Yeah, I don't think I've seen such an incoherent attempt to ban someone from having an opinion. It's on a level with saying you can't disapprove of Harold Shipman until you've got a medical degree.

Presumably we all have to spend the rest of our lives running around getting various professional qualifications and careers, just so that we can have opinions on utterly generic moral questions which happen to be faced by someone with that degree.

Indeed - apparently my Trump bashing was "unqualified", so I now have to go and run for President, get elected, be President for 4 years, and then I can start bashing him.

There are some other things on that todo list ('rape first wife', 'cheat on pregnant third wife with pornstar', 'publicly blame your failed business on a dead man before his funeral had even taken place', 'send deranged tweets to Kim Jong Un while on cough medicine and alprazolam') but you'll get to them ;)

But nah, seriously, I don't know how some people can say such absolutely witless stuff, and still see fit to click 'send'. I think they are just nonplussed that not everyone else has the same Ubermensch ethic as they do, where anyone sufficiently rich or accomplished is exempted from the moral requirements incumbent on normal human beings.

They worship them, to put it simply - the rich and powerful - and they don't understand & can't process that not everyone else does.

Exactly.

I'm not a Facebook user, mostly because of the vast and repeated privacy violations they've committed in the past (not to mention their monopoly behaviors and political influencing, etc.) - but because I don't run/own/fund any similar monopolistic entity, I'm essentially forbidden from even talking about it??

Another is ClearView AI (oh look, another Thiel-funded thing!) - I oppose the existence of that company based on their entire business model being the abuse of people's information without consent, and how they expect you to cancel yourself to prevent being abused by them [1]. But according to some people [2], anyone that hasn't been abusing people's privacy cannot have an opinion on ClearView AI's actions [3], until you actually do so yourself [4], otherwise you're just "posturing" [4][5].

Yeah, great logic!

> They worship them, to put it simply - the rich and powerful - and they don't understand & can't process that not everyone else does.

What's worse are the ones that go out of their way to justify or even apologize their behavior (not unlike those part of a certain political cult right now).

[1] https://app.clearview.ai/privacy/deindex

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Kranar

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858726

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858764

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858663

Yeah, it's an absurd claim. And of course it never applies to their own hagiographic opinions of these people and these companies - it only invalidates critics. Handy! Who wants to be the one to tell the Holocaust historians?

And yeah, ClearView is absolutely typical. I'm not going to genuflect to some seasteading-obsessed professed libertarian whose entire business career, practically, has been in the realm of surveillance companies targeted at the bloated and despotic American state. Not even if you wrap it in some cod-philosophy blog post that namedrops Bayesian probability and game theory and Taleb.