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

The Silicon Oligarchy

themargins.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 96 posts

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#81

Post by golergka »

nix0n wrote: post #53
golergka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be a bit out of context of American politics, so an honest question here: how a threat to looters, who actively commit a crime, without any reference to skin color, can be racist? Seeing how violent these riots can get, that phrase is exactly what I would love to hear from authorities as black business owner, for example.

The references to skin color are usually implicit (especially after his presidential term started), but they are always there. I can understand how a non-American might miss Trump's racist phrases, but he's pandering to a white supremacist base who are sure to see them. I don't have a specific link to reference, but the tactic he's using is often referred to as a "dog whistle".

> he's pandering to a white supremacist base who are sure to see them

At this point, it seems like a non-falsifiable hypothesis. I constantly see how in american politics anything Trump says gets interpreted in most bizzare way possible, rationalizing it that he's speaking in secret code for his white supremacist friends. What really got me whas the point where american media quoted Trump on praising General Lee, as if Trump was gloryfing Conferedacy - while the quote in context was clearly intended to paint Lee as a worthy adversary and by that, praise the Union.

I'm sorry, but after that, all accusations of "racism" and "white supremacy" sound like the boy who just cries wolf again. And the most saddeing part about it is, I know for a fact that after saying that, I will be accused of being a closeted nazi too.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#82

Post by AnimalMuppet »

hackissimo123 wrote: post #74
z9e wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have an estimate as to how many white supremacists there are in the US? I’m genuinely curious, because the popular march in VA had what, a few hundred? I realize that may not be the entire population. There’s probably more anti-vaxxers than white supremacists at this point. I don’t understand how people think there’s a white supremacist base that has a ton of power in this country.

This blog post[1] tried to figure out a number back in 2016. (Warning: that's not the only thing the post discusses; avoid if you've already had too much culture war.) To quote: "My guess is that the number of organized white supremacists in the country is in the very low five digits." It's just the thoughts of some random blogger, not an academic study, but he lays out his methodology in detail and it seems reasonab…

Ah, that turned on a light bulb for me. They're finding dog whistles by deconstructing the text. That makes perfect sense.

Since there are so many possible deconstructions (as many as there are readers), it also means that it's a game that the speaker cannot win. Someone will always be able to deconstruct what you say to be a dogwhistle, no matter what you say. So the only possible approach is to just ignore them, because if you try to play their game, you are going to lose, and to continue to lose.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#83

Post by AnimalMuppet »

throw0101a wrote: post #36
leereeves wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Twitter does is transmit messages between people. Why do you consider them different from other services that do so?

Twitter is a private company, which uses private servers and network switches, that communicates with ISPs and their private equipment, to send the information we're talking about. Radio and TV use public resources (EM waves), to which they have been granted a government license, to transmit information, so the government can ask them to do certain things at times.

And the phone company? Aren't they a private company that uses private wires?

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#84

Post by proc0 »

pjc50 wrote: post #44
proc0 wrote: post #9

tl;dr: I'm from Turkey and "orange man bad" So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as unbiased, when it's borderline propaganda. C'mon.

It turns out that the orange man is bad, in many of the same ways that Erdogan is bad.

Nah. It's more true everybody is brainwashed because people are scared to think for themselves.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#85

Post by proc0 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #34
proc0 wrote: post #9

tl;dr: I'm from Turkey and "orange man bad" So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as unbiased, when it's borderline propaganda. C'mon.

The great advantage of Trump for those of us in the rest of the world is that his emphasis has been on doing unto his own rather than doing unto others.

Correct, America first.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#86

Post by hackissimo123 »

golergka wrote: post #79
hackissimo123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump used the the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" as part of a longer series of Tweets about the riots. The same phrase was also said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70 years ago whom no-one had heard of before the Tweet. Some have drawn the conclusion that Trump was in fact making a deliberate reference to this obscure racist.

> The same phrase was also said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70 years ago I have to come clean: I haven't been completely intellectually honest in asking the question above. I have already known about it. The point is, I have a problem with the way present-day american political life has a way with meanings of words. You guys seem to put so much importance on imaginary dog-whistels and connotations, and…

I fully agree; was just trying to give a direct answer to what I perceived your question to be.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#87

Post by 898420938988 »

golergka wrote: post #81
nix0n wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The references to skin color are usually implicit (especially after his presidential term started), but they are always there. I can understand how a non-American might miss Trump's racist phrases, but he's pandering to a white supremacist base who are sure to see them. I don't have a specific link to reference, but the tactic he's using is often referred to as a "dog whistle".

> he's pandering to a white supremacist base who are sure to see them At this point, it seems like a non-falsifiable hypothesis. I constantly see how in american politics anything Trump says gets interpreted in most bizzare way possible, rationalizing it that he's speaking in secret code for his white supremacist friends. What really got me whas the point where american media quoted Trump on praising General Lee, as…

You may already know this, but when people say "white supremacy" they might not mean what you think they mean. For a certain strand of activist, "white supremacy" doesn't just mean the KKK, lynching, Jim Crow, apartheid, black slavery, all the other obvious and overt forms of white racism. It refers to a vaguely-defined sense of racism that supposedly is omnipresent in American (and more generally Western) society, affects everything we do and is apparently inescapable. These people will tell you that we live in a white supremacist society, that white supremacy is at the core of most if not all of our social, political and economic structures, and if you disagree then this only proves that you support the system and are therefore a white supremacist.

