Ask HN: Is HN Pro-Fascist? It sure seems like many articles that are critical of the Trump Administration or of certain people in the tech world (eg Musk) are flagged in under an hour. It does not matter if it a tech focused article or pure politics, it will just be flagged. What do people think: is HN pro-fascist? |
Re articles getting flagged, see the HN guidelines:
>Eschew flamebait.
>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities
Also re Musk there have been ten Musk stories submitted in the last 24 hours, none actually flagged as far as I can see, though with little interaction. You can have too much of that stuff.
There are multiple factions. There's the people fearful of AI, the people who post everything anyone posts if it vaguely relates to AI, the people who love to complain about AI posts, and the people who left because they got sick of all the AI stuff.
If you want a description of the politics related factions, just apply `sed -e s/AI/politics/g`.
EDIT: Not sure how one can read some of the comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605618 and not conclude that sizable portions of the userbase are disturbingly racist and fashy. But I suppose it's a nice opportunity to use the "Comments Owl for Hacker News" plugin to tag particularly deplorable users for easier flagging in the future.
[1]: As a reminder, this man supports far-right parties like the AfD and called people on government benefits "parasites." Plus a million other things. And his "wood chipper" megalomania has already lead to dozens of documented deaths in impoverished countries.
And yes, there are some things that are coming out of legislation which would usually be of big interest to HN (or at least I would think so) but I don't bother submitting stories if one or two particular people have their names prominent in the story. It is what it is.
EDIT: That said, the one I posted today didn't get flagged (yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594622
EDIT 2: Something else that will get a story flagged seems to be anything about XLibre (for or against). I'm guessing that has to do with who is running that project which is kind of a shame since I'm curious why there's so much reflexive and visceral animosity for those suggesting we slow the roll on forcing all distros and desktop environments to move to Wayland.
I mean, him being a notorious crackpot doesn't help, obviously. But it's a project with absolutely minimal promise.
His specific usage has the center-left covered! Too bad it didn't stick
(Strictly speaking, that'd be "neo-corp", like "neo-lib", but with more of a Futurist flavor. You could even say cyberpunk :)
https://davidgraeber.org/videos/donald-trump-is-a-classic-co...
But when seemingly innocuous posts are flagged, that label seems too weak.
To those sympathetic to these political posts..upvoting or posting calm or mildly supportive comments like the above (BEFORE THE FLAG happens) might help to prevent flags..
The title of this one is too inflammatory imho
EDIT: The comments to this one seemed alright but still got flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601096
You ask one of the robots "are you pro-fascist?"
What answer do you expect?
All in all these are definitely not right wing opinions.
That suggests that HN leans heavily anti-Trump, but also doesn't want to talk about him all the time, so flags posts that drag the forum in that direction. Ditto Musk and "fascism," whatever that's supposed to mean nowadays when everyone to the right of Mao gets called a fascist sooner or later.
I.e., Trump & deportations. Very political and would flag immediately. Trump & NASA, perhaps not flagged at all. Trump and his cankles? Flagged immediately. Trump & science grants? Perhaps not flagged at all.
This isn't reddit. Or at least, I'd hope it shouldn't be.
I think after like 100M+ levels of wealth, "morals" and "ethics" go out the window.
You can be on the margins and yell all you like and still be on the margins, they know it doesn't matter what you do. [1]
If you're an oligarch and get in the way you fall out of a window.
Jeff Bezos was no ally of Trump I, had he not been sitting behind Trump II at the inauguration he could have kissed all his rocket plans goodbye because all his permits and contracts could be canceled just like that.
[1] Being "marginal" is probably more blessing than curse in a lot of cases and a status you might want to retain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588392
it hours to get it flagged where a Trump/Musk criticism gets flagged in a few minutes.
But it was flagged. I really really doubt HN is "pro-fascist", but I think it leans to the right because it is the rich that funds their projects.
Most HN users are tech employees or freelancers on salaries or contractor fees, so whatever political slant HN has aligns with that.
Posts about the U.S. administration and tech celebrities get flagged because people try and submit them every day and they lead to repetitive flamewar discussions, which is everything that HN is trying to avoid.
