71–80 of 313 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did the author state that? Because I wouldn’t have shared it if that was stated. Edit: the author states that the post is having technical issues. I don’t believe there’s any indication it shouldn’t be shared/discussed.
its tagged 'Things I will regret writing' I implied it, maybe I'm wrong
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…
Take this one that has two relative high voted threads and was at the top for a while: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/at8cuq/the_orches...
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…
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…
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…
>half the country.
I disagree that half the country is conservative. I was put onto this idea by Michael Moore actually, who argued that if you run the surveys, turns out most Americans support liberal values. This article is a good summary: https://prospect.org/article/most-americans-are-liberal-even...
> 82 percent of Americans think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington.
> 59 percent favor raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour.
> 78 percent of likely voters favor establishing a national fund that offers all workers 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.
> 60 percent of Americans believe “it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”
> 60 percent of registered voters favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.”
> 58 percent of the public favors replacing Obamacare with “a federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.”
> 63 percent of registered voters—including 47 percent of Republicans—of Americans favor making four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free.
> 76 percent of voters are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about climate change.
> 84 percent of Americans support requiring background checks for all gun buyers.
> 60 percent of Americans believe the recent killings of black men by police are part of a broader pattern of how police treat black Americans (compared with 39 percent who believe they are isolated incidents).
I could go on. The point is, a true conservative is somewhat of a minority in America, and also, a "conservative" isn't what one might think. There are probably a lot of people in the Bay Area that believe they are liberals but are actually conservatives - tons of self-described libertarians here, for example, whose opinions on the invisible hand and free market I would argue are conservative.
Then, there's the "modern conservative" - the MAGA hat wearer that thinks Mexicans are taking their jobs, but are also somehow draining tax money by illegally being on welfare. The racists, the homophobes the ones that believe bullying is a valid "treatment" for the "disease" of transgenderism. The ones for whom "conservatism" isn't so much a political belief as an ethical one - "we need a conservative judge to prevent abortions, and if he's a misogynist so be it, it's for the Greater Good." These people aren't necessarily "alien," but their thought process in 2019 is, especially compared to the rest of the world.
I think the world as a whole is becoming more rational. I think more people are getting good educations. In a rational world, racism and homophobia and all the things that are "scarily conservative" just don't jive. There's no good arguments for it. It's the Mexicans are taking our jobs and our tax money at the same time thinking - totally irrational, totally incompatible.
> I have met exactly one co-worker that openly expressed conservative views
If "conservative views" means "government should spend less," I think SF could use more people like that, for god's sake just look up the budget for Van Ness improvements. The existence of opposition would help cases like that.
But if "conservative views" means "gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry," fuck'm, why would you want someone like that around? How does that "help the public discourse?" How does exposure to that viewpoint help anyone? "Free speech?" I don't buy it.
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…
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…
It wasn't that homogeneous, nor always comfortably off. Certainly some groups were hugely over-represented. A lot of the early non-tech groups, and BBS's before them, had a surprisingly wide distribution. You could have a civil discussion on uk.politics with diametrically opposing views. Most didn't degenerate into a flame war, of course some did. Occasionally actual politicians would show up. Or authors in writing groups. Try that today on /r/politics.
The largest change was losing netiquette. Every new join, whether techie, scientist or whatever, was expected to read and abide. Once people started arriving in volume those basic "rules of the club" rapidly became meaningless. No one cared to listen. As people moved through forums, to the social networks the idea of moderation or self accountability at all, died stone dead. Everyone apparently now expects to be just as crass and offensive as they like, because "free speech".
I don't think much of that change could have been avoided. I do think the social networks could have decided to enable moderation far more than they have.
"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…
Which government is censoring people?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
He seemed kind of angry at other people for bringing it up as a way to demonstrate what he was doing was wrong but then turned around used those topics as an example of why his moderation and general platform were so great. Guess he can just have it both ways because.
It's nothing but pseudo-intellectual masturbation. The idea of meaningful debate is apparently more important than actually meaningfully debating something to people like the author of the article being linked. Anyone who apparently brings attention to the absurdity and uselessness (or sometimes harmfulness) of what he's doing is "just against him" or is just too morally disgusted to actually think about the topics. Which is actually kind of a funny view point when you think about it; he truly believes other people just don't "get it" which is the summary of the entire article.
It's arrogance and foolishness masquerading as an enterprise in advancing knowledge.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?