Anybody imagining themselves as alive during the Franco regime and not considering throwing a Molotov cocktail or two doesn't believe in freedom, equality, or democracy. It's disturbing to see how many fascists seem to comment on Hacker News. Begone, you contemptible Francoists!

Kind of on brand for this site these days, tbh. A brand of anti social that believes disruption done for anything but monetary gain deserves extreme punishment, regardless of circumstance.

You’re reading people, like myself, who are upset with the articles framing, because it has created a causal link between the reasonable concern that a parent would have with a child engaging in political violence, with the result of a corrupt reformatory program.

Yes, being raped and given electro-shock treatment IS BAD. It’s also very much not what her parents signed her up for by turning her into a reformatory.

Nobody here is defending a fascist regime. We’re just complaining about horrible editorializing.

Edit: these downvotes… SMH

I don't know why you're surprised. This place is primarily about making money.

Businesses are set up like tiny little fascist dictatorships. They are always trying to pay less taxes, evade regulations, layoff workers, monopolize, destroy competitors etc. They don't know anything about the public sphere, or common good, or government, or democracy, or rule of law etc. They suck at that, it goes against all their training and instincts.

You're not wrong about the strong emphasis on money making and profitability in HN comments (it was started as much as a forum for startup or wannabe startup founders as a tech forum), but it's also had a significant libertarian (little-l) streak. It's kind of hard to square that libertarianism with the apparent support of Franco's regime seen in the comments here today.

Study your history, because that’s an old story. The Puritans who fled England and settled in Massachusetts Bay did not try to establish religious freedom in the modern, pluralistic sense. They just wanted freedom to practice their own religion. They were intolerant of dissent and quickly established their own orthodoxies. Individuals who challenged their religious and civil authority, such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished. Quakers who arrived later were brutally persecuted, with some being executed.

There's very little little-l libertarianism here. It's always anti-Communist Reagan-Greenspan style Objectivism disguised as little-l libertarianism.

They can seem like libertarians because they believe that they themselves should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want, but any activism is of the consumer-rights variety i.e. "I can do whatever I want with my property!"

Under Franco, the mean HNer would be upset that they couldn't buy (or create) whatever book they wanted or any piece of art they wanted. That's it. They'd even preface that objection with an "admission" that most of the books or art that Franco would ban were terrible and shouldn't be read or looked at.

Franco himself was weak, soft, and like the 3rd choice to rule fascist Spain. His position and his government was due to the tacit support of people very similar to HN users today. At least he's keeping the Russians away...