The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.
Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.
It's also very very funny to me the general tone of self-congratulatory nonparticipation all over this comment section about how superior we all are for not using social media or twitter or whatever.
HN is social media too! I've heard the arguments why it's not but they aren't compelling to me; it is one. The main difference between here and twitter is the tone.
On here there is a cultural expectation that you will perform dispassionate erudition but if you read beyond that at all very few comments are any more intellectually stimulating than an average tweet. Less, honestly, at least people on twitter still seem to value joy and humor and whimsy.
I only got into tech a bit over five years ago and that was the first time in my entire life I had been above the (demonically low) US poverty level.
There is absolutely a difference in how rich and poor people treat poor service workers.
It's not that poor people treat them better per se but it's different. Poor people can be cruel to each other because they are all suffering, crab in a bucket shit.
Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to.
I've been on both sides of this and am speaking from painful experience in both cases.
To be clear unprogrammed worship is absolutely still a thing in the US. In my large metro area there are I think five active meetings and two of them of them are unprogrammed.
The reason it was interesting to me is that before I decided to start going to meetings again as an adult, I actually didn't know that ANY quakers anywhere did anything other than silent worship. So to find out that not only does it exist but is probably the majority of quakers today was jarring.
The eye of the needle thing does not represent his entire full viewpoint on wealth right? It comes up quite a few times. Regardless of how you interpret the camel bit, there are other moments where he clearly tells the wealthy to give it all away.
So a lot of this is wrong but irrelevant to this so I won't touch it.
The main thing you seem to be missing though is that the subreddit is not meant to be a neutral ground for people to compare and discuss ideas.
It's a place to get concrete, consensus- and literature-based answers from people with real experience and practice at history. Having people in the comments presenting ahistorical information entirely outside of scholarly consensus only detracts from that goal.
So even if you consider this _only_ a power-vs-speech thing, there's still a strong argument that moderation is the correct step. When conversations detract from the stated purpose of the community they are restricted. Same as right here actually.
Yeah there's a thing for a while now in the US where we like to talk about "judeo-christian" values or roots or whatever. I've never really understood it except as a way to exclude islam which I really believe is all it is.
Parts of the white evangelicals going hard into it is weird but not completely out of nowhere I guess.
BUT! Anyway the "judeo-christian" thing is just a rhetorical move. I think overall Americans are very ignorant of judaism and think it's a lot more similar to christianity than it is but no one thinks they're the same religion. Uninformed but not likely to mix the two up like this.
At least in my (I think typical?) big city tech worker circle the bible as literature has been received with disdain the couple times I've seen it come up.
I also had a (atheist) friend once tell me he bought copies of the bhagavad gita and quran to put next to his bible so he would look well read instead of christian if anyone looked at his book shelf.
14-16 year olds who are actively participating in white supremacist movements are white supremacists.
The person being targeted by their harassment campaign can't know and doesn't care that they're minors or they think they're kidding or whatever.
The harm is the same and the right-wing radicalization of young white men online is an extremely serious problem. People in this age range have killed people for this idealogy!
Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.