7 ms·

The Liberal Blind Spot

64 points by nkzednan 10y ago

ender7 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
vacri 10y ago
The author is missing the point of tolerance, which at it's core is "don't bother other people". Evangelical christians, by definition, bother other people.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  The problem starts when some people say they're bothered because of other people's actions that are performed within their rights as citizens. For example, people being bothered because of people wanting to own guns, even when those people have no plan or intention of murdering anyone with the gun.
  - vacri 10y ago
    You can be for gun control without taking your argument to people who don't share your opinion. By definition, an evangelist cannot do this - it involves bothering people outside the group.
    - hnamazon123 10y ago
      Gun control by definition affects other people. What?
      - vacri 10y ago
        I am for gun control. I don't lobby any politician for it, and I don't raise the topic anywhere, neither do I give my vote based on the issue. I do engage in conversation about it when it's raised by someone else. Tell me, how am I bothering someone who is minding their own business on the topic?
- hnamazon123 10y ago
  The raison d'être of leftism is literally to bother other people because it gives leftists a feeling of power.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    If you want to compare bothering other people, both left and right is guilty of bothering other people. On the left, we have taxes, gun control, speech control (the PC variety), various financial and labor regulations, etc. On the right we have decency laws and associated speech controls, marriage licenses, drug prohibition, opposition to immigration, etc. Of course, both lists are far from being complete. The ideologies built on not bothering are outside linear left-right spectrum, towards libertarian and further anarchist ideas (depending on how far you are willing to go with that concept).
    - hnamazon123 10y ago
      Yeah I agree except for the immigration thing. That is an international affair and a matter of sovereignty and has nothing to do with personal freedoms. Leftism currently is driving the hardest for authoritarianism. I expect we'll see something similar on the right in about a decade though I'm curious to see what it'll look like considering that it seems like religiousness is on the permanent decline in America.
      - angersock 10y ago
        They hardly have a monopoly. Trump's stated positions on weakening and attacking the press when it suits him are from the same playbook.
        smsm42 10y ago
        True, though I would not take Trump as a good example of a conservative. He certainly plays hard on some of the conservatives' currently favorite instruments and sings some of their favorite songs, but that doesn't mean he is ideologically one - just that he wants their votes, and they are willing to ignore (not all of them, mind you - there's a sizeable anti-Trump sentiment among the conservatives) his mismatches with their agenda because they perceive the matches are more important.
gozur88 10y ago
That's because they're not actually liberals. They're leftists. Would it be too much to ask that we use the word "liberal" the way the rest of the Anglosphere does?
- hnamazon123 10y ago
  To be fair, this is mostly goalpost moving. Leftism is now mainstream liberalism. I used to identify as a liberal but now mainstream liberalism (leftism) is against basic things like freedom of speech. Feels weird to identify as a 'conservative' since I grew up associating very negative things with that term but there it is.
  - DigitalJack 10y ago
    The political terms left, right, conservative, liberal, have a different and often opposite meaning in the US than most of the rest of the world.
- argonaut 10y ago
  The fact is, liberal youth, students, and academia have traditionally made up a substantial portion of what is considered the "liberalism" movement.
Afforess 10y ago
When this topic comes up, I feel "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"[1] should be mandatory reading. Tolerance isn't about allowing dissent or including marginal groups. Tolerance is difficult, unpleasant, and uncomfortable. If you don't feel those particular traits for any given groups opinions, then it isn't tolerance. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
- curiousgal 10y ago
  Exactly. Personal anecdote; I am not a religious person but I live in a Muslim country. A Facebook friend who is an atheist keeps making obnoxious posts about religion; calling religious people stupid and atheists intellectuals etc. I was really tempted to honestly tell him to zip it as all of this was cringeworthy and served only to annoy people. But as I was typing a long reply I realized that this is what "tolerance" or more likely "freedom if speech" is all about; it's not "believing people can say what they want" as much as "not pointing out how annoyed they make you feel".
  - nkurz 10y ago
    Maybe, although I'm not sure it's clear cut in your case. I don't think that tolerance necessariy requires pretending to agree. Sometimes (although not necessarily in this case) an uncomfortable private conversation is more appropriate. There's a large difference between pointing out to someone one-on-one that you don't agree, versus pointing out to "the group", who you expect to agree with you, that the individual is in the wrong.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - DigitalJack 10y ago
