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My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults.

Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting your conscience, go ahead, that's choice.. you have different goals.. but remember that instinct that wants you to scream at this-this-this type of person is a confrontational approach that deep down falls in the pattern of, eliminating the other tribe.. if you choose to do something about it and what you do is your responsibility and problem.

I just think the solution should lie in : 1) dialog 2) laws

I think beyond those 2 lie some really wrong answers..



I think the extremes, both left and right, have realized that their greatest enemy is not the other extreme, but the masses in between.

A group that has the numbers, with mild views that can dilute your message with reasonable doubt, challenge certain aspects of your extreme yet be broadly acceptable to a much wider audience including those tending towards your side – that's poision for an extremist.

Therefore, their solution to that is tribalism, polarization, and shaming for any hint of non-compliance with the extreme's dogma.

End result is that the vast majority of moderate people do not participate in debates on sensitive topics, leaving the field open for polarizing demagoguery. All that's left is to make more topics sensitive to get an advantage there too, and that's progressing very well too.


"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” - Dr. King, 1963


this might be false equivalence. People far on the left (except from some nas-bols; which I’ve never encountered in the wild) call them selfs anti-facists. It is clear who their greatest enemy is. In fact far left groups (like food not bombs, etc.) often engage in social programs called mutual aid where the goal is to spread propaganda through helping the masses.


> spread propaganda through helping the masses.

1%'er motorcycle clubs, mafia organizations and radical religious cults are notorious for doing this as well.


Again fails equivalence. Mutual aid is not causing anybody harm. In fact it is not mutual aid by definition if it does cause harm.


At the risk of entertaining the no true Scotsman:

A leftist that doesn’t empathize with the masses, is not a true leftist.


There is no consistent conception of the masses to the left. Traditionally, there is the labor class and the capital class. In the modern left, oppressors and oppressed are typically determined by identity group, but the game is the same. To win the game of leftism, you better pray that you're in the "masses."


True. A Marxist will have a different conception of the masses from an anarchist (even though the intersection is usually pretty large). But I fail to see what that has to do with anything. There is no game of leftism. The goal is to free people from the tyranny of capitalism and fascism (marxists might emphasize the former while anarchists the latter).

Leftists generally accept rich folks sympathetic to the cause, even though they technically don’t belong to the masses. For example Marxists and anarchists alike generally accept Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy as leftists (even though the latter was born into great wealth), and leftists generally accept Dan Price (#DanPriceSeattle on twitter) even though he is a boss (i.e. not off the masses).


It is not to free people, it is to free the abstract idea of people. This is how leftists are as tyrannical as everyone. They have a romantic idea of the poor which is not tied to their actual existence or wants, and act on it. Too often, it is just a way to morally justify their own wants or desires. Any evil can be justified if it helps a faceless mass of people.


> romantic idea of the poor

It is actually quite fun to read Dostoevsky’s Idiot with that in mind that Dostoevsky might have written Prince Myshkin (the Idiot) with Leo Tolstoy in mind. Dostoevsky was very much not a man of means, whereas Tolstoy literally came from a line of nobility. To Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s talk of the impoverished must have sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about.

That being said, I do think that romanticism of the poor is a really old school mentality, maybe some boomers sometimes still engage in it, but I doubt that you’ll find contemporary leftists engaging in it. Today’s left is much more AOC and Greta Thunberg complaining about how shitty life is for the poor (with a substantial retweet history each backing up poor people calling for it).


There is no game of leftism? The game is for the oppressed class to take power from the oppressor class. Who fits into which of those classes is a contentious issue, though as I said, more frequently predicated on identity than anything else.

Also, to be free of the "tyranny of capitalism and fascism," I hope that those are two different categories. Capitalism and fascism are near polar opposites.

It's also important to understand that leftism necessarily ushers in tyranny. It is impossible, not just in practice, but in theory, for leftism to be implemented without an authoritarian state. If you attempt to get around this constraint, it will only be by you failing to describe a state whose outcomes will fall within the objectives of leftism, or by describing an authoritarian state by any other name (syndicates, guilds, unions).


Unfortunately it can be difficult to tell who empathizes with the masses and who is just pretending to in pursuit of power.


The two aren't mutually exclusive. Power is simply the capacity to influence the behavior of others, and in a democracy, it is leveraged to get anything done.


