neveroffensive

The former is probably also the majority

I think we also would disagree on the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.

for present problems, ie the practical side

I see your point here, but we can't lose sight of the big picture. Compromising in the short term, no matter how many people it might help, seems like a bad idea to me.

I believe universal justice exists. I believe you can quantify justice. I think at the end of the day you and I are both right, and both wrong. We hold utterly different perspectives on life, choice, and freedom. These may be irreconcilable. For example, I genuinely believe depression can be cured by "not being depressed".

Edit:

What if I want to live my life paycheck to paycheck? What if none of what you just described about freedom from the emotional stress of finances matters to me? What right do you have to force me to make the "right" choices and be financially responsible? Why shouldn't I be allowed to hurt myself?

Nothing you've said here is wrong. The enquirer doesn't meet the minimum standards of journalism, they are a blackmail rag. I think this could actually be proven with empirical data.

There's a difference between a correction to a flawed article and attempted blackmail though... One is an accident that can occurre in the course of good journalism, the other is something else entirely.

There is no such thing as "financial freedom". Financial freedom is a concept that arises from personal beliefs and practices.

There is only one universal freedom, the freedom of chioce. I think this is more important than any 21st century pay day lending problem. We need to preserve free choice not just for our generation/set of problems, but for all time.

Edit: Don't confuse living a long, healthy, happy life with freedom. They could not be more different.

Shouldn't the `Student` class implement `Person` here? Did I miss that in the code sample?

climate change + population growth will stress humans on the continent and increase environmental destruction

I find it interesting that population growth is discussed so little in the context of climate change. It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates. This would have a major impact on both climate change, and the depletion of the planets resources.

We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.

As a US citizen, what can we really do. I realize our country shares responsibility for climate change, but isn't a major problem here also poaching? To really solve this, wouldn't Africa have to step up and crack down locally on industry damaging the environment, and poaching?

I don't think anyone is burring their heads in the sand, we just have no power to change things here or abroad. Half of our country still thinks climate change is a hoax...

This is one of the things that turns me off Hacker News, an overly strong bias in defense of white men.

Really? I feel the exact opposite. HN is full of articles like this, singling out white men, and claiming they are somehow either toxic or the beneficiaries of privilege.

I detest gender/identity politics, and don't think claims should be leveled against an entire group based on unrelated physical traits. This is the only reason I jump to defend "white men". If an article was posted making the same claims about another race/gender I would mount the same defense. However, those kinds of articles never show up here, because the are more obviously racist.

None of these subs contained "sexual deviants".

This is the problem with using the government to enforce any kind of grey aria social issue. We all have different definitions for sexual deviants, or reasonable drug use, etc...

I'm sure the above comment has some sort of religious background, and genuinely believes people on those subs are deviants.

why is it so hard to not be a jerk to other people? That's really the essence of "being PC". Treat others with respect.

Other replies have already hit the main points of why this position doesn't really make sense. Mostly it comes down to "jerk" being a subjective term.

However, I'd take thing a step further even. Why is it a problem if someone is a jerk? As adults shouldn't we be trivially able to disregard the aspects of someones communication we deem "jerky"? Why do we consider it reasonable to escalate hostility when someone is being (what we perceive as) a jerk? "Sticks and stones my break my bones, but words will never hurt me", is an objectively true statement. Any harm done by words is self inflicted. If we use the basic, nearly automatic, capacity we have to filter communication, "jerks" aren't really a problem.

Can anyone speak to how likely it is a case like this will succeed? It seems like abuse of the court system has become more rampant, especially with the emergence of patent trolls.

How often are people able to recuperate expenses incurred while defending against a frivolous suit? How much additional legal work is required to actually seek reparations like this? Is it judged as part of the original case, or is it a separate lawsuit?

No, it's a massive statement, and I think you're being intellectually dishonest to assert it's not. The counterargument is also a huge statement, none of us are saying it's not.

The only reason the counterargument is slightly more palatable is because it conforms to Occam's Razor.

because they consciously and continuously choose to be poor is ridiculous on its face

This is a blatant straw man. We are saying they don't make wise choices for a myriad of reasons, not that they intentionally choose to be poor.

Edit:

If you make bad choices in life the end result will be poverty. That doesn't mean you chose poverty consciously.

One aspect of this will be does our indulgence of our own negative fantasies weaken our capability to act rightly when presented with a real world moral choice and does that make us culpable...or more culpable if we make a wrong choice.

It'll be really interesting to see more data come out about this. This concept is pretty much at the core of the video game violence debate which is still somewhat ongoing.

expecting that the officer is going to basically be like "Aw shucks, guess my hands are tied.

This happens more often than not depending on the nature of the relationship/ticket. Source, my Grandpa was State Patrol, and my Dad carried his business card (I don't think they had official cards back then). I saw him use it twice, and both times it work. However, he has gotten tickets out of state, so it depends on the circumstances.

In the past it was just considered professional courtesy, and only applied to very close family members (wife/son). It wasn't an official thing. You would never have "gifted" it for Christmas to anyone, and sure as hell not to a politician/someone who wasn't family.

