> Mr. Pathak said Mr. Chau, believed to be 26 or 27 and from Washington State, may have been trying to convert the islanders to Christianity. Right before he left in his kayak, Mr. Chau gave the fishermen a long note. In it, police officials said, he had written that Jesus had bestowed him with the strength to go to the most forbidden places on Earth.
A perfect storm of Christian and American arrogance.
Please explain to me how the fact that he happens to be American is proven to be causal here?
I guess you make a good point. After all, the missionaries who converted indigenous populations all over the world were all from the USA. Oh wait, no. The vast majority of the Christian missions were founded by Europeans. Arabs converted millions to Islam hundreds of years ago.
But yeah, they were all infected with American arrogance.
Proven to be causal? Like we'd clone 1000 John Allen Chaus, raise them around the globe, and see how many of them do something fatally arrogant relating to overseas travel?
As an American who has lived on 4 continents, I can confirm that American tourists quite often live up to the stereotype. I have a variety of painful memories of times I've had to intervene and explain things and/or translate for aggressively clueless Americans. Many travelers are great, of course. But I still think the stereotype is justified.
It makes sense, I guess. We grow up in a country big enough that we can travel widely without learning another language or learning much about dealing with different customs. And our wealth and our culture of American exceptionalism make it easy for us to spin the globe, plop a finger down, and expect that we can go there and do as we please. Often it works, even if it does rub the locals the wrong way. And sometimes, as here, it doesn't work at all.
It is, but in my experience (cruise from Venice -> Greece and back last summer) that stereotype applies to every culture. Americans just happen to be louder at it.
A very snide remark you start with, not realizing you are proving my point.
He made a statement that is a sweeping generalization that isn't even provable.
Your anecdotal experiences on 4 continents are again, just that. Anecdotes. The American travelers you didn't notice, and therefore don't remember, aren't included in your confirmation bias fueled reasoning.
Right. Everybody understands that not every topic is in practice approachable with the sort of level of rigor we use in, say, particle physics. But we are still people who have to live in the world. So everyone has a variety of heuristics they use to deal with topics that are not as tractable.
That includes you, of course. What studies do you have that show that demanding proof of causality in casual conversation is effective in improving the discourse? None, I'm guessing. But here you are doing it.
Well, wide eyed 'convert heathen!' zeal became pretty unfashionable in much of Europe for a bit, so most of the serious missionaries left for the Americas. American arrogance is really only European arrogance that has been left on the stove to brew for a bit longer.
As someone from the deep south (the largest baptist church in America was walking distance from my house as a kid) there's a huge push for third world mission work among evangelicals. The only reason why you don't see the focus on explicit conversion is that they don't feel like there's many pagans left to convert.
I'm fully aware of the push for missionary work by US evangelical churches.
Is it arrogance? Is it American arrogance more specifically?
As someone who is borderline atheist, but grew up in a religious household, I don't think it's arrogance of any form. I think that these people truly believe that they are saving people from a bad afterlife. You can certainly call that delusional. Just not sure it's arrogance.
I think the entire idea of going half way around the planet to tell a bunch of people how they're doing life wrong without putting any effort into understanding why they don't already agree with you (aka nearly all mission work) is the epitome of arrogance.
Americans certainly aren't the source of arrogance nor its sole practitioners.
But the phrase "American exceptionalism" is a thing for a reason. And if other societies through history may also have indulged in similar thinking, it functions more to demonstrate how a comparable place in the world can present comparable temptations more than it serves to refute the existence or problems of exceptionalist thinking among Americans.
Religious fervor may, of course, play a greater role (something I'm personally acquainted with as someone who was also involved in evangelism once). The combination of background cultural exceptionalism doesn't help, though.
America was simply late to the party but there is a long history of American missionaries carrying on the tradition. Hawaii wouldn't be a state if it wasn't for American missionaries.
"Front national" people are not exactly "crazy".. on the racist / bigot side but mostly working class people scared for their wallet / culture. They wouldnt exacly go evangelise peopne like that
I said something admittedly nasty about Mao's policies a couple of months ago, and was threatened with banning due to "borderline nationalistic trolling". Fair enough.
It sure doesn't seem to be enforced in an objective fashion though. More likely, it appears to be more in line with the current fashion of SV: Never discriminate, unless it's against a group viewed as being powerful and bad by West Coast Americans, in which case it's ok. American? That's definitely a way to be cool and anti-imperialist/colonialist. Christians? Even better. Because of all of the regressive religions which preach hate towards gays and deny evolution, Christianity is the one practiced by white people from Alabama, and therefore it's funny and useful to attack it. If this gentleman were an Islamic missionary from Egypt, the above comment probably would never have been made, and if it had, would be removed, with good reason.
It's true that HN moderation is inconsistent, but for a completely different reason: we don't see all the comments. This makes consistency impossible.
All: please help with this by letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com when you see an egregious comment on the site that hasn't been flagged or moderated yet. We can't read all the comments, but we do read all the emails.
I'm not Dan, but I can offer my own advice: don't generalize individuals into groups, and don't attack any individual or group here. It never leads to the kind of thoughtful discussion that HN is known for.
If you see a comment that attacks any individual or group, the best thing to do is downvote it, flag it, and move on.
As you can see, now that I've noticed the thread and had a chance to moderate it, the evidence shows the opposite.
You've been here long enough that I wish you would be more charitable. You've made such comments before. I wouldn't ban someone just for saying false or mean things about HN moderation, but it's still a bummer. Especially since, if you'd take a longer and fairer look at what we do, you would know that it's not true.
There's incredible bias here against Christians and occasionally also white Americans. Sad for a website that's A) dedicated to technology, where people are supposedly more open and accepting, and B) supposedly holding itself to a higher standard than other similar forums.
My advice would be to just ignore it and flag rule violations, in my admittedly brief HN career doing anything else has never helped me nor anyone I'm replying to.
A perfect storm of Christian and American arrogance.