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RIP Culture War Thread

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Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#61

Post by iron0013 »

api wrote: post #33
iron0013 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scanned the thread a bit and can second this. I am originally from Ohio the type and extremity of right wing ideas present there seemed far to the right of anything typical in the midwest. There are KKK types and similar in Ohio of course but they're pretty extreme outliers in most areas, especially anywhere near a city or a college. I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explos…

I actually mentioned the Klan in my comment above too, originally, but removed it for fear the mods would consider it flamebait. However, I'm not sure folks here on HN are really aware of exactly how unpalatable (to most people) the contents of the Culture War Thread often were.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#62

Post by simonsarris »

> People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. [...]

> But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.

I see this happen often, including to myself, and it's why I stopped talking about politics (or even interesting philosophy/economics questions except among other phil students) on Facebook. Anything deviating from the opinions of a few vocal friends would lead to muted threats, worded like: "So you're essentially making space for Nazis by saying its OK to talk about this?"

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#64

Post by manfredo »

api wrote: post #33
iron0013 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scanned the thread a bit and can second this. I am originally from Ohio the type and extremity of right wing ideas present there seemed far to the right of anything typical in the midwest. There are KKK types and similar in Ohio of course but they're pretty extreme outliers in most areas, especially anywhere near a city or a college. I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explos…

I think the key thing people aren't accounting for is the displacement of conversations. There's probably a highly elevated rate of conversations about topics people can't express in person.

Regardless of people's opinions of the threads, there's still the discrepancy between most people characterizing the thread as right wing when in reality the majority of participants were left leaning.

There's studies that show that people on either extremes of the political spectrum are more likely to see centrist or even moderates on the same side as being on the opposite side of the political spectrum. I see a lot of that happening in the Bay Area. Things like setting up more restrictive hiring flows for white and Asian men is taken for granted in much of the Bay Area when such policies are pretty controversial in much of the country. On the flip side, mainstream conservative views like support for restrictions on abortion is essentially unheard of.

I'm sure there are conservative places that are analogues to the Bay area on the other end of the political scale. But that doesn't make it any less of a concern to me.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#65

Post by npsimons »

kadendogthing wrote: post #50
ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

>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…

> Now you can present almost any idea, no matter how ridiculous, harmful, or "bad" it may be and there will most likely be audience.

Like anti-vax, or AGW denialism, or white supremacy, or flat-eartherism, or creationism, or trickle down economics . . .

Need I go on?

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#67

Post by thaeli »

logfromblammo wrote: post #37
manfredo wrote: post #13

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 have determined that I am far too liberal for Alabama, yet too conservative for California_SFO. 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…

This is one of my favorite things about living in a (literally) inside-the-Beltway suburb of DC. The local governments are far enough left that I'm afforded civil rights protections, but the overall culture is accepting of a range of viewpoints. It helps that most of the zealots (of all stripes) are inherently political transients here, who come and go with the electoral cycle.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

komali2 wrote: post #55
haberman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, as described in this article, is that some people have good faith beliefs, respectfully expressed, that are nevertheless so repugnant to others that you will be tarred for not censoring them.

>is that some people have good faith beliefs, respectfully expressed, that are nevertheless so repugnant to others that you will be tarred for not censoring them. I'm skeptical of this - I've never seen a polite racist argument, for example, or a polite homophobic one. The closest I've seen is a post riddled with condescension - something along the lines of "you don't understand, I'm trying to save your soul from the…

Go visit the Culture War threads then. The article states that the CW threads were full of these kinds of arguments, so if you want to see examples, you know where to go.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#69

Post by legitster »

komali2 wrote: post #52
ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

>hen make some fake accounts and post something bad yourself. Write hit pieces on the owner or author and highlight those cherry-picked things. Spread those pieces far and wide, and keep writing new ones with the same theme. I've never heard of this happening - was there specific instances of this you were thinking of? I'd like to read more, if possible.

It is fairly acknowledged that for the new Ghostbusters movie, Sony Pictures deleted well-reasoned and articulated negative comments on the trailer's Youtube, but left up hateful and poorly worded ones so they could portray all negative criticism as bigoted.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#70

Post by iron0013 »

sigstoat wrote: post #38
thebooktocome wrote: post #24

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 why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves. "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.

That hasn't been my experience. On most conservative forums, most people--clearly conservative--describe themselves as "libertarian". Look at elected officials: who's more likely to describe themselves as a "libertarian", Republican politicians or Democratic politicians?
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