cannot attest to that at all. A good portion of all highly voted submissions were against the rules in the last two weeks and not tech at all.

Not even just the submissions, these sort of articles end up in discussions that break majority of thr In Comments guidelines, shattering any illusions that HN is somehow superior to everywhere else on the internet.

IMO, I don't think the articles should neccesarily be flagged, as the rules seem kinda loosely interpreted on this stuff, but more of the comments should probably be flagged than get so.

To have an opposing view in 2020 is to risk being beaten. Advise keeping your head down and your mouth shut.

You're saying that anyone who gets beaten for their opinion had it coming?

Truly we live in evil times.

Yes, you should be allowed to call him that. No, you should not be allowed to punch him in the face, and should be arrested and jailed for doing so.

Violence is justified to protect yourself or others from violence. Not from speech, from violence. There are some small grey areas, but this isn't rocket science.

> Should Richard Spencer be punched in the face for being a bigoted piece of human garbage?

No? I'm not sure why you're advocating violence. If we start allowing violence against bad people, where do we stop?

This line of thinking is almost always a less-than-useful simplification.

Should punching Richard Spencer be punishable by the law?

Yes.

Is punching Richard Spencer "moral"?

No.

"Should" you punch Richard Spencer?

No.

Is punching Richard Spencer "understandable"?

... this is grey. However, if you have a sufficient ideological motivation in a certain direction, the argument essentially makes itself: Violence! It's bad. If you're not motivated in the opposite direction, it's the easiest thing in the world to stop there. If you're motivated enough, you can tack on some extra easy hops in logic: "You're advocating violence! You're evil!"

Yet if somebody drives a car into a group of fellow citizens whom you know or identify with, killing one of them, and a news outlet puts out a story calling the dead a whore, you'll quickly find yourself willing to meditate on the scenario more thoroughly.

> But then there are sentiments that are beyond the pale.

A lot of people are working, successfully it appears, to make the pale a lot smaller by publicly destroying reasonable peoples' lives for the most minor infractions as a warning to the rest of us.

Which suits them.

Giving equal opinions to those filled with hate has gotten us to this point.

From my Catholic perspective it is remarkable how well it tracks with heresy, for context: dissent from one point of the Magisterium makes one a heretic. Analogy being dissent from one point of the most recent iteration of liberalism makes one worthy of unpersonage / cancellable. Recent high profile target being JK Rowling discussed here a few days ago

Cancel culture in action.