I'd say it's very hard for a powerful nation to not suppress somebody in the long run.
Just think of any powerful nation (or group of people, or whatever), and try to think of somebody they have oppressed, or are still oppressing. It's typically not hard to come up with examples.
Agreed. Its possible that the group survived their oppression and becomes powerful enough to oppress, they loose their identify, in the sense that their culture evolves, along the way. Resulting in oppression along some axis.
I don't know if it's always the case, but it's true if given the opportunity. In the end all people are the same. Cultures may be different, but our lizard brains are the same. Us vs them, and dehumanizing others into something less than humans, whose suffering does not concern us.
Not sure if I would lump all those up together, these examples are overly broad and have little in common. There's more than a thousand years and basically no causal link between Roman persecution of early Christians and Crusades, let alone European imperialism, especially if you take Ethiopian, Greek, Georgian, and Armenian Christians into account. Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between, and Mongol Empire was humongous to begin with, it wasn't about Rus' in particular. And communists that became ruthless oppressors were already radicalized during the persecution, it was literally the radical wing of a militant faction of a huge umbrella party that included people that would have felt right at home in modern EU (e.g. Kollontai and her early activism).
The better explanation is simple and banal - power concentration makes people abuse it.
> There's more than a thousand years and basically no causal link between Roman persecution of early Christians and Crusades
You don't need to go that far forward, though. It took Christians <400 years to promulgate the Edict of Thessalonica that made Christianity (and of a very particular kind at that!) to be the only legal religion. And one can argue that it's no coincidence that it happened pretty much as soon as they have gained the political upper hand in the Roman Empire.
> Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between
Not really. Muscovy was still paying tribute to the Golden Horde and recognizing their supreme authority under Ivan III. His grandson Ivan IV ("the Terrible") conquered the Tatar state, making its lands such as Kazan part of his empire, and sent an expedition to start the conquest of Siberia.
The inaccuracies here are not so much with timing, more so with lack of precision wrt the groups involved. In general, though, I think it's fair to say that, for most part of human history, the oppressed become the oppressors pretty much as soon as they are capable of it.
I think that a lot of monotheistic religions, including Christianity, are generally intolerant to other branches and religions, especially when the faith is supposed to represent absolute truth, so it's probably unrelated to the history of persecution. And Muscovy wasn't the only land opressed by Mongols.
>In general, though, I think it's fair to say that, for most part of human history, the oppressed become the oppressors pretty much as soon as they are capable of it.
Doesn't this also hold for non-oppressed that have the opportunity? Although I suppose it'd be hard to find any examples of non-oppressed groups. Pillaging or conquering neighbors was pretty much the norm throughout the history. Rus' was converted to Christianity in part to stop raids such as Siege of Constantinople of 860.
I wouldn't consider this "lumping the groups together", or that they must exist together in time... its likely a group may require many generations before they can "oppress" another group.
My list of examples is very similar to this one and the ven diagram here is "was oppressed became oppressor"... in most cases it appears that only if the oppressed are destroyed or I would argue in the case of America- controlled at the margins... then they don't circle back around to abuse their newly acquired power.
Edit: yikes—quite apart from the current topic, you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot with flamewar posts and personal attacks. We ban accounts that post like this:
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good things, but if you want to keep participating in this community, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
Wait, my message was obviously intended as a bit sarcastic (which isn't very smart, I'll admit). But are you actually saying that I'm now allowed two racist comments without risking a ban? (three, counting this guideline-abiding comment?)
Then I don't understand what you were saying by "this is how HN moderation has worked for over a decade", wasn't that a response to my previous comment that said exactly that?
It's not the case that "for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does", and that's not what I was doing. When I said HN moderation has worked the same way for over a decade, I didn't mean that the description you gave was accurate—it isn't. (Nor, I assume, did you mean it to be, since you were being sarcastic.)
We try to persuade users to follow the site guidelines, and tend to give warnings and make requests before banning accounts, especially if they are active participants who have been around for a while. We don't rush to banning such users; we try to explain the intended use of the site and convince them to honor it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
Thank you for clarifying and sorry about the sarcasm.
I am absolutely no one, but I'd like to highlight that this kind of policy is (indirectly) why I don't use HN. Tolerating intolerance to the extent you do (which isn't 100% but still a lot) allows people like the one you responded to originally to drive hackers like me, my loved ones, my colleagues and my students away, while attracting other hateful people, as they see that they are tolerated here. In a possibly too extreme comparison, this the same dynamic as the "nazi bar problem" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar). I hope you know what kind of community these policies has made of HN.
I don't agree with that characterization of HN. In my experience, people who make this complaint are usually coming from a place of political passion. That's understandable, and we might have more common ground on that level than you'd expect. But it's no basis for operating a community, assuming you don't want to just exclude people with different views and backgrounds to your own.
It's easy to invoke strong pejoratives like "hateful" when describing people who have opposing viewpoints and passions to one's own—in fact, it's hard not to. But it leads to a rapid escalation. A bad comment turns into a "hateful view", "hateful view" turns into "a hateful person", and soon that leaps to "how can you tolerate hateful people on your site". (The next logical step would be to suspect the mods of being "hateful people" themselves.) This escalation is, in my view, bad for community. It leads to uniformity within one's own group and rage and enmity towards difference.
Having banned countless accounts for breaking the site guidelines over the years, I can't accept that "hateful people" are tolerated here for very long. When accounts are posting abusively, we may give them more warnings than you (or a lot of other users) would prefer, but we ban them in the end. A good example is this very subthread. I ended up banning that account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629). (Not, I should probably add, because of this or any other conversation about moderation, but just out of standard practice.)
p.s. You are not no one! I appreciate your comments and I wish I could write a better reply—I know a better one is possible, that expresses more precisely how I think about this. Alas it would take me hours, so I'm making do with one I don't much care for.
I have trouble seeing it your way. The person you were originally responding to, and originally wanted to tolerate because they also did good posts, was saying blatantly racist things about "the arabs in palestine" and that they essentially deserved the war crimes they're suffering, or that they brought it on themselves or whatever. To me this sounds like pretty straightforward political and ideological hate.
But anyway, this is only one case and we should not base our thinking just on it. The problem is the policy (or the way it's systematically enforced) and its broader results. I don't know the details of how the moderation works here nor have I any statistics. I only know that I saw too much racism and hate towards whole groups of people because of their identity here in the past, and that when I occasionally stumble across a HN link, I usually can still see that hate being a lot more represented than in other spaces I frequent, and that the kind of policy you described to me has never worked at building diverse and interesting communities.
We appreciate your biased comment, aimed at portraying Palestinians as terrorists and non-indigenous to the area, cherry-picking history as it suits your narrative. We're not interested, though. Thank you.