In the US today, you're a real dumb dumb if you try to attain power via a left platform. A handful of people did it (AOC, Omar, Taleib) but by far if you want a successful career you take a mainstream R or D position and just try to outdo everyone else in culture war takes. I'll point out that "the squad" is social democratic in nature, they aren't as far left as you can go by far.

A left position calls for redistribution of wealth and transfer of control of the means of production, which gets you attacked from nearly all establishment sides.


The establishment isn't what it once was.

Obama turned out to be an establishment President (with bailouts, not prosecutions, for the architects of the housing bubble and crash) but he ran as an anti-establishment candidate.

Then, despite obviously being part of the establishment, Hillary tried to do the same, arguing that she as a woman she clearly wasn't part of the establishment ("Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment.")

She lost to Trump, who - despite being a billionaire white male - constantly attacked and was attacked by the establishment, in particular as a "populist", someone chosen by the people, not the establishment.

And until the DNC united behind Biden, Bernie was giving him a serious challenge, and Biden was relying on his anti-establishment rep with his "black firewall".

Meanwhile, Bloomberg was painted as the clueless establishment candidate and laughed out of the race.

A young politician (left or right) studying recent events would be smart to run away from the establishment, just as so many elder politicians have (while perhaps seeking establishment support in secret, and hoping not to be caught).


This is strongly undercut by "the DNC (i.e. the establishment) united behind Biden" who is currently POTUS instead of Bernie or Trump.


But facing enormous pressure from a younger generation that seems to be far to the left of Biden and was not happy with either Biden or Harris, but voted against Trump rather than for Biden.

And even with all Trump's failings as a person, it was a close election between the unpopular populist and the likeable establishment compromise. Is that evidence of establishment strength?


Thats hard since sometimes the masses are fighting against being helped (because that would be socialism) while languishing in poverty.

Do they really have the right to commit suicide by policy, taking us with them via climate change?

It is realy hard to empathize with those.


> the masses are fighting against being helped

If you are looking for a clearler symptom that you don't empathize with them, there isn't any.

What is not a moral failing, by the way. But check your "Left" label, because it's probably wrong.


You can be Left without empathizing with people who want you dead. That's a pretty straightforward application of Paradox of Tolerance.


It's entirely your choice who you empathize with. If you don't act over your indifference, it doesn't harm anybody. It's impossible to empathize with everybody.

The criticism people are raising is about a kind of hypocrisy, even when lying is entirely to oneself.


I know a certain Jesus Christ who would disagree with you. In seriousness though, visiting poor rural American during Trump is a really numbing experience. You see the people there flagging Trump signs everywhere while living in dirt poor conditions. It is hard not to emphasize with them even though they are calling for everything you are fighting against.

After all, the establishment has failed those people. The democratic party has severely failed them. Democracy it self has failed them. I know that really capitalism has failed them and they would find better answers under socialism then under Trump (after all Trump has failed them as well). But you must still understand where this is coming from. That is you must empathize with them, even though their views are wrong.


Funny, the Berlin Wall was called antifascist - Antifaschistischer Schutzwall


Calling yourself anti-fascist does not make you immune to totalitarianism, tribalism and othering any more than, to borrow an analogy, writing "cool" on a box makes it a freezer.

edit: Oy! The downvote is not for disagreeing!


Downvoting for disagreement is ok on HN; always has been.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

What's not ok is going on about downvotes. It never does any good, and it makes for boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Well alrighty then.

I feel like that works better for factual, technical claims than political ones though. As another website says, "No technology is discussed."


Im sure the foot soldiers of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot had that exact same purity of thought, the exact same infallible self-belief and the exact same absolute certainty they were on the right side of history.


Maoists and National Bolsheviks are a really small minority inside leftist circles, you will have to look for a long time before you encounter one in the wild. And when you do, and if you are a leftist, you will most likely shun them. Racism is usually not tolerated by the left.


Varg is pretty much a textbook NazBol. Thing is people won't stop tripping over each other to label him far-right/Nazi before hearing anything he says. Pretty likely this is happening to most other of their ilk as well.

In the five years or so I spent hanging out with Socialist Party USA folks, I met loads of Maoists, including a former party chairman. There were a lot who were Trotskyists out in the open and Maoists if you got them drunk enough to talk freely.


