I guess he's saying that hn is "non tilted/neutral" toward any political stance, and as such pinning a comment to a Ukrainian donation gov website could be seen as "supporting" someone
It's an age old debate for sure but "bullshit for cowards" isn't reasoning about it, it's propaganda wording just as easily employed by the aggressor trying to silence people who don't support the war. Since there's no need to mask the real reasoning here, why employ those kinds of attacks?
I could have written it nicer but I was annoyed. Thanks for calling me out.
But I stand by the point. What is not clear? If A attacks B, and B would be happy to revert to back to state before the attack, then C saying it's not it's problem, it's neutral or that it only supports "peace" (letting A win by making B surrender) is not C being neutral. It's direct support of the attacker.
I think what's least clear about your framing is how and why e.g. someone wanting to remain neutral/peaceful can ONLY imply their opinion is "B should surrender so A can win" or similar type statements. Thoughts like "if you don't support B then you must hope A wins" or "If you want peace it means giving A what it wants" are not full arguments in themselves, they are just the claims repeated.
For example, there are certainly those who want Ukraine to just surrender some of its land for peace (the POTUS seeming to be one). That by itself does not explain they MUST be supporting Russia, it just opens the door for such a possibility. Some along these lines of wanting peace/surrender don't support Russia but don't think there'd be anything of Ukraine left at all if the war were to escalate further. Others of completely different opinion believe de-escalation over time towards peace talks will lead to better and better "A and B returning things to the way they were" type results given enough time - but only if the pressure/interest/escalation/pile-on is lowered instead of raised. Yet others have different takes on why/how to be neutral/peaceful and what they think it will end with. And, of course, some genuinely don't support Ukraine because they view the situation as a risk themselves - we just can't jump to that being the only possibility without more reasoning for the rest first.
Now I'm not here to try and argue you should agree with these arguments or that if you respond to just the above points you've now countered the full spectrum of opposing opinion by any stretch of the measure. The only reason I bring these examples up is to show how repeating the conclusion "being neutral is only supporting the attacker" isn't as much providing a point as conveying your current stance. To argue points around it is to try to give credence to why that is the only (or most) correct conclusion and approach and where the other opposing ideas all fell short.
When the depth of consideration of counter-arguments instead comes across as "the other side are just bullshit cowards" or "it's just clear" the best you can hope for is a lot of "ooh-rah" for people who already agreed and a coinciding complete write off from those who disagreed.
As an addendum: Folks (not necessarily you, people like to AI summarize comment history) sometimes take what I say to mean I personally don't support Ukraine or that I explicitly support Trump's actions around this or whatever else they come up with. I personally support Ukraine to fully return to its pre-war borders, disavow most of the government of Russia's actions, and am severely disappointed with Trump's treatment of Zelensky (bringing things back to the original thread). I just have relatively strong opinions about how tone of conversation can be overall damaging for a ideology regardless of the intent or literal stance.
I don't think I did any personal attacks. I simply pointed out that, if they think Neutrality is for cowards, they should probably join in the fight that they believe in instead of not acting, aka neutral.
That "if you feel so strongly why don't you go fight" trope is a cliché of personal attack, since it insinuates hypocrisy and cowardice. If you say you didn't mean it that way, I believe you, but it would still land that way with many readers, so it's necessary to disambiguate these things more clearly.
Most come to news.ycombinator.com expecting see ycombinator activities and content from fellow users, not to find out what Dang's latest endorsement is. When we all feel a certain importance to something content about it appears and bubbles to the top automatically.
