And an extension of the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness.

Edit: funny, I pre-sniped the sibling responses to your comment.

The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.

I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/14/southern-sta...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/justice-depar...

Simply that a type of order was enforced to build a global money-ist theory of society and and market + trade platform.

I might, wrongly, argue that many of these regions both would have continued in the chaos and death they otherwise were already participating in, but i'd also accept that the Dutch in Africa, English in the Caribbean and China, etc all introduced net new outside chaotic aspects on purpose. I'd also accept that attempts at order by the American's ultimately resulted in chaos, especially of course in the middle east.

As to south america, this I'll acknowledge of course was an history of interference, one that is hard to argue the contra-positive since communism in almost all regions of the world failed to develope a long term stable order which was both culturally, trade, and fiscally sustainable, with many falling to a worse state after these outcomes.

Do you think that subsistence-working at Only Fans, or the local strip club is a better alternative?

For every 'women in sacks' argument that can be made, there is a street downtown where women put themselves in immense danger just to be able to feed their kids, pay their medical bill debts, get themselves some kind of safety net...

Same shit, different social flavor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic...

Why are you just completely making things up?

To me, it all seems to boil down to the notion that Bernie would credibly have "drained the swamp," which would have effectively tanked the careers of a lot of long-serving Democratic folks who were not aligned with his populist/progressive agenda. Simply by hiring people that would have aligned with his vision, this was such a threat to existing power, it had to be stopped. Yes, the Rs are worse (in my opinion), but this gives me plenty of distrust for the Ds. Institutions eventually become more about institutional survival than about their "core mission."

For some reason I remember that moment as vividly as I remember pulling out in the car with my mom on the way to school and hearing that a plane had hit the WTC.

So, the Clinton-controlled DNC from 2016 put Trump in the White House.

The positive message is that since then the Democrats have been infused by Sanders-like independent Democrats that want to do the right thing, but we must keep on pushing to rid and guard the DNC and party administration off the corrupt billionaire influences.

> Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states

Can you list these states? This should be easy to verify.

> concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to

Can you cite a law that tells private parties who they must support?

Non-violent protests have a place. On occasion though, you need to hit the system where it hurts in order for it to take you seriously.

Or, alternatively, did we cease to have a democracy?

So was this person Romney in 2012? McCain in 2008? Kerry in 2004? Gore in 2000?

Any one of those presidents would've abolished democracy?

Somehow we picked the right candidate every time?

The average constitution lasts about 18 years. The US constitution has lasted almost 250. Statistically, that's quite unlikely if a candidate ran on a platform of abolishing democracy in every election.

People, including individuals, aren't single-minded, rational, or scientifically literate.

In the case of anti-fascism, many on the left earnestly believe that a far-left candidate is the solution because their bubble tells them that their views are dominant. After all, they and many of their friends aren't excited to vote for the moderates, but would vote for someone more left.

I'll sacrifice a lot of things I care about for leadership that would shore up democracy (I'm not sure how, though fixing redistricting is a big one), but it's seen as normal and admirable to refuse to compromise.

He looked at me and smiled. Went back to his coding.

I just want to put it out there that just because you happen to be in a place with a lot of unsavory people doesn't mean you, yourself are unsavory. We shouldn't paint everyone with so Catholic a brush. You have to go to the grocery store, but so do pedophiles, drug lords, and wife abusers. That's kind of how I see HN.

Yes. It's a crap hole.

But some neighborhoods just have crap hole grocery stores. Tech is kind of one of those "neighborhoods", and HN is a grocery store. You don't have to socialize with the other customers, and you can restrict yourself to only buying the decent foods on offer.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.

I think we have different definitions of pleasure.

This is a relatively dry place for any kind of conversation other than hyper logic conversation devoid of empathy or humour.

On certain tech topics, it can be very informative. On anything where there is a conflict between the topic and how the base makes money, there's a lot of down voting and sad rhetoric. As a result, you rarely get to discuss the harms of AI or certain oligarchs, e.g. musk, zuck, bezos, Russia, Israel.

This is a place mostly for reinforcing your own beliefs, rather than finding new ones, unless it's around a very mild topic.

Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.

Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.

It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.

As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.

It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting. Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.

What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.

But, they now allow NSFW content in regular boards like technology, and for the first time in 20 years I actually saw someone post cheese pizza... plus I regularly see more and more leaked data posted there first, so I wouldn't call it less lawless at all.

I'm not sure if there's an actual website that did it? I've made micropayments for other things like PAYG phones and speculating on crypto.