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Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

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Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#391

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

secondcoming wrote: post #221
paperwasp42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally seen NYT bestselling authors talk about how they're super excited to publicly heckle an author at his next book signing. And join in on conversations promoting burning his book. His crime? Writing a female character who goes on the run, has limited food, and trains in martial arts--which leads to her losing weight. This was, apparently, fat-shaming and deeply sexist. The authors involved in these thr…

> Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left For now. There is a deliberate tactic on the left to become more and more extreme. A sentiment expressed today that's totally fine may not be fine tomorrow. It will be used against you. The left will turn on itself once it has made Conservatism illegal.

The right just tried to burn down the House in the US, murder the government, and install a dictator because it didn't accept that it lost a fair election.

Many on the right still can't, even now.

If you want your philosophy to remain legal, acting like this is a very bad thing and not something that can really be excused - for any reason - might be a good start.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#392

Post by loveistheanswer »

Person5478 wrote: post #371
srtjstjsj wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad take, the wrong side of "paradox of tolerance". Firing/boycotting someone for doing nothing wrong, not even for something "offensive", but just for appearing to have some observable qualities vaguely similar to people who do offensive things, is unjustifiable.

It blew me away when the ok symbol somehow became a white supremacist symbol. I couldn't believe people would actually allow white supremacists to have so much power over them that they'd circumvent such a benign symbol.

If my meme history is correct, the okay symbol was created as a troll on 4chan, and the media took the bait

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#393

Post by helen___keller »

Putting aside the specifics of this particular instance of culture war, global social media is a huge liability to be associated with your public persona and everyone should be aware of this, even the tech illiterate.

If you post something for the world to see, assume that the wrong person will see it at the worst possible time, even if it's years in the future. If you aren't comfortable with that, take your posts private or suspend your account, or delete your old posts, ASAP. At one point I literally walked through years of reddit history to delete any posts that might be embarrassing, even though I post pseudonymously

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#394

Post by iSnow »

rayiner wrote: post #352
iSnow wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's most certainly not true for Germany, at least if we are talking about German definitions of conservatism. A lot of GOP members are more close to what in the German political system would be seen as the extreme right, arguably bordering on the autocratic right. There is representation of the conservative voice both in media and the political system. There is repression, both informal and in the legal code, of N…

Don’t you guys have crosses on government buildings? https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/bavaria-germany-crosse... Didn’t Angela Merkel reject “multiculturalism?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/14... Don’t you have religious education in public schools? https://www.dw.com/en/in-german-schools-opt-out-of-religion-... Isn’t abortion still technically illegally in Germany? https://www.dw.com…

Oof, I won't go into details, but you got a couple of things wrong about Germany.

First, the crosses on gov't buildings are specific to Bavaria. As the USA, Germany has a strong federal constitution which allows the states some lee-way. Furthermore the German Constitutional Court has ruled crosses in schools must be removed if parents object, a ruling that was partially overruled by the ECHR.

Second, Merkel's remarks were rather specific to a form of living together without an overarching attempt at having and enforcing core values. She did not reject other cultures or beliefs. I doubt her position would be controversial in a country with the "e pluribus unum" as part of the brand identity, but I can't really say as I don't know the USA too well.

IDK about the assessment that liberals destroyed social conservatism in the USA as it is again not my country. But from over here, it really seems like the GOP went into a tail-spin over the last decade, maybe even since Reagan. In Germany, due to our voting system, the conservative party is as much a coalition as the Democrats in the USA while the left is more splintered.

I'd say if you wanted to have a less extremist conservative party, you'd need to get rid of the FPTP voting system: it would allow the GOP to jettison the right-wing extremists and seek a ruling coalition while fighting the Democrats for centrist voters/moderate conservatives.

But if the liberals really forced the GOP into becoming a assembly of lunatics, hats off, they did a great job. I somehow doubt it, though...

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#395

Post by throw998 »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #281
D13Fd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know why people use "post what you're thinking" style social media at all at this point. With employers being so sensitive, how can the cost/benefit analysis ever really result in a determination that it's a good idea to be active on Twitter/Facebook (or Gab, Parler, TheDonald.win, etc.)? Maybe that's part of what makes things get so extreme on those sites. The most reasonable people know enough not…

A bit of a tangent but, this is all the result of having people use their real names on the internet. I remember when there was a big push for people to create profiles tied to their real identities with the argument being that everyone would behave themselves if their real lives were connected to the things they did online. That argument is dead as discourse is now. Instead of well mannered discussion between opposi…

The argument may be dead, but the powers that be are pushing hard to make online anonymity illegal and a thing of the past, precisely because they want the kind of mob mentality that happened to the literary agent mentioned in TGGF.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#396