    I have a sort of similar situation, but about politics. Does tolerance require that one subject themselves to this sort of thing? For example, I finally discovered I can ignore the shared item on facebook instead of the person sharing it. It's great, like improving the signal to noise ratio. But is that intolerant? I mean, I'm not doing anything to prevent this friend from sharing this stuff that I consider crap, so is that enough, or am I expect by tolerant society to not ignore things?
esolyt 10y ago
It is not a blind spot. Intolerance against intolerance is intentional. > Surveys show that Americans have negative views of Muslims when they don’t know any; I suspect many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends. If a liberal perceives Muslims and evangelicals to be intolerant (or at least less tolerant than themselves), their intolerance against them will be intentional and it may serve a purpose.
- mikevm 10y ago
  This is beyond just intolerance of the intolerant, it's a sick worldview. I'd like to repost here a Reddit comment which I found to perfectly capture what is wrong with the so-called regressive left: Social Justice Warriors are also referred to as the regressive left because they are regressing backward from liberal society to defining people based solely on their identifying group, be it race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religious belief. They simply rationalize their bigotry differently; the bigoted right separates people by these lines but think that everybody should conform to the majority/dominant group. The bigoted/regressive left also treats people on the same lines but think that those in the dominant group should give special privileges to those in the minority in order to equalize. This is also an important distinction. It isn't that they are just overzealous on equality; I don't think that's necessarily possible. They have redefined equality. For most of us, it has always meant equal treatment of all individuals by setting a single set of rules and judgment based on individual merit. The liberal ideal is to not even care what color, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other personal identifier a person has, unless it is directly relevant. Thus which group you fall in is generally irrelevant. That you happen to be born with a certain skin color then gives you no personal benefit or hindrance. The regressive left defines equality as a bulk statistic over the whole of an identifying group. Which group you fall in then is critical to how they treat you, the same as far-right bigots. (They only differ on how they treat each group.) If you are white and male, for example, then you are seen as privileged because, statistically, white males have more wealth and power. That you may individually have no power or wealth is irrelevant to them, as if there is some big party where all the white males all go to divvy up the loot and push a single common agreed interest. By this reasoning, a homeless American white male murdered by police (like Mark Kelley) is privileged; a billionaire African black woman (like Isabel Dos Santos) is not. To these regressives, the idea of not caring what somebody's personal identity is (such as race) is abhorrent. They don't see their blatant racism or bigotry, largely because they think it's ok as long as they're rooting for the group that is statistically an underdog (even if the individual isn't). When challenged on this whole bizarre re-definition of equality, many will dismiss it as "reverse racism", meaning it's only racist against the dominant group, so who cares. (Again, regardless to the actual circumstances of the individuals.) But this is, of course, mistaken. They are stereotyping all people based on the groups they fall in, and dictating which groups are allowed to do what, across all groups, and to the detriment of many in those groups. Muslims are seen as oppressed in the West, so the regressive left oddly supports the conservative Muslims to oppressive other Muslims, like separating men and women, because that oppression is just part of their culture, which is an underdog in the West. So if you are a liberal Muslim woman seeking equal rights and treatment for Muslim women, the regressive left will actually fight against you, even trying to get you banned from speaking at a university. It's this perverse redefinition of equality based on bulk statistics that leads to such bigoted reviews that the regressive left ends up with many of the same policies as the bigoted right. A fundamentalist religious group on the right in California sued (and failed) to have yoga removed from schools as a violation of their religion. A regressive left student union successfully stopped yoga classes at the University of Ottawa under the guise it is "cultural appropriation". At Missou, the activists demanded blacks-only housing so that they could explore their culture. Racists on the right also want blacks in their own housing. In the UK, student unions have supported the right of Muslims to separate men and women in lectures as long as they are the same distance from the front. "Separate but equal" was also a policy of the American racist right. The regressive left, led by Anita Sarkeesian, wants to stop sex and violence and scantily clad women in video games. The religious right, led by Jack Thompson, have long fought for this as well. Same policies over and over. Just different rationalizations. They aren't just an extreme version of the left; they've abandoned liberalism for a form of underdog authoritarianism via stereotypes.