Reminds me of some test I read in a book (can't remember which one).

A teacher asks some student to stand up and raise his hands before him. The teacher stands in front of him and does the same, touching the students hands. Then the teacher starts pushing, and the student uses force to stay in place. Then the teacher uses more force, and so does the student.

Finally the teacher asks: "Whay are you pushing me?". "Because you were pushing me!"

This is exactly what is happening here. You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.


There's a common idea I see sometimes in discussions about weapons of war - would it be good if everyone only made defensive technologies? Say no to fighters and bombers, but yes to surface-to-air missiles? Say no to guns, but yes to anti-ballistic protection?

But to this, the answer is: every defensive technology can be used as an offensive weapon. I can pack my SAM turrent on a truck and drive all the way to your city, and start shooting down your airliners, and you won't be able to do anything about it, because whatever guns you scavenge from a museum mean nothing to my anti-ballistic vest.

This is what I think of when I see people who purposefully inject themselves into communities, feign offense and call society for help. Using means of protection as weapons.


> ... You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.

On the contrary, Chinese martial arts (as well as physical exercise more generally, as with Tai chi chu'an) use the pushing hands exercise to teach how to skillfully yield and redirect the other party's power. It's viewed as foundational to the entire discipline.


Martial arts is not politics, and the western mindset is to respond with equal or greater force. In fact the military doctrine is to respond with disproportional force. Yielding may be the smarter thing to do, but that's would be seen as weak in most of the world (including, I suspect, China).


This is exactly what is happening here. You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.

There was an episode of STTNG that had a profound effect on me as a kid as a metaphor for confrontation, where the crew of a destroyed ship kept saying "more power to the shields" when the "shields" were actually causing the problem.


So in that case, the party with authority and power asked the other to do something. Then the powerful party started pushing and then complained about counter pressure. Sounds familiar.


> "My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well)..."

> "Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good."

a good first start is to follow the latter maxim when discussing the former issue, particularly when it comes to issues of power and influence. you're already lost when you speak in terms of left and right. those are distractions from the real coercions impinging on our freedoms daily, from the desire to stagnate and wield (more) power. you need to pierce that construct, disregard it entirely, to understand and orient your resistance and dissatisfaction toward the rightful source.

two people chosen randomly are going to be vastly more similar than different, no matter where on the artificially-constructed political spectrum they are. this is how we know it's constructed and not real.

the left-right dichotomy, like all dichotomies, collapses our thinking into detrimental zero-sum tribalism pointing us against each other rather toward the real source of conflict, power-wielders, creating an artificial, seemingly-insurmountable gulf, that fractures the populace and shields power further from the will of the people (that's us).

a power structure can do awesome things, and sometimes we need it to do those awesome (positive) things temporarily, but stagnated, amassed power can do a lot of awesome, negatively-externalizing, and self-serving things not in the interest of the many (especially the future many).

the way to think about power is as flows, not stores, and especially not as individuals, which is where our primitive brains betray us constantly. to harness power, we must allow it to temporarily coalesce when and where it will do good, and dissapate steadily so as not to stagnate, and corrupt, in any one set of hands.


Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.


Yea, a recent example of environmental shaming that worked was the reduction of littering from cars. Roadside cleanup helped, but tossing stuff out of car windows used to be significantly more common.

What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.


The tickets for littering are huge.


Laws rarely change so you can track the impact of various campaigns over time. Over time they have significantly changed people’s behavior.

So sure in some states the fines are huge, but New Mexico’s $50 fine is a minimal risk.


I believe the "Don't mess with Texas" advertising campaign was actually significantly more helpful than the ticket cost. If you think about it, people usually only know about the cost if they get fined but people know that it is frowned upon to litter through an advertising campaign.

After all, the people in and around your car can judge and shame you while you can only get a ticket if there's a cop around.


And exceedingly rare.


Interesting thought, it would seem to follow that those less effected by social shaming might find themselves at a evolutionary advantage over those that are greatly effected. For example those who ignore prohibitions on premarital sex may have more children overall.


Except that society has a mechanism for for enforcing social norms: laws. Premarital sex might seem like an evolutionary advantage, unless you live in a society that murders you for such activities.

You are right though, which is why high-status in a society are "allowed" to break social norms with no consequence.


