One thing I find interesting is that moral outrage and hygienic thought are now the domain of the left - a sharp contrast to even a couple of decades ago. If a young person wants to be edgy and rebel - they become far right, not far left.
The 'alt-right' is largely a manifestation of this.
Far right being edgy and rebellious is only the case in a narrow segment of the world that happens to be overrepresented on HN. The right is rebellion for young, affluent, educated white men that attend liberal universities and work in tech. For everyone else being far right is either how things have always been or not in your own best interest.
I don't know how you've come to these conclusions. A huge segment of the working class is right-wing and always has been. Being far-right is a rebellion for the poor just as much as it is for the rich.
Not sure about the working in tech thing but that seems an apt description, at least from my college days. There was always a playing of the victim card since the politics of the students at the university were decently left. The funny thing is that, like most college towns, it was a blue oasis in a sea of red so their perspective on being victims was interesting, to say the least.
Finally someone advocating civilized discussion instead of finger pointing! Really if we want to improve society we must stop screaming and get to work!
"The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about."
But wasn't that also an all out war on the far left as well as minority movements vs letting the right-wing militants fester over time? I recall the 90s, esp. after the OKC bombing, having a lot more talk about militias. The media also plays up cartel violence or, usually black/Latino, gang violence more than we've ever seen discussion of the Aryan Brotherhood or, at the very least, classifying abortion clinic attacks/bombings (typically done by white Christians) as terrorist attacks.
I was about to flag your comment but decided not to.
Instead, let me ask you this: why give a single-sided view of things? What about the far-right protests in Charlottesville or the “tiki marches” on Virginia Tech campus?
It's very easy to take what we have for granted, you soon accept it as the norm. I'm not sure what the answer is, perhaps some enforced hardship now and then to remind us how things were.
> Like the boy who cried wolf, the Twitter mob crying "SHAME!" becomes easier to dismiss the less precisely it positions its crosshairs. To move the needle on gun control, public outrage needs to remain focused on the gun-violence epidemic, lawmakers' inaction and the lies of the NRA. But in the wake of the shooting, viral outrage has also erupted over U.S. President Donald Trump's crib sheet reminding him to express empathy for the victims and his unserious proposal to arm teachers. Just looking at the responses online, an observer from another planet might think we humans believe all these offences deserve equal attention. When everything is worthy of outrage, effectively nothing is.
I really think kids by a certain age should be able to distinguish for themselves the importance of events from the hysteria of the writer. Maybe a cartoon series where twitter is the villain? At the end of each episode, the heroes realise they were being wound up.
This is dangerous. Complimented with _virtual moral high ground_, a lot of stupid people have a voice. Reminds me of [0]. Female porn star said she didn't want to shoot films with male porn stars who did gay porn prior. Of course many people found that outrageous. Cyber bullying made her kill herself. One would think women should have freedom to decide for themselves who they should have sex with. Ironic.
Is there a male/female breakdown in the pattern of expressing moral outrage, signaling, receiving reward from likes and share, and amplifying it? Does either sex express more outrage? Does either sex receive more rewarding likes and shares?
I highly suspect it is closely tied with each sexes favored topic. Most women are less interested in Right-to-Repair, where men seem much less interested in identity politics until either get the pointy end. I, like you, would favor data over conversation and pontificating.
Already, studies of this type can be hard to fund. Introducing a component that could promote bias (real or percieved), is enough to often warrant its disconsideration, and it is unfortunate.
> where men seem much less interested in identity politics
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bias to this. After the 2016 election, there was discussion about the focus of Democrats on identity politics, but Trump's campaign was almost entirely identity politics, which was rarely explicitly called out.
It seems as though when the group that holds the most political power (men, white people, Christians) has concerns, it's not viewed as identity politics, whereas for political minorities, it is.
I've heard the point made that the Democrat's identity politics caused the Trumpian identity politics as a backslash. If topics are frequently about solving issues for groups that are explicitly different from you, you get framed as the problem and frequently even prohibited from having a voice backslash is inevitable especially by people who don't agree with the problem statement in the first place. That approach is not a productive way to have any discussion.
> I've heard the point made that the Democrat's identity politics caused the Trumpian identity politics as a backslash.
Well, it's true that white identity politics in the US was a response to abolitionism and the upswing since the mid-20th century a response to the civil Rights movement, and the Republican Partt embrace of white identity politics a direct response to LBJs embrace of civil rights, so there's a long term historical sense where (accounting for the flip in party positions over history) that's true.
More immediately, Trumpian identity politics is more a direct reaction to neoliberal globalism with a rhetorical veneer directed at Democratic identity politics.
On the other hand, Democratic identity politics are currently the major distraction from the fact that the dominant Democratic faction is dedicated primarily to neoliberal globalism, so there is that.
> the Democrat's identity politics caused the Trumpian identity politics as a backslash
Trump's campaign made sure to groom this backslash and harvest the maximum amount of polarization from it. As did Hillary's campaign on the other side.
The next step in "bettering society" seems to be creating some kind of resistance towards that thing.
