jnbiche (u/jnbiche) - Readit News

jnbiche commented on Pompeo tells Congress Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China axios.com/pompeo-hong-kon... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

sizzle · 6 years ago

That's a big claim, please provide some sources if you are to be believed otherwise it's just unsubstantiated fear mongering

jnbiche · 6 years ago

So the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct headquarters was just overrun, weapons seized, and burned down by hundreds of citizens. National Guard and SWAT are en route.

Are you still so sure about the idea of internal civil strife being "unsubstantiated fear mongering"?

And by the way, race-based civil conflict is only a small part of the structural problems I'm worried about. There are multiple deeper, more dangerous threats on the horizon.

For example, are you sure that Trump will peacefully vacate the office if he loses the election? If not, what exactly do you think will happen then?

Finally, not that this matters a whole lot to me, but to provide you with "substantiation" that you may accept, many mainstream media outlets have covered this in detail in the past year or two. Here are just a couple, Google keywords such as "US civil war 2" (just "civil war" turns up Avengers stuff) and "boogaloo" for more mainstream media coverage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-america-talk-turn...

https://www.macleans.ca/society/america-is-deeply-divided-an...

jnbiche commented on Pompeo tells Congress Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China axios.com/pompeo-hong-kon... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

cmurf · 6 years ago

Even during the U.S. civil war, it was possible to avoid violence, for the most part. Sherman's rampage, once he decided to take the war to the people... I'm not sure what percent of death and destruction that represents. The photos of the aftermath though are remarkable. Still, most folks avoided it.

jnbiche · 6 years ago

Modern warfare is very different than war 150 years ago. Look at Bosnia and Syria for typical examples.

And before you say: oh, they're different from us, remember that Sarajevo was a modern city that hosted the winter Olympics 8 years before brutal war broke out. Most of its citizens thought the idea of war happening was absolutely preposterous, until it wasn't.

jnbiche commented on Pompeo tells Congress Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China axios.com/pompeo-hong-kon... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

carapace · 6 years ago

War with Mexico?

jnbiche · 6 years ago

No, no. Internal civil strife.

jnbiche commented on Pompeo tells Congress Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China axios.com/pompeo-hong-kon... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

splintercell · 6 years ago

Who do you think would be rioting? Pro-Brexit people or Anti-Brexit people?

jnbiche · 6 years ago

That question depends on how Brexit goes, doesn't it?

jnbiche commented on Pompeo tells Congress Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China axios.com/pompeo-hong-kon... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

hopfscotch · 6 years ago

There is political violence on the horizon in the US. I would not come here. I'm looking for a way out myself.

jnbiche · 6 years ago

I agree. I'm surprised more HNers aren't aware of this potential. To be clear, I condemn those pushing us toward political violence, but it has a decent chance of arriving in the next 6-12 months even.

jnbiche commented on Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity wikimediafoundation.org/n... · Posted by u/elsewhen

dang · 6 years ago

The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Don't forget that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.

The biggest factor, though, is that Hacker News is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in large internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.

People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts, it's in a context where conflict is somewhat expected, such as a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends is quoting indignantly (a la "can you believe so-and-so said this"). Then you can bond with your friends about how bad something is.

The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of them, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.

This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?

Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions in a bottle.

This "non-siloed" nature of HN leads to deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness that she was willing to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.

This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].

It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.

Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite of that. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the "orange site" sucks.

I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.

HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring (conflicting) parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.

I know it sounds strange and grandiose, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.

[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.

jnbiche · 6 years ago

I appreciate this comment and mostly agree with the contents of it. But I take exception with the use of words like "evil", "monsters", etc.

I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.

I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.

If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.

I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.

And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.

(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).

By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.