Question:<p>I'm black and I live in Canada and I am hard at work at pivoting my business to position it for success. One option I've always considered for various reasons is to move the business to the US. At the same time, I've become increasingly concerned about the level of bigotry, division, and outright hate being spewed publicly by what seems like an increasing portion of the population. At first, I attributed this to TV sensationalism but the more I scour the internet, the more I come upon hateful videos, articles and comments from <i>non-anonymous</i> users.<p>This all culminated today when I read an article a friend shared about an NJ robber who was choked to death after he tried to rob and subsequently headlock one of his victims. My question is not about the appropriateness or legality of the action on either side. My question stems from the downright insensitive, hateful, divisive, racist views expressed in the comments section of the post on a seemingly neutral website like NY's Channel 4 NBC News: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Smackdown-NJ-Robber-Killed-by-Former-HS-Wrestler-138711694.html<p>Is this really what America has become? Has the United States become a place where a shockingly large number of individuals feel comfortable with placing their name and image beside the same type of hateful rhetoric that would have been spewed back in the days of segregation?<p>Why am I asking this on HN?:<p>I am posing this question on HN because I generally feel that people on HN are rather open and deliberate with their responses. Scoble (after what he felt were numerous personal attacks) chastised this community about this a few days ago but there is definitely a benefit in this - most of the time. As such, I feel the HN community is more than capable of providing me with a response to this regardless of whether or not it's a tech question.
I think it is a logical result of more and more people coming online and more people having access to more efficient ways (smartphones & always on 3g+...) of posting these comments/blogposts you are confronted with.<p>Did you ever go outside and talk to random people on the street, asking them for their views on several topics? Personal worlds are shielded by our social circles and our neighborhoods (which, if you read HN, is probably not the slums) and yet, if you really talk to random people, you'll find that a lot of these people say scary things. Interesting things as well, but also scary things. I stepped out of a hotel a few months ago, bumped into a man on the street; we started talking. He was French, a private jet pilot, sounded quite well educated. He was going to the drugstore to get cough medicine and I had to go in the same direction. When we were about halfway, an Middle eastern man passed us; when he was out of ears reach, the French guy said, while nodding to the man, 'we should bomb all those f<i>ckers, they don't deserve to live'. People who say this kind of crap to total strangers have no qualms posting it online either; these people were not online before in the numbers they are now.<p>How would they know that if you are logged in with Facebook or Gmail that your name/profile link automatically appears next to the post? People know very little about computers (including smartphones) and integration + apps make it very easy to blend in such a way that it would be </i>hard* for people to actually not make their name appear.
The racist/anti-Obama/anti-Democrat remarks are getting many more "likes" than those with opposing viewpoints. That does seem kind of odd for a site like NBC; I would expect the numbers to be more balanced, at the very least. I wonder if an influential right-wing site linked to the article, and this is what's driving all the traffic.
The comments in that thread aren't much different than what's said on talk radio or even certain mainstream TV news and opinion programs. It's probably not worth worrying about for your business aspirations but certainly is an unpleasant facet of living in the USA.
As an update, I thought I'd share this with everyone here:<p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57372861-71/bbc-confronts-facebook-troll/" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57372861-71/bbc-confronts-...</a>