A man holding open debates on college campuses, regardless of political beliefs, is categorically different to a man whose legacy was founding al-Qaeda and masterminding 9/11.
Not to mention Kirk's views were not too different from the majority of American voters who elected our current president.
Why make such a comparison? Don't you think this sort of rhetoric contributes to the toxic political landscape we find ourselves in?
Kirk's views specifically contributed to the toxic political landscape and he himself often called for violent action. He boasted about funding buses to go to the january 6th storming of the captiol, which was almost certainly not peaceful. He also called for the bail of the man who invaded Nancy Pelosi's house, again violently. His trail of supporting violence is long and public. Just because you hold open debates, does not mean you cannot also incite violence.
Given that bin laden initiated violence, I'm not sure this is a reasonable comparison. I do not know anything about Wissam, so am saying nothing about them.
There is room for nuanced conversation here. If the status quo in this thread is "violence is never justified" then I feel that flaggers and downvoters should justify their position with more nuance when confronted by a litany of human history that runs opposite of that notion.
I wonder at which point you consider locking this thread, if even a simple question asking for precision on a viewpoint is being flagged and downvoted.
What curious conversation is happening outside of the normal thoughts and prayers top comment and inane one-liner quotes. Seems like the mods had no problem whatsoever letting the other politically motivated assassinations get flagged away and removed swiftly. How interesting.
Forgive me if I will not celebrate this man's life.
This site is a consevative and fascist bastion that masquerades as an open and free thought forum. Your personal moderation efforts are evidence for that. That you timed me out for so long after unflagging the comment indicative of your bad faith.
Passionate partisans see the site as biased against them no matter what their politics are. For example, the people with opposing beliefs to yours see it as outrageously biased in your favor. This is a well-established phenomenon, and has been for many years. If anyone wants further explanation, one starting point is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
One can argue about why, but it seems clear that this is not an objective perception since it generates such contradictory conclusions.
I've seen you post it elsewhere, for example when DOGE illegally entered government buildings and siphoned off americans data.
During that time apologia for this coup was voted to the top and most of the criticism of the ongoing actions were swiftly flagged and removed. Similar things happened for the michigan assassinations.
I would truly be delighted to be wrong here.
You could release data to lend credence to your hypothesis. Other people have asked for this when you post this from time to time... and they usually get flagged and eventually go dead! If you feel so strongly that its true then show us: hacker news truly is apolitical. I sense however that that data would be damning, and we'll never get to see it.
Anecdotal comments from anonymous internet actors only proves that the mud slinging is equal. But if hacker news did have a right-wing troll problem, I would expect that to be the outcome.
I didn't say that HN was apolitical (an impossible state!). Rather I'm making an empirical observation about the users who complain, as you have, about how HN is biased in favor of the opposite side.
What I'm saying is that your perceptions and the perceptions of your opponents are the same, except for the high-order bit (the political direction you favor) which is 0 in one case and 1 in the other. You can pick whether you'd like to be 0 or 1 :) - apart from this, your perceptions about HN and the style of commenting are so similar that one cannot but conclude that some common mechanism underlies them. Whatever that mechanism might be, it can't be HN's bias, since by definition there can't be two opposing biases.
> You could release data
The public data is already more than sufficient and no one looks at it, except to bolster what they already believe, indeed are certain is obvious.
It would certainly interesting to have a greater diversity of moderators, for instance if this platform runs techno-centric (reflecting the beliefs and biases of managers and corporations in the tech industry) then maybe some academic, scholarly, and/or public intellectual type of person so as to balance out the implicit editorial voice that is inevitable in any online moderation scheme.