This is really hard to respond to because the general definition is straight forward, but concrete examples get controversial really quick. As I understand it identity politics is dominated by in-group and out-group thinking. The group can be racial, cultural, gender based, didn't really matter. Extreme examples are: You aren't allowed to speak about the situation of women in the work place without identifying as a woman; if you are pro abortion and don't smoke you are likely against guns and the crucial part: might be shunned from your social group of you aren't; funny example from a recent article here: if you are a true Vegan you also can't eat processed food like Quorn.
May I suggest the wikipedia page? The term has historical significance. It's usually applied to underprivileged groups and associated with democrats. For some reason no one calls it identity politics when Trump divides us into patriots and sons of bitches. Or real Americans vs coastal elites, etc.
I wouldn't ask about single words/concepts without wiki'ing first. It's when even wikipedia leaves me blank that I pray for the interpretation of a HNer (or stackexchanger etc). Wikipedia says identity politics is people holding political positions in the interests of their religion, social class or caste, culture, dialect, disability, education, ethnicity, language, nationality, sex, gender identity, generation, occupation, profession, race, political party affiliation, sexual orientation, settlement, urban and rural habitation, and veteran status. Well damn, that's everything.
Yes, it covers everything. But in the US the term "identity politics" became popular during the Civil Rights Era. So it has been used to describe issues impacting African Americans. They vote overwhelmingly Democrat, so Republicans use the term in a derogatory manner.
> It seems as though when the group that holds the most political power (men, white people, Christians) has concerns, it's not viewed as identity politics, whereas for political minorities, it is
I have no support for trump, but the level of identity politics was nowhere near comparable. This is when the phrase "check your privilege" became a meme - because it was being used to shut down the conversation. Progressives literally had a scorecard for if they'd consider talking to you. (Gay +1, Trans + 3, Black +2, Female + 1.5, Hetero Parents -5).
It's disheartening to see people turn down the opportunity to discuss ideas and then feel morally righteous about it. I can't think of anything more anti-intellectual. If this attitude doesn't change I only see things becoming more polarized and nasty. We need people discussing ideas with those who don't always agree. That's the engine for progress.
>I have no support for trump, but the level of identity politics was nowhere near comparable. This is when the phrase "check your privilege" became a meme - because it was being used to shut down the conversation. Progressives literally had a scorecard for if they'd consider talking to you. (Gay +1, Trans + 3, Black +2, Female + 1.5, Hetero Parents -5).
This kind of PC-obsessed SJW seems to me to be a total fabrication of the right disconnected from what actual leftists and progressives are fighting for.
#metoo wants men to stop harassing and assaulting women with impunity
#blacklivesmatter wants cops to stop murdering black men with impunity
You know what, I think these are issues where people should be polarized "morally righteous" about, whatever that means. They are real injustices that affect a large number of people on a daily basis. Activists rightly view these struggles as ideological battles to be won, not conversations to be had. What is the "other side" to affirming the basic humanity of women or black people?
This kind of PC-obsessed SJW seems to me to be a total fabrication of the right disconnected from what actual leftists and progressives are fighting for.
Pay more attention to what's not said.
#metoo wants men to stop harassing and assaulting women with impunity
...and men with similar stories of being on the receiving end are ignored or told to shut up and sit down.
#blacklivesmatter wants cops to stop murdering black men with impunity
...and people trying to bring up actual statistics, or examples of non-black men getting murdered by police, get shouted down. It can't be about us-vs-them culture or training that says to always escalate instead of de-escalating or any other systemic issues, it has to be solely and directly about racism.
>...and men with similar stories of being on the receiving end are ignored or told to shut up and sit down.
That is not true at all. It's just that these events are much rarer (women rarely occupy positions of power and abuse that power sexually).
>...and people trying to bring up actual statistics, or examples of non-black men getting murdered by police, get shouted down.
Again, you're fighting strawmen. Most leftists are anti-police in general and certainly care about violence against white people committed by the police, especially white people who are marginalized in other ways.
>it has to be solely and directly about racism.
It isn't solely about racism, but racism is a huge, primary component.
> What is the "other side" to affirming the basic humanity of women or black people?
But how much of politics is economic theory? We're split along the dismal science of welfare and taxation. It's unfair to the socially liberal and fiscal conservatives to shut down economic conversations on the basis of "you must hate blacks and women". That's really what I feel unjustly about. In the past people may have been more willing to discover your nuances, now it's a simple matter of red team or blue team.
>It's unfair to the socially liberal and fiscal conservatives to shut down economic conversations on the basis of "you must hate blacks and women".
Perhaps, but how fine is the line between "you advocate for economic policies that disenfranchise black people and women" and "you hate black people and women"?
I agree -- I think that right wing economics falls apart under debate and scrutiny (ie, it reveals itself to be based on the interests of the wealthy and powerful and to the disadvantage of the poor and middle class) and discussion is a good thing. But I haven't seen many economists becoming subject to deplatforming in the way that racist or misogynistic speakers like Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, etc have (rightfully) been, so I don't see this as really an issue.
Outrage inflation is a thing but there's a limit to how far outrage could take society anyhow. Shaming and outrage are continuous with bullying. They only work on weak people. But it's still open to us to better society by improving ourselves as individuals.
