Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RIP Culture War Thread

slatestarcodex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 313 posts

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#81

Post by komali2 »

logfromblammo wrote: post #37
manfredo wrote: post #13

What really hit home was this passage: > I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing; my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative. I moved from Western Washington where…

I have determined that I am far too liberal for Alabama, yet too conservative for California_SFO. The feedback loop of exclusion works for a lot of monocultures. They just have to be offensively fanatic about something , and the zeal will drive out anyone foolishly moderate enough to disagree. If you wouldn't enjoy assigning the Christian apostles to football team positions, you will feel like an alien somewhere. If…

>I'd like to be able to live somewhere that I might hear people discussing open borders at the gun range, or misogyny at the gym, or military budgets at the coffee shop.

There's a gun range in the Santa Cruz mountains that's about a 20 minute drive from downtown Mountain View where I've had just those types of conversations. I had a discussion on military budgets, with sailors, in a bar in SF months back during Fleet Week. I literally had a conversation about misogyny at the gym with my friend today, because for once we were outnumbered by women there.

I think SF is an ideological monoculture in that you aren't really allowed to be racist or misogynistic or homophobic here, sure. But you're certainly allowed to be conservative in the "old" sense of the word. Tons of the new rich here are.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#82

Post by haberman »

eschaton wrote: post #57
haberman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, as described in this article, is that some people have good faith beliefs, respectfully expressed, that are nevertheless so repugnant to others that you will be tarred for not censoring them.

I don’t understand why people think giving space and respect to odious beliefs is somehow virtuous. What it does is normalize those beliefs and enable them to propagate while simultaneously exhausting those who oppose them. See Sarte’s comments on Anti-Semitism; the holders of odious beliefs are generally not “playing the same game” as those who oppose them, and giving space to all ideas, no matter how awful, is actu…

> the holders of odious beliefs are generally not “playing the same game” as those who oppose them

Maybe a few years ago I would have found this argument convincing. But here is the current state of the Internet (from the article):

> it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.

I think it's hard to claim that even people with truly Anti-Semitic beliefs are somehow playing a more deceptive game than this, or appealing more to people's biases and irrationality.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#83

Post by labster »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #76
gipp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've left out of that idyll of the early internet, though, is that its population was - smaller, by many orders of magnitude - from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds - mostly of comfortable material means These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about. The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a…

Wasn't exactly an idyll, but there was a widespread belief that you abided by some basic standards, just as you might if going to a restaurant compared to sitting at home in your boxers. Or as dang and sctb try to enforce here. It wasn't that homogeneous, nor always comfortably off. Certainly some groups were hugely over-represented. A lot of the early non-tech groups, and BBS's before them, had a surprisingly wide d…

/me checks calendar.

Yep, still September.

To a social network, moderation is a cost center that limits engagement and lowers impressions, while making many of their products get upset at their censorship. Sure they could have done more, but there were a lot of economic reasons not to do so.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#84

Post by rosser »

kerbalspacepro wrote: post #48
wbxrs wrote: post #15

Looking at those charts, why are libertarians considered right-wing? They may be so economically, but they definitely are to the left (or even the far left) socially. Giving that this post talks about social stuff, and not economical stuff, I believe that 51%/49% chart to be simply wrong.

Libertarians are considered right-wing because the left-right axis is simply, "How much do you think the government should be involved in the issues?" When it comes to economics, the answer "more" is left and the answer "less" is right-leaning. When it comes to social issues, the answer "more" is left and the answer "less" is right-leaning. How can this be? Well, the answer is that while social conservatives sound ve…

On the one hand, I think your comment, while excellent, is an egregious oversimplification.

But it's actually the left-right axis that's the egregious oversimplification, and as long as people insist on reducing political questions to that one axis, the "discourse" will continue to be as meaningless and "more heat than light" as ever.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#85

Post by komali2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #68
komali2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is that some people have good faith beliefs, respectfully expressed, that are nevertheless so repugnant to others that you will be tarred for not censoring them. I'm skeptical of this - I've never seen a polite racist argument, for example, or a polite homophobic one. The closest I've seen is a post riddled with condescension - something along the lines of "you don't understand, I'm trying to save your soul from the…

Go visit the Culture War threads then. The article states that the CW threads were full of these kinds of arguments, so if you want to see examples, you know where to go.