If you're actually asserting HN doesn't censor, and wouldn't censor even more if people actually felt free to express their true opinions here, I question you're intellectual honesty.

the left should embrace free speech rights and other legal protections of rights because, due to our lack of power, the left is most likely to be subject to assaults on those rights from above.

This quote bothers me deeply. Isn't the spirit of this essentially, "free speech is good because without it my voice might not be heard, and my voice is very important".

It seems to me that many people on the left are much less rights concerned than I would have though. Can't help but feel it's because the left began to realize people they disagree with would end up with rights too, god forbid.

your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility.

The poster clearly feels there are large groups of racists on the internet. I'm trying to ascertain where they think these groups are, and exactly what they feel these groups believe. The 4chan mention was a guess.

Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem.

I stand by my question. I think the poster has misconceptions about internet culture, and wish to reach the root of them to either correct them, or my own misconceptions. You're assertion here dose not make sense to me.

Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture.

Once again, I'm trying to understand how the poster conceptualizes racism both within the context of the internet, and society as a whole.

Forgive me, but if someone is seeing pervasive racism in society I want to know where and why. I fail to see how this is me parroting a baseless meme-culture. I'm sorry if talking about skin color and crime offends you, but that is no excuse to disregard me as some sort of troll. I have a genuine desire to engage with the poster on their opinions about the nature of the internet/racism/social progress, and being dismissed in such a pedantic manner seems uncalled for.

Edit:

My larger point here is, in my experience racists are a dwindling minority. However, people have begun to conflate certain types of discussion, and forms of comedy (namely absurdist), with genuine racism. These misconceptions are leading them to feel that the internet is somehow heavily racist. True racism is a serious issue, and deserves a heavy handed response. We need to be careful that the racism we point out is true racism, not just an opinion we disagree with, or a joke we don't find funny.

I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

Why even bother banning them. This just silences the opinion, which technically could still be valid. I'm sure at some points in history gay and civil rights activists would have been the ones getting banned.

I agree about the down-voting, but I truly feel we need to stop babying people in regard to controversial opinions. If you can't reject and ignore a blatantly racist and unfounded opinion, I'd argue you shouldn't be participating in discussions of any kind. This seems like a fundamental skill necessary to coexist in human society.

Edit:

I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to participate in discussion if you get angry and offended by an opinion. This is totally fine. However, if you need someone to step in and hold guns/ban hammers to peoples heads to exist, maybe the problem isn't with society, but with you.

It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...

I don't really understand this sentiment. If we admit that we all hold beliefs that could be wrong, isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom? The radical freedom of the internet isn't a result of a set of beliefs, it's the result of evicting belief and allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit.

We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened.

I think you're wrong here. The world is becoming an exponentially more peaceful and tolerant place in my experience. There is still a vocal minority which gets attention thanks to the open platform, but the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science. Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010? In what ways?

It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.

Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism? What large anonymous groups do you believe consist of genuine racists? Do you consider me a racist if I make the statement, "more crime in America is committed by people with dark skin, relatively", even if I make no attempt to suggest a correlation or reason for this statistic?

You are apparently not allowed to think differently, which is sort of ironic, coming from the birthplace of Apple.

I hate to be "that guy", talking about the "normies" invading his favorite community, but I feel like this is essentially what happened in tech. The shear value of the industry has mandated the involvement of more conventional groups. It's no longer a space of cold logical computer nerds, emotion and ideology has crept in.

My main point is, I don't think that the innovators, or the "different thinking" is gone at all, it's just been overwhelmed by the cookie cutter college intellectuals we churn out these days. I mean lets face it a College education isn't what it used to be...

I'm not trying to say that computer nerds are somehow smarter than other people, or that College grads today are idiots. My College GPA alone would suggest I'm the idiot. I'm more talking about the death of cold logic, doing whats effective, and living ones own life, which seemed to be the mantra of the old school libertarian "big thinkers".

And yes, I do hate myself for using the term "normies". I'm washing my keyboard with bleach as we speak.

Perhaps in your case, a little introspection will reveal an "us" vs "them" attitude which you already hold.

Sure, it's self referential to an extent, but it's literally impossible to criticize someones behavior without defining two categories. The point as I see it is, a large minority of libertarians/conservatives in tech are arguing for "live and let live", but the dominate left won't give up forcing their ideology on the industry.

"Live and let live" at it's core tries to eliminate the "us vs them" mentality, but there is still always a "them". In this case it's the people who don't "live and let live"...

Edit:

Self referential seems wrong... I think I meant it's a paradox? Even in acknowledging the category "us vs them believer" as existing, makes you an "us vs them" practitioner.

If reading HN has taught me anything, the tech scene is full of conservatives and libertarians.

In my experience, libertarians yes, conservatives not so much. Also, libertarians have to tread extremely carefully in tech. The true libertarian perspective doesn't fit with the new left at all, and can be easily misinterpreted as supporting racism/harassment etc... Try making a joke about dongles with a friend at a conference (totally fine from the libertarian perspective), and watch the dominate ideology of the left in tech crush you...