I challenge the implication that conscientious people should find themselves compelled to be manipulated by the moral outrage crowd. That's exactly the kind of thing they play on.
Yes, it should be a last resort. But the rest failing, violence is sometimes needed. Few social progress was ever made without violent struggle. Turning the other cheek isn't an option.
You must consider that there is an equal but opposite version of you thinking this very thing. Just as implicitly convinced that if you fail to abide their way of thought in calm discussion, then there must be something wrong with you.
And then what, what about it? Say I believe in the abolition of slavery. An "equal but opposite version of me" believes that slavery should continue. No amount of talking is able to convince the other side. What do you make of it?
You're fighting a strawman, just in the same way the opposite of you would do. Just like you, your opposite will build up a straw man of you, throw together some sophistic logic to claim your very existence is a threat to society, and the next thing we know we have people shitting all over each other in a self righteous frenzy each equally and thoroughly convinced they're protecting society from its imminent destruction at the hands of the quixotic windmill turned man they're fighting.
Am I to conclude you would be against a war against slavery then? Or that there is no good or evil; me and then are the same because, well, we're both fighting each other?
I think Tango's point is not that one is right and one is wrong. I think the point is that neither side is actually listening and engaging with the other's position. Instead, it's "if you really understood my position, you would of course agree with me" - on both sides.
Note that this has nothing to do with one side being right, or with one side being morally superior. It has to do with being so certain that you don't listen.
And it's self-destructive. If you're on the anti-slavery side, you're morally right. But if you actually listen to the other side, you might be able to have a conversation where you persuade some of them. If you merely broadcast your own rightness (and the other side's wrongness, moral bankruptcy, and stupidity), you aren't going to persuade anyone. (Unfortunately, in the case of slavery, there may not be any route where you eliminate slavery without a civil war.)
But that is my point precisely. Sure, let's engage the other side. Let's make our arguments heard. Let's understand the other side and try to persuade them. I'm all for it. But failing that, what choice to we have but to resort to violence if we must (as you admit in your last sentence)?
What you do not seem to acknowledge is that your view boils down to 'my way, or violence.' And your opposite is similarly viewing things through a lens that boils down to 'my way, or violence.' It's easy to see how this is going to end... When you put this in some sort of reduction to absurdity by pretending debates are about slavery, then it masks how truly psychotic this is. In reality, people are discussing things that are far more shades of grey than black and white, but with complete mutual self righteous determination that their side of grey is actually the 'white' side.
But let's get back to even notions of black and white, right and wrong. People must be allowed to think and even argue in favor of things that are completely awful. Deciding to assault people for wrong think makes you no less wrong. The difference is in action. And again this often results in people trying to do things like invoke some sort of 'paradox of tolerance', but in reality - there is hardly such a thing. Please list an of a single society that was oppressively destroyed by an internal force that made their points relatively peacefully. That whole sentence is a a nonsequitor. It's the prime example of that sort of sophistic logic people use to convince themselves that they're protecting society from its imminent demise, and it's complete nonsense. And it's also arguably the most dangerous thing in this world. Nearly all 'evil' in this world has been done in the name of some greater good.
I'd agree that the terms 'weak' and 'strong' are used too loosely about people especially in moral matters. However in the case of disobeying one's conscience it seems clear: part of the mind wants A and another part wants B. Disunity is weakness.
Sorry but this is dumb. Outrage culture, like the weaponisation of the abortion, drug and gun debates, has been going on since _at least_ the sixties. I mean, look at this picture and tell me how social media’s made this worse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Rock_Desegregati...
What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice. The outrage has always been there, and no progress has been made on those issues. Thinking social media is causing the left to get more vocal is like thinking cameraphones cause police shootings.
Five short years ago, I was no less a permanent resident of the Internet than I am now, and I was no stranger to the unsavory dark corners. Yet I had either never, or very rarely encountered so many of the inflammatory topics that i see now on a daily basis.
There were no regular references to nazis (godwin'd threads aside) and white supremacy. You don't even hear about godwin's law anymore, because it applies much too often now. I'd never heard of antifa. I didn't daily encounter people accusing people and things of being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on. I didn't know the names of any white supremacists other than David Duke, and I rarely saw anything about him. (Ironically, I still have never seen any white supremacist material or figures in any organic context. I only see them being promoted by their opponents due to the Streisand Effect).
My perception of all of this has changed drastically in the last 5 years. I encounter all of the above daily to the point where it's never far from my thoughts. That was never the case before. I'm not an activist. I don't take an interest in politics. I only subscribe to graphics programmers on Twitter, and I only visit subreddits that interest me. But it's only in the past 3-4 years that I can't even be on the web without seeing all of the above.
Now all of this hasn't found its way into IRL, yet. But it has begun to. People I've known for many years have recently started posting about what I consider fairly extreme political ideas. Certain distinctive vocabulary, and the associated thinking, is seeping into their lexicons.
I'm sure there's a lot of truth to what you're saying too. But culture spreads. If those outraged voices are "just" being heard more, there is no "just" about it. They're drawing people in, the ideas are spreading, and the mobs are growing too.