You can pass all the laws you want but if they aren’t backed up by a general consensus in the society they will be defied at every turn.


Counter-point: authoritarian regimes.

The general consensus in such countries is that the laws are terrible and oppressive, the the brutal enforcement largely ensures compliance.


Brutal enforcement is quite distinct from legislation so much so that the legislation becomes unnecessary since such practices often take the form of extrajudicial conviction and punishment at the hands of police or the military.


>Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming.

HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.

Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.


Please don't add supercilious dissing on top of the flamewar this thread has already degenerated into.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Here's a deplatforming example that is very much in line with societal consensus: when Daech was recruiting teenagers and young adults from Europe, there was a constant struggle, by both platforms and law enforcement, to systematically de-platform the accounts pushing their propaganda.

It is likely that had this propaganda been allowed to run unchecked, there would have been even more people recruited by Daech to go fight in Syria (or get married off), and to attack random civilians in the name of this ideology. Most attacks, if not all, were perpetrated by people who had in large part radicalized online, away from extremist mosques where they might have been more easily detected.

That being said, I don't believe censorship or de-platforming should ever be used outside of preventing the spread of propaganda that results in actual attacks on people. Anything short of this is just talk.


It's very rude to say people are "pretending" just because you don't agree with their beliefs.


It absolutely does work. A little bit, at first, when you have broad consensus backing you - but it does work. People will begrudgingly change their behavior for relatively minor things, and the change in the use rate of racial epithets in public reflects that.

The problem is that A) this process is more useful for advancing within the ideological block than for advancing the ideology's goals, and B) there's a "Laffer Curve" of sorts for paying "moral taxes" in following behavioral norms. The internal dynamics of a movement is going to set the level by true-believer dynamics where outrageously high demands are acceded to, while the general public is going to respond to that level of demand of "well, if you think I'm a bad person for saying 'Latino" instead of 'Latinx', that's your problem".


> It absolutely does work. A little bit, at first, when you have broad consensus backing you - but it does work. People will begrudgingly change their behavior for relatively minor things, and the change in the use rate of racial epithets in public reflects that.

The only change is that you now have a bunch of people who are afraid to use a handful of naughty words in public because they might lose their job over it. You haven't changed any minds or hearts, you've just moved the conversations into private rooms. You can't end racism by just shaming people for using the n-word. It's arguably just as bad now as it was during the Civil Rights era, but you can't easily see it anymore because it's mostly kept within "friendly" company.


> The only change is that you now have a bunch of people who are afraid to use a handful of naughty words in public because they might lose their job over it.

That's not the "only change". If were, that's still a feature, not a bug. It means that real consequences are possible, and that those possible consequences are widely understood.

One is never going to change the mind and heart of a deeply racist person, but one can help bend the overall curve of intolerance over time.


How do you know that you're actually "bending the curve" and not just driving it underground?


Because you can measure by harm caused, not just by thoughts thought.

For example, I posit (without proof) that, because we have effectively banned hateful racist speech in most standard professional workplaces, the people who work in those environments and used to suffer harm (through being forced to work in an openly hostile environment to them, through being denied advancement or equitable compensation, through the mental stress of being the target of hate speech, etc.), that those people suffer less harm today then they used to.

- Is it perfect now? No.

- Can people still be secretly denied promotions because of racism? Absolutely.

- Does it happen less frequently in the aggregate than it used to 40-50 years ago? Almost certainly, though I base this claim on common sense for now (don't have scientific sources handy but I'm sure I can find some).


Let's see...

My grandparents used the N word freely.

My parents used the C word on occasion when they were younger and grew out of it.

I don't use either, and neither do my kids.

Generations don't exist in bubbles. They are shaped and influenced by popular society just as much as their local communities.

30 years ago, the AIDS epidemic was a punchline.

17 years ago, you couldn't be openly gay in the military and the majority of people in the US supported it.

Now, most people are in favor of gay marriage and a sizeable percentage are fine with trans rights.

The best part about bigots is that they are mortal.


They're mortal, but that's cold comfort when they're oppressing you now.

And they cling to power. The party that opposed gay marriage now controls 67% of the voting power on the court that legalized it. If that case came up again today, it would almost certainly go the other way. And they may, in fact, find ways to re-litigate it.