This might sound ridiculous but it's taken very seriously by a growing number of people; it has its roots in a certain strain of postmodern thought called critical race theory that's been slowly emanating out of academia for the last decade or two and is now seriously spilling over into the mainstream. See e.g. Robin Diangelo's book White Fragility (which is currently back on the bestseller lists) which asserts that all white people are racist, and if you're white and don't admit that you're racist then this is just you demonstrating "white fragility" which proves... that you're a racist. This is of course divisive, harmful, unfalsifiable garbage but if you don't think these kind of ideas are becoming very influential then you haven't been paying attention.

So basically the reason why it seems like people are constantly throwing around terms like "racist" and "white supremacy" like they have no meaning is because they have consciously and deliberately stripped these words of all meaning. Of course that's not how they'd describe it, but if think this is just me being a conspiratorial right-wing nutjob I highly encourage you to learn more about critical race theory (newdiscourses.com is a good place to start) and understand what these activists are saying. This stuff is coming for you eventually whether you like it or not so you'd better be prepared.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#88

Post by aebtebeten »

golergka wrote: post #79
hackissimo123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump used the the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" as part of a longer series of Tweets about the riots. The same phrase was also said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70 years ago whom no-one had heard of before the Tweet. Some have drawn the conclusion that Trump was in fact making a deliberate reference to this obscure racist.

> The same phrase was also said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70 years ago I have to come clean: I haven't been completely intellectually honest in asking the question above. I have already known about it. The point is, I have a problem with the way present-day american political life has a way with meanings of words. You guys seem to put so much importance on imaginary dog-whistels and connotations, and…

speaking of interpretations, this is what I read in the local paper: "Facebook removes Trump Ad due to Nazi symbol" https://www.srf.ch/news/international/wegen-nazi-symbol-face...

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#89

Post by bsanr2 »

pjc50 wrote: post #43
bsanr2 wrote: post #28

>One of my new grand theories is that America lags 5-7 years behind emerging markets when it comes to the impact of American companies on society. And now, whatever heaven and hell tech companies have wrought upon the emerging markets is now on our doorstep. This dovetails quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the co…

> quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country One of my wilder observations is that, while the conspiracy theorists are wrong, they're "exactly wrong": the unevidenced thing looks a bit like something that actually happened but with completely different details. The thing they're worried about is the US doing t…

Let's go wilder: it's a little bit of both. There wasn't anything in the crack/cocaine epidemic that suggested white fear of the same thing happening to them; drug addiction was seen as a moral failure which white society, as a whole, was immune to. Rather, the fear was that the drug epidemic would affect white communities through spillover effects in terms of crime and an expanded welfare state.

What actually happened?

White people weren't immune to widespread addiction after all. (This would have been obvious if Americans had connected alcoholism to illegal drug addiction, or, well, black and white people not actually being biologically different in regards to addiction, but we weren't ready for that.) Our conscious decision not to treat the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health crisis, because of the racial associations involved therein, meant we were unprepared to deal with the opioid epidemic in an effective manner.

But this also serves as a nice example for what you've observed, because the way that the opioid crisis began to be handled once it finally came out of the shadows was directly informed by how America had seen blacks treated in "Drug War I". The impetus for the swift, soft policies that were put in place were 100% the result of reflection on the destruction drug-related incarceration and public and private divestment of black communities wrought on those caught in the first epidemic.

But I also want to point out that you're coming at the subject from a white perspective: "It happened to black people, so white people are scared it will happen to them." I want to hit you with the black perspective: "It happened to black people, so it is GOING to happen to white people unless you listen to our stories (and here are some examples of what happened when you didn't)." In this light, it's ironic that you would label me the conspiracy theorist. In a lot of these situations, white Americans are paranoid; black Americans are experienced. And it often takes a white person synergizing what we already know into academ-ese for people to take our warnings seriously.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250210715

Again, see you in November.

Re: The Silicon Oligarchy

#90

Post by 082349872349872 »

aebtebeten wrote: post #88
golergka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same phrase was also said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70 years ago I have to come clean: I haven't been completely intellectually honest in asking the question above. I have already known about it. The point is, I have a problem with the way present-day american political life has a way with meanings of words. You guys seem to put so much importance on imaginary dog-whistels and connotations, and…

speaking of interpretations, this is what I read in the local paper: "Facebook removes Trump Ad due to Nazi symbol" https://www.srf.ch/news/international/wegen-nazi-symbol-face...

found in english: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-facebook-trump/facebook-ta...

As you all point out, this could simply be highly unfortunate coincidence. I would advise the white house to try internally circulating campaigns for feedback before running them.

(a flight of fancy: the infamous Antifa agent Max Isayev, as part of a highly structured plot —supported not only by the FBI, but also by Thurn und Taxis and the Trans Scouts of America— to prevent Trump's reelection, has gone deep undercover at Fox under the name of Seymour Buttz, and has been both circulating memes with unfortunate connotations among the Base and flashing subliminal emoji during programming, confident that in the US things that happened in WW2 are even less part of common knowledge than things that Ancient Astronaut theorists believe, making it more likely his nefarious "suggestions" will intermittently seep into campaign material with the innocents none the wiser.)

Post reply on HN