I didn't know how many of my second-tier friends, and friend-acquaintances, were assholes, belligerent politically, and or just downright mean when it comes to things they disagree with (small or large). It's a very odd thing to be exposed to so many of a distant person's thoughts on so many topics over years of time.
I think part of the aspect of Facebook sucking so bad now, is that people have become 'friends' with vast numbers of people that they really are not in fact friends with, and never would be. Previously they would have remained unexposed to all the things they don't like about said persons. Now that exposure is a daily event, and it makes a product like Facebook horrible, because it sinks to being a shit-show 24/7, where your thousand 'friends' on a network like that end up overwhelming the less than 20 or 50 people you'd ever care to communicate with regularly. What's the subtractive value of being exposed to one terrible post by an acquaintance 'friend' on Facebook? How many good posts does it take by your actual friends on there, to offset that negative? I'd bet it doesn't take being exposed to very many personally negative posts in a day to drop the Facebook experience into the sewer.
Fundamentally, I think this means that the hyper-connection experiment known as Facebook is doomed to fail (ie be a miserable product), unless you heavily restrict it down to a small core socially that you actually get exposed to. And then if you do that, is there any point to having the thousand 'friends' on your fake friends list to begin with (I'd say no).
That's to my point (my opinion): small, tightly curated social networks will produce radically superior outcomes in terms of product experience. You can accomplish that on a platform with a billion users, however the connection counts have to be relatively small compared to what's common on eg Facebook today.
Those 400 or 1,000 fake friend lists, are at the core of why people have a bad experience on Facebook: nobody really has a hundred friends. Facebook's drive for hyper connectivity, doomed their product to suck.
Large, hyper connected networks will always end up being mediocre or worse experiences. With that experience sinking as they grow toward saturation, and assuming hyper connectivity amongst the users on the platform.
When relatives ask me to help with the Facebook app, I just can't. And I'm a power-user of about any program/device I use. I doubt more than a fraction of the users of that app know anything else than the basic stuff like "add a friend", "make a comment/post", &c.
Just shows that invoking Godwin's Law as if it had probative force was nonsense in the first place. Valid principles of reasoning can't be suspended by fiat.
Godwin’s Law wasn't suspended and isn't a principle of reasoning.
(Godwin did indicate that a common adaptation of the law, which is a principle [though not a valid one] of reasoning, which is often mislabeled as the law itself, was both overly broad and specifically improper when applied to particular comparisons to the Nazis.)
Turns out what I was referring to was not the law itself, but a principle that is mislabeled as it, which I object to people using as a "checkmate" move or as a thought-terminating cliché.
> Just shows that invoking Godwin's Law as if it had probative force was nonsense in the first place. Valid principles of reasoning can't be suspended by fiat.
What is the valid principle of reasoning allegedly suspended by Godwin's Law?
Most invocations of the Nazis are nothing more than name calling.
That statement was substantially more accurate 24 months ago when we didn't have organized groups of individuals marching in our cities literally chanting Nazi slogans.
Even prior to Trump's election and prior to Godwin suspending Godwin's Law I had seen a decline in references to Godwin's Law, even in places where I would have expected to see it invoked. This decline was noticeable to me even in 2012.
I fetched the quote from wikipedia. I didn't even realize Godwin was still alive. I assumed he was some long dead Greek philosopher.
>On December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician." On August 13, 2017, Godwin made similar remarks on social networking websites Facebook and Twitter with respect to the two previous days' Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, endorsing and encouraging efforts to compare its alt-right organizers to Nazis.
Since you bring up abortion, drugs, and gun laws, I think a lot of the blame goes to the erosion of federalism in the U.S. It used to be more possible to roll your eyes and walk away when people from California or Texas (or wherever) passed ludicrous or outrageous laws. Making everything a single national issue actually ratchets up the conflict, especially in a country as diverse as the United States.
There is some hope, though, in that at least the drug laws seem to be moving back to a state-level issues (depending on what the Attorney General can get away with).
You only have to convince five! And you're right, that doesn't seem too difficult. Getting the supreme court to unanimously agree on something would be a miracle.
Before you can convince even Five though, you have to have a case strong enough to bring to court in a court system that by design is reactive (contrast: proactive) to changes in the law. You then need to make it through any number of courts (local, State appeals, State Supreme, Federal district, Federal appeals, and finally SCOTUS), and then, if you make it that far, you have to hope SCOTUS decides to actually take your case on rather than kick the can back down to a lower court.
At any part of the process, litigation can come to an end if the parties involved decide to settle or if one of the parties chooses to stop fighting it. This is actually one of the ways the more controversial parts of US law have been in force for so long, either nobody has standing to bring a lawsuit, or if they do, the US Department of Justice will sometimes rather choose to stop litigating than potentially lose one of their more powerful legal instruments or reveal too much information about how they gathered evidence for a case in the first place.
> What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice
There's a lot of truth here. Same goes for the perception that social media has made us "dumb" -- it's just that now we're hearing from a lot of people who simply did not have a public voice before.
