711–720 of 882 posts
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It’s pretty inherently bad if losing your job means you can’t feed your kids or yourself.
Exactly. It’s absurd the consequences of losing your job are so fundamental. It’s time civilisation moved forward from this.
I don’t think you mean to downplay the impact of someone losing their job today, but that’s how it came across to me.
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>one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies... No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong. The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames…
This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now. This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the c…
People who hear almost nothing that doesn't support the revolutionary narrative and are bombarded with stories about how those who "bravely" denounce dissenters are "heroes", and especially young people with little worldly success to be proud of, go on a rampage to feel the thrill of glory and power over others. The Red Guards are born. They burn whatever, destroy whatever, attack whomever, for whatever excuse they can come up, confident they'll be lauded as heroes by the "news" if they can somehow claim they are fighting enemies of the revolution, and if they can make it dramatic enough to compete with all the other aspiring heroes for attention. Because for most Red Guards, it's all about the thrill of feeling powerful and important.
My Chinese relatives frankly feel a bit of schadenfreude about it. "So, you were supposedly the ones with all the freedom to think and say whatever you wanted, criticize whoever you wanted, and freely argue for your own opinions. We were the ones who were forced to keep our mouths shut and not say what we really thought because we were still stuck with a conform-and-submit culture that wasn't yet enlightened."
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"Many people have lost their livelihoods" Hmm, sounds intriguing. Do you have any sources for this or concrete examples which can be fact-checked?
The ones I can find quickly: * Nicholas Sandmann (for an image taken out of context) * Tenured UNC Professor Mike Adams * Goya Foods' CEO Bob Unanue (attempted) * Terese Nielsen (allegedly) * Grant Napear * Justin Kucera (allegedly) * Aleksander Katai * Kathleen Lowry * JK Rowling (attempted) * Cornell Professor Dave Collum * Stephen Hsu * Leslie Neal-Boylan * James Bennet * Melissa Rolfe * Emmanuel Cafferty
I enjoyed this essay, but I think PG missed one aspect of the recent cultural changes: Even though startups are founded by the aggressively independent-minded, they have insane amounts of ideological conformity. Many people with beliefs that are widespread in the US (pro-life, pro-gun, Republican, etc) are now "in the closet" in the Bay Area. Don't believe me? 10% of San Franciscans voted for Trump in 2016. Yet of al…
Coming from where I live, it's surprising to think of any of those (pro-life, pro-gun, or Trump voter) being quiet about it, so my feeling is that they are nonexistent in your circles, not quiet. But perhaps they are indeed closeted there. FWIW, I also thought that SV (though not SF) was full of firearm enthusiasts and prepper types, but that's probably an uninformed view from the other side of the country.
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I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…
You're engaging in a straw man of both sides and it makes me want to disregard your argument entirely. > you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like... Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign? There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because he was on the legal defense team for…
Then if possible I'll compare last June to this June and see if it looks closer to June 2010.
There's a subtype he doesn't mention but I think deserves notice and is especially pertinent to today's environment. That is, the conventionally-minded who is convinced they are die-hard independently-minded. People like this come across by chance doctrine which appeal to a special part of themself, be it religious, political, or social doctrine. They hardily embrace the newfound doctrine and denounce others as havin…
I think the example of the students of the Princeton professor is very similar to this subtype: > I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it. Most people, myself included, like to believe…
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Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. It's really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it, I guess. Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as 'either you agree with us, or you're literally Hitler/Stalin' depending on…
Am I misreading you or are you framing the left as the forces of conformity? Only one side has badgeless forces snatching people off the streets and is talking about disregarding the results of our election. My apologies if I misunderstood.
Further, I wish Paul Graham would try to convey his ideas with less condescension and smugness. There's a sense in which he maligns large swaths of humanity as somehow defective or worthy of shame. Certainly the term "idiots" doesn't help.
Further there's an essentialism and determinism that's sort of disturbing (labeling preschoolers as sheep is kind of messed up) and lacking in empathy.
Finally I suppose this is obvious, but I'm guessing Graham situates himself as a paragon of fierce independent-minded thinking and courage. It's rather easier to do that when you're absurdly independently wealthy. Thinking through the courageous stand countless people are taking even right now around the world, risking life and limb, just makes this feel a bit like a grievance-laden tempest in a teapot.
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This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now. This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the c…
As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance…
And where is the evidence for this assertion?
This is pg conflating conformity (because conformists* would largely be the ones choosing to undertake the work of deciding which ideas to ban) with stupidity, which... is pretty telling... and wrong.
Intelligence (to the extent that we even understand what it is) seems largely orthogonal to both of the axes pg presents in his essay, and isn't strongly correlated with any particular personality traits at all.