RIP Culture War Thread • Hacker News Board

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#121

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:00 PM UTC

50656E6973 wrote: post #98

komali2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I've been racially slandered for posting MLK quotes, even though I'm not black (they assumed I was). Conversely I've also been called a racist/bigot for claiming white people didn't invent racism/slavery, or that statistical differences in social groups shouldn't automatically be attributed to oppression, or that Frederick Douglass is evidence of how someone can free themselves from oppression. They obviously had nev…

In general it seems that people are tolerating smaller and smaller deviations from their ideological views. While I'm not against calling people out at times, it does seem the truth is increasingly seen as unacceptable.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#122

Post by ufmace » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #43

ufmace wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. The naivete of everyone is somewhat understandable because each generation lets new technology (e.g. telegraph, airplanes, internet, etc) seduce them into thinking its capabilities will help humans unders…

Those are true and good points, and the overall argument may be true too. But if so, what are we to do? Don't bother trying to make the world a more peaceful place because we are doomed to failure?

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#123

Post by johnny22 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #108

komali2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. There's a gun range in the Santa Cruz mountains that's about a 20 minute drive from downtown Mountain View where I've had just those types of conversations. I had a discussion on military budgets, with sailors , in a bar in SF months back during Flee…

Problem is, relatively benign viewpoints are labelled as racist, misogynistic or homophobic when they aren't. And it's done in an effort to silence "undesirable" opinions. What I've noticed the most about SF are it's inhabitants being shocked (shocked!) to learn that people have views different than them. It's as if their entire world ends at the city limits.

I think it's interesting to see all the people talking about the Bay Area here. I've never done anything but pass through California, and yet I tend to mostly share the views of these "liberal" Bay Area folks. I grew up in southern Virginia.

You should remember that we're not all from the Bay Area.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#124

Post by kadendogthing » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:12 PM UTC

berberous wrote: post #95

kadendogthing wrote: post #50

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…

And who decides which information is beneficial, useful or constructive? What makes you think you are on the right side? By the way, I note that you have been downvoted/flagged to oblivion. I only see your comment because I prefer to browse with 'showdead' enabled. So, you presumably post here because you like this forum, yet your peers think your comment was not worth anyone even _viewing_. I think your comment was…

It's not about what information is useful. It's controlling what information is bad/can be abused.

How do I feel about my comment being flagged? It's totally expected. This is a heavy technolibertarian site.

The idea that "things will just sort themselves out" in any field can never be questioned. Saying that maybe things should be a little bit controlled is always met with extreme cult like fervor. The current effects of status quo paradigms are never taken into consideration.

And because of this the term "free speech" has become a thought terminating cliche.

You apparently can't ever know what's right or wrong, or say what's good or bad.

What a terrible way to think.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#125

Post by helen___keller » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

I think the internet is just an awful place to have a "national discussion" honestly. Arguments you encounter are not representative of opinions actual people hold, both because of bad faith internet trolls & because of vocal minorities. I think people have started learning this, which is why so few people care about social media censorship and the lack of open debates on the internet. Most people have probably had enough 30 comment threads with trolls on facebook to not give a shit about internet debate by now.

Nowadays if I want a good debate or a debate on a truly controversial topic, I would only do so in a closed chat room with people I know. The internet is only for advertising my opinion rather than debating it, although I am as guilty as anyone of occasionally getting derailed into a full argument.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#126

Post by kadendogthing » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:14 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #115

kadendogthing wrote: post #50

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…

> Stop assuming there are enough rational/good actors to counter act the bad/ignorant actors who propagate bad information. It took me a few minutes to think of what really bothered me about this line of thinking, and I think it comes down to this sentence. If you believe that this is true, why should it stop with just the internet? Why not all of life? This is exactly the line of thinking that, when applied to real…

Before I continue, how exactly does a dictatorship play into what I said?

You realize say, peer review is a thing. You can't just publish whatever on a news site. Or in scientific journals, or your community bulltein board.

So I'm a bit confused.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#127

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #86

What stands out to me the most in this post, and I hope people can see this and recognize how widespread it has become, is the use of slurs to silence someone, by calling someone a nazi, or a racist, or alt-right and the like. SSC had a fabulous post (years ago?) about Trump and the narrative that he is appealing to nazis or alt-right. And now to see the same tactic used against Scott here. I wonder at what point a s…

[flagged]

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#128

Post by AnimalMuppet » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

Just speculating here...

The Russian playbook in 2016 wasn't just to get Trump elected. It was to divide America. Now, we seem to be doing pretty well at that all on our own, but I wonder if some of their work would be to divide online communities, especially one where people from different tribes could talk reasonably with each other.

And, reading the article, it seems like this could easily have been an orchestrated campaign disguised to look like a bunch of people just self-organizing to yell at something they didn't like because it allowed "them" to speak. (Or, it could in fact have been just a bunch of people self-organizing to yell.)

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#129

Post by coldtea » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

gipp wrote: post #19

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…

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…

>- 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.

In no way in the "idyll of the early internet" I was part of, did I consider fewer people of "homogeneous cultural background" and not poor, as the "prerequisite" for open discussion.

>The techno-libertarian-utopian ideals of the early internet were always a pipe dream because they failed to recognize the role of these factors in their culture, and attributed it all to the medium itself.

Sorry, but part of my techno-libertarian-utopian ideal was open discussion period. Not some version of "civilized" discussion that should follow some specific form and decorum.

Trolling, flame wars, controversial opinions (all of which were part of the BBS culture and Usenet), were totally fine too.

If we just wanted fewer people of middle/upper middle class homogeneous cultural background, we could just talked to our friends face to face.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#130

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 11:22 PM UTC

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 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.

As far as I can tell, the explosion in extreme right-wing ideology on the internet has come from the "special kind of bubble". The San Francisco Bay and the Boston activist-academic sphere breed ultra-reactionaries like pretty much nothing else, because they teach you to take Poe's Law as a standard of politics: no matter how much it sounds like a parody by the enemy tribe, you really can find someone purporting to be at the ideological vanguard of your tribe going to exactly the extremes you think would be a step too far.

In a related matter, as a matter of fact, today the noted Marxist journal Teen Vogue printed an article explaining that Bernie Sanders is overtly reactionary on identity politics, including an accusation that Sanders supports "settler-colonialism" (it's a tweet, of course), and Vox pulled a damn similar move on Elizabeth Warren a week or two ago.

The far-right bases itself on agreeing to many of the most toxic frames the far-left has, and then taking the other side. The far-left does exactly the inverse. It mostly just depends which side has "their" mainstream party in office at the moment -- the one out of power, builds a new extremist ideology based on their opposite. It would be easy to say, oh, that's ridiculous, I reject those premises and those frames, but then you find your own fellow-travelers affirming them.