That said, I think instant access to social media is eroding our impulse control abilities. We're able to act our emotions before they have a had a chance to simmer down. Maybe a lot of the outrage we're hearing is heat-of-the-moment comments that the commenters don't hold as long term views?
To clarify, you are saying 'the Internet didn't make us dumb, but now the dumbest of us now have equal access to a microphone'. Is that a correct reading of you?
If so, that's interesting. Because of feedback loops at multiple levels...
Your last sentence is interesting. You appear to be saying that people might not believe the stuff spewing from their very own fingertips...
...people might not believe the stuff spewing from their very own fingertips...
They don't. Only hyperbolic writing and videos get attention nowadays. Everyone's trying to one-up everyone else in the attention wars. Virtue signaling abounds. Calmly stating a reasoned opinion is a quick way to be ignored.
The author points out that it's different this time because you're not getting a more balanced perspective which you would've received from traditional media outlets and from interacting with other members of the public through face to face communication and potential confrontation.
This is because social media companies have a vested interest in showing you things you only want to see to get you hooked on the site so they can make more money. Then you share more outrageous things because you get a hit of dopamine when another like minded person shares or agrees with your outrageous perspectives.
> a more balanced perspective which you would've received from traditional media outlets
Are you serious? Traditional media outlets have always been run by the landed gentry (or their capitalist equivalents), and so have almost always reflected the ideas of the existing system.
Really? I look at the everyday newspapers, and I see even the "left wing, unauthoritarian" news papers preaching xenophobia, ignorance, and bad science. None of which are present within traditional academic "left-wing liberal" thought, with writers such as Rosenburg and Chomsky.
Part of this is that the Overton Window has shifted so far right that "left wing" in the mainstream now means "center", however it cannot be ignored that what the mainstream considers 'normal' has indeed been shifted over time by the editors (and through them, the owners) of the newspapers.
I think for me the most startling revelation recently was that what I considered to be a traditionally marxist perspective and given right, "The freedom from want", was adopted by western countries during World War Two. It's a damn shame that although it is a founding right, it, and efforts to implement it, have been for decades ignored and disparaged within the media and within "right-wing" academic circles.
Part of this is that the Overton Window has shifted so far right that "left wing" in the mainstream now means "center", however it cannot be ignored that what the mainstream considers 'normal' has indeed been shifted over time by the editors (and through them, the owners) of the newspapers.
That's a bit disingenuous, considering the overton window had been relentlessly moving leftwards for decades before this. I think what you're seeing now is a correction, and the end of "peak leftism" - at least for another few decades.
No, it's been shifting more _liberal_, which is different. The effects of British and American McCarthyism still put Marxist (and also any associated leftist) thought very much out of the mainstream.
You can easily observe this on politicalcompass.org
They analyze voting records, speeches, etc. and use an objective test to score each party leader on where they stand on certain policies.
One of the problems in US discussions that I've noticed as someone from Europe, is that Americans tend to talk about "leftists" and "rightists" to mean people who are respectively "less authoritarian" and "more authoritarian", regardless on where those people actually stand on matters relating to the left/right divide. I would say this is one of the biggest problems in US politics, as it causes the most misunderstandings when two people enter into a discussion.
As for the UK, you can see here that historically there is and always has been a right-wing bias, which fits with the (more or less) three party system that we have: https://i.imgur.com/yI0QXpL.png
> No, it's been shifting more _liberal_, which is different. The effects of British and American McCarthyism still put Marxist (and also any associated leftist) thought very much out of the mainstream.
But Marxism is a much more socially acceptable than say, fascism. I've seen a lot of communist themed parties where people hang up hammer and sickle flags, but rarely any parties where people hang up swastikas (or at least, they don't post them on social media !)
> Political Compass isn't an impartial or scientific measure. It's center is not guaranteed to correspond the political center of the globe.
> But Marxism is a much more socially acceptable than say, fascism.
Are you sure? I'm seeing a hell of a lot of openly fascist speakers (Spencer et al) getting positive publicity in the mainstream press. I mean, really the only reason why Milo's book tanked was because he said some disgusting things about child-abuse. My more right-wing leaning friends (pro-Tory) have been sourcing Breitbart lately, which is an obviously fascist news source.
It's also important to note that Fascism traditionally has never been seen as a widely acceptable option by the mainstream since Mussolini, possibly before. This has had even more reinforcement with the US's operations in Iraq and the surrounding regions supposedly being justified with "They're fascists, we want to give these people democracy".
Compare that with Communism only really getting a bad rap under McCarthyism and Stalin (And I guess China? Except only really Stalinists will call that Communism, since less than 3% of the workers were in the "People's Party" at the time of the revolution...). Communism's affinity for the unions, which in non-American are systems that guarantee that employees get treated like humans, only helps further a positive image for it.
> Political Compass isn't an impartial or scientific measure. It's center is not guaranteed to correspond the political center of the globe.
Of course. But it's much, much more impartial than many other sources I could bring up.
I'm not very familiar with Richard Spencer. Can show me an example where he self-describes as fascist? I couldn't find anything relevant on the wikipedia page. Ditto with breitbart being "obviously fascist". I might accept it being a right-wing tabloid, but that seems about as silly as calling huffington post "obviously communist".