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ljm wrote: post #295
paperwasp42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally seen NYT bestselling authors talk about how they're super excited to publicly heckle an author at his next book signing. And join in on conversations promoting burning his book. His crime? Writing a female character who goes on the run, has limited food, and trains in martial arts--which leads to her losing weight. This was, apparently, fat-shaming and deeply sexist. The authors involved in these thr…

If you go with the horseshoe theory then the far left is barely distinguishable from the far right. The only thing that changes really is the framing of the issue and the motivation. If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation…

I agree that it isn't really about 'left' or 'right', as both leanings are held by plenty of rational non-extreme people. Extremism itself seems to be growing in our culture, and as long as we're focused on putting a political label on it I think it will continue to grow. It is very tempting to believe that everyone you disagree with is part of the most extreme representation of that disagreement, because that makes it easy to dismiss them, and ultimately I think that just pushes people more to the extreme ends.

I don't know how we get out of this. I can't think of a good way to encourage empathy over outrage, as the former is often too painful and the latter often too enjoyable. In the information age it is far too easy to find the hedonistic outrage-dens, and there's a lot of money to be had running such places.

Speaking of likening echo chambers to opium dens, the Rat Park[0] experiments suggest that environment does play a significant role in drug-seeking behavior, and it does seem that a lot of this extremism can be traced back to things like the increasing wealth-gap, the hollowing out of rural America, systemic racism, rampant political corruption, and other societal ills. Therefore, maybe it isn't necessary to address the symptom of extremism directly --by, say, trying to teach people empathy-- but instead focus on treating the underlying illnesses. Of course, since our politicians are elected by the people they represent, and it would seem far easier to manipulate people's outrage for votes than to focus on actually fixing things, that might not be possible either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#397

Post by loveistheanswer »

user-the-name wrote: post #274
inglor_cz wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is the Internet. It is an unwelcome, but arguably useful X-ray of the society. I believe that erasing such people from a worldwide forum veers dangerously close to covering an alarm signal on your car's dashboard with black tape because it is annoying and life feels better without worrying about what might be happening under the hood. I prefer living my life without illusions about the rest of humanity,…

No. Letting hate like this fester is more like not treating a disease even when you see the symptoms, and arguing that it is better to know the disease is there. It makes no sense. This kind of hate SPREADS. Letting it be normalises it, and lets it spread. The antidote to this kind of thing is for the rest of society to loudly and clearly reject it, and make it very obvious it is not acceptable. Letting people keep s…

Judging by Dr. King's philosophy, it would seem that covering up, censoring, and cancelling hateful people is the same as covering up a boil and letting it fester.

"We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#398

Post by elliekelly »

sneak wrote: post #359
elastolin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this satire? The fact that you even specify that you "do not ask for passwords" for social media accounts of potential hires, is sketchy as fuck. I'm sorry for the desperate people that go along with this shit.

I wanted to clarify as there are reports of employers asking for people's social media login credentials (to log in as them and archive/review old/private posts) as a condition for hiring. I think that's insane and abusive. Asking to see someone's public webpage isn't.

Do you drive by their home before hiring them? Maybe peek through the windows? Obviously you can’t ask for a key to their house, that would be insane and abusive. But anything you can see from the street is fair game, right?

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#399

Post by tptacek »

nemothekid wrote: post #358
eric_b wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used find GPs comments insightful, particularly with regard to computer security. Now his comments are predictably and assiduously leftist-political, and rarely on-topic to the article from what I've seen. > The new "Newsweek" capitalizes on the brand reputation of the old one, but has no connections to it From an external perspective it seems like the same argument could be made about the tptacek HN account. The p…

I don’t think it’s fair to disparage someone because they don’t share your political views. tptacek hasnt changed extremely; you just never knew. I’ve been following him on Twitter for years; and I don’t believe he had changed at all - rather HN has had more political stories as the tech sector grew.

The irony is that my friends on the left say the same thing about me (it's a rough time to be a "liberal" and not a "leftist", even though we apparently managed to take control of all the levers of power and should be reveling in our ascendancy).

Anyways, this is yet another reason to flag political stories on Hacker News! It blows to lose the ability to enjoy someone else's writing because you learn too much about their politics.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#400

Post by eplanit »

The Left is using psychological projection as a technique. They accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they themselves are doing. They'll call you a fascist while they burn books. They'll call you racist while accusing you of "white privilege". Like you say, they'll destroy people's lives, based on racial hatred, while accusing those people of racial hatred.

Domestic terrorism.

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