HN moderators do often protect legitimate threads against flag-brigades. HN is the right medium for those topics circumstantially, as the rule says, and as reported by moderator. Please stop pretending to be an authority on rules out of your personal displeasure. I don't appreciate being called out for rule-breaking when moderation has clarified that it is acceptable per standards.
It's just the personal opinion of one moderator, contradicting published rules, and I disagree with the decision and your opinions about it. It's ruining everything I like about HN, and I don't want another social medium going down the drain after the /. debacle.
I just wanted to say that I hear you, I understand (at least partly) how you feel, and I'm sorry it landed this way. I don't think I agree that the decision "contradicted published rules", but insofar as I have to interpret the rules and in a case like this that is inevitably and intensely personal, you're not wrong to say "personal opinion of one moderator".
The experience of this thread was brutal, and of course it would have been so much easier to avoid it, but I don't think avoidance serves HN's purpose in the long run.
Anyhow, I appreciate your contributions to HN and I hope the positive will outweigh the negative in the long run.
I would strongly wish to urge you to continue to avoid contentious topics like ongoing wars or domestic US politics. These topics nearly destroyed /., if you've been there 2014-2016 you know what I mean, and it took them many users, great efforts, and changes in the moderation system to get it on track again. I left /. forever at this time, and many other did, too.
If you insist on highly controversial topics, you should at least provide ways for users to block other HN users and all of their submissions in a symmetric way (if X blocks Y, X and Y cannot see each others posts). To give you a sense of perspective, I discussed the current Israel/Palestine situation on Reddit, and had to (i) mute more than a dozen subreddits, (ii) block about a hundred users, and (iii) report half a dozen users. I received private messages by people I haven't even discussed with that literally threatened my family with rape and death. Of course, these accounts were removed, but the danger of leaking one's real identity and corresponding real-world consequences are still high on pseudonymous sites. Not everybody on HN is a tech billionaire who can afford private bodyguards.
For many people, me included, it is not a good solution either to just have an ability to hide a thread without voicing any opposition to the partly horrendous discussions in it. Although I want to leave Academia (and probably will), I'm currently working as a philosopher on moral decision-making and related topics in meta-ethics, and that means that I feel obliged to sometimes participate in such threads, if they exist. But my take is that, if possible, they should be avoided. There is no lack of social media where people can discuss politics and ongoing wars.
Slightly tangential to the discussion, but are there any readings you would recommend on moral decision making?
Background: I am(was?) a left-leaning israeli jew, and Oct7 and the subsequent IDF response make me feel as if I can hang up my moral compass on the wall as a non-functional vintage decoration.
Sorry, I saw that a bit late. I don't think I can recommend any reading for your particular conundrum. That falls into the area of general normative ethics. My area is formal axiology in metaethics, which concerns the structure and logic of "good" and "better than" comparisons. That area of inquiry is neutral about what values are the right ones, it concerns how to make decisions on the basis of given values, and what structural constraints these values have. Such a theory has normative components, but these are very abstract. For example, I have defended a theory of value structure according to which values come in different qualities; some values can outrank other values, which has far-reaching consequences for decision-making (e.g. expected utility can no longer be used, even if one is willing to endorse it otherwise).
As you can imagine, there are many approaches to normative ethics, international law, and the ethics of the rules of war. I'm by no means an expert in any of them and also do not believe that moral philosophers have authority regarding specific normative judgments. When I said I feel obliged to say something about the topic, I was more or less talking about a personal feeling of responsibility rather than claiming any moral authority. What I can recommend is to not be a consequentialist in moral evaluations of specific decisions, though consequentialist considerations are important in policy-making when statistical data is available. Motives and intentions matter a lot, and their roles are also codified in international law.
My personal take on the subject is that the military intervention in Gaza so far is morally justified. Deaths per bombings are low (not high, as some people claim) if you take victim numbers provided by Hamas and numbers about target bombings by IDF. Civilian:combatant casualty ratio is alleged to be around 2:1, which is also low for urban combat. But the main reasons why I believe it is justified are that there is no other alternative to put Hamas out of power, or at least substantially reduce the power of Al Qassam brigades, no past actions of Israel could in any morally relevant sense justify the Hamas terror attacks, I see no compelling evidence that the IDF or Israeli government wants to commit genocide (which, by definition, requires intention), Hamas endorse terrorism and self-portray as jihadists, there is an ongoing hostage crisis, Hamas has often attacked Israel in the past, and Israel has a right to prevent future attacks. Consequentialist counting of the number of victims plays only a minor role and, as far as I know, is also not very relevant from a legal point of view. Commensurability in the rules of war is relative to the military goals, and must be judged on a case by case basis. I've read and agree with how this is defined in the Geneva Conventions.
Neither that Palestinians are oppressed (or feel that way) nor whether some land belongs to them or not plays any substantial role in my personal moral assessment because these do not justify terrorism and hostage-taking.
Anyway, that's just my personal take on it. Sorry I'm unable to give you any good reading recommendation.
Thank you for the reply. I did learn a few new words such as "normative ethics" and consequentialism. I'll start with googling them and see where it leads me.
Although in the end only primary sources count in philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good resource for getting into specific topics.
I hear you and appreciate your comment. Here are some thoughts that come up in response.
HN's position on this (i.e., re political content on the site) has been stable for years now, hasn't destroyed HN yet, and IMO probably won't. Certainly we'll do all we can to avoid that. If you or anyone wants to know how we think about it, there are lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Most questions that people have about HN+politics are answered there; if a question isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. A couple of starting points might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019) or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020).
I go back and forth on the killfile idea but my gut feeling is that it's not in HN's interest. For better or worse, it's in HN's DNA that we're all in one big room together. The site isn't sharded into silos the way others are. Here's a thing I wrote about that a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
Decisions like this—e.g. about to what degree to allow political content, or whether to introduce block lists / killfiles—are risky because it's easy to see what's bad about the status quo (e.g. political flamewars are awful, having to see awful comments is awful), but much harder to see what's good about it and what one would lose by dropping that.
You're right about the downside of allowing a thread like this. It's painful and awful (to me too). And you're right that there are other places for people to talk about this. But what does it do to us as a community if we don't touch it at all? That's the question I'm sitting with. HN can't be the community it ought to be if all we do is disconnect from painful and divisive things; we become a lesser version of ourselves if we do that. (I wrote a bit more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38658881.)
That does not mean we're going to let HN burn up with flamewars about this topic or any other. It needs to be carefully regulated (in the sense of calibrating, not ruling over), and we'll do our best. For example that's why I didn't turn off the flags on a different post last night (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527).