I've noticed terms like "fascist", "white supremacist", "far-right" are thrown about fairly casually, while calling self-proclaimed communists "communists" is often met with derision or denial.
> I'm not very familiar with Richard Spencer. Can show me an example where he self-describes as fascist? I couldn't find anything relevant on the wikipedia page. Ditto with breitbart being "obviously fascist".
Your sources are an absolute joke. I'm willing to have a real conversation about this, but I'm not trawling through links with memes in them.
You mentioned McCarthyism before, yet you believe in a similar conspiracy theory - "Crypto Fascism" - where instead of people being secretly communist, they're secretly fascist. I don't know how you reconcile this with yourself but I don't buy it.
It might make sense to separate key social issue from the rest. The way the media frames matters of divorce, race, LGBTQ and gender have all moved leftward to varying degrees.
But on issues like labor and capital the media definitely moved rightward. On foreign policy, the press definitely seems to favor conflict escalation over diplomacy, which can be viewed as a leftward or rightward bias depending on the situation.
So today, the "center" in media is the socially-permissive, global intervention, capitalist perspective.
maybe i'm misperceiving this, but it seems that the left's criticism of US military action has diminished or been muted.
in the 60's people on the left literally criticized US soldiers as they returned to the US from Vietnam. (the phrase "baby killers" comes to mind). you don't hear that sort of thing today.
criticizing US soldiers is just not done. even Barbara Boxer touted her work with the "Wounded Warriors" project. Al Franken went on USO tours. it's just not ok to criticize US soldiers. on the contrary, we thank them for their service and try not to call into question what happened "over there."
furthermore, when GW Bush argued for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, an awful lot of Democratic politicians got on board and voted to authorize it. i think they were afraid not to authorize it.
later, drone attacks carried out by the Obama administration were more or less accepted too.
I'd go further. On many topics, the Overton Window shattered.
Let me start with the idea of a "personal Overton Window". It's the positions that an individual thinks are within the realm of reasonable discourse. Then society's Overton Window is composed of a bunch of individual ones.
So, 40 or 50 years ago, it was clear to about 95% of people that gays could not marry. Those 95% gave society a clear Overton Window on the topic.
But today, maybe 30% of people still have gay marriage outside their personal Overton Window. Maybe 40% not only have gay marriage in their personal Overton Window, but it is outside their personal Overton Window to not be totally accepting of gay marriage. This means that 70% of the population excludes at least 30% of the population from their personal Overton Window. As a result, no societal Overton Window is possible - we're just left with a bunch of conflicting personal ones.
Filling a whole paper is harder than writing a tweet, sure, but nuance has nothing to do with it.
It is very common to see an entire page of arguments all pointing in the same direction. It can be even worse because it allows for a sneaky progression from well accepted facts to whatever bullshit they want you to believe.
For example a tweet may go "Chlorinated water kills thousands of people every year". An full article may start with actual scientific research about how chlorine can kill, then talk about some specific group of people who don't drink chlorine water and are healthy, follow up by talking about some people making profit off water chlorination, throw in some stories about decadent billionaires and then deliver the final message. Nothing about that is nuanced.
> What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice.
And that's the important thing. They have a huge voice now, given the loudest and most repetitive people get way more presence, and how social networks are malleable to bots. Saying this existed decades ago is like comparing nuclear weapons to arrows and bows and saying lethal weapons existed since time immemorial.
It's hard to say they have a huge voice. Perhaps louder than we are used too. At the end of the day, Trump is still President and the Republicans run both the House and the Senate.
I meant how misinformation and provocation is used to generate confusion and support.
Voices we did not hear until recently should be clear: many niche groups, good or bad, that was unknown to the general public until the advent of the social media.
> I mean, look at this picture and tell me how social media’s made this worse:
Before you had to get up, go somewhere and protest to get noticed. A lot of people agreed with those students that desegregating was outrageous but only the people in the immediate area / willing to travel got noticed/heard. The costs of expressing moral outrage were much larger.
Now I can sit on my toilet and express moral outrage about Mozilla's CEO giving money to anti-gay marriage groups or whatever and be seen/heard by the entire world instantly. Thus the volume of moral outrage has been turned up big time.
Which was the point of the piece you just dismissed offhand as dumb:
"If moral outrage is a fire, is the internet like gasoline?"
You seem to have read a different article than the one linked here. The first few paragraphs specifically addresses the concerns in your first paragraph, and I feel that the rest of the article sympathises strongly with your second paragraph, lamenting not the expedience of those voices, but their risk of drowning in poorly directed outrage.
While it’s true now that cameras don’t seem to be reducing police shootings (needs citation) I suspect it may lead to better behavior. Similarly, social media also drives a amplifying feedback loop that you’re not factoring into your analogy.
There's something to be said about the ubiquitous nature of hd video capturing phones today with the ability to live stream/instant upload (police) shootings in all their gory detail to the masses.
This is outrage in an IV drip connected to your veins.
One could say that electing an unqualified reality TV star as president was one way of expressing outrage at the status quo. It's all a matter of perspective.