hnamazon123 10y ago
If he got this far, this guy is about 2 months away from supporting Trump. Leftism is a religion and leftists are some of the most close-minded people you will ever meet. MAGA
- dang 10y ago
  Please stop calling names in HN comments, and please stop using HN as a platform for ideological venting. That's not what this site is for.
  - hnamazon123 10y ago
    The article posted is literally about ideological differences so.. what? Also, name calling? What? I see that the submission was removed or flagged down. I suspect that has more to do with the fact that it is critical of leftism rather than that it has nothing to do with startups or programming. This community would be much better if you just removed most of these non-programming/non-startup related submissions.
    - dang 10y ago
      This isn't a political bias, but a bias in favor of civil discussion and intellectual curiosity, which burn to a crisp in flamewars. The color of the flames doesn't matter. You've been abusing HN badly by using it exclusively to prosecute politics, often aggressively and uncivilly. That's not a legit use of this site, so we've banned your account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com; we're happy to unban accounts when people want to use the site as intended.
      - hnamazon123 10y ago
        Where did I 'name call' though? Why is this acceptable to you?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795186 I'm not religious but this would seem to be absurdly inflammatory in normal contexts. I think that may even be illegal to put into practice. Also why allow political stories at all if you don't want people exclusively discussing them?
guelo 10y ago
Conservatives love liberals and are super inclusive of them. This is only a problem on the liberal side.
jrapdx3 10y ago
It's hard not to agree with the premise of the article, basically that we should live by the values we assert. Or as often expressed on HN, we should "eat our own dogfood". I guess it's the familiar problem of awareness of one's own biases, and the classic example of the kind of "insight" that few people achieve. Acceptance of others feedback and interpretations of reality is usually essential for such self-development. Likely the author believes the essential components are missing: both the diversity of world views and the willingness to hear them. Reminds me of HN discussions about diversity in tech industries, while widely divergent points of view are expressed, moderators caution us to express experiences and opinions in a civil manner. That can't be too much to ask. Lucky for me I've not had to deal with academia in a long time. Remarks like those in the article give the impression that there is increasing bias and intolerance. Of course that couldn't be uniformly true among institutions and disciplines, but to the extent it exists it would be pernicious. To those on HN who have current first-hand experience in academic environments, I'd love to ask how much the situation resembles that noted in the article. Edit: keeping a good thought the thread's subject can be discussed calmly, better to be able to learn something from it.
kaid 10y ago
It's quite ok if people have prejudices, and even discrimination, or any other thoughts that are controversial, as long as their actions aren't harming another person's property. In my personal observation, the problem of liberalism, is it is trying to enforce a ideology/doctrine in a larger scale, through law making process or extensive propaganda, etc.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > In my personal observation, the problem of liberalism, is it is trying to enforce a ideology/doctrine in a larger scale, through law making process This 'problem' sounds like a near-perfect description of the civil rights movement in the 60's. I'm not saying it's the correct tactic for all social ills (as seen by liberals), but it has its use and it has worked before. I fear the problem is that the only tool they have is a hammer.
  - kaid 10y ago
    Yes, it worked initially, as those oppressed groups did get some degree of equal opportunities. But today, as it evolved in such a political way, the subtext has changed, different groups of people using it not to gain equal rights, but equal privileges, or rather, supremacy against other groups.
ebola1717 10y ago
