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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Standford posts about its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI), HN Reacts

Links to EHLI source: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf / http://web.archive.org/web/20221219160303/https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli

Link to HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816

Note: my intent in linking to another forum isn't to create a in-group/out-group dynamic. My intent is to comment on how this is a sign about a broader cultural shift. Moderators, if this skirts too close to the offending the spirit of themotte, please let me know (or just delete it).

HackerNews is an online watering hole where a large number of Anglosphere people congregate to talk about startups, programming, and entrepreneurship. There is also no lack of plain old geeking out about cool tech, especially of the DIY variety that relates to drones, 3d-printing, or, more recently, AI.

The group skews somewhat left of center politically speaking. Over the past decade that I've been lurking it, it skewed a little bit more, in the sense that moderators became more accepting of openly political content that was aligned under the "21st century American progressive" label. I witnessed an influx of posts and comments about topics like coops, the evils of capitalism, etc. although, thankfully, that never became the main object of the community.

However, the thread I link to above has accumulated over 1200 comments in under 24h, which is a rare occasion--the death of a great contributor, a major shift in the industry, etc. More importantly, from sampling the first two pages, the overall sentiment appears to be negative toward what Stanford put out.

Before going deeper on the reaction, here's a taste of what Stanford posted:

Grandfather: This term has its roots in the "grandfather clause" adopted by Southern states to deny voting rights to Blacks.

Red team: "Red" is often used disparagingly to refer to Indigenous peoples, so its use in this context could be offensive to some groups.

Blackbox: Assigns negative connotations to the color black, racializing the term.

Brave (do not use): This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "noble courageous savage," equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.

This kind of political weaponization should all be familiar to experienced Culture Warriors on themotte. But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.

I have no idea what it's swinging towards, especially since in reality the pendulum is a 4d object zigzagging through multiple political dimensions. Still, it's a welcome sign that at least this flavor demagoguery is losing its bite.

I don't think the Culture War is in any danger of dying down. But I suspect (and hope) that the reaction on HackerNews is an omen of the CW shifting directions, so at the very least we'll have something new and exciting to debate about.

Edit: Some people have remarked in the comments that this isn't that astounding since HN has always been more grey-tribe aligned and more likely to react negatively to woke overreach like this. I find myself needing to readjust map.

Even if “the pendulum is swinging” (which I have been hearing every year), all the media has to do is gin up another George Floyd. Will these “reasonable” hackernews progressives have the fortitude to keep their cool in the face of the next outrage du jour, having learned from these excesses? Will they actually vote Republican? Doubtful imo

Have Republicans given them any indication that they would not simply impose the same sort of policy but in favour of their own aesthetic preferences and power structures, the moment they gain any amount of power? At the end of the day, SV people are still culturally much closer to Democrats than to Republicans, and the proposition to solve their issue with their progressive overlords by inviting in the Republicans must seem about as sensible to them as if you proposed to Republicans to solve their issue with their Democratic-party overlords by inviting in the Iranians, Russians or CCP (which, I thought, is a known but generally considered edgy and stupid position among much of the Dissident Right).

Republicans aren’t known for forcing speech codes around dubious notions of “harm”, so yea, they should vote R, I’m surprised people don’t realize they are the libertarian team. At worst they might draft a law that states school children shouldn’t be taught america is the worst country on earth that they should defile and shit on at every opportunity

They kind of are known for that, though. Moral majority? The libertarians are bought by gun policy and tax cuts, not free speech absolutism.

Most recently, Christians are less powerful, but the battlefront is anything LGBT. “Don’t say gay,” to quote the boo light.

It’s not “anything LGBT”, but it is gender ideology. Do we really need kids instructed in how to use dildos in sex Ed class? The dems of Chicago seem to think so 🤷🏻‍♂️

If you have to reach back 40 years then no, they aren’t “known for that”. That’s before the lifespan of your average woke millennial

Moral majority seems to loom pretty large in the imaginings of progressives who would consider voting Republican due to woke, though. And it’s not like similar kinds of people aren’t very ensconced in the Republican coalition and very likely to be appointed to important positions by Republican admins.

Are California republicans conservative at the level of >40 years ago though? Because you’re not voting for some southern evangelical when you’re voting for an R in a deep blue state. If people are too dumb to parse this then they deserve their one party dystopia

This has actually been a problem for the California GOP (and to a lesser extent, Democratic parties in places like say, Wyoming). The only people left to vote for the out-party are the radicals, which give the radicals more power, which turns off the median voter in the state, and thus, the power becomes even less popular.

Somebody could've beat Newsom in the recall, but they would've had to actually meet the median Californian voter where they were - instead, Republican voters got behind Larry Elder, who has a multi-decade career as a right-wing entertainer.

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