zlacker

>>walter+(OP)
The short-sighted arrogance of the headline really turns me off the article itself. Nothing "went wrong" with the internet. The internet is fine.

The culture of first world nations however, is completely fubar, has been since before all of us were born, and will probably continue to be long after we're all dead. (second and third world nations are also completely broken, but we expect that.)

It's the same kind of nonsense when people say "We've destroyed the planet!" No we haven't, we destroyed our own survivability in our own habitat, but the planet _is fine_, and will shake us all off some day without so much as a thought about it. The internet is equally indifferent and unaffected by our stupid capitalism problems.

>>origin+wg
I'm curious what you mean by "second world nations". The original Cold War definition was countries aligned with the Soviet Union. What's the second world today?

>>pavlov+5j
Well, third world countries are nations which are significantly behind the "First World" nations in terms of social, economic, and political development or progress. For example, much of the middle east still believes that an imaginary sky-fairy has given them the authority and permission to murder women with rocks anytime the men get upset about something, and they think simply being men gives them the right to rape women. These things basically makes them cave-men.

So "second world" countries are those which are not quite stone-age savage, but are still noticably behind.

So an example of a "Second world" nation would be the United Kingdom, which enjoys many of the modern luxuries of the first world, and much of the social freedoms and progress, and yet still suffers under a completely irrational monarchy and lacks essential freedoms such as the right to self defense. As citizens of the United Kingdom are completely forbidden from keeping arms for the sole purpose of defense of self, family, and property, they are essentially servants of the state. Such a nation cannot then be justly described as "first world", as real first world nations such as the United States have enjoyed these additional freedoms for many generations now.

If my definition is not "official" then I apologize, nobody ever really explained the meaning of the phrases to me and my understanding is simply based on 3 decades of contextual usage. The implication is that there is a single path of progress which all nations are basically following. The first world is setting the example, and the rest are following our lead.

('that we still have such a long way to go is one of the reasons it's so amazing we haven't nuked ourselves to extinction yet :)')

>>origin+TF
This breaks the site guidelines. We don't want ideological, religious, or national flamewar on HN.

Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again?

>>dang+f81
I apologize for that, I do try to keep my comments in line... however..

Do we not have an _obligation_ as participants in this world society to speak up about horrors? Inaction leads to more suffering. If the discussion is only happening on HN, how can we justify our inaction to ourselves in the name of adhering to some arbitrary guidelines? "First they came for the..."

I understand why the guidelines exist. I even agree with them, mostly. However, I don't see the harm in tolerating necessary discussions about social awareness. This is where the adult conversations are happening. They aren't happening anywhere else. I am genuinely afraid of the social consequences of this policy.

Also, there is some confusion regarding where the violation occurs. Was it my original comment? Because I don't see a violation in my original comment. The comment you replied to was simply trying to clarify my statements for someone who asked for a clarification. Is clarification a violation? If so, this looks like "thought-crime" right? I would be grateful if you can clarify this for me.