Even when the majority of that party switched to be in favor if it, they continue to vote for leadership who opposed it. Laws against trans rights are being enshrined in law literally as we speak, and it will take a very long time to scrub them off the books.

They're mortal, but I take no joy in that. They have disproportionate power, and as it dims, they use it harder and harder.


I am not sure your example holds: I have no use for racist terms, thus I don't use them.


When you elevate yourself above a group of people there is no option for dialog, because engaging in dialog would mean that you view those people as equals.


Maybe they're trying to force a violent response from the right, so they can use the power of the state to crush them?


My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults.

This seems manifestly false. A lot of adult behavior can be changed by scolding, a lot of society runs on scolding.

I'm a pretty rational and strongly opinionated person. You won't change my opinions with scolding. But if someone says "don't talk so loud, you'll wake the baby", well, you can certainly change my behavior. But even more, a lot of people do not operate at anywhere near this the level of rationality and a wider area of their behavior can be changed by scolding. Which is to say the population of fully adult humans is a lot less than the population of humans above the age of majority.

And sure, you can't control everything with scolding, you can't replace the police and the army with scolding but scolding, peer (and non-peer) pressure, etc is a tool in the hands of all the different incarnation of "society".


Certainly people get all angsty about being scolded. If it were being ignored, they wouldn't talk about it so much.


I don't think anyone really expects to convince racists, sexists, homophobic, rapey, violent, narcissist to change their ways. Ignoring them is obviously bad so there's nothing left to do but to try and make sure their, technically legal, but clearly nefarious, behavior doesn't go unnoticed at every opportunity.


Not only would they disagree with you, but their strategy actually works. Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective.

In terms of "adults", they are few and far between. There will always be biological adults, but so many adults are emotionally stunted that it's difficult for me to give them the title. Just as domestically raised cats are more child-like than cats that have spent their lives on the streets, the average life of an adult in the west is replete with comfort and novelty so as to keep them from building maturity and character. This makes them incredibly easy to be shamed into doing whatever is considered acceptable by the society they're in.


> Not only would they disagree with you, but their strategy actually works. Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective.

Is the goal of social justice movements just to be hot topics? Your statement makes it seem like success is measured by the amount of retweets or something. Clearly that can't be true, but if global fascism and ethnic nationalism is on the rise, what actual victories can this strategy claim to have won?

In general I think there has been progress, but it's all come from other corners: economics, regulatory reforms, art, and so on. Other than getting attention, are there any specific things you're thinking of when you say this strategy has been effective?


I think the current primary strategy is to destabilize Western liberalism. Every tenet of liberalism is actively under attack, and successfully so.

Individualism? Long gone, the name of the game is collectivism and your identity groups are everything.

Color blindness? It's officially considered to be an outdated, laughable mode of thinking. If your identity collective is paramount, how can you be blind to the parameter by which we should first be characterizing you by?

Freedom of speech? Muh freeze peach. This is now a dog whistle value for hate speech. Freedom of speech just means freedom for the identity groups in oppressive positions.

Rule of law? The application of the law should, of course, not be universal. It should be applied with context, with the context being...you guessed it...your identity group.

Objectivity? Facts? Reason? Tools of the colonialists in order to snuff out alternative modes of thinking. Any claim at truth is simply done within the context of the identity group.

If you don't think the left has succeeded in this objective, I don't know what planet you're living on. As a liberal, I can hardly communicate with any of my peers within the framework that has been foundational to Western civilization.


"Individualism" was never really implemented as "western" value; it was only ever a catch-phrase to defend the status quo by insisting those at the top "earned the right" to be there.

"Color blindness" likewise has mostly been used to argue that those on the bottom of society deserve to be there; (again) preserving the status quo. I.E. shutting down discussion by labeling racism a "solved problem".

"Freedom of speech" complaints most often come from those claiming to be "censored" because they are no longer being given a megaphone.

"Rule of law" is used to prevent analysis of those laws by, among other things, demonizing any discussion of those laws' motivations, or the cultural context in which they are enforced.

"Objectivity, Facts, and Reason" are used as buzzwords, often by those who know they aren't actually on their side, because

1) everyone knows they are good, and so claiming to already possess them is convincing rhetoric,

2) painting your opponents as "rejecting" them is also persuasive rhetoric, especially to your uninformed audience.

