Every time race comes up on HackerNews i am shocked at how horrifyingly racist (some) users of this site are. Not only did a user somehow think that this context would exonerate this very racist man, both you and I are getting immediately downvoted for disagreeing. There was a post last week or so that was so full of racist comments it just got taken down. I wonder what on earth brings together HackerNews and racism like this.

I wonder mate...

A shining HN knight hoists themself onto their (very) high horse to respond:

You know, topics like this are not always black and white. There is a full-range, nuance and discussion.

I'd also wager that the downvotes here are because this flame-bait kind of comments are not appropriate for HN, or if they are appropriate then some might not think it's contributing to the discussion anyways.

Me, I think the refusal by some to admit (or accept) that the full-context post adds to the discussion and to instead double-down and cry more racism is definitely not constructive.

I'm honestly getting tired of these "race card" low-blows and one-sided thinking shutting down conversation.

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Seeing more pushback than I would have expected on EAs, EACCs, and Bostroms than I would have expected.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

fascists and racists do not welcome the spotlight (unless they're already in an extremely powerful position from which to, subjectively, enjoy the attention), and our very good friends have recently become quite illuminated

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 8 months ago

Yeah, HN is a huge "community" and even if the site design tries to flatten it to some sort of homogeneous soup[1] there's plenty of subcultures. The people who are interested in IQ, the danger of "woke" etc. tend to congregate on those submissions where these issues are discussed, but crucially, those submissions often don't stick around the front page that long. Neither do controversial discussions.

When these discussions do surface into mainstream HN, there will be pushback.

[1] I wrote a bit about this here: https://gerikson.com/m/2023/12/index.html#d03p01_sun

[–] AcausalRobotGod@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Rare CS Lewis win