I Am Deleting the Blog

I had a bad experience with this yesterday.

My country right now is deeply divided between literal left (not USA left, I mean actual marxists) and "right" (almost noone support true rightwing, either in historical sense, being monarchists, or in the current sense, being capitalists, what they support instead is a populist authoritarian way of doing things, more in common with left than with any kind of right).

I now have to be very careful with who I talk to, often whatever I say spark trouble because where I live most people are marxists, and I am ex-marxist.

So I decided yesterday to talk with people in an whatsapp group that is anti-marxist... instead found myself having to be careful and self-censor because they went all the way to the other side, hard, people there were mad our former justice minister praised the army honor... because to them, that is evil, what he should be praising is the army might, as soon I touched on the subject it sparked hostile rants against anyone that believes that a violent army-backed coup is wrong, in a chillingly civil way, they explained to me that the army job is basically kill people in the government until it obeys the majority of the population, basically a literal dictatorship of the majority.

It became obvious then... I won't find a place to talk about my now somehow "moderate" views.

It was predictable that Scott Alexander would be called out for his blog and the people attracted to it. For people driving change in society today, he's the most problematic type of person of all: reasonable, moderate, thoughtful, and a fair minded person who equips intelligent and charismatic people with critical tools for deflecting histrionics.

Journalism is broken. What was news in its imagined golden age, and what news is now are very different things. The essential ingredient that makes a story news is conflict. If there is no conflict, there is no news story. Without it, it's a puff or a think piece, or a listicle, or comment, it's not news. What's missing in news is the legitimacy of the conflict.

The problem, and the reason editors and journalists themselves can't understand it, is that what people popularly call "fake news," is not necessarily about fabricated facts. Reporters and editors will say stuff like a quote is a quote, those were your own words (basically) and you don't get to define context or how people interpret them.

The problem of "fake news" is that it is not necessarily the facts, but the conflict itself that is manufactured. Setting up the subject of a story in opposition to someone who doesn't have standing in their field, elevating fringe views to being on an equal shared platform with mainstream ones, propping up a weak straw man to represent unpopular opinions vs. a protected establishment figure, are all examples of standard news items that people reject as fake. Outing Scott Alexander's personal identity is a way to set up a manufactured conflict between the individual psychiatrist as an imperfect man, and a mob who see his charitable views as equipping their opposition.

What once may have been an interesting battle of ideas among public intellectuals is now just a series of predictable fixed fights, using the same hackneyed tropes, and the same story line over and over again of victims and their oppressors, with the same stock underdog characters triumphing over the same cast of cliche villains. Throwing people to an angry mob is manufactured conflict - and therefore I would argue, fake news.

It would be just as harmlessly entertaining as professional wrestling if it weren't the gate keeping institution for public discourse being reduced to a propaganda mouthpiece for an ideology that is predicated on belief in permanent struggle and conflict for its own sake.

Alexander is one of the more popular writers online and his view is important and essential to public discourse. It would be a shame to see him cancelled too, but it is a predictable stage in a path we've marched down before. If nothing else, his blog should be seen as a canary for some grim inevitabilities to come.

There have been many times when I wanted to use my upvoting ability to unhide a comment that has some merit. To that end, I wish I could see the precise score of downvoted comments. (IIRC, a net score of -1 prevents a majority of HN readers from seeing the comment.)

> Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.

In fairness, they overtly slandered a group of schoolchildren and sent a nationwide mob after them (including celebrities who made very thinly veiled threats against them on social media). That didn’t seem to drive much ethical change within the NYT, so I don’t have much hope for this (“merely” doxxing a psychiatrist/blogger) to reform them.