This is a messy and poorly constructed argument. In the abstract, sure the author's not wrong that the academy lacks conservative voices, but what concretely are we missing? In economics, the contributions of conservative thinkers is clear. What's the equivalent for conservative voices in sociology? That in fact, blacks are poor because of their culture and not ongoing structural racism? I honestly feel that any worthwhile conservative arguments are being made by center-left thinkers. This particularly is incredibly disingenuous: > I suspect many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends. The comparison to Muslims is an awful false equivalence. First of all, discriminating against someone because they hold intolerant beliefs is categorically different from discriminating against someone based on their religion (and let's be honest, given that Sikhs and other South Asians get targeted, it's really a racial issue). Second, he's postulating this without any evidence. Lots of academics grew up in the South or the Midwest, and a lot of great universities are in those areas as well. Thirdly, even if someone doesn't know an evangelical personally, they are exposed to Jerry Falwell, the Bush administration, Fox News, Kim Davis, etc. If Kristoff wants to make the claim that individual conservatives shouldn't be judged based on the plethora of conservative thought leaders that represent them in the media, he needs to provide an actual argument for that distinction. If he doesn't want racists, homophobes, misogynists, etc. in the academy, he needs to provide examples of the useful discourse we are missing out on. Frankly, the center-left vs hard-left feel like the debates we should be having as a society, e.g. how do we reconcile the racist history of our most esteemed institutions with our modern values, or how do we deal with the consequences of tech rapidly eliminating the livelihoods of millions of working class citizens.
- jdminhbg 10y ago
  > Thirdly, even if someone doesn't know an evangelical personally, they are exposed to Jerry Falwell, the Bush administration, Fox News, Kim Davis, etc. Even if someone doesn't know a Muslim personally, they are exposed to Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi regime, ISIS, Hezbollah, etc.
  - ebola1717 10y ago
    Which is why I said that if this is the argument Kristoff wanted to make, he has to make that argument. The equivalence you're trying to draw is a very poor parallel, and needs a lot of work to turn into a coherent argument: 1. The elected officials and thought leaders of a group are much more representative of a group's beliefs than rogue actors. 2. The point you're trying to make is that evangelicals may not be a monolith. That's a completely fair argument abstractly - but what does it mean concretely? After all, Evangelical is much more specific than Muslim. Specifically, in the context of the last 30 years of American politics, Evangelicals have been a socially conservative movement, often standing in the way of gay rights & women's rights. "Muslim" is just a much broader term, and doesn't carry that political weight. If your argument is that there are evangelicals outside of that movement that aren't bigoted that deserve to be heard, well you have to explain what that group looks like. Also, you have to change your thesis to "We need more moderately right leaning people in the academy" which as you can see is a much less bold and interesting claim, and is one about goal posts, not the intolerance of the left. 3. Internal politics are more reliable. The average American can understand more of the nuance of what's happening in their country because it's reported & discussed more, and competing sources are more readily available. 4. Let's be honest, it's not like the academy is swimming in Muslims either. Kristoff agrees that blatant homophobes, racists, misogynists, etc don't deserve to be hired.
Frozenlock 10y ago
It's too late for leftists. The leftist narrative lost with Gamergate. All the domains used to crumble in face of the leftists. They went after individuals and tried to get them fired. They virtue-signaled even in Github repos. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 Everyone who wasn't inclusive enough got attacked. You career was in jeopardy if you ever dared to think something a little outside the norm. Politics, scifi, comedy, STEMs... Every and all domain fell. Except gamers. Gamergate was when everything changed. This is when being more-progressive-than-thou stopped working. The pendulum stopped moving left. To anyone who's been paying attention (and old enough to understand), this was a major event. Everything since then was just going through the motion. An immense building crumbling down while everyone inside it is trying to get to the top. "I'm more tolerant than you; I accept trans in my bathroom!" If you are even slightly interested in history and sociology, you should be very attentive to the next few months/years. As a more libertarian/right-wing individual, it is a glorious thing to see. I just hope that the leftist didn't push the pendulum so far that it's going to come back with a vengeance and destroy everything it its path.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tomjen3 10y ago
I wouldn't hire a religious person as a faculty member because to be religious today you have to make so many failures of basic reasoning that you are unsuited for the position.
- tzs 10y ago
  So you wouldn't hire Donald Knuth?
  - tomhoward 10y ago
    Or Freeman Dyson? Or Roger Penrose?
    - tomjen3 10y ago
      Good counter argument, I change my stance. Also I can (theoretically) hire Dyson, since he is still alive.
      - tomhoward 10y ago
        Good on you. FYI you can theoretically hire Penrose and Knuth too - they're all alive. You may find it interesting to read Einstein's discussions of religion and spirituality too, in particular this quote: I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Eins...
  - tomjen3 10y ago
    You are right, that belief was wrong.
- dang 10y ago

