You may be familiar with the layer structure of communications: Internetwork layer,below that transport, below that link layer, and at the bottom the physical layer. The physical layer is where it gets really messy: noise, interference, reflections,whatever.
In human interaction, at the bottom layer is the simple fact that at any time, any human can just not follow the rules. That's not necessarily wrong. Maybe the rule just isn't important, and everyone recognises that. Or maybe some deep moral principle should override it. But at that point, other people have to make a moral call - do they ignore this breach of the rules? Do they object? Do they assess the moral principle as overriding?
The military have some usefully neutral terms for behaviors, one of which is 'revisionist'. A revisionist power wants to change the rules, a status quo power wants to keep them. It's fairly clear that the US government is presently a revisionist one. That means that pretty much everyone has now to make the call as to whether what they see is allowable or, given the scale and power of the US federal government, a five-alarm fire. And they will often want to take that to places where they have some kind of trust in the intelligence or good will of the other people there. For a lot of engineers, that's right here. If this were a workplace or uni, there would be break rooms and water-coolers where this kind of discussion could go. But HN has none of that - there's only one category of discussion. So if you flag every such discussion, you're denying them the opportunity to do that. And that's not keeping politics out of HN - that's a political act itself.
If you think you can bury your head and ignore politics for any amount of time, you are mistaken. Your purchases, comments, and actions are all political and strategic, whether you want to believe them to be or not.
Facism is taking hold. There's no hyperbole. Everything will be affected. We need to respond. The only over-reaction is here in choosing to bury your head in the sand.
infecto|11 months ago
ajb|11 months ago
You may be familiar with the layer structure of communications: Internetwork layer,below that transport, below that link layer, and at the bottom the physical layer. The physical layer is where it gets really messy: noise, interference, reflections,whatever.
In human interaction, at the bottom layer is the simple fact that at any time, any human can just not follow the rules. That's not necessarily wrong. Maybe the rule just isn't important, and everyone recognises that. Or maybe some deep moral principle should override it. But at that point, other people have to make a moral call - do they ignore this breach of the rules? Do they object? Do they assess the moral principle as overriding?
The military have some usefully neutral terms for behaviors, one of which is 'revisionist'. A revisionist power wants to change the rules, a status quo power wants to keep them. It's fairly clear that the US government is presently a revisionist one. That means that pretty much everyone has now to make the call as to whether what they see is allowable or, given the scale and power of the US federal government, a five-alarm fire. And they will often want to take that to places where they have some kind of trust in the intelligence or good will of the other people there. For a lot of engineers, that's right here. If this were a workplace or uni, there would be break rooms and water-coolers where this kind of discussion could go. But HN has none of that - there's only one category of discussion. So if you flag every such discussion, you're denying them the opportunity to do that. And that's not keeping politics out of HN - that's a political act itself.
jlongr|11 months ago
If you think you can bury your head and ignore politics for any amount of time, you are mistaken. Your purchases, comments, and actions are all political and strategic, whether you want to believe them to be or not.
AlecSchueler|11 months ago