john_brown_body's comments

It's not "masquerading as unbiased news reporting", it's a longform magazine essay. Of course the writer, who has been covering this story for years, is going to bring his own perspective to framing the story and exploring the implications of the case. The New Yorker is not a newswire.

What's happened here is you saw an article you didn't agree with and invented a completely fictional scenario to justify dismissing it. You're also fundamentally confused about the medium.

This seems to be part and parcel with the mindset endemic to HN where any coverage of any issue that doesn't 100% agree with the commentator's preconceptions is assumed to be Wrong and the author either malicious or incompetent.

Is this really a thoughtful or useful comment? It's a completely unsubstantiated smear of the writer because you don't agree with his take on the case.

I know the following concept is absolutely foreign to most people in tech, who would gladly take seed funding from Unit 751, but if you're accepting millions of dollars in donations and investments you actually do have a basic moral responsibility to do at least a minimal level of due diligence, lest you end up helping to whitewash the reputation of a known child sex trafficker.

Either Ito failed to do even a minimal amount of due diligence on a person he accepted millions of dollars from, or he did and then didn't care. Either way, it's a catastrophic failure of judgment.

He ought to resign immediately. This is CYA apology. He's taking responsibility in words only. It's disgraceful.

Resign.

It's relevant to the political problem of defeating their opposition, sure, but not relevant to the merits of the policy.

It's also fairly obvious - rich people think they're better humans than poor people and don't want to live near them. Not worthy of much hand-wringing or fretting in my opinion.

Who knows or cares? Overcoming the opposition of wealthy, cloistered local elites is an important political problem, but the specific nature of their opposition isn't relevant to the policy issue or the public interest.

No, this does not resolve the issue at all. The problem is not that police are accessing Ring footage against the will of the owners, the problem is that Ring users are complicit in constructing a surveillance panopticon that affects everyone else and has no mechanisms for preventing abuse.

Personally forgoing Amazon devices isn't the solution. There must be political action.

A focus on the mediums through which these shooters express their views misses the forest for the trees, which is that this is fundamentally a political problem.

There is an ascendant political ideology in the United States, and in the West more broadly, that is rooted in a fear that White supremacy is being eroded by immigration and demographic change, and that violence against minority populations is an acceptable response to these changes.

This ideology is promoted by the President and prominent members of the Republican Party and the party-affiliated media; government goon squads are used to harass and ethnically cleanse those populations; and "lone-wolf" paramilitaries terrorize them directly, while allowing their "respectable" enablers and ideological supporters some degree of plausible deniability.

The solution to this problem doesn't lie in technology or communication platforms or mental health awareness or anything like that. It lies in organizing politically to defeat the supporters of this ideology and take power away from its proponents.

The conquistadors and colonists were generally adventurers from impoverished regions of their home countries, engaged in extremely arduous military and quasi-military expeditions thousands of miles from home, so using them as a counter-example is a little odd; like using American soldiers stationed in a forward operating post in Afghanistan to judge the culture of hygiene in America.

I agree that the Internet has "amplified a certain contrarian tendency that goes too far", but I think that tendency is more evident in top-rated Hacker News comments than in the work of professional historians like the author of the article.

Instead of a non-profit, it should simply be nationalized and run as a utility. This not only eliminates the "tax on transactions", it would also transfer Visa's enormous power to structure markets (by cutting entities out of the payment processing system) from a private corporation to a body with at least some democratic accountability.