I spoke to several people during the election who expressed this sentiment. One said they hoped he would do "as much damage as possible." It was definitely a FU vote to many people.
Unfortunately the establishment has not gotten the message so I fear it will escalate.
>Unfortunately the establishment has not gotten the message so I fear it will escalate.
What message? Impotent rage against "the establishment" isn't a message, it has no goal but catharsis.
People who elected Trump because they wanted to see damage to the system are getting it. Trump has humiliated the US, disgraced the office, made himself a laughingstock to the entire world and destroyed the world's confidence in us as a superpower. They get to see him rage at liberals and leftists and judges and the intelligence community and vent his spleen at everything Fox News told him was terrible with the world that particular night.
But what else did they expect? They elected a man who was not competent, who didn't necessarily share their beliefs, and who was no less an establishment figure (in being a globalist billionaire rich old white man) than anyone else. Did they think having this bull break some china in the Oval Office would lead to anarchy? Dissolution of the Union? what?
And what would they escalate to? A literal ass?
Those Trump voters are getting what they wanted... monocles have dropped and pearls have been clutched and lulz have been had. I don't understand why they wouldn't be happy. If they wanted their particular grievances against the system remedied, they would have elected someone capable of doing so. But they only wanted to see an old man piss the rug on the White House, so... fine.
I don't disagree but many people have the sense that there are no candidates willing to do anything to remedy any of our real problem. The perception is that the whole system is rigged for the benefit of the financial and political classes and no change is possible, so the only option impotent rage.
I do think there's some truth in this. The structure of elections in the USA guarantees a two party system. Votes for third parties are just another kind of impotent rage since the two party system makes third party victory nearly impossible. Both major parties are so big and so entrenched that they're resistant to change, bureaucratically inbred, and beholden to massive sources of campaign cash.
And yet, if the system were perfectly rigged, Hillary Clinton would have won, and Trump would never have been allowed to make it to the primaries by the oligarchs... or was he just another puppet of the establishment? Either Trump's election was completely futile, or an opportunity wasted on nihilism.
It's difficult to have sympathy for people who feel disenfranchised from the political process, and who protest that process by choosing sabotage it to no specific end. Particularly when other groups who have been historically more directly harmed by the government have managed to succeed in creating progressive change, albeit slowly and at personal risk, and from the ground up. If Trump supporters care that little, then they should just stay home next time. After all, nothing they do can possibly matter, can it?
>What message? Impotent rage against "the establishment" isn't a message, it has no goal but catharsis.
I'm not sure if "What message?" is willful ignorance or disdain for the platform, but it's surely not a useful rhetorical device, if you are unable or unwilling to go look at Trump's campaign promises and try to understand why people might want the things he promised, it's not worthwhile for you to try to engage in a debate about it.
The "message" (or lack thereof) being referred to is that of the Trump voters whose purpose for voting was to see chaos out of spite for the status quo. Not Trump's message. You could have easily grasped this if you had bothered to read all the words. Do your best, there weren't many. Together we can make Hacker News great again!
GP stated that opinion was expressed by one of several Trump voters, which makes it a minority (even fringe) opinion. "The establishment" getting "the message" encompasses more than that. I'm sure you're holding plenty of disdain, but definitely willful ignorance seems to be playing a bigger part in forming your opinions.
That minority opinion is what I was referring to. You're willfully misinterpreting my comment in order to express faux outrage at a slight I never made. I'm well aware of Trump's message and his opinions - both have been and remain inescapable, and I don't hold any disdain towards anyone who voted for him out of a sincere belief in his platform, although I do think they were misled by a charlatan and should have seen it coming a mile away.
I do have lots of disdain for Trump as a person, though. Everyone should, his supporters most of all.
> outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement
I tend to agree, but I suspect that is the last thing the networks would be willing to change, as that is what keeps people there and gets advertising clicks.
If it were to reach the point of attracting regulation, what could be regulated? Maximum engagement by the networks, impose some sort of ration, or regulate the users and their twitterings?
So I could see it all too easily ending up solving the wrong problem in the wrong way.
Honestly off the top of my head, I don't know how I would approach this. Especially when some of the possible approaches would be a conflict of interest for the networks.
Robert Heinlein, in one of his novels (don't remember which one), had a scale of how emotionally loaded individual words were, and regulations that prohibited news organizations from using the more loaded words.
Of course, nobody's going to agree which words have what rating on the scale...
> I think outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement.
You don't say. That's very much a reason and was something Facebook and others were being criticized for profiting from during the last presidential race. Engagement means you spend more time on Facebook, which means spending more time looking at ads and supplying Facebook with user data.
I have a hard time understanding why anyone thinks outrage is an inappropriate reaction to Harvey Wienstein. Guess people have different thresholds for empathy.
Rational reasoned handling of a situation is the only treatment that's not worse than the malady.
Note how the final statement is empty virtue signaling: "Guess people have different thresholds for empathy" -- in other words, I'm outraged because I have the appropriate amounts of empathy, unlike those that are not participating in mass outrage, who lack it. The idea that someone can have empathy and not fall into fits of outrage is not entertained.