Yea, that's what I'm trying right now, nothing good yet though. I'll keep scanning here and there though.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#86

Post by zaroth »

What stands out to me the most in this post, and I hope people can see this and recognize how widespread it has become, is the use of slurs to silence someone, by calling someone a nazi, or a racist, or alt-right and the like.

SSC had a fabulous post (years ago?) about Trump and the narrative that he is appealing to nazis or alt-right. And now to see the same tactic used against Scott here.

I wonder at what point a slur will be called a slur, regardless of who is targeted, even when it is deployed against a white cis-gendered male trying to speak his mind? At what point can we try to promote a specific subgroup but not at the expense of the perceived alt-group?

It frustrates me that these labels are cheapened and weaponized like this so pervasively. Why is it so convenient to label someone as a wrong-thinker and this is an acceptable shortcut to nullify rather than engage and grapple with their ideas?

I think there are a lot of people hoping Trump will be re-elected not even remotely because of any measure of competence or even particularly as a matter of policy, but just as a way to say, no, the culture war doesn’t get to disqualify a Presidential candidate by drawing him as a caricature of a nazi or a racist.

I’m sorry to read that Scott has been on the receiving end of this kind of information warfare. I don’t know what the defense is supposed to be in this age of doxxing and righteous indignation. I guess at least I’m glad his blog is still being hosted and his DNS still resolves.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#87

Post by silisili »

ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

It's not just 'companies', it's people. Reddit has become beyond frustrating because of how siloed subreddits have become. I have to visit a mix of politics, news, and yes, the_donald, to even begin to get a breadth of happenings and news. This was never more apparent than this whole Smollet case. After it was found that it was a hoax, not only were all threads pointing out it was a hoax removed, but also all previous accusatory threads that had been allowed to stay prior. Conversely, you'll never see any negative news about the Trump administration on the_donald.

I'm a person who likes to read, and rarely comment. This experience is completely broken for me, as there no longer seems to exist 'neutral' places for discussion. Is it that people value 'samethink' above all else? People getting more easily offended? I honestly have no idea, but it wasn't always this way...

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#88

Post by mundo »

Tenoke wrote: post #34

I can only describe Scott as a paragon of intellectual honesty and a true proponent of fair and unbiased discourse. So it saddens me to see him [partially] silenced by trolls and people who are dishonestly pushing their agendas. I can imagine how many discussions and people have been silenced in a similar manner, especially when things are more muddled.

+1, I don't always agree with him but I don't think there's another blogger who can touch him for niceness, thought-provokingness, and intellectual courage. He's like a walking, talking manifestation of the HN submission/commenting policy.

(For anyone who's just learning about him, there's a "About/Top Posts" on the top menu. He's probably most well-known for writing on contentious political topics with unusual civility and insight, but he also has a ton of stuff on psychiatry (how various psychiatric drugs work, analyses of drug studies he does/doesn't agree with, etc) and on science generally that's quite useful, e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-... )

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#89

Post by haberman »

jasode wrote: post #43
ufmace wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may well be right about the civil nature of things in the early days being due to being composed of a small group of techies whose culture wasn't all that different from each other. Maybe it was naive of everyone. It doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, though, to hope that even the most different of us could talk out our difference more and resort to violence and intimidation less. Maybe we're now see…

>Maybe it was naive of everyone. It doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, though, to hope that even the most different of us could talk out our difference more and resort to violence and intimidation less. The naivete of everyone is somewhat understandable because each generation lets new technology (e.g. telegraph, airplanes, internet, etc) seduce them into thinking its capabilities will help humans unders…

Very interesting citations, thanks for sharing!

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#90

Post by yyyymmddhhmmss »

ufmace wrote: post #23
gipp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've left out of that idyll of the early internet, though, is that its population was - smaller, by many orders of magnitude - from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds - mostly of comfortable material means These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about. The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a…

You may well be right about the civil nature of things in the early days being due to being composed of a small group of techies whose culture wasn't all that different from each other. Maybe it was naive of everyone. It doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, though, to hope that even the most different of us could talk out our difference more and resort to violence and intimidation less. Maybe we're now see…

Not wrong. Even https://reddit.com/r/stupidpol is a very earnest and respectful place.
Post reply on HN