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0 pointsfatbird6y ago0 comments

I hate that the parent is being downvoted. It speaks to the poor quality of the community at HN. Parent is absolutely right: twenty or thirty years ago, you were driven from the public sphere for merely a fraction of what passes today as 'within bounds'. Every cry of how we're self-censoring and being chilled rings hollow with every tweet by the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Whining about the boundaries now is just a confession of how little history you know.

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michaelmrose6y ago

The boundaries have always depended on who you are. Most of us aren't billionaires with the office of the president of one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the services of the strongest military on the planet, and millions of admirers to shield us.

This extremely perverse situation tells us a good bit about a lot of our fellow citizens but nothing about what the rest of us can get away with nor the constraints placed upon us.

If I said something that was misconstrued sufficiently enough for thousands of people to hear about it and hate me even wrongly I wouldn't be giving up my position at MIT I would probably end up homeless until lack of Asthma medication caused me to suffocate.

Part of that not having billions of dollars to fall back on thing.

kelnos6y ago

I think there's more nuance, though. Trump gets a pass (and even praise) for the garbage he spews because he has so many supporters. RMS gets kicked out because his community demands better.

If you or I said something stupid, it'd either not be noticed much at all, or get 15 minutes of fame and then fade into obscurity. In reality, our lives wouldn't change all that much. Yes, there's an outside chance that we could do something so dumb that we'd lose our jobs, but that's vanishingly unlikely, and still, I'd expect the effect to be temporary.

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