Lumich

Not the reason for this post, but while we're here I have to side with quotemstr, whose comments I've been subscribed to for a while because of their quality. There was, in my view, nothing personal about his comment, at least nothing to take issue with.

But I guess it has to do with that strange and hypocrite ideology that makes some people abuse grammar and employ plural personal pronouns when they fully well know that (a) the guy is singular and (b) the probability of him being female is almost zero as the climate on HN is toxic for women. (Maybe it's a way of pretending it isn't?)

Anyway.

So, my "karma" reached a new high-score, and it means that once again, all my comments are stillborn, dead by default, killed by software (obviously, no artificial or other intelligence involved in any way, not even simple text analysis).

How did this come about? Well, it's the work of bigots. They abuse the "flag" feature, which is meant to stop spam and trolls, to suppress comments, opinions and even facts they dislike or disagree with. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that close to two dozens of my comments have been flagged to death. Not a single comment was spam or trolling. Not a single one.

Even my very long and thoughtful post about my doubts concerning T-rex and, by extension, the science of dinosaurs was flagged (50089549). Why? What's wrong with these people?

While bigots may only account for a small percentage of HN users, they are effectively handed over censorship privileges to limit HN discussions to their narrow-minded vision of the world.

They're not religious bigots, of course. Instead, they're ideological bigots, or even scientific bigots (in as much as science has displaced religion as ideology for the educated classes).

It would be easy to change the effect bigots have on the site and the discussions that can be had here. For example, it seems users can look at other users' "karma", which is seen as a kind of "merit". Well, abusive "flagging" could be punished by negatively affecting "karma". Plus, next to "karma", some "flagging" stat could be displayed so "flaggers" would be seen as such.

HN has been around for a long time, and people with a mindset similar to mine must have shown up now and then and made the same observations and maybe complained about it in some way. I have seen some such comments and complaints. To no avail, apparently. So I have to conclude that the de facto censorship the minority of bigots are allowed to exercise on HN is fully intentional.

Then of course it is not a site for minority views, and not even for curiosity. It's not a site purely for bigotry either, of course, but, sadly, bigotry seems to play a more important role than curiosity.

« a bit of a conspiracy theorist rant by non-historians »

That's not at all a fair assessment of their work. They aren't trained historians, okay, but that's not unusual for authors of history books; it can even be a plus (unencumbered by institutional constraints and the need for ideological compliance). Docherty and Macgregor also provide lots of detailed concrete evidence, following the prosopographic tradition of Carroll Quigley. The topic of the book is the machinations of a "secret elite" (whose members are well-known high-ranking public figures), so yes, this is akin to a conspiracy. But it is neither a rant nor a theory.

Back then there was more lo-tech, today there's more hi-tech. I was referring to the money figures given. It was $11 billion of lend/lease for the Soviet Union, which today would be around $230 billion. The combined aid for the Ukraine (US+UK+EU) has exceeded $500 billion.

« The comparison with WW1 is instructive in that regard. Then, the view that conflict with Germany was inevitable was surprisingly widespread »

What is surprising about that? The Northcliffe propaganda press and writers such as H.G. Wells had been nurturing the idea of the inevitability of war with Germany for years, so, unless they really sucked at propaganda, at least some "positive effect" would be the expected outcome.

« It's just that the nature and scope of the conflict that caught them by surprise - a land war »

Maybe, in some respect. But they had factored in the armies of France and Russia, hadn't they (in 1904 and 1907 already), so they were certainly expecting some land war scenarios.

The reason they didn't tell their people they were willing to sacrifice them on the order of a couple hundred thousands may have had to do with the lack of popular support for such an honorable prospect.