I can't believe another commenter got flagged for replying 'cancelled' to this.

TBH I wasn't sure what the commenter was trying to communicate. That she had been cancelled? That she should be cancelled? I definitely wouldn't have flagged such a comment, but I would agree that it wasn't exactly adding to the discourse.

It seemed like a tongue in cheek joke about people projecting that women are strong(like south park style joke I guess) and if you say they are not..you are cancelled? I dunno, I appreciate humor, but yeah that was swift admin action on that.

I think the vast majority of flagging is by regular HNers (with some karma threshold), not admins.

I try not to make too many jokes on HN. They have to be very clearly funny and/or very spot-on to survive HN's this-isn't-reddit ethos, which seems to be pretty strictly enforced.

My anecdotal experience is jokes/poorly supported takes get downvotes.

If you want to get flagged, the best way to do that is to make an irrefutable strong argument that ruffles political or economic feathers of a popular ideology on HN. There's nothing that enrages people here more than an unpopular but sound argumen they don't like, so they flag it to make it go away. If they can quickly disprove you or make you to look an idiot, they'll downvote rather than flag so that everyone can see their moral or intellectual superiority in the full thread.

Please link examples.

I found various examples of notch making "ancap" arguments and getting flagged. They're examples of comments getting flagged due to their expression of unpopular viewpoints, although frankly they were lacking in quality argumentation so they're not the greatest examples of his point.

> They have to be very clearly funny and/or very spot-on to survive HN's this-isn't-reddit ethos

I downvote jokes even if they are funny, and it is (partly) the "HN-isn't-reddit" methos. Reddit has so much noise-to-signal that it's not particularly valuable. It's like junkfood.

HN is better because every comment (per the official rules) is supposed to be substantial. Jokes that are funny but not satirical or insightful aren't substantial in my opinion.

(I should also say that I often find reddit to be hilarious, but that's not what I'm looking for when I come here.)

I think the flagged commenter was probably thinking of the quote in terms of a framing related to trans people.

Most of the time, comments that don't add anything of substance to the conversation get downvoted or flagged at HN.

Seems like a very unclear and incredibly low value comment to me... :shrug:

Or for better or worse, saying that black lives matter.

It's really amazing that both Thatcher and Reagan came to power at around the same time, delivered such fabulous witticisms, and caused very similar societal harm.

Not really. They delivered exactly what the biggest demographic group at the time wanted. Which is... Exactly what you expect in a democracy with a particularly large voter bloc...

Not that shocking. Both the UK and US had suffered under economic policies that didnt deliver.

Not shocking the voters wanted something different.

Didn't deliver!? That's an absurd claim.

Not really. Carter didnt talk about the “general malaise” just for fun.

The economy was pretty much in the dumpster for most of the 70’s in both countries.

Not unusual for the old guard to be turfed out when that happens.

UK before Tatcher was a depressed society with stagflation, rising crimes, crumbling infrastructure; that couldn't even clean its own streets. It was a society completely hamstrung by old unions that would happily collapse the economy in face of global competition, as long as their jobs gave the same pay - nominally.

Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason.

Honestly, I'm not an economist, even worse I was not a fully functioning and critical thinking adult before the Thatcher era, you could well be right but I find it really hard to believe.

For example the UK has also had subsequent Conservative victories for the last 12 years or so but every single argument made in 2010 about their approach has been proven true. To the detriment of every person in the UK.

So it doesn't necessarily follow in my eyes that an election win means that what you're doing is the right thing, only that you are popular and you can convince people you will do something to help them.

I can't argue with you on the recent Conservative track record, they're a pale shadow of the party they once were. The only thing that's saved them is that Labour under Corbyn was plainly, obviously such an utter catastrophe in the making the Cons couldn't help looking good.

There certainly was an aspect of that back in the 80s. In the early years Labour was lead by Michael Foot, basically a likeable version of Corbyn but just as unelectable. But then, the Labour Party back then was properly Marxist and had actually pushed forward a programme of nationalisation and unionisation that worked out about as well as you'd expect.

The most egregious example of waste was the coal industry, hence the strikes. The tax payer was subsidizing coal to the tune of £1.3 billion a year which was real money back then, just under 1% of total national GDP, not including the increased costs to power and steel industries that were prevented from using cheaper alternatives. When the mining union leader Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.” That's what we were dealing with. That's just coal, but swathes of industry had been nationalised and was a horrible rotting carcass of waste and losses dragging the country down. Reforming that lot was incredibly painful but it had to be done.

Maggie is generally portrayed as being incredibly unpopular, and the way she was lampooned by a generation of up coming British comics was cruel though frankly hilarious, but she won resounding election victory after victory. The economy she built transformed the country into the modern nation it is today. Notably when Blair and Brown brought in a Labour government in 1997 they changed essentially nothing substantive because her reforms palpably worked. All the proposed changes reverting Britain towards a statist socialist economic agenda were quietly shelved and never talked about agin until Corbyn came along.