Claiming that people are actually demonizing them is a mischaracterization.


None of these were actually faithfully followed, and they were indeed used as excuses. But they used to be viewed as ideals to work toward. Now there are circles where they are _only_ seen as excuses, and they really have been demonized.


You could make that case, but I do think that they ceased to be "ideals to work toward" before people started recognizing them as such. I.E. it was only after "colorblindness" advocates started using the term to shut down discussions of issues facing minorities that people started calling out "colorblind" rhetoric as disingenuous.


One more observation. The choice of words in "diversity equity inclusion" is telling. DEI is god in Latin. In good old times, the ruling class had the Church with its inquisition and heresy to control the crowd, when the neutral laws didn't work. Today you can shout "I'm a heretic and I don't believe in god" and nobody would budge, so the ruling class had to invent something else. Not long ago it was the abstract communism and terrorism, but even these two words don't instill fear in masses today. So the ruling class has come up with this DEI - the new awkward god for the masses, and racism being the new heresy. But given how convoluted and laughable this ideology is, I bet it won't stick for even ten years. I'm really curious what will be next.

Someone here has posted a link to the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model. A quote from it: "So I think when we talked about the "fifth filter" we should have brought in all this stuff -- the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority."


Western liberal democracy is collapsing because the right wing reactionaries were right about diversity destroying society, but their mistake was attempting to focus on things like racial and religious diversity. Diversity of ideas is not sustainable.

Now we can see multiple “factions” each with different ideas about the direction to take society with many of these ideas being excluding of or outright hostile to a different faction. So the solution? You have to kill them before they kill you (not in a literal sense, or at least not yet). Some of these factions will band with others (see right-libertarians typically siding with reactionaries and the progressive adoption of various leftist ideas) though it will be interesting to see what happens there when whichever group comes out on top.


> Is the goal of social justice movements just to be hot topics?

I'm not sure I understand precisely what you're getting at but, for the record, anyone reading this should understand that I am not suggesting that hot topics are the goal of social justice.

In fact, I wasn't even making a value judgement of left wing causes in general, but people seem to always take the word "leftists" as a pejorative. All I'm saying is that leftist political strategies have been successful in that, on any given day, I can tune in to any given medium and count on trans rights, BLM, UBI, social equity, anti-racism, and so forth being a topic of conversation. This wasn't nearly as true before the current wave of leftism gained steam.


> I am not suggesting that hot topics are the goal of social justice.

"their strategy actually works." implies that their strategy accompishes their goals.

"Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective." impies that hot topics are what their strategy accompished.

The transitive property between "goals" == "what strategy accompished" == "hot topics" is at least pretty clearly implied there.


Their strategies may “work” in the short-term but I think short-term thinking is really damaging the long-term progress for the US political sphere. The reason the founders decided to emphatically form the “United States” is because we are stronger working together than as factions or tribes.


> we are stronger working together than as factions or tribes.

"We are stronger working together" is what a tribe is.


You might have to define “works”.

There was a raid on the capitol. Racial tension is at its highest point in decades. Domestic terrorism is on the rise.


I hesitate to respond to this because I've been scolded by dang whenever I make political comments about specific groups, so I'll have to speak very generically. I will say that political movements can be either ambivalent towards or in support of destabilization of the current regime, even if that means doing things that superficially appear to be counter to their goals, so long as their politics are normalized and even chosen by the information brokers.


I make the distinction between anti-racism and anti-racist. If you're anti-racism, you want to reduce racism and that involves talking to people who are racist to fix the problem. If you're anti-racist, you just want to beat someone up and use racism as an excuse.


The first is actually the fabric that modern society relies upon.

The second is what you are doing in your post.


While shaming and scolding might be overused, it's a legitimate tool in some cases. The problem is that a lot of sjw are punching down while telling themselves they are punching up because the person is white.

How often did I end up in a room full of urban, university educated people looking down on the white rural common folks.

The common people are not always common by choice. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't follow wonkish academic stories about the history of race to understand modern issues. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't see all the shades of gray of advanced morality and sort out complex issues about gender and race. These are the type of people that need to see a moral guide every week just to follow a simple morality where they can't process much beyond stereotypes.

