Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. This is beyond the pale.

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

you are insane

Posting like this will get you banned to HN regardless of how bad someone else's comment is. Please follow the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

An insult is not an argument. Go back to twitter.

Posting like this will get you banned to HN regardless of how bad someone else's comment is. Please follow the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

That sounds terrible. If you want to punish someone, just say they raped you, and put up with a month's worth of prison. And also, genuine rape victims will be sent to prison, to top up their already ghastly experience.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

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

Out of all your replies this one hurts the most. I did not post it troll or cause flamewars, but because I thought it was a novel and while not self-evidently beneficial, could at least plausibly work. I wanted to have a serious discussion of pros and cons. And I think that I, sasha and kjeetgill had a productive and curious conversation.

It's not accurate to imagine that HN (or any sufficiently large internet forum) could have a "serious discussion of pros and cons" of imprisoning rape victims. For every user who might entertain that as a disembodied thought experiment there are countless more who will react with physical aversion, entirely understandably. As for "productive and curious", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26501428 (or much worse) is the statistical outcome of a provocation like that.

> If you want to punish someone, just say they raped you, and put up with a month's worth of prison.

I'm not sure that is necessarily a problem. If someone is willing to suffer in prison to get revenge, then there must be some kind of serious grievance behind it. They say "an armed society is a polite society", and this kind of double edged sword might just lead to a more polite society. It becomes a formalized way of taking vigilante justice basically.

This is just a very short rabbit hole to paying someone else to spend a month in jail for you.

That's a fair point. I suppose that just like paying a thug to beat your enemy up, you would have to make the transaction illegal and hope you can make it sufficiently uncommon that it's not a problem.