It is not “starting a flame war” to point out the masses of comments that rushed to draw racist and xenophobic conclusions about the killers identity before this information was revealed. If you as moderators of HN do not moderate such behaviour in the first place, then don’t be surprised to find that users might take it into their own hands.
You could have made that point without garish flamebait like "tech executives to be forcibly housed in a palace against their will". If you had done so instead, I would have had no reason to post a moderation reply.
We're not trying to combat anyone's substantive points. We're just trying to prevent garden-variety internet destructiveness. As you have a history of the latter, it would be good if you'd review the site guidelines and take them more to heart: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That's clearly not enough. Tech executives are doing too many drugs and it's leading to this kind of behavior, it's a cultural problem. They need fewer broken families and more time spent in church. And these rotten ones they need to be under constant watch by strict, controlling wardens.
Have you considered that the media has jumped to a framing of tech-on-tech crime at the behest of the powerful Big Homeless lobby? When was the last time you saw anyone but a homeless person sleeping in newspapers.
It’s interesting that you feel the need to say you don’t mean to politicize this, when the topic is already quite clearly political in nature, you’re simply addressing a point in an ongoing political discussion.
I believe the point is that peoples alternative theories of the issue being due to homelessness are the political ones. So by calling those people out, the commenter is opening themself up to political discussion.
I don't think there's anything political about saying "those people were wrong, I wonder if they'll change their views when presented with evidence that they were wrong". I also wonder if the people that jumped to conclusions will examine why they did that, but that's not a political statement.
Right, you don't think its political. But of the people who want to say SF is a crime-ridden hellhole, it will be political to them. So saying they are wrong invites them to argue with you about something they see as political.
It does seem like there is a constituency that wants to make this political, facts be damned. Calling that out will probably invite them to continue down their chosen path as you say, but it's still worth pointing out false narratives, even if the response is kind of annoying.
No, it's just accurate. A personal or business problem between two people is not political. What happened is a lot of people wanted this issue to be political, but they turned out to be wrong.
Those are the facts of the case, however what they were commenting on was the conversation that arose and has been ongoing since the event, which is out of line with the facts as we have come to know them. That conversation exists and is already political, there is no “making it political” at this point.
> I wonder if all the many commenters who had preemptively blamed homeless or poor people for this would change their mind in the light of this,
You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
> all tech executives to be forcibly housed in a palace against their will
I think sidetracking this with charged political comments and silly hypotheticals trivializes a serious issue.
>You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
It's true that the perfidious Other did not commit this particular crime even though I speculated immediately that They did. However, keep in mind that they are still a big problem! Me being wrong doesn't mean they're not!
You think you're being clever but you're just unwittingly being true. SF problems existed well before the case of Bob Lee and will persist - with the help of people like you - well after. Whether or not this particular case is part of them we'll soon see, but either way the problems are absolutely real and obvious to anyone not working very hard to not see them.
>You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
I don't doubt they have concerns. I doubt their ability to reason.
Using a single case as if it defines whether or not a massive systemic problem exists is not "ability to reason". It's ability to score gotchas on the internet. It's not the same thing.
Politicization is a ratchet. The conversation has already been politicized, I don't think there's any avoiding it.
Second, the discussion for all intents and purposes isn't even about Bob Lee, it's about crime in SF. That's why even when it turns out that Bob Lee wasn't killed by a homeless drug addict, the conversation is still about the homeless, drug addicts, petty crime, etc. I think it's illustrative of how wrong it is to use his death this way, even if he had actually been murdered by a vagrant, it would still be wrong.
I made that assumption, but kept my mouth shut, because it wasn't proven. And until there's released video evidence, an admission, or a guilty verdict, I'll do the same here. I think the initial people were too quick to blame druggies, and I think we'll just as well have people too quick to blame the people who blamed the druggies.
If you check out the “similar discussion” linked in a sibling comment to yours, you’ll find quite a lot of talking about that topic, if it interests you, for example the current top comment:
The assumptions were incorrect, but the problem is still there. Just removes one data point.
I walk around SoMa and it's a common occurence to walk past someone (loudly) muttering to themselves that they're going to kill or attack someone. It's not a "political" thing anymore, the city desperately, desperately needs help.
> I walk around SoMa and it's a common occurence to walk past someone (loudly) muttering to themselves that they're going to kill or attack someone.
I'm not saying that they all have a tic disorder or OCD, but utterances such as this can be linked to them. Tourette's is not all people saying sexually explicit things, sexually explicit utterances are only about 10% of Tourette's cases.
The point isn’t that homeless kill people, it’s that homeless and drug addicts create environments where people are more likely to be killed, by anyone.
Setting aside for a moment that this incident did not involve homeless people, we need to bring systems thinking to this problem, and ask what created the environment of homelessness to begin with.
Focusing only on the symptom here is similar to focusing on error logs and system crashes as if they are self contained phenomena and lamenting the impact they have on operations teams.
These issues are signs of upstream problems, and either there are poor coding practices somewhere in the org, or infrastructure that hasn’t been properly scaled/optimized (among a myriad of other possible causes).
This community in particular is well positioned to understand this broader mindset.