The best AIs out there are not able to simulate advanced empathy. It is highly complex and involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-...). Given the level of complexity, I don't expect everyone to be able to intuitively get it.

A lot of people are intellectually underprivileged and too often, sjw like to scorn and mock them for their handicap.

The way I see it, Trumpism is made of an evil right wing elite that has managed to capture a large swath of simple minded folks party because these simple folks were pushed away from more reasonable political affiliation.

Populism doesn't have to be negative. The US constitution starts with We the People, not We the Scholars. Yes populism means unsophisticated views but these could be aligned with reasonable policy as much as right wing policy if the left didn't show so much contempt for the intellectually and morally disadvantaged. Democracy means you need unsophisticated people to vote with you to win elections.


Do you know the history of jaywalking? Shaming works.

But telling people they shouldn’t insult and denigrate people for immutable physical characteristics is not shaming them, but if it is that’s a weird aspect of the interaction to focus on.


How politically correct does the left need to be? Especially after the "deplorables" gaffe, the left has bent over backwards to avoid appearing to be condescending towards rank and file right-wingers.

And it's ultimately hopeless. No matter how hard we try, someone on the left will scold. Oops.


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> And of the two sides, only one is actively trying to restrict the freedom of people based on skin, religion and sex. Only one side is arguing for violence against weaker people, like fugitives and migrants.

I sincerely don't think either of the two sides is advocating for those things (ignoring a very few extremists - on both sides - with malicious intent, who don't represent the majority).

I do see those issues mentioned a lot in the public debate, but mostly in the context of straw man arguments repeated as a sort of battle cry, and to denigrate "the other side".

It was a whole lot easier to push McCarthyism than it ever was to convincingly prove you weren't a communist.


The AfD called to shoot migrants at the EU border. They retreated to the "only one person's personal opinion" after a harsh backlash.

QAnon representatives are calling for the murder of Democrats. The same group advocates for brutal treatment of migrants, restrictions of freedom of choice for women, direct violence against muslims.

I don't see any of this on the left side of the political spectrum. Also, when someone in a group voices radical opinions and calls for violence it represents the groups view when said group is not distancing itself from these views. Because if the group doesn't, the one person is just the group trying to find out how far they can go.


I appreciate you proving my point about extremist outliers, the ones who don't represent the majority of either side, yet receive all the media attention (and association with whichever side is currently being vilified).

> when someone in a group voices radical opinions and calls for violence it represents the groups view when said group is not distancing itself from these views

When "the other side" has an interest in associating you with extremists and refuses to listen to you repeatedly denounce the actions of those extremists, there's nothing you can do to convince them otherwise. Again, the demagoguery and parallels to the McCarthy era are troubling.


On case of the AfD it is rather Mccarthy's old outfit deciding to treat his new one as a threat. The Verfassungsschutz, the German federal interior secret service, decided to watch the whole party as threat for democracy. The Verfassungsschutz was headed by a certain Mr. Maaßen who is now touting right wing conspiracies i social media. The minister responsible for the agency once prouded himself of deporting 69 Afghans on his 69s birthday. Ajd they are treating the AfD as a right wing extremist group now. Should tell you something. Or not.


> I don't see any of this on the left side of the political spectrum.

So, like, when someone tweets "kill all men", no one on the left says: relax, it was obviously just a joke!

Also, Valerie Solanas and Donna Hylton never existed, or at least were never considered heroes by the left.


You seem to get down-voted but I agree with your view and I think is is funny that the free-speech-absolutists downvote / to take your speech away.

To be intolerant against intolerance is at the heart of any stable, decent, livable society. I don’t understand the view of the free-speech-absolutists because it is so obvious that it doesn’t work.

In Europe - or least in The Netherlands - saying discriminatory thing can get you fined or in jail and that is how it should be if you care about your society.


> To be intolerant against intolerance is at the heart of any stable, decent, livable society.

I agree; in the name of preserving social order, SJWs should all be thrown in jails.

Just kidding... but that's what the article is talking about. You can make strict laws (or social norms) against "intolerance", and someone else will be happy you handed them a powerful weapon they can use against you.

Do your political opponents seem intolerant to you? Let me tell you a secret: the feeling is probably mutual. You prefer to focus on those parts where they are less tolerant than you, and ignore the ones where it is the other way round. They do the same.


