What is most disturbing about this trend is the concept that some arguments are unassailable, that some ideas are not up for debate and discussion. "Safe space", while an admirable concept at first glance, has been co-opted by people who just want a rhetorical nuclear option to protect weak or unfounded arguments. It quickly becomes a race to the bottom to see what is the crassest idea you can successfully firewall b…
You may be confusing "isn't interested in disucssing it with you" with "isn't up for discussion at all". Maybe you bring less to the conversation than you think you do, in some cases.
Yup! That idea gives me hope that we are not in an inexorable decline of intellectual thought. Fashions, including intellectual ones, are both faster to appear and slower lived than actual ideological shifts. I think it's telling that while political and ideological fashions fall in and out of favor, actual policies tend to progress towards effectiveness.
What makes you think polices get more effective? The F-35 is a laughing stock. Surely most effective wouldn't be an overbudget, past deadline, aircraft with a host of problems. Surely most effective would mean avoiding things like that with government purchases. Taxes get more complicated every year. I have a whole extra set of documents and fines to deal with because no health insurance is punished now, for example.…
The point of ACA was to make not being insured more hassle than being insured, to motivate you get insurance, not complain about the hassle of being uninsured. Maybe you philosophically oppose insurance, but it isn't ineffective at its stated goal
> are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finan... > Also, way to go easy on the left. I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. W…
>I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorit…
The economist recently had several articles supporting the right of sex workers to work legally and openly, and is supportive of gay marriage: when you say they have a 'bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones' , are you suggesting they are against those things or supportive of them?
Is this phenomenon observable in cultures that are generally accepted as more progressively feminist than the US? (e.g. northern European countries, Germany, etc) I'm not American and I don't know much about feminism, so for me it's hard to tell the proportions with which these ideas come from US culture vs feminism (there are accounts of UK based initiatives, but there is heavy cross pollination between the US and U…
This sounds like a conclusion looking for evidence. What's with the interest in blaming this on feminism?
A very good reason to generally attack/dismiss feminism IMO is that it is this morphing amoeba-like ideology. One's personal feminism is always different from 'those mainstream feminists', yet you do not see a lot of distancing from some of the very harmful feminist extremists that are around. ("NAFALT" - not all feminists are like that)
It's gotten to the point where the analogue would be to label oneself a 'stalinist libertarian' (because not all stalinists are like that) or other similar nonsense.
The more I see this kind of thing the more I am starting to fear that this is an unintended consequence of the internet. Similarly to being raised in a cult, the internet gives people the ability to spend most of their time in a community that reinforces their world view while forcing out any dissenting view points. Subcultures on the internet tend to trend towards the more and more extreme as anybody expressing an o…
You can see it in action on Hacker News, or any sites with downvotes. Inevitably, the downvoting will destabilise any equilibrium - the views of even a slight majority will get reinforced in a positive feedback loop, and you end up with an echo chamber. There are several opinions that I know can't be voiced here.
HN is nothing compared to reddit when it comes to this phenomenon. I come here to get away from the crazy. And then I go back to reddit when I run out of content here.
You can see it in action on Hacker News, or any sites with downvotes. Inevitably, the downvoting will destabilise any equilibrium - the views of even a slight majority will get reinforced in a positive feedback loop, and you end up with an echo chamber. There are several opinions that I know can't be voiced here.
I frequent HN, often write controversial opinions and the downvotes are rare, usually I have someone spend the time and write a reply. The way adults should deal with the stuff. But we techies love to argue for the sake of arguing, so we are good at looking at it as a game.
On the topic of things unable to be said however, disagreeing with Stallman seems to result in immediate downvote shitstorming.
> I have had problems with people thinking I'm arguing or > attacking their ideas, when I am only looking for a > debate and a more thorough view of their ideas and > line of thinking. Noble intent, poor execution. Consider that people in oppressed groups (women, victims of sexual assault, ethnic minorities) have had their legitimacy questioned and denied throughout most if not all of history. And then along comes yo…
Well, I'm making conscious effort to improve, but to be fair I never did quite go so far as to question obviously disturbed people. What I describe is more in line with a heated discussion of politics or history. In any case, this lead to micro conflicts I wasn't aware of and so poor relationships. Your solution is spot-on. I had such difficulty following through, that I literary tied up a piece of red string on my l…
I'm with you in a lot of ways. Debate/dialectic/etc is how I generally would like to come to an understanding of things. And that's not wrong. It's just... a lot of people don't work that way, and frankly we're being jerks if we try to force it on others.
>I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorit…
The economist recently had several articles supporting the right of sex workers to work legally and openly, and is supportive of gay marriage: when you say they have a 'bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones' , are you suggesting they are against those things or supportive of them?
The Economist is a bit of a weirdo: a genuine liberal-capitalist publication. They're the odd ones out, these days.
OCD runs in my family, and as soon as I figured out I also had it, the way to get over it was to confront the things that "triggered" it. I've been wondering for a while if there's any similarity to not facing triggering issues in OCD and for all these people who've experienced trauma.
> The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extreme. I see a lot of evidence on the right but not much on the left. E.g. The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. But I don't really see any evidence that, say, what the folks lobb…
Also, if the Left always gets more left-wing over time, while the mainstream always moves leftward, leaving nobody but a lone batch of online hyper-reactionaries defending decency and normality, where's my Communism? Worker-owned cooperatives? Commons trusts? Basic income? Only the last of those is even under the remotest mainstream consideration! And how is it that we've got the most hegemonically capitalist system…
The problem is that these particular college students are too far left, its that the ones who are being extremely leftist are also trying to silence everyone else and remove the intellectual environments from universities. It's not about which side their on, it's about the end result they're trying to achieve. Leftist college students in the past weren't trying to silence and terminate professors for expressing a viewpoint contrary to theirs, unless there was some kind of legitimate attack with it.