Since then Conservatism on both sides of the pond has suffered an appalling moral and intellectual collapse. The conservative and republican parties are mocking parodies of their former selves. Back in the 80s there were serious, major economic and social problems that desperately needed fixing and economic liberalism had the answers. Nowadays that's just not even vaguely controversial, instead the focus of the right has shifted towards damaging reactionary dog whistle issues like culture wars and blind nationalism. That tendency has always been there, but now it's all they have.

>"The conservative and republican parties are mocking parodies of their former selves. Back in the 80s there were serious, major economic and social problems that desperately needed fixing and economic liberalism had the answers. Nowadays that's just not even vaguely controversial, instead the focus of the right has shifted towards damaging reactionary dog whistle issues like culture wars and blind nationalism. "

The conservatives of the 80's had a problem to solve, stagflation, inefficient socialism, big state. Neo-liberalism solved those problems, but created new ones.

The conservatives today have another problem to solve, mass immigration, rampant crime, loss of sovereignty and ability to reform to foreign bureaucracy, dependency on foreign manufacturing, etc.

Part of these problems are residues of the same economic neo-liberalism that was enacted in the 80s. Reagans immigration act and Thatcher's neo-liberalism saved society from the socialist dystopia, but over time it has thrown society in a neo-liberalist dystopia that few people like, beside the elites.

The conservatives have moved on to new, real problems. You seem stuck in the past.

Where we differ is I just don’t see any of the problems you list as actual problems. I’m in favour of immigration, it does us a lot of good which is why conservative policies actually encourage it, and illegal immigration is a tiny fraction of it overall. Crime rates are down significantly from the 80s. Even in the EU we had all the sovereignty we could ever need, and negotiated opt outs of huge swathes of regulation we decided wasn’t for us.

A friend of mine tried that line about manufacturing on me a few years ago and I asked him what kind of factory he wanted his so. To work in when he grew up. He looked at me as though I’d just shot his dog. We don’t need factory jobs, we’ve git near full employment anyway. That’s why we need immigration to solve our demographic issues with our ageing population. We’ve got plenty of jobs much higher up the value chain, the main problems are around training and education.

If you can't see that immigration is having a negative impact, which so many voters perceive, then yes you have a minority perspective. Crime in the UK is so bad in some areas that Ukrainian refugees were shocked.

They perceive what the media tell them, not what’s actually happening, because fear and xenophobia sells newspapers. On average immigrants are younger, more law abiding, more likely to be employed, consume fewer benefits and make less use of health care than native born Britons. Also Britons who live in areas with large immigrant populations are the least concerned about immigration.

As for the crime rate the perception is divorced from reality, I’ll quote from Wikipedia: “The United Kingdom's crime rate remains relatively low when compared to the rest of the world, especially among first world countries.” Our crime rate is a fraction of that in Ukraine before the war. Their murder rate is three times ours.

> Also Britons who live in areas with large immigrant populations are the least concerned about immigration.

Maybe if you define immigrants with passports as Britons. There's a reason why the BNP, British National Party, won the two seats they ever won in counties most affected by immigration. This effect would also be exact opposite of that in Sweden, which is intriguing, because here the sub-urb ghettos are split between social democrats, which the immigrants vote for, and the nationalists, which the few non-immigrants left vote for.

The fact that you are trying to argue that areas affected are the least concerned, when the case is exactly the opposite across Europe; says a lot about your "reality". Modern leftists are a scourge.

Modern leftism has certainly lost it's way, and frankly so has a lot of the right. I say that as a life long conservative voter. I'm that odd combination, both an economic and a cultural liberal.

Thatcher is what I like to call a "Marmite politician": either you absolutely loved her, or absolutely hated her. She was a politician of her time, by which I mean she was exactly the politician we needed at the time that we needed it. I doubt that any other politician could have achieved what she did in the UK. Everybody else would be too willing to compromise.

As someone who was born at the start of the 70's, I think you really had to live through the 70's and early 80's to realise how bleak it was. And I say this as someone who grew up on mostly free school meals, had their phone cut off for non-payment etc.

> Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason.

Arguably the reason was the war, not domestic policy [0]

[0] https://history.com/news/margaret-thatcher-falklands-war

You're downvoted but I don't think you're wrong. In general it seems to be the case that if you're waging a war and you're not getting completely crushed the electorate (or at least the "undecided" voters") tends to rally around whoever happens to be in charge. And indeed I think it's fairly safe to say that most agree that Thatcher benefitted electorally from a strong response to the invasion.

I should add that as a Scot I'm definitely not a fan of hers (you just grow up there knowing "Thatcher Bad") but I'm not quite at "put a stake through her heart and garlic round her neck"[0] :)

[0] - https://twitter.com/halaljew/status/1294414600566382598

Gulf war didn't save Senior Bush from the bad-economy, neither did the Iraq War help Tony Blair's popularity.

It's a lot more complex than war-helps-current-leader, at least outside the US. It depends on the war and the context.

Fair point, these are actually great counterexamples

They are. That war is also unusual in that it was an attack on a country far away that wasn’t a threat to the US or UK, and there was little to be gained.

It was a strange time.

I think that was the reason for one of them, certainly. But then she and our armed forces did a tremendous job in reclaiming the Falklands from a fascist dictatorship.

Nothing in that article indicates that the war overshadowed her domestic policy, both contributed to her success.

It is, and neither more neo-liberalism nor socialism is the answer.

So that’s how flag waving nationalism and Brexit came to be tried.

It's not over yet, we're yet to see the how the opposite of mass immigration multiculturalism affects a european nation too. Jusging by Sweden and Germany who has applied it the most, it is and ending that goes "no more please"

> UK before Tatcher was a depressed society with stagflation

Hardly a problem local to Britain, and hardly something Thatcher solved. It was a crisis that also passed in countries that did not elect viciously anti-state, anti-working class governments.

> crumbling infrastructure; that couldn't even clean its own streets

Bit of an exaggeration, and I'm not sure how Maggie "Minimal State" Thatcher has supposedly helped with that.

> Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason

If it weren't for the Falklands she would have been a one term president.

I wouldn't call defeating communism and winning the Cold War "societal harm".

"Defeating communism" like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AfPFlWnww8

No, by outspending them militarily, encouraging Solidarity in Poland, and forcing Gobarchev to realise the inevitable.

Encouraging Solidarity in Poland was the right call, but it's not likely that different leaders would have opposed it.

"Neither the strong nor the weak version of the proposition that American defense spending bankrupted the Soviet economy and forced an end to the Cold War is sustained by the evidence."

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/foreign/reagr...

I hardly think you can expect an unbiassed opinion from Gorbachev.

I expect Gorbachev to be wildly biased, which is why I don't attach much credence to his statements.

It is funny that all the Experts (TM) have been talking for years how the USSR was an unbeatable giant with colossal strength that can not be defeated and Americans need to seek friendship with them and learn to live alongside them and learn to respect the choice of people in all the communist countries. In fact, the Democrats went the further along this road, actually requesting help from Andropov to fight Reagan (yes, that happened, look it up). Until Reagan came and... the mighty USSR is no more. The Eastern Europe is free. Then The Experts shrugged and proclaimed that it collapsed by itself, through forces of nature that any learned man would easily predict and that they can easily explain, and nothing Reagan did has anything to do with it. Of course.

Fabulous witticisms is usually take down of someone or something that is hard to argue against, but rarely actually factually correct. People who deploy it are arguing by emotion and insult, which would explain why they are also people capable to cause a lot of societal harm.

"Fabulous witticisms" feels good to listener and is funny, because it validates what people want to hear. It is rarely actually correct or actually correctly describes world.

I think you need to hear better comedians. The best ones are funny and accurate.

One thing I noticed is that political thinking tends to come in waves. Not just for countries individually, but globally. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, but each age seems to have its own zeitgeist in the world's collective consciousness.

Currently, for example, there is Wokeism in general, with particular emphasis on transgenderism. Transgenderism only "affects" a very small percentage of the population, nobody paid it any mind a decade ago, and yet today it's a thing.

Isn’t this just evidence of the Overton Window? The amount of promotion needed to push any particular cause is significantly lower than people intuit. And following on from this, once that cause has hit the mainstream, the amount of coverage it gets leads to people further overestimating its true significance. After that point it just snowballs

I think what we’ve discovered is that, thanks to the Internet, that’s a strategy that’s significantly easier to employ than ever before. In the past ups at least need to have mainstream media outlets onboard. Nowadays you can do that with a hashtag

Or Tywin Lannister's "Any man who must say, 'I am the King', is no true king."

Well, how does that apply to Zelensky talking to the Azov Battalion in 2019 then?

"Denis, listen, I am president of this country, I am 42"

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1510419008457039874

You do know that that video is from the TV COMEDY show Servant of the People, where he plays the role of a Ukrainian president BEFORE he was actually elected president?

I don't. I have other some clips that were actually used illegitimately from that context. It is possible and I'd be happy to look at your source if you provide it. But it is worth noting that it is indeed confirmed that leaders of the right did indeed tell Zelensky that they would hang him should he actually try to demilitarize the conflict zone long before the breakdown of communication and acceleration of hostilities in 2022.

Quick! Bury and flag the original comment, you know, before people start thinking! ;)

You need a source beyond the video being obviously choreographed? Do you think real-life interactions are filmed that way?

I appreciate all the flags, but why is wrong to ask for sources? What isn't choreographed about that president? He has multiple US based PR consultants, there's a behind the scenes for his AR addresses[1], they had a vogue photo shoot[2] all in the middle of a war.

They played air raid sirens for Biden[3], after Biden got assurances from the Kremlin for his visit[4], all the while even CNN reporters said that there were no signs of any strikes.

Why not just providing sources instead of slandering people that ask for them? Even if the person above is right, asking for sources and providing is the correct behaviour in an adult conversation on a platform that prides itself to be full of scientists.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zckV1bYrGdQ

[2] https://www.vogue.com/article/portrait-of-bravery-ukraines-f...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfaCc1feMaM

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/20/how-biden-pu...

It isn't wrong to ask for sources, but I shouldn't have to provide sources for obvious claims. You can find your own source too. Or not. Up to you.

Anyway, I'm not replying to all your other crap, but you should check yourself b/c you're really buying into some obvious BS here.