>If you didn't believe your views mattered, you wouldn't bother to post here.

lol wut? Not parent poster, but I post here precisely because I know my views don't matter. This is idle chitchat with people in a similar line of work. There were a few times I've actually had something to say, and you can bet your ass I didn't post it on Hacker News.

Ok? That's you, and I'll take your word for it. But you aren't the one who is very energetically engaged in an extended argument about what constitutes acceptable political dialog in various spheres.

But even taking you at your word, I think you're wrong. You clearly believe the view you're promoting here, and it's obviously important to you to contradict me, important enough to spend both your time and mine on it. There are a million ways you could spend your idle time, and it's not an accident that you picked this one over the other 999,999 options.

Why the fuck were @wpietri's perfectly valid comments above[1] flagged and/or downvoted to death? It's not like they were advocating either rabid racism or even rampant-PC anti-racism[2] -- they were just stating the rather inoffensive and uncontroversial[3] opinion that not speaking out on something isn't just "neutral" but actually supporting the status quo.

@dang, please un-deadify those if you can. (Yeah, I know: Don't argue about downvotes, yadda yadda. But also: Don't abuse flagging, right? So sometimes, in order to point out the latter, you have to do the former.)

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[1]: i.e. not this one, but the grandparent and great-great-grandparent (or thereabouts).

[2]: Just to take the most inflammatory examples that came immediately to mind.

[3]: And, at least AFAICS, factually true.