It's pretty sad watching all the comments here calling this suggestion mccarthyism, witch hunt, etc. Police departments should be doing this and holding their employees to a high standard that's not a witch hunt that's common sense.

If you are a member of a violent gang or are too racist to police justly you are too dangerous to employ as a cop. Not looking for and removing these people is intentionally turning a blind eye to the extreme danger they present to people in their communities.

Because just calling for it does nothing. It’s clear that a top-down approach would be much more effective at solving systemic racism in law enforcement than a bottom-up one. The racists get witch-hunted and fired? Good. People being scared to be overtly racist is a good thing.

you know the goal is to deradicalize people, right?

When the East German police force was dissolved, its employees were allowed to apply for positions in the new police force (though without a guarantee of a position). Except for those with ties to the Stasi, who were barred. There is precedent for such an approach, and at least in that case it seems to have largely worked.

was this preceded by mass social and economic unrest and presided over by a government half the population views as illegitimate? good governance can bring the country back together, crackdowns, purges and retaliation will create the monster that you think is already there.

> was this preceded by mass social and economic unrest

Is this a joke?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain#Fall_of_the_Iron_...

If the goal is to deradicalize then getting the radicals out of the police force seems like a great starting point, no?

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That is not allowed here, regardless of your politics, because it destroys the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The FBI and DOJ already know the extent of Right Extremist sympathy in local law enforcement[0]

[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...

If you think being against white supremacy is “far left”, you might be a little too far to the right.

You've been using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys the curious conversation that this site exists for.

When I looked back through your account history trying to find examples of using the site as intended, rather than political flamewar, I ran across https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25626137 instead. That's not a political flamewar comment, but it still breaks the site guidelines badly. I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you do, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us some reason to believe it.

You don't see the irony of censoring a leftie in a thread that complains about the right getting censored by a 'left-wing witch hunt' do you?

I have had plenty of interesting debates on here; when it comes to politics however, HN has a certain bias and an ideological blind spot. The narrative that the left is censoring everybody while you have Republican legislators passing this[1] is laughable, yet the narrative persists because it's not being challenged.

I do try to see the other side[2] when I think it makes sense. Playing victim of the left while a right-wing mob just stormed the Capitol is not one of these times, sorry.

The cynic in me thinks this is what YC wants; it promotes the sort of thinking on which VC thrives. I have little reason to believe otherwise. There's few people on HN challenging these narratives and now there's even fewer.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...

2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691631

This is a better-than-average reply to a we've-banned-you. I appreciate that and will try to respond.

I didn't consider your ideological preference when banning you. It would be the same if you were arguing for the opposite side, so no, I don't see any irony—the logic seems boringly straightforward. Sometimes I don't even know what ideological preference an account has—it turns out if you do something often enough, you can train yourself to mask out those bits.

Claims of "bias and ideological blind spot" about HN are legion, but they're wildly contradictory. The people you disagree with make just as impassioned claims about how overrun HN is with bias in favor of your side. I could give you so, so many links...

I totally get how a cynic would trace this back to YC's business interests, and there actually is a chain that connects HN moderation to that, but it's different than the one you imagine. Here's how we actually think about this: the way to maximize HN's value to YC is to maximize how interesting it is to the community [1]. I know it might be hard to believe, but it's that simple. It's a rare treat to get to work on a problem where you literally only need to optimize for one thing and you know what it is [2].

The neat thing is that you can imagine this motivation to be as sinister and greedy and evil as you like, and it's still awesome. If YC owns the leading place on the internet for good hackers to gratify their intellectual curiosity...that is crazy valuable [3]. Why would we manipulate HN for any other purpose? That would be stupid—it would lose us the good will of the community, which is the entire thing. Whichever way you slice this problem, YC's interests are aligned with keeping this community happy. It's a fortunate historical accident that we ended up in this position, and personally I feel grateful for that (because it allows me to do this job without much conflict of interest) and am pretty fierce about protecting it.

The things we ban accounts for—like snark, flamewar, attacking other users, ideological and political battle—are what causes a forum like HN to get less intellectually interesting. That's why we don't want flamewars. It's not a moral or an ethical point. It's just that flamewars are boring. They feel like they aren't boring, for a while, but that's an illusion—it confuses high-activation with curiosity, and in reality those two are mutually exclusive. Once the anger and trauma have vented themselves, there's nothing left, and people are left feeling bitter and disconnected from each other—hardly a condition in which to playfully explore the world.

