But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side.
It's zero sum because people understand that it's at least theoretically possible to get all you want by appealing to rights without convincing the other side. So there's less incentive to be sensible.
The activists like Chase Strangio have done far more damage than any online crazy like Gretchen Felker-Martin. You can ignore crazies.
Tanista
1d ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war.
I disagree actually. All of those examples are just proof that we can't suspend judgment on values. They all matter a lot. To what you can say, do, to the very composition of the republic (what could be more important?).
The only question is whether the groups debating it come to some sort of compromise, one crushes the other or both sides are given enough space to live their lives in a manner congruent with their values and away from the tribe with inimical values.
Part of the problem with many of these values issues is that the last of these has been removed from the game (the internet doesn't help here) and values are often zero sum (even within the left-wing coalition some of the tension between rights claims don't seem resolvable in a way that satisfies both sides)
It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked.
Part of the problem is precisely that they were mocked. Whether they were prophets or actively brought about their worst fears, I think there's a backlash effect where people feel that attempts to keep things within some reasonable window were actively used against them by defectors on the other side. Once you get burned on "no one is saying/doing X" you become less charitable.
Tanista
2d ago
I feel like this should be my handle at this point but: It's Just Twitter.
Remember learn to code? No? Why would you?
What sounds like innocuous career advice is, in many cases, part of targeted harassment. The phrase “learn to code” was added to Know Your Meme four days ago, where it’s described as “an expression used to mock journalists who were laid off from their jobs, encouraging them to learn software development as an alternate career path.” Part of the Know Your Meme entry explains that those posting the phrase “believe those news organizations have been shitting on blue-collar workers for years.” Additionally, writer Talia Lavin posted screenshots from 4chan that suggest the “learn to code” tweets were a targeted attack by the notorious online message board. “Learn to code” is more than internet schadenfreude. It’s also the most recent rallying cry of an anti-media faction.
There was word Twitter was taking down “learn to code” tweets because they fall under the umbrella of abusive content, but a Twitter spokesperson clarified its position in an email: “It’s more nuanced than what was initially reported. Twitter is responding to a targeted harassment campaign against specific individuals—a policy that’s long been against the Twitter Rules.” Twitter also directed me to its policy on targeted harassment, which prohibits “behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior.” I also asked Twitter whether it was able to identify coordinated efforts directed at the mass of recently laid-off writers, or whether it could tell where those efforts were coming from, but the company did not respond as of publishing.
They broke any attempt to coordinate what is basically a mean-spirited joke (assuming it was coordinated in the first place - if it's anything like reddit and "brigading" there's a lot of crying wolf). No way would they allow this sort of thing. Elon not only allows it, he signal-boosts it.
YMMV on which is better.
She was in a school shirt which I would say is a big no no
Funny, I was just completing a mandatory training at work about the social media policy.
Reading it now (they actively make it so you can pass without ever reading these things which is really counterproductive), it explicitly says: all communication, "regardless of whether they are posting on personal devices or accounts", is subject. It goes even further "even private posts can violate the policy if they are seen by others".
Like...maybe the rules in Canada are different for legal reasons. But even a message in a totally private chat gives them license to fire you and I don't think my workplace is particularly strange here for a large entity. Which is understandable, given that nobody cares at all come outrage time if it was on a Discord with three people.
If you are wearing a work shirt I don't even know why there'd be a debate. You're (rightly) fucked. What moral principle can spare you? Would it be acceptable to wear a Coca-Cola shirt as an employee and then start dropping slurs?
The issue is that the premises they're working from are highly-exaggerated, making it quite unlikely that there actually will be a Reichstag Fire Decree (or Nuremberg Laws, etc.).
The steelman is not that they're worried about Hitler, it's that they're worried about another Willie Horton situation. Which, from the left-wing view, was a opportunistic racial attack that not only cost Democrats the election but actively led to destructive tough-on-crime policies instead of left-wing policies that would have helped remove the causes of crime.
To many African-American people, the scars from that campaign attack remain fresh. Whatever Mr. Bush’s intentions, they said, the campaign encouraged more race-based politics and put Democrats on the defensive, forcing them to prove themselves on crime at the expense of a generation of African-American men and women who were locked up under tougher sentencing laws championed by President Bill Clinton, among others.
The logic is not really that different from not wanting to cover terrorists or shooters on the grounds that it inflames the public and makes them want cures worse than the disease.
We don't really need to bring in the Nazis. There's a perfectly American fear here.
Tanista
5d ago
what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind?
Which Exodus? Hundreds of thousands of people into Canaan? Or maybe just the Levites? Just between those two positions you have an incredible difference in how likely you'd be to find evidence.
Tanista
6d ago
"And by the way I’m not here to say you’re racist, I don’t think you are. We have not called you one." Of course, after that he went on to explain all the racially damaging things he thought Sam had done. To Ezra, I guess Sam was (is) effectively a racist, not an intentional racist. That was really the progressive argument in a nutshell for about 10 years.
Smearing someone as a useful idiot for racists at best then psychoanalyzing them for not taking it well...if we're talking about gall, that's up there.
This is one of the reasons I find it hard to be sympathetic now that the worm has turned and people are angry at having to share Twitter with people they think are too interested in the topic. People were absolutely brazen about being bad faith.
Tanista
6d ago
Britain is sending cops at God knows how many people for their tweets but we're supposed to draw the twin conclusions that:
- The state is just neutrally defending "liberty"
- The current status quo is unassailable.
Tanista
6d ago
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
This whole thing is based on assumptions I don't think retvrners share.
Not least that liberalism is a debate of values managed by a neutral-ish state (as opposed to an imperialistic one that takes sides and actively destroys social arrangements it doesn't agree with). That there is such a a thing as unproblematic or fixed visions of "modern liberty" (the current version must be unrecognizable to many past liberals) and so on.
If you don't agree with those assumptions all of this is at best naive and at worst a cover.
There's no fair debate when one side has the swords.
This isn't even true, which is even worse. In places like Canada (also just attempted in the UK) people in the right groups get differing sentences because of their alleged group-specific troubles
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