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The group chats that changed America

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Re: The group chats that changed America

#151

Post by dmonitor »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #72
dmonitor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should interpret "not being able to posit your idea" as your idea losing so hard in the marketplace that people refuse to even consider it.

The right is winning elections and your side is not. Maybe consider stop being alienating liberals long enough to build a coalition that wins elections? Eventually the Democrats are going to recognize that hardline "if you're not with us, you're against us" progressives are costing more votes than they're worth and show them the door.

The "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality is exactly what won the current administration. People like the image of a strong man with his own opinions. Democrats have been retreating to the center on nearly every policy position, and it clearly isn't working.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#152

Post by mindslight »

lovich wrote: post #144
dang wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid that's sample bias. We've done exactly the same kind of moderation countless times on all wings of commenters for many years. You're right that not every comment which should be moderated actually gets moderated, but this is not because we're secretly on one side or the other. It's because we don't see most of what gets posted here. There's far too much of it to read, and we can't moderate what we don't se…

I have interacted with you before and want to believe you but then I see comments in the same post like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823412 > We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do. > If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking…

Would it help you build some trust if I, as the original commenter in this thread and long time HN user with showdead=yes, said I have not noticed an overriding left/right bent to moderation? There are definitely topics and periods where there is more frenetic energy from the "left" or the "right" causing more heated comments, but this is not a moderation bias.

And I agree that my original comment was treading the line in a few places! I think some of that is necessary these days, as I said in a follow up. Honestly I'm still reeling a bit from dang's response of effectively 'oh, you were talking about the current concentration camp? carry on then'. Because yes - I wish that term were still unnecessarily inflammatory.

(also FWIW the other "right wing" comment you're talking about is actually coming from a "left" perspective. I don't think it's an appropriate response to this topic, and I'm personally past that kind of self-flagellation because the time to focus on fighting the "rabid progressivism" is when it has power. But we're all processing this in our own ways)

Re: The group chats that changed America

#153

Post by gaws »

freshfunk wrote: post #111

Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and resul…

> I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked.

The best private chats are those with a few vetted members who understand the consequences of a leak. However, this doesn't fully protect the chat because the leaker, especially if he or she is a skilled liar, could remain anonymous indefinitely.

A common thread among leaks is that people post salacious content under their real names (or pseudonyms that are easily traced) under the guise they are sharing in a "safe space." Nothing is safe from a serial screenshotter.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#154

Post by mindslight »

wat10000 wrote: post #45
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombina…

You’re ok with the idea of steelmanning the Elite Jewish Conspiracy but you take issue with this? Reevaluate your priorities, man.

So, just in case you missed my point -

I vastly preferred the world in which we could leave the "Elite Jewish Conspiracy" thread unpulled, and write off the rare person mentioning those words as some crackpot. But the reactionaries have been pulling hard on these types of threads, and using the bland generic negative responses to drive even more engagement - "see THEY don't even let you talk about it!". So like maybe we - the "left" if you prefer that narrower label, but really "actually-conservatives" (as in we actually respect the institutions and values of our society, rather than merely pretending to) - need to start tackling these topics head on?

Putting my original point a different way - maybe we need to stop taking the mild widespread pushing of societal tolerance/progressivism/etc from our institutions for granted, and acknowledge it as a hard-won asset created from the horrors of World War II? Like the rightist machine of unquestioned hierarchical execution has and likely will always exist in our society, so if there's some ever present cloying refrain of "don't embrace the rightists" expressed throughout our institutions and media is that really surprising? The alternative is to give the rightist forces of top-down control a blank check, which they will eagerly embrace to carry out individual-prerogative sadism as we're currently seeing.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#155

Post by mrguyorama »

dang wrote: post #4
mindslight wrote: post #3

So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked? Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually prett…

Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombina…

The US has done literal concentration camps at least twice, has a literal torture camp we rent in Cuba explicitly to get around the "inalienable" rights of people in the US, and the current admin has literally sent people to an active concentration camp in El Salvador, and has joked about sending "homegrown" people to this camp and that El Salvador will have to build more as they blatantly ignore the courts telling them to bring people back.

