> can you honestly not understand the dangers of the path you're going down?

I downvoted you, and I consider your question here hyperbolic. I don't think you are being disingenuous, I believe that you sincerely hold your belief, I just view your concerns as a modern day Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling. I've looked at the same set of data and come to different conclusions than you.

I don't think we'll see eye to eye, and I don't think it's likely we'll convince each other of anything, so I don't know how worthwhile this comment even is, but I thought I'd pass it along as a "Here's one reason why people might be downvoting you and here's how you are being perceived."

Maybe that's not valuable, maybe you already know that's why people are downvoting. I dunno, it just felt like you were accusing your downvoters of not being rational actors, and I suspect your downvoters look at you the same way?

It is valuable, and I appreciate your response.

It may not surprise you to know that I fundamentally disagree with downvoting in general- I feel like there a difference between signaling "this is low quality content" and "I disagree with your point".

In HN there's no way to make that distinction, so if you want to express a viewpoint that's unpopular (which we should encourage in debate) you have to be willing to pay a karma penalty.

Please stop going on about downvoting. The guidelines specifically ask you not to.

I feel the same, actually. I'm a Marxist. I often get downvoted for mentioning something about socialism or social justice in general. I believe many of those downvotes are because the community here is not particularly fond of that ideology.

I get it. I'm not particularly fond of lots of ideologies. But I don't have tools here to differentiate between, "I disagree" and "Your comment is structurally bad (rude/breaks the rules/is low effort/etc."

I think we'd both benefit from breaking the coupling between those two reasons to downvote. (And yes, I'm aware that downvoting because you disagree is against the rules, but I don't think that stops anyone. :D )

Downvoting because of disagreement is specifically allowed here, and pretty much always has been.

You know, I could have sworn I read in the guidelines somewhere that downvotes aren't to be used just to signal that you disagree, but in diving a bit deeper I think that's just one of those things that people say, but doesn't actually ground to any specific rules/guidelines.

And in fact, an early post says the opposite -- downvoting because you disagree is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

You might be thinking of the Reddit guidelines, where this rule is famously never observed.

> Our passions are easily manipulated. When you have sacred cows and official truths, you enable the very thing you're trying to fight.

There is no arguing whether or not the Holocaust happened. That's not a debatable thing but something that affected millions of people. There are too many impressionable people on the internet and often a weak education system. How else do you suggest we prevent history from getting rewritten by a bunch of internet flashmobs?

People are going to be impressionable regardless if the current majority enforces its stance on something or not. This includes well educated and well off people like you or me a lot more than many would like to admit. In the end this is a great method for preserving the status quo but it does nothing for answering the actual question of how we can reliably chase truth it just says to trust the currently written truth - something we often find to be completely wrong or intentionally misleading throughout time and location.

A shorter version of the above might be: If a method only tells us what was undebatable is so it's not really all that great a method it just happens to be right (to the best of our knowledge according to actual methods) in the completely obvious cases like the holocaust.

As to what's a better quick answer? Well that's the million dollar question but it doesn't mean any other answer we have at the moment is inherently good.

> Violent attacks based on politics became normalized.

It's always been this way. Police/authorities around the world happily beat the piss out of protestors. This is a not a new situation; it's the way things have been since forever.

> Take a look at the "I punch Nazi's" crowd.

You ignore the whole, "I disagree with fascists, racists, and others who spread hate against people for no reason than the color of their skin. And I oppose them by publicly expressing my thoughts about them." crowd. Which is the vast majority of people.

Punching someone makes them the victim. Which is precisely why you're pretending that everyone who supports trump is getting beat up, rather than look at the truth: which is they are merely get silenced and ignored by people, and are forced to go into echo chambers to express the abhorrent thoughts because most people don't want to hear their hateful garbage.