I don't think that what I wrote was off-topic, because poking fun of Southern White society was a major theme throughout the entire article, not just the part I quoted directly.
And my subsequent posts clarified my viewpoint, and weren't written in inflammatory language. It's not my fault that some people immediately associate the use of the term "White" with a crazy Stormfront posting neo-Nazi. How else am I supposed to refer to the subject matter? Using White in a negative context seems to be fine.
If a lot of people think that using terms like "White culture" makes you a neo-Nazi, then that precisely confirms that the viewpoint I was parodying in my first post is alive and well.
You poured gasoline along the shortest path to a flamewar, threw in a couple matches, and then acted like the rational one. Subsequent posts to "clarify" merely feed the flames. The damage was done. And "it was only a parody" is deeply lame.
The discourse is fragile. This kind of thing harms it. Whether it's arson or just pyrotechnics doesn't much matter.
The term "parody" is often misused, but I was using it correctly here. My post was a parody of what I perceived to be anti-White bias. This did initially cause some confusion, but all of the criticism I received was by people who recognized the intent of my post.
A more direct version would have gone something like "Imagine if the author had portrayed Jews, Chinese or Africans living in the US using the same insulting caricatures, or conflated their relative ethnic homogeneity with literal inbreeding..."
If you would prefer the latter style of presentation, I will try and avoid satire/parody as a stylistic device.
Satire and parody and other forms of creative provocation can be intensely vital things. But they don't work on HN. We could speculate about why, but empirically it's a property of the system: certain things make HN less interesting. High-signal provocation isn't possible here. It just leads to noise, which leads to more noise.
HN's rules aren't about propriety—they're about trying to stave off lameness. HN is an experiment in trying to remain interesting, so anything whose effects, compounded over time, make the site less interesting counts as bad.
It took me a long time to figure this out in my own posts. I hate dreary language, so I'd try to make comments that were interesting rather than lukewarm. I slowly learned that, no matter how "interesting" they seemed to me when I wrote them, provocation that leads to noise only lowers the quality of the thread.
We're not demanding that people behave themselves for convention's sake—that would be tedious and inevitably lead to a backlash. Rather, it's an optimization problem: given this system called HN, what will make it more interesting and less lame over time? Whatever the answer is, it doesn't have to do with the quality of individual comments but with their systemic effects.
The spirit in which we're asking people to work on this is not a finger-wagging one. It's more like giving a hard problem to a team.
And my subsequent posts clarified my viewpoint, and weren't written in inflammatory language. It's not my fault that some people immediately associate the use of the term "White" with a crazy Stormfront posting neo-Nazi. How else am I supposed to refer to the subject matter? Using White in a negative context seems to be fine.
If a lot of people think that using terms like "White culture" makes you a neo-Nazi, then that precisely confirms that the viewpoint I was parodying in my first post is alive and well.
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