I Quit Hacker News

I agree with a lot of his points.

A TSA worker, to them, is not some guy without a college degree who is feeding his family, he’s an amoral pawn of an evil bureaucracy that exists solely to ensure that peaceful Americans have to get their junk touched by the back of someone’s hand before boarding a plane.

I got eviscerated for suggesting an alternative to berating the front-line TSA workers. To repeat, they are working hard, in a shitty job, to feed their families. They are following the rule they're given, and have no input to the process. Treating them like shit isn't the answer.

The ideology is often anti-corporate to the point of naiveté, and that’s nothing compared to how anti-government it is.

This seems to be a problem in any tech community. Maybe the larger percentage of Asperger-like folks?

I'm not sure it's the specific issue of TSO decorum that Matt is trying to communicate, so much as it is the perceived lack of life experience and corresponding biases that HN commenters appear to bring to issues like this. We do, in the large, sound like a bunch of 17 year olds when we talk about the TSA.

I disagree with Matt about TSOs, but I think that's probably survivable. What might be less survivable is the fact that a group of people who are overwhelmingly privileged young male knowledge workers are spending time talking about politics at all. This is a crappy place to talk about politics. Discussions seem to invariably devolve to Rand-ian libertarian software developer vs. WTO protester software developers.

hmm, i haven't seen a lot of WTO protester types here ...

there certainly are a lot of privileged male knowledge workers here. that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad place to talk about politics, though. it depends a lot on your goals.