64 points by nkzednan 10y ago

ender7 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

vacri 10y ago

The author is missing the point of tolerance, which at it's core is "don't bother other people". Evangelical christians, by definition, bother other people.

dingo_bat 10y ago
The problem starts when some people say they're bothered because of other people's actions that are performed within their rights as citizens. For example, people being bothered because of people wanting to own guns, even when those people have no plan or intention of murdering anyone with the gun.
- vacri 10y ago
  You can be for gun control without taking your argument to people who don't share your opinion. By definition, an evangelist cannot do this - it involves bothering people outside the group.
  - hnamazon123 10y ago
    Gun control by definition affects other people. What?
    - vacri 10y ago
      I am for gun control. I don't lobby any politician for it, and I don't raise the topic anywhere, neither do I give my vote based on the issue. I do engage in conversation about it when it's raised by someone else. Tell me, how am I bothering someone who is minding their own business on the topic?
hnamazon123 10y ago
The raison d'être of leftism is literally to bother other people because it gives leftists a feeling of power.
- smsm42 10y ago
  If you want to compare bothering other people, both left and right is guilty of bothering other people. On the left, we have taxes, gun control, speech control (the PC variety), various financial and labor regulations, etc. On the right we have decency laws and associated speech controls, marriage licenses, drug prohibition, opposition to immigration, etc. Of course, both lists are far from being complete. The ideologies built on not bothering are outside linear left-right spectrum, towards libertarian and further anarchist ideas (depending on how far you are willing to go with that concept).
  - hnamazon123 10y ago
    Yeah I agree except for the immigration thing. That is an international affair and a matter of sovereignty and has nothing to do with personal freedoms. Leftism currently is driving the hardest for authoritarianism. I expect we'll see something similar on the right in about a decade though I'm curious to see what it'll look like considering that it seems like religiousness is on the permanent decline in America.
    - angersock 10y ago
      They hardly have a monopoly. Trump's stated positions on weakening and attacking the press when it suits him are from the same playbook.
      - smsm42 10y ago
        True, though I would not take Trump as a good example of a conservative. He certainly plays hard on some of the conservatives' currently favorite instruments and sings some of their favorite songs, but that doesn't mean he is ideologically one - just that he wants their votes, and they are willing to ignore (not all of them, mind you - there's a sizeable anti-Trump sentiment among the conservatives) his mismatches with their agenda because they perceive the matches are more important.

gozur88 10y ago

That's because they're not actually liberals. They're leftists. Would it be too much to ask that we use the word "liberal" the way the rest of the Anglosphere does?

hnamazon123 10y ago
To be fair, this is mostly goalpost moving. Leftism is now mainstream liberalism. I used to identify as a liberal but now mainstream liberalism (leftism) is against basic things like freedom of speech. Feels weird to identify as a 'conservative' since I grew up associating very negative things with that term but there it is.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  The political terms left, right, conservative, liberal, have a different and often opposite meaning in the US than most of the rest of the world.
argonaut 10y ago
The fact is, liberal youth, students, and academia have traditionally made up a substantial portion of what is considered the "liberalism" movement.