If almost 80 years of havinthese laws in basically every European democracy doesn't proof that these laws aren't miss used, I don't know what can.

And no, denying people service, jobs and social security based on color, religion sex or whatnot is not the same as fighting for people to have these rights. Because the former takes away rights, while the latter grants rights without anybody else loosing anything.


Of course, if all your side ever does is "fighting for people to have these rights, without anybody else loosing anything", then you are the good guys.

Do you honestly believe this is a truthful description of reality?

Do you believe your opponents would also agree with this description (that is, if they only could abstain from lying for a moment, e.g. if you would give them a truth serum)?


Thank you, that is exactly the point.


The funny thing is that free speech doesn't exist. Nowhere do you get free speech. There are always limits. Even in the USA.

Let me tell you also a secret. It is not about political opponents disagreeing over their views. That is not the intolerance I refer to. You make it a sad word game.

It's the intolerance of discrimination, of hatred of (groups) of people. We in The Netherlands have laws against discriminatory speech and hate speech.

Last time I checked, SJW mostly are against stuff like discrimination. They are no threat. This is not a 'both sides' situation.


The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off; the left is currently the majority, and the right is, on average, old.

In this regard, it's absolutely a "viable approach": By making it low-status to be right-wing, or even by not carrying right-wing views on popular private platforms, it makes the right-wing destined to lose out somewhere along the line simply due to the youth not wanting to associate with them.

It's a waiting game above anything, and on a long enough scale it looks like the winner is clear here, for better or worse.


The weird problem with this strategy is that there's a number of people who become more conservative, for whatever reason, as they get older.

The generation that comprised the hippies are now in their 80s. Mitch McConnell would have been in that generation.

So while the current crop of conservatives are dying off, they are being replaced by new members.


It's not enough to make up the gap, though. Further, hippies rarely voted, and weren't the majority or even close to the majority of their generation.


It's typically because they get wealthier as they get older. I'm not expecting millennials and gen-X to get more conservative. Zoomers, maybe.


> "The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off..."

Seems doubtful. Rural and poor areas remain strongholds for conservatism and that seems unlikely to change. The urban left may increasingly outnumber rural conservatives but that doesn't necessarily give them more power thanks to the way that the electoral system and government in the United States is structured.


What does "winning" even mean for the left? The people who choose leftism will win against everyone else for the reasons you say, but like all political victories, winning is (comparatively) the easy part. Keeping your values intact and governing a successful society is the hard part.

The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism. What remains?


What's good about liberalism?

They seem more progressive than ever; an open socialist nearly won their primary last year.


Liberalism and progressiveism are not the same thing.


> The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism.

This is a direct quote from the post I am replying to. I know liberalism and progressiveness aren't the same thing. I am stating that they're getting more progressive, and I don't see why liberalism declining is a bad thing.


Socialism, liberalism, and progressivism are all different ideas.

Leftism tries to combine these ideas into a coherent political ideology. Liberalism (the part about individual rights) is a check on the abuses of socialism, and progressivism is supposed to make it all work (experts in control making good decisions).

I'm not a Leftist, but I can acknowledge that it's a coherent ideology.

When you take Leftism and take away liberalism and progressivism, you are left with rebels that have no solution to anything. Like BLM and antifa which are always recruiting to attack a mysterious "system" rather than making serious proposals. (It's always easier to get people to agree on a problem than a solution.) If they were to win, it would look more like Venezuela or Cuba than Denmark or Sweden.


I know that liberalism and progressiveness are different things. Liberalism isn't tied to progressiveness, but progressiveness is inherently tied to economic justice. Socialism is certainly a progressive stance.

Liberalism can be dropped with no real loss.

What's wrong with Cuba? It seems like it's doing pretty well; it has more or less the longest-lasting government in South America, largely because it dropped liberalism.


> I just think the solution should lie in : 1) dialog 2) laws

If they're not willing to be reasonable (like, you don't get to "dialog" about whether or not genocide is appropriate), then the best and most moral course of action could very well be to stop them from recruiting your friends.

In the context of tech, this is the essence of deplatforming. Twitter and Facebook cannot censor, since they are not governments. However, as private entities, they can decide not to let you use their service. That's their private property rights in action.


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One of my all-time favorite metaphors on the internet:

"I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years."




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