Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

You have to understand the true nature of American power.

America invades Iraq, slaughters a million people, fundamentally destabilizes the ME leading to the rise of ISIS, and then caps this off by dumping billions of dollars of advanced weapon systems on the region's two fiercest aggressors, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

But if you talk to most Americans it becomes very clear that they sincerely believe that China is the most significant aggressive threat to the world and Iran is responsible for chaos of the ME.

The interesting thing here is that Americans aren't trying to fool or mislead anybody else, only themselves. They don't really care what anybody else thinks and as long as they remain wholly isolated they can preserve the illusion. Every once in a while Americans will hear that the rest of the world believes they are the greatest threat to world peace [1] but this is met only by a moment of blank bewilderment or assertions that the rest of the world is just jealous. But this total disconnect between actual reality and obsessive paranoid fantasies isn't a symptom -- it's the whole point. That's the game.

A French friend describes it best: "Americans are super-heroes of bad faith."

It's what explains articles like this. Again, these people aren't pretending. It's what they really believe. In the author's mind, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X -- both threatened, imprisoned, and ultimately assassinated -- were "celebrity spokespeople" for the left. (I won't even go into wackiness where Malcolm X is "more famous" than Coates, at this point I suspect that the author himself doesn't understand what he's writing.) In the author's mind, being anti-PC is somehow a deeply "taboo" stance. In the author's mind all of the fundamental, "Orthodox" institutions are controlled by liberals who control the "airwaves and pulpits and universities." In the author's mind, the big problem with silencing is that people censor themselves rather than being actually censored by powerful corporations and governments. The conclusion is tragic: anti-PC ideologies, despite being secretly super popular, have ultimately failed to "penetrate to anywhere they might actually have power."

All of this has absolutely no relationship to reality and this is the point. The true goal here is to promote and validate an alternate reality such that communication with the reality-based community becomes impossible. All of this nonsense isn't meant to convince or persuade reasonable people, that's why it's nonsense. The nonsense serves only to isolate the author and his readers. The question itself, and the plea -- "won't somebody think of the brave anti-PC youtubers!" -- is so disconnected from reality and contravenes all objective measurement that it will only attract the true believers. That anti-PC and anti-liberal ideologies are heavily popularized and pushed 24/7 in the vast majority of Youtube videos, the most popular news networks, the majority of state governments and ultimately by the President himself is what gives the entire exercise its power.

[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/polls-u-s-is-the-greatest-thre...

Some observations from somebody who both writes internet software and has been a member of HN since almost the beginning.

1. With a large enough audience, somebody will get upset about something. Sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes I made my point poorly. Sometimes they just don't get it. Sometimes they've just had a bad day and whatever my point, they're not going to like it. Sometimes? Sometimes they feign having their feelings hurt as a way to control conversation. With a large enough audience, you get all of that. Tons of it. You can't say anything to a large enough crowd without in some way it being wrong for some consumers.

2. Every minority group will tell you how oppressed they are. Whether it's greybeard COBOL programmers or hipsters grooving on whatever the other cool kids are, they are all misunderstood, put down, and oppressed. It's a mantra. (That doesn't mean that it's not true. It means that you're going to hear it whether it's true or not)

3. The interests of providing a public forum and the interests of society to hear minority opinions and evolve are in conflict. They always have been. The minute the first city built the first city park there was some kind of Nazi-like group wanting to demonstrate there. Such is the nature of public spaces. (Long discussion here about bullshit internet sites pretending to be bulletin-boards when in fact they're publishers and seek to shape and control what appears on their sites)

4. Sharp contrast, conflict, and passion is what drives clicks. PG once said that he wished more folks would publish stuff about Erlang innards and less political/emotional stuff. It was a great sentiment. The problem is that nobody clicks on those stories or upvotes them. But if I run a school for earthworm jugglers, and a link comes up titled "Earthworm schools under attack again!" I'm going to vote that up before I even click on the link.

What does that mean? For internet sites with any volume at all, owners focus on making the fewest people possible upset. Over time this always ends up with a site full of people who look, feel, and act just like the owners do. Good for the site, good for the readers (perhaps), terrible for society. No bad guys, evil plots, bigotry, or malice required. It's just a natural result of the system.

So yes, you can be both popular and silenced. The mob always find a way to shut out what it doesn't want to hear. That's why open access and free speech for everybody to everybody is so important.

It doesn't to me tbf; UBI and no minimum wage means that employers are allowed to hire people for no wage. Then again, there's already loads of ways to get around minimum wage laws, see the gig industry, hospitality (e.g. anyone that depends on tips) industry, and prison labor (modern slavery).

I think the ludicrousness that people really MEAN to point out is not that they have viewership yet claim to be silenced - it’s that the views of these people are often exactly that of the mainstream, yet they claim to be silenced. For example, Peterson explicitly represents ‘common sense’ and a return to the supposedly natural values we’re all familiar with. And the (obviously somewhat generalised, here) views that monogamy is good, LGBT is bad, women should be homemakers and men are good at tech, political correctness has gone mad, and (in the case of Sam Harris) bombing the Middle East might be a good idea, aren’t exactly radical viewpoints, so claiming they’re being silenced is laughable.

Their opinions are not really taboo, and are popular (especially with the more powerful groups in society) precisely because of it. The comparisons in this article to, say, transgender, workers rights, or peace activists therefore don’t really jibe with me.

A lot of the debate is exactly informed by this: what we suspect some silent majority are really thinking.

So if I have a lot of sympathy with left-leaning ideas, it's probably because in a certain part of my life I see a lot of quietly right-wing ideas.