RIP Culture War Thread

One of those books-that-would-be-a-fantastic-long-essay is "The Big Sort," it tackles this exact problem.

Modern life actually seems to be driving people into micro-cultures, rather than bringing people with different beliefs together.

If there are 10 right wingers and 10 left wingers, but the right wingers post 10x as many comments, that's a rather different scenario than if they're posting equal numbers of comments.

As to the "no comments section" policies, I'm gonna be honest: I don't blame them one bit. No one owes anyone a platform, and considering how easy and cheap it is to host your own content, why should anyone be forced to broadcast someone else's opinion?

The truth of the matter is there are more trolls these days - see especially "The Card Says Moops" (https://youtu.be/xMabpBvtXr4) as to one reason why. If you say "get your own website and post there" it raises the bar just enough that trolls won't do it. I think this is a good thing.

Note that I am firmly in favor of Net Neutrality and carriers (eg ISPs, registrars, etc) banned from having tiers or otherwise hampering access. What I oppose is people crying censorship when big name sites kick out the despicables. As I pointed out above, anyone can get a website and domain name.

Libertarians are considered right-wing because the left-right axis is simply, "How much do you think the government should be involved in the issues?" When it comes to economics, the answer "more" is left and the answer "less" is right-leaning. When it comes to social issues, the answer "more" is left and the answer "less" is right-leaning.

How can this be? Well, the answer is that while social conservatives sound very authoritarian- and they are- when it comes to things like gay marriage, sex, etc, the authoritarian force for them doesn't come from the State. Ideally, it comes from society and the church. They would rather the government not get involved at all, private beating do the work.

Socially liberal people, however, want the government to protect this behavior. Notice that the Left didn't take the 2015 SC decision and say, "Yay, we've got marriage, we're done." No, they wanted the government to protect the employment rights and other various rights of gays.

Where do libertarians stand? Well, they don't want the government to help! When given a hateful baker, they say, "Hate and bake, I don't care, the market will handle it!" On the spectrum of answers to "How much do you think the government should be involved in the issues?" this is obviously a right-leaning answer. The distinguishing factor is that libertarians don't have any personal gripe against the discriminated, they just think the government shouldn't raise a hand to help them.

tl;dr: The Left-Right access is about government involvement, and libertarians want less involvement, just like their more "socially conservative" counterparts.

>It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days

Good.

>with the internet as a means to control, oppress, and indoctrinate.

No, we're just not allowing "information anarchy." Not all information is beneficial, useful, or constructive. Some of it has net negatives.

Stop assuming there are enough rational/good actors to counter act the bad/ignorant actors who propagate bad information. We don't have the public education infrastructure in a good enough place to assume that. So stop assuming it, because the data is telling you you're wrong. We're seeing the opposite of what everyone claimed would happen if everyone had access to as much information from as many different sources as possible. And we've just tip toed into this era and we're already seeing bad effects.

The internet of yesteryear (and I mean decades ago) was largely populated by well educated people. Most of them were educated in a fairly structured environment, and knew how to qualify credible sources and credible information against information that was most likely incorrect or uncredible. That's not indoctrination. That's not "oppressive." The exact opposite paradigm you want for the internet created a populace that allowed the internet to be a great place to have civil, intellectual, and life altering conversations. Someone saying something absurd/incorrect/dangerous never could go far. It was always beaten or it was ignored, left to die because there wasn't an audience for those ideas.

Now you can present almost any idea, no matter how ridiculous, harmful, or "bad" it may be and there will most likely be audience. And that's a problem. The idea that again, we can just let ideas fly off the wall and it'll slowly get filtered out is not tenable and has every ounce of data loudly saying this perspective is not true.

You might be well educated enough, or even just have the intelligence, to discuss certain topics in an intellectually curious manner from a distance. But others, a lot of others, are going to take them at face value and run with them.

It's information anarchy. Anarchy always results in new power structures that are less suitable to civil existence.