Afforess 10y ago

When this topic comes up, I feel "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"[1] should be mandatory reading. Tolerance isn't about allowing dissent or including marginal groups. Tolerance is difficult, unpleasant, and uncomfortable. If you don't feel those particular traits for any given groups opinions, then it isn't tolerance. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

curiousgal 10y ago
Exactly. Personal anecdote; I am not a religious person but I live in a Muslim country. A Facebook friend who is an atheist keeps making obnoxious posts about religion; calling religious people stupid and atheists intellectuals etc. I was really tempted to honestly tell him to zip it as all of this was cringeworthy and served only to annoy people. But as I was typing a long reply I realized that this is what "tolerance" or more likely "freedom if speech" is all about; it's not "believing people can say what they want" as much as "not pointing out how annoyed they make you feel".
- nkurz 10y ago
  Maybe, although I'm not sure it's clear cut in your case. I don't think that tolerance necessariy requires pretending to agree. Sometimes (although not necessarily in this case) an uncomfortable private conversation is more appropriate. There's a large difference between pointing out to someone one-on-one that you don't agree, versus pointing out to "the group", who you expect to agree with you, that the individual is in the wrong.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  I have a sort of similar situation, but about politics. Does tolerance require that one subject themselves to this sort of thing? For example, I finally discovered I can ignore the shared item on facebook instead of the person sharing it. It's great, like improving the signal to noise ratio. But is that intolerant? I mean, I'm not doing anything to prevent this friend from sharing this stuff that I consider crap, so is that enough, or am I expect by tolerant society to not ignore things?

esolyt 10y ago

It is not a blind spot. Intolerance against intolerance is intentional. > Surveys show that Americans have negative views of Muslims when they don’t know any; I suspect many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends. If a liberal perceives Muslims and evangelicals to be intolerant (or at least less tolerant than themselves), their intolerance against them will be intentional and it may serve a purpose.

mikevm 10y ago
This is beyond just intolerance of the intolerant, it's a sick worldview. I'd like to repost here a Reddit comment which I found to perfectly capture what is wrong with the so-called regressive left: Social Justice Warriors are also referred to as the regressive left because they are regressing backward from liberal society to defining people based solely on their identifying group, be it race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religious belief. They simply rationalize their bigotry differently; the bigoted right separates people by these lines but think that everybody should conform to the majority/dominant group. The bigoted/regressive left also treats people on the same lines but think that those in the dominant group should give special privileges to those in the minority in order to equalize. This is also an important distinction. It isn't that they are just overzealous on equality; I don't think that's necessarily possible. They have redefined equality. For most of us, it has always meant equal treatment of all individuals by setting a single set of rules and judgment based on individual merit. The liberal ideal is to not even care what color, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other personal identifier a person has, unless it is directly relevant. Thus which group you fall in is generally irrelevant. That you happen to be born with a certain skin color then gives you no personal benefit or hindrance. The regressive left defines equality as a bulk statistic over the whole of an identifying group. Which group you fall in then is critical to how they treat you, the same as far-right bigots. (They only differ on how they treat each group.) If you are white and male, for example, then you are seen as privileged because, statistically, white males have more wealth and power. That you may individually have no power or wealth is irrelevant to them, as if there is some big party where all the white males all go to divvy up the loot and push a single common agreed interest. By this reasoning, a homeless American white male murdered by police (like Mark Kelley) is privileged; a billionaire African black woman (like Isabel Dos Santos) is not. To these regressives, the idea of not caring what somebody's personal identity is (such as race) is abhorrent. They don't see their blatant racism or bigotry, largely because they think it's ok as long as they're rooting for the group that is statistically an underdog (even if the individual isn't). When challenged on this whole bizarre re-definition of equality, many will dismiss it as "reverse racism", meaning it's only racist against the dominant group, so who cares. (Again, regardless to the actual circumstances of the individuals.) But this is, of course, mistaken. They are stereotyping all people based on the groups they fall in, and dictating which groups are allowed to do what, across all groups, and to the detriment of many in those groups. Muslims are seen as oppressed in the West, so the regressive left oddly supports the conservative Muslims to oppressