Just to give you an idea, you could have easily undermined the argument that reaction to Snowden's revelation was a societal shrug.
a) Your strawman, who is apparently comfortable without privacy from the government, but does support free speech so they can be racist?
b) The guy who replies to a comment advocating for privacy by derailing the discussion with an inflammatory post, seemingly forgetting that the patriot act had bipartisan support, and in an ironic twist, also presents an anti-free speech position which demonstrates they themselves lack the integrity to defend civil liberties.
But yeah if you can keep the distance and express calmly the contempt for some people go ahead, they had a lot of reasonable people in the ignavi circle of dantes inferno, I see that as italian
I dont know but to me look weird to talk nicely as upper class “hello my dear, have you by any chance read about today’s violation of human rights, have you got a calm idea?”
But you're also making an important point here and I don't want you to feel like it hasn't been heard.
I agree with you that emotions are important and need to be given a place. HN's rules are definitely not about constraining everybody into a starched, repressed state. The big question is how to express emotions in a way that leads to more curious, respectful conversation and not to a flamewar in which people just get mad and rush to defend their side and bash the other side.
This is an open question—it's not something that we've figured out yet as a community or a culture or in terms of moderation. But here's my current take, FWIW.
It's much better if you express your emotion explicitly as something you are feeling. If you directly share what you're actually feeling, that will make your comment more interesting to other people and make it less likely to sound like an attack on others.
Many people (including me) have a hard time doing this, so instead of saying openly how we feel, we encode it into a statement about a thing, an idea, or another person—and then we get our emotion in through the "back door" by packing as much intensity as we can into our language. Sound familiar? That's how much internet discourse works.
This feels safer because it makes you less vulnerable, but it's a recipe for internet disaster because people will get triggered by the intensity rather than receiving your actual meaning—and to be fair, it's not their fault, because you didn't really give them a chance.
* For past explanations on this point see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You may not owe wastes of sperm better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
(Edit: I appreciate that you downregulated this in your replies to other users - I'm sure that prevented the thread from turning hellish.)
As between someone who says I really don’t care if they know I use Viagra, wear size 13 shoes and like guacamole, and someone worried about a knock on the door for child porn, I can tell you who probably needs to spend some time with a professional on their personal problems.
Now everyone that respects privacy feels like they're alone. And all the broken people have a target to bash, to feel better about themselves. I'm talking about the folks using "I don't need privacy, because I have nothing to hide (this means I'm better than you)" to avoid facing their personal problems.
The main problem of the situation we're finding ourselves in is this: How can you dispute information obtained this way? Reporting this: https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2021... ..is what gets you arrested for child porn possession. This man was snatched from his home without a warrant. The last remaining journalists, still working in this environment, took note. Make no mistake. The original story from Rolling stone magazine has been removed. Of course the people that followed the story closely, looked the other way in fear of being accused of supporting pedophilia. There was no outrage.