This is asinine Dang. Making references to REALITY as it exists right now is not "flamewar".

The HN guidelines have never required people to ignore reality.

Discussing concentration camps in the context of the US has never been "flamewar" territory. This is like when Google bans your account for showing historical footage of atrocities. Whitewashing reality like this is gross.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#156

Post by mrguyorama »

michtzik wrote: post #92
UncleMeat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disinvitation data is so incredibly small that there's no way on earth we can call this "rabid." In Haidt and Fukuyama's "The Coddling of the American Mind" they present data on disinvitations attempts . And it is in the tens of attempts nationwide. They even have to present the data with Milo Yiannopoulos removed since he made up a considerable portion of all disinvitation attempts. You can think that students a…

The FIRE Campus Deplatforming Database claims to collect 769 successful deplatforming attempts.

If you have been banned from running an event at every single college, every single local bar, every single local theater, etc, you still have just as much ability to get your message out as the vast majority of average people.

Nobody has any obligation to provide you a platform. That is literally their first amendment right. If you want to use the government against "cancel culture", you are attempting to suppress people's first amendment rights of association.

The founding fathers had to pay people to print their pamphlets. That option has always been available and was the very context that the first amendment was built around.

The founding fathers never expected anyone else to carry their ideas. They expected ideas to be carried by their merit.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#157

Post by iszomer »

ethbr1 wrote: post #150
iszomer wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there were firmer ideological underpining to the right's platform, I'd be willing to listen. But there isn't and will never be imo, as human behavior cannot be hard-categorized into easy to understand boxes. Just as a light example, look at the former D's that were appointed and confirmed by the current administration. Would you say they have accepted a level of the Right's conformity over their original/core be…

Using Bessent and Navarro as examples, they both have ideological underpinings to their approaches. Unfortunately (for the world) they're also contradictory. And the administration doesn't seem capable of enunciating a coherent decision as to which guides its policy -- instead it's last-man-in-the-room-ism.

I think if it really was the case that Trump's 2nd term appointees had been all right-leaning, the narrative that he is a _fascist dictator_ would have held more weight. But it hasn't as a sort of compromise or willingness to meet closer to the center.

Whereas inversely, a true-to-life dictator XJP whom there is no perceived dissent within his congress or at minimum ever widely publicized or disseminated. Maybe this is the ideological stability you are looking for?

Re: The group chats that changed America

#158

Post by neilv »

UncleMeat wrote: post #146
neilv wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had to deal with this firsthand. If it's a public university, and their personnel are getting death threats regarding university work, the university had better make an effort to help -- if not for decency, then for liability. Including working with law enforcement. One easy thing the university can do themselves (under the direction of a lawyer or administrator) is to ask IT for the Web server logs (or an…

Well let me tell you very clearly: this is not how any of this works. The FBI won't care. The local cops won't care. The university won't pull logs for network traffic, nor would the existence of this information be meaningful to anybody to take any action.

Universities can grow some of the most arrogant and unaccountable people, even worse than a bad for-profit company. But two things that can get the attention of many of the bad apples are journalists and lawyers.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#159

Post by dang »

mrguyorama wrote: post #155
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombina…

The US has done literal concentration camps at least twice, has a literal torture camp we rent in Cuba explicitly to get around the "inalienable" rights of people in the US, and the current admin has literally sent people to an active concentration camp in El Salvador, and has joked about sending "homegrown" people to this camp and that El Salvador will have to build more as they blatantly ignore the courts telling t…

Did you miss where I apologized for misreading mindslight's comment?

Your post would make more sense if I hadn't added the "Edit" bit to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43817409 (nor posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824481 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823390). But I did that more than 24 hours before you posted this.

Re: The group chats that changed America

#160

Post by computerthings »

dang wrote: post #37
e40 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I have ever disagreed with you dang, except in this case. The comment seemed thoughtful to me.

I appreciate the reply. My reaction, like most moderation comments, was shallow and limited in scope to what I know about forum dynamics. If you come out swinging with Nazi references, you're turning the knobs to 11 from the start. That's not compatible with the kind of discussion HN is going for. It's particularly troublesome when the thread is new, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Also it's n…

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