31–40 of 313 posts
I dunno why people think moderating comments is so hard. It's obvious when someone is arguing in bad faith: repeating the same stuff over and over, condescending tone, dismissing opposing side, etc. People are afraid of being accused of censorship.
What really hit home was this passage: > I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing; my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative. I moved from Western Washington where…
I'm from the midwest, and the thread seemed consistently right-wing and reactionary to me. I don't encounter people with... let's be charitable and call it "controversial" politics like those of the typical Culture War Thread poster in my day-to-day life, so what exactly does Scott think is an appropriate contrast to the liberal bubble he thinks dominates west coast tech culture? East Texas? A Trump rally?
I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell.
I can imagine how many discussions and people have been silenced in a similar manner, especially when things are more muddled.
"Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people wil…
And there's the problem. It's not "unfair" to delete comments like those described.
What really hit home was this passage: > I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing; my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative. I moved from Western Washington where…
The feedback loop of exclusion works for a lot of monocultures. They just have to be offensively fanatic about something, and the zeal will drive out anyone foolishly moderate enough to disagree.
If you wouldn't enjoy assigning the Christian apostles to football team positions, you will feel like an alien somewhere. If you think veganism is nonsense from both ethical and nutritional stances, you will feel like an alien somewhere.
The ideological monocultures have to be intentionally upset, or they progress into self-reinforcing shielded bubbles, that are even tougher to crack.
I'd like to be able to live somewhere that I might hear people discussing open borders at the gun range, or misogyny at the gym, or military budgets at the coffee shop. I'm sick of people suffering "downvoted for disagreement" in real life. It's like the awful clique-caste system from high school has metastasized into (un)civil adult society, and no one can eat at anyone else's lunch table anymore.
Looking at those charts, why are libertarians considered right-wing? They may be so economically, but they definitely are to the left (or even the far left) socially. Giving that this post talks about social stuff, and not economical stuff, I believe that 51%/49% chart to be simply wrong.
They may be socially liberal as individuals, but they are all too willing to curtail the government's ability to protect the rights of minorities. That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves. For example, the libertarian solution to the Christian baker, gay wedding cake problem is that the government does not have the right to stipulate non-discrimination laws for public-facing bus…
"libertarians are always classified as X" reliably identifies a person as opposite-of-X.
if you hit up the conservative forums, you'll find libertarians regularly described as dope-smoking lefty hippies, and whatever else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They may be socially liberal as individuals, but they are all too willing to curtail the government's ability to protect the rights of minorities. That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves. For example, the libertarian solution to the Christian baker, gay wedding cake problem is that the government does not have the right to stipulate non-discrimination laws for public-facing bus…
That's like saying having legal abortion guarantees a zero percent birthrate. It would be legal to for restaurant owners to offer segregated sections if they wanted to, that's all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you've left out of that idyll of the early internet, though, is that its population was - smaller, by many orders of magnitude - from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds - mostly of comfortable material means These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about. The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a…
You may well be right about the civil nature of things in the early days being due to being composed of a small group of techies whose culture wasn't all that different from each other. Maybe it was naive of everyone. It doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, though, to hope that even the most different of us could talk out our difference more and resort to violence and intimidation less. Maybe we're now see…