And it's the main reason why I rarely write comments on HN. Everything is so political. If people don't agree with you, they downvote you. Your karma only reflects the popularity of your views. If you're writing something that is controversial, it's likely to lower your karma, if one side can downvote it before the other side sees it.
* a dictatorial leader
* an authoritarian government
* nationalism and/or racism
* militarism
* promotion of a "natural order"
I don't think any of those accurately characterize a dominant ideology on HN. If anything, in my observation, HN is somewhat libertarian-leaning, rather than fascist.
Mussolini did a great job as delineating exactly what fascism was, and the NSDAP fit it, but in general it really doesn’t fit states outside of that particular time and place, including most regimes described as ‘fascist’ today.
The arguments for why Trump is somehow a fascist are among the most facile I’ve ever heard, and I say that having never voted for nor supported Trump, and having even more negative an opinion of him now than I did previously.
Political discourse will never be anything beyond laughable until we can get past screeching at each other over which side is the secret fascist.
Anti-fascists are jealous somebody has better footwear than them. Woke right NPCs who blog endlessly about "cancel culture" wish Karl Marx was banned 150 years ago.
If you read The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post you'd think Zohran Mamdani has the opposite policies of Trump but he's twice as angry. He's dangerous to system not because he's angry but because he listens to people, something you'll see him do on YouTube or TikTok but that mainstream TV channels won't show you.
See also: Why US presidents present as happily married and religious, no matter what the reality is.
I am not saying they would solve it, but they would make it some other community's problem.
But like, you wanna see the most unhinged antisocial takes? Well, go to Twitter, then when you're bored, come here.
It's not really HN in particular though. It's a silicon valley thing.
Are there pro-fascist posters here? Absolutely. I've seen full throated advocacy for some vile things here. The worst of it usually gets flagged.
Is there a strong correlation between flagging political posts and support for fascism? Not necessarily. Although some of that is definitely the HN Trumpist/right-wing contingent, this forum harbors a particular distate for anything not explicitly tech related (often beyond what the actual site guidelines state to be on topic) which includes politics of any kind.
And HN is designed so that flagging and downvoting has a much greater weight than upvoting, so it really doesn't even take much to tank a thread.
To steal a few examples from a convenient summary list someone[1] made:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
...
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Open to other definitions. But I look at that list, written in 1995, and it feels like you can check off a lot of these items in things that are rapidly being normalised.
1. https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...
If you know your 'Pataphysics or Chaos Magick you know that's a magic spell to put fascists in charge.
Probably just best to focus on those qualities you don’t like on the other side and leave the labeling to the future historians.
This doesn’t sound like a couple of fascists.
Ok, but that is a different thing than a specific political lean. I know quite a few folks who claim to care about the homeless, but those claims don’t ever translate to action. That leads me to suspect that what they actually care about is people believing they care about the homeless.
Curious what you consider fascist about people who hold zero corporate or political power
Ok, so use words appropriate to what is happening. When you work to redefine “scary” words in an attempt to try and piggyback on their negative history you minimize that history.
> Curious what you consider fascist about people who hold zero corporate or political power
The point was that I don’t consider what we see today as fascist and you shouldn’t either…because it’s not.
…this is the guy who bombed Iran?
> to better represent the people
Do you just believe everything that people with power tell you?
This is self-contradictory gibberish. Deregulation and small government for him means further weakening labour laws to the point where the interests of the majority of Americans, ie, wage workers, have no ability to advocate for their needs and no recourse when he encroaches on them.
>Trump [...] seems to be consistently anti-war.
This was already a surreal claim to make when he was sending troops and PMCs into Iraq and Syria, deploying SEALs on abortive raids in Yemen, where Saudi troops were using arms his administration provided them, oh and, I dunno, ordering the assassination of the highest military official of a sovereign nation. It becomes solipsistic in the month after he oversaw the US' direct intervention in Israel's war with Iran.
I get that you want to redefine what “fascism” is, because historically it’s associated with some really evil things, but I am not willing to dilute that definition.
That's a completely ridiculous definition of fascism and again, if you pick that most Americans would be fascist and consider it a good thing.