I've never been seriously sexually assaulted or had my classmates shot in front of me. So I don't know how I would respond nor can I tell someone what is the appropriate reaction. I don't think anyone can predict how they would react. It's like Trump saying he's run into the classroom to stop the gunmen. Nobody believes that.
Better to read the original framework in Nature [0]. Avoids the hot topics of the moment and focuses on the real issue, which is polarization of society.
Moral outrage is hiding the fact that it's not the kids doing it. There is an entire network of activist organizations researching these issues, so that when tragedy strikes, a campaign can be astroturfed within a day, and pressure can be exercised on large corporate and public targets.
This takes time, and effort, and willing megaphones in media. The biggest illusion of the social media era is that any of this is "organic" rather than instigated top-down, using human networks built slowly over time rather than spontaneously willed into being using the magic of Twitter.
The media does not report, they shape the agenda, decide what is important and what isn't, and who gets to be heard under what sort of light.
Even this article pulls the same scam: it sneaks the question by you of whether the "kids" will succeed, thus painting them as the only real people with agency. You don't need to believe in conspiracy or crisis actors to see this is bunk.
I'm a Virginia Tech alumni. A roommate was wounded, and my academic advisor and several former professors of mine died. The killer had handguns.
When NBC chose to air the recorded manifesto that Cho recoded after he killed two students, but before he had gone to Norris Hall to kill entire classrooms, I knew they were ringing a dinner bell for more killers.
Gun availability hasn't changed. Media reporting has. However they shape the narrative by selecting who to interview. Many Parkland students blame the FBI and Broward County police for ignoring dozens of specific warnings regarding the killer. They aren't included in interviews, at all.
I resent the fact that the media repeatedly ignore the recommendations from the American Psychology Association and report the name and picture of the killers, fueling copy cat incidents, and conveniently ignore this in favor of guns.
When NBC gave the killer of my academic advisor his dying wish to get ratings, I knew that they don't care about victims. They just want ratings and the controversy that feeds them.
It’s interesting to see how it’s all played out. Fox News of course has only shown students blaming the FBI and pushing for armed teachers, also criticizing CNN. CNN has pretty much only shown the student activists pushing for gun control. And every network is out there for ratings. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be pushing the gore and brutality along with constantly talking about the perp, as you mentioned.
Absolutely. Social media may be new, but coopting or even creating "outrage" as a weapon to further a specific political agenda is nothing new. The Chinese cultural revolution with its hysterical Red Guards comes to mind (as a particularly harsh episode).
This is interesting, and people here seem to agree. Any research or anything I can read that gives more info/backs up your claim?
I don’t doubt your claim and I’m sure it happens to a degree, but I also believe that 18 year olds are capable of saying “yeah, we’re not happy that our friends are dead and no one is doing anything about it” while a camera is switched on.
You can watch Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self documentary. It’s about the rise of modern “Public Relations” and the systemization and proffessionalization of propoganda by corporations and governments.
Teenagers are quite capable of doing what you said and organizing their outrage when they really feel like it. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t also vast political and social machines working to aid, defeat, or co-opt the students’ cause. And I say this as someone who agrees with the students.
It’s really as simple as this. This is a 34 second clip of Edward Bernays, consultant to Joseph Stalin and father of the American Public Relations Industry illustrating how to transmute a reprehensible idea into an acceptable one. And doing it with a frightening amount of ease.
And many of those networks of activist organizations are tied to rich patrons. This is one reason why inequality is problematic. Inequality as such is not a problem, except for the purely envious, but in a wage slave economy like ours, money can buy extraordinary influence.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe that at all. Sure there are large groups pushing for change in certain areas but it’s significantly more likely these kids held these views before and now have an opportunity to voice them to a large audience. If you believe these kids really have no intention then you also need to believe Kim Davis the homophobic champion of the right or the cake bakers also did what they did and continue to do only at the urging of backing groups. I believe these people truly believe in their various causes, and while it’s possible some larger groups helped shaped them, I don’t think any of it can be called a scam.
Parent explained what he meant by "they set the agenda" literally in the same sentence: "[they] decide what is important and what isn't, and who gets to be heard under what sort of light."
>There is an entire network of activist organizations researching these issues, so that when tragedy strikes, a campaign can be astroturfed within a day, and
Those "corporate and public targets" do the exact same thing. This is just how politics works (sometimes wirh astroturfing, sometimes without).
>pressure can be exercised on large corporate and public targets.
Who use similar tactics but they do so with more money and resources than their diametrically opposed activist networks, and are typically way more reliant on astroturfing - e.g. when Comcast stuffed fake comments in the FCC comment box in its push to roll back net neutrality.
I know I'm older than most here (and have the tri-focals to prove it) but did anyone else read this as "modem outrage"? Perhaps it's just the font used on HN because as I type this, it's pretty clear that:
modem != modern
But with formatted (and deemphasized) title text I see modem = modern.
Back to the topic at hand - I don't think modern outage is much different than it used to be. The main difference is that it spreads much faster. Outrage used to start in one location and might take months to reach another part of the country (at which point it would be over in the originating location). Now it's possible to have everyone enraged (outraged?) at once.
The 'alt-right' is largely a manifestation of this.