I don't mean to imply that the things you care about and are fighting for don't matter. They do matter, and that's true of the others as well. But this is an optimization problem. Our job is to keep HN interesting. Scorched earth is not interesting [4]. Therefore we have to ban accounts that take this place in that direction.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] I'm not saying HN is good at it—I wish it were better. The point is that the niche is so valuable that anything else YC might do to try to squeeze value out of it would be dumb. Also, it's all relative: if the rest of the internet descends into flames and HN can manage to remain interesting, its value grows. We're basically in an outrun-the-bear joke.

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

You don't have to be right or left wing to call out hypocracy, especially if there's historical precedence.

The hypocrisy is that the US has and is supporting 'which hunts' all over the globe, which the right largely supports. Perhaps it's just that it's also starting to come back home now.

Is the right-wing not against white supremacy?

> Is the right-wing not against white supremacy?

Appeal to white supremacists to attempt to build a winning coalition has been a core GOP strategy for more than a half century; that part of the right-wing that isn't itself white supremacist relies on support from white supremacists to advance their agenda. (To be fair, that was true of the Democratic Party instead of the GOP from the founding until the 1960s, but for a couple of breaches between the extreme racists and the rest of the party that were usually healed in short order. White supremacy has always been a powerful enough force in America that it's always been a significant influence on at least one major party.)

I truly, truly do not understand. We know far right extremists have infiltrated law enforcement agencies. We know many people who participated in the terrorist attack on the Capitol were in law enforcement. We know even some of the uniformed officers were fraternizing with and aiding the terrorists. These are facts.

Why on earth would we not try to detect and remove these people from law enforcement agencies?

because that is literally how you create a trained insurgency.

Many countries have had to prune their police forces of extremists. East Germany, Northern Ireland, South Africa... Generally, the negative consequences of this have been minor and manageable; it's a path already well-trodden.

Germany in 2019: https://m.dw.com/en/neo-nazi-scandal-hits-german-elite-milit...

That's absolutely a real and serious issue, but it's a separate issue to the dissolution and reform of the East German police during unification, which didn't lead to a communist insurgency.

I completely agree, 2 separate issues, one was successfully finished, as there are no new Stasi members joining the police ranks - but the other issue is ever present. I think there should be "radicalization" checks for any people in position of power (Police/Military), and if they don't uphold the values of the country anymore, they should be let go from their jobs.

Even if that's what would happen (and I don't think it is), an insurgency is better than those people being authorized agents of the state. Better of two bad alternatives, but deradicalization of in-power authorities while they still hold power is an impossibly tall order.

Do we know that? Or is it just propaganda to manipulate us? Because it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

As for the mass infiltration of law enforcement by far right extremists, both official agencies such as the FBI and independent investigators have produced copious evidence and all reached that conclusion.

As for law enforcement involvement in the terrorist attack on the capitol, there are plenty of videos. Law enforcement agencies around the country have also disclosed that some of their officers were involved, which seems like an odd thing to fabricate.

So yes. We know that.

I'm not at all interested in mob justice (going in either direction). But still, comparing this idea to McCarthyism is sneaking toward Godwin's Law territory.

There's a pretty big gulf between a relatively abstract set of political and economic opinions, and an ideology that views some groups of people as sub-human and inherently criminal, and specifically seeks to disenfranchise them. One can quite reasonably make the case that individuals who hold opinions along those lines are temperamentally incapable of protecting and serving their community. Their whole community.

The Chicago Public Library had a gallery documenting victims of torture by the Chicago Police Department. Plenty of photographs, making it quite clear that it was almost exclusively a thing that White cops did to Black and Latinx citizens. It's hard to see how we as a society can hope to eliminate state-committed atrocities like that if we're not even willing to weed the ideology that produces them out of the paramilitary wings of our local governments.

Are you saying white supremacy is just another political ideology in the marketplace of ideas? Because I don’t believe that. White supremacists must be removed from all law agencies. And they are usually pretty public about their white supremacy on their facebooks.

So you believe that the crowd protesting and at the Capitol were all white supremacists?

Well, the people wearing "6MWE" and other anti-semitic tshirts certainly were.

We were discussing the infiltration of white supremacists in law enforcement. Not sure what your question is getting at in regard to that discussion.

Indeed, I read the GP hastily.

I'm sure if you went and asked them if they were racist, most of them would not claim to be. But, considering that the stated purpose of the protest is founded on the continued belief that the only possible explanation for Trump's election loss was a epic-scale government conspiracy, we're not exactly dealing with a group of people whose beliefs about the state of things are easy to reconcile with reality.

Speaking on a more macro scale, the movement that produced that protest and this insurrection is so transparently rooted in racism, with roots going back at least as far as the Southern Strategy, that we're now to the point that trying to apologize for them is, at the absolute best, an act of petty denialism.

Funny how you suddenly supposedly have sympathy for the victims of McCarthyism while the right is still today calling anyone left of the far right a communist marxist.