Re:I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks
by Tainnor on Thursday March 20, 2025 @11:24AM
(#43424633)
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything specific because I understand that the problem is hard. But I feel like some people want to have their cake and eat it too. If you don't silence certain types of discourse, you alienate certain participants (and HN understands this to a degree - you can't use racial slurs here, for example). Maybe that's acceptable - but you just have to be honest about it.
It sounds like you think the problem is the wrong sort of people. But almost everybody retreats into ego defense and partisan struggle under sufficiently threatening circumstances, even though some people are habitually more prone to that kind of thing than others. It's more about minimizing the frequency of the wrong sort of circumstances.
Additionally, though I think everyone is happy that I'm not the one running the site, I have observed elsewhere that your favored "ruthless silencing" approach has some side effects you may not be anticipating.