Coercive comments being objectively wrong I can understand, but this is not the case 100% of the time. Obviously, coercing someone into sex is borderline immoral (Edit: I looked up the actual definition of coercing, and would actually say it's completely immoral, since it's unwanted), and if there is any threat or power behind it it's essentially blackmail.

What I don't understand is the unwelcome side of things. This is where my argument stems from. There are a lot of things that large portions of society feel are unwelcome that others feel are perfectly acceptable.

I look back at history, with all the "unwelcome" things we have arbitrarily restricted that resulted in oppression, and I feel like we are dangerously close to making the same mistakes. I mean there was a time when scientific discourse was very "unwelcome", and it didn't really benefit society much. Is saying, "Nice behind", the same as discussing mathematics, of course not. However, I still feel like we are closing in on a world where any expression of sexuality or attraction is disallowed. Which is think is a fine thing for a company to opt for, but not something we should be forcing.

If a company want's to ban all sexuality and non professional interaction, forcing their employees to wear uniforms and only talk directly about business, this is fine. However, if a company want's to have bikini/board shorts day, and allow consensual non coerced sex in the office, I also think this is fine. Because the simple truth is, not everybody find this unwelcome.

I'm hoping someday people will realize that none of this is objective, and there are actually perspectives dramatically different than their own. It's not just one person either, and there is a spectrum. We need to stop forcing our narrow perspectives on others, and learn to live and let live.

Edit:

If people feel they can't work at a place with a certain set of rules or philosophies then they need to simply move on. Should a Muslim coffee shop not be allowed to print verses on their cups because their American workers find it offensive and unwelcome?

What is it about harassment that bothers people? Why don’t people like being subject to sexual harassment?

I can't answer this question. That's my point, I have no clue why people care about what they perceive as sexual comments being directed at them. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Here is my thought process; if words can't hurt people physically, and I personally don't care about anything anyone says to me, there must be other people in this world that feel the same way. If this is the case than harassment must be on some level subjective, but a objective analysis of common reality would come to the same conclusion. It's a simple fact that what is sexual harassment in America today is not the same as it was 10 years ago, or the same as it is for a tribe in Africa, and I don't believe an objective definition of sexual harassment could ever exist. Therefore sexual harassment can not be universally banned in the workplace or otherwise. At least not in a non authoritarian rights based system.

Of course if all you care about is your perception and your subjective reality, and you believe it's ok to push this on people, my point is moot. I just lean towards basic rights and leaving the subjective stuff alone. It all depends on how you view reality. Personally I feel reality has a common base of extremely simple truths (science/normative ethics), and all else is essentially arbitrary. Is this right or wrong? I'm clearly not qualified to say, nor is anyone else.

Edit:

It's like trying to find an answer to the equation "2+2" if you don't know anything about math. Some people say the answer is between 14 and 20, some really strange people may say it's 2,000 and they know it for sure. Personally, I think it's best to say it's between negative and positive infinity and wait for additional information.

The question of the ethics of sexual harassment in the workplace is "2+2", and nobody on earth really know anything about "math" in this regard. So defer to the least restrictive answer.

I can understand the "it's not just one comment" angle, this kind of makes sense. Although, I'm still not convinced everything taken as sexual harassment is actually such, at least to the extent external government intervention is need.

With intimidation the words are a non issue, it's just vocalized intention. With verbal harassment the words are all that matter, there is no intention. If there is intention, then it's a threat not verbal harassment.

My concern overall is that in the long term government and policy will be such that even so much as giving a simple compliment like, "I like your shirt", gets taken as punishable sexual harassment because someone find this sexually charged based on their own life experiences. My personal hope is that sexuality will become less of a taboo, and people will become less sensitive to it. This is jut my preference though.

This is what I've been trying to get at. What makes people offended or uncomfortable is much more arbitrary and subjective than I think most people are willing to admit.

I understand you wouldn't want that, but I would. I find it endlessly hilarious honestly. Even if the person directing it at me was serious.

My point is there is no common ground here. What is/isn't acceptable to me clearly differs from you. It will be thousands of years before society has any chance of finding common ground on what is/isn't offensive. What do we do in the mean time? Set arbitrary standards, or learn to live without them?

I know it's not what you meant, but obviously unwanted physical sexual conduct is immoral/illegal.

In regard to verbal sexual conduct I would say it is certainly undesirable in a work environment. I wouldn't allow it for a second if I ran a company, but this isn't my company. If Upload want's sexual conduct to be a part of their work environment, it's a dumb choice, but it's their choice.

You can't brow beat society into being perfect, you can only give people basic rights and hope for the best.

I'm sorry but I just don't think anyone has the right to be free from verbal harassment. I challenge you to even come up with a definition for verbal harassment that could be universally applicable.

Honestly, this makes perfect sense. I don't know if this is practical in the real world, but there is logic to it that I can agree with.