For the best experience on desktop, install the Chrome extension to track your reading on news.ycombinator.com
Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | history | drfloyd51's commentsregister

Strong disagree.

One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.


There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what "help" really is.

Giving money to someone who could otherwise work is very different from giving food to a single mother who is already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also enables their addiction to continue.

Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help" looks like in practice.


It's scary how blind people are to this. The right wing wants to help people in the long term and the left wing wants to help people in the short term. Both approaches seem obviously wrong to adherents of the other because they both disadvantage the group that the other wants to help.

Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.


> The right wing wants to help people in the long term

That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.


If there are ANY people the right wing wants to help, it's rich people and grifters, and "long term" to them is like 3 months. Sorry, but the current admin IS "just bad" and DOES want to harm people - see ICE.

Try thinking of honest examples. If you can't, you're not competent to have thoughts about the topic because you will only be able to feel emotions and pretend they're thoughts.

> The right wing wants to help people in the long term

> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people

Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".


Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.

The other side actively goes out of their way to be cruel and is proud about it. All the while trying to stigmatize decency and help.

> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are

Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible!

> more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping

This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.


"Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular take in the USA.

I think the actual sentiment is closer to "first, do no harm" (a.k.a. the precautionary principle) which is not nearly as bizarre!

That might be the noble aspiration that lives only inside their head, while outwardly the sentiment seems to look more like "make the government harmful so we can justify making it smaller."

As I understand it the key Republican discovery was that their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.

That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.


Does C++ have build in memory management now?

I enjoyed the article. And it gave me a different perspective about how sometimes you have to go to where the people are to get your message out to people that they should leave.

I for one, was happy the article was on HN.


The solar eclipse pictures are absolutely beautiful.

That isn’t actually refuting his original argument. Just proving his example false.

Then you beg the question with a bit of a straw man fallacy thrown in.


> That isn’t actually refuting his original argument. Just proving his example false.

Correct. It is extremely false. And it's an extremely well documented event, as well.

> Then you beg the question with a bit of a straw man fallacy thrown in.

I expressed my opinion. I did not misrepresent that person's argument (i didn't represent it at all). As for begging the question, well, I'm not sure what you're referring to, unless you mean the intensely cut and dry sequence of historical events? In which case... well, they're so unaligned with reality that it's comical.


If you relate funding to arrests, more arrests will be made.

Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?

At least then there is an objective 3rd party that has to agree with the charge.

Of course… the judges and the cops are paid by the same entity. And the judges and the cops know each other through their work.


The prosecution and the judges and the law enforcement and probation officers and law enforcement who protect the judge and the prison system and the jail system are in quite a cozy and self perpetuating cycle. Prosecutors in USA get such high conviction rates cause they ladder charges to encourage defendants to take plea deals, everyone in system profits. It’s so profitable most large local law enforcement agencies in USA have marketing departments.

> Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?

More quilty verdicts would be made. Regardless of guilt


I. AM. THE LAW.

Dreddful.


28 important emails in 20 years? Would the information in those emails had gotten to you via a different vector if you did not have email? This sounds like a case for not having email.

lol. So many guys here taking about how girls are involved in gaming.

Me too! But from a different angle.

The vast majority of gaming focuses on zero-sum resolution. Someone loses or dies so someone else can continue or live.

In my experience as an American white male I have a feeling women would be drawn towards win-win resolutions, or even games that are not so focused on conflict. So taking COD and swapping the bad guys for aliens and the base for a “house” and nuclear secrets for “children” isn’t going to succeed. (And would also be super sexist.)

But really don’t listen to me. Ask a woman.


I can read a trashy romance novel on a bus. But if I crack open a skin mag, I am a weirdo.

So which is the lesser?

Actually… false comparison. They make skin mags featuring men too.

So let’s try this:

Woman reading a romance book. Vs a man reading a romance book.

One of those is “weird”.


I don't think either of those would typically be seen as weird? It's certainly less common, but I think the people most likely to find it weird would be those who would think women reading trashy romance novels is weird too.

Your comment has real "a man wears a schoolgirl outfit and a woman wears a schoolgirl outfit, but society doesn't like one - checkmate feminists" logic to it.

The idea you'd start with comparing porn to a book says enough about how honestly you're coming to this conversation and where your starting point was for what romance novels even are.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search:

HN For You