Advocating what amounts to rape and torture just because we don't break it into its components (it's tacitly accepted, after all) is utterly abhorrent and deserves every step closer to invisible that it's getting.
Soo, people who you disagree with should be stopped from spreading their opinions? Come on, it's not that extreme, he's supporting the status quo. It's not like he's saying that all <minority X> should be killed. For comparison's sake, I once wrote here that "the Israeli government are a bunch of nazis" (and I'm still ashamed of that), and I got fewer downvotes (which doesn't make any sense at all, it was a horrible and worthless thing to write). In fact, people who disagreed with me took on the discussion and I learned a lot. That's what HN should be about.
I really don't understand why supporting the current US prison system is an opinion so dangerous that it must be hidden from sight.
Also, if you would've carefully read his post, you'd have seen that he doesn't advocate rape and torture, but the perception of it. It's a subtle difference, but a significant one.
>Soo, people who you disagree with should be stopped from spreading their opinions?
Nobody's stopping anybody from spreading their opinion, last I checked. I said the downvotes were deserved.
Not only for being factually incorrect, ("Prison has to be scary", which is the whole premise of the post, is handily disproved by looking at some of the Nordic nations' systems), but for perpetuating the kind of culture that allows solitary confinement (i.e. psychological torture) and prison rape to be accepted by otherwise sane and caring people.
The culture of "whatever happens to guys in prison is their own fault" NEEDS to stop.
> Nobody's stopping anybody from spreading their opinion, last I checked. I said the downvotes were deserved.
directly contradicts
> [it] deserves every step closer to invisible that it's getting
from your previous comment.
Also, you know that downvoting something enough hides it from HN. On HN, a downvote doesn't mean "I disagree", because we have comments for that. A downvote means "this comment isn't HN-worthy".
As for the actual discussion topic, I mostly agree with you and I don't understand why you're discussing it with me. I'm defending another's right to disagree with you and me.
> The culture of "whatever happens to guys in prison is their own fault" NEEDS to stop.
I agree, but I'm appalled that you think you can enforce a culture change by hiding the opinions of people that don't want that culture change. You can't shove culture down people's throats.
Actually, it does. pg has said that it is fine to use this way.
I think it's stupid, and you'll see in my profile a screed against the braindead moderation style of HN and why I think it's bad. I don't particularly care anymore though - there is no interest from the admins in changing it, so it's pointless to try.
It's possible to disagree with an argument without losing respect for the person making it. You might, for instance, have a rare or specialized experience that would lead you to think differently from another person. Even if you know that person to be wrong, you wouldn't respond with a downvote. Not if their position was intelligent and stated in good faith. Reasonable people disagreeing, and all that.
And then there are the idiots. Here, the downvote is less about disagreement per se, and more about a response to thought that is generally stupid and awful. What it says is that your opinion is so unworthy of consideration that it's simply being removed from circulation.
The comment you're commenting about doesn't use either of these words. He (or she) merely says that "prisons should be scary" and "the current system does a good job of achieving that."
In fact, I would tend to agree with him: Prisons should be scary. If people have no reason to be scared of prisons, what keeps a huge number of people from just giving up on ever doing anything economically productive and instead just shoplift or burglarize whenever they want/need something and don't have enough money for it, because they know that once they're caught they can just take it easy and sit in jail playing video games all day? If that happens, who will grow and prepare all the food to feed these prisoners, and do the work to maintain the jail facilities (and the supply chain which produces the needed materials)?
A society that doesn't have a punishment that people are afraid of seems to me like it would be on a short road directly to a complete collapse of civilization.
The second point is right on the money as well: The current system does do a good job of being scary. I certainly don't want to go to jail, and I've made a habit of noting gray areas in the law where behavior I intuitively think of as "reasonable" is actually illegal, and how you should conduct yourself around law enforcement officials to minimize your chances of going to prison (in the US, you should never help them in any way, never lie to them or physically resist them in any way, refuse consent to all searches, and decline to speak with them unless you have the advice of a lawyer who represents you and will be present during the questioning.)
Neither he nor I say that rape and torture is the only possible way to make prisons scary. For me, being locked up for years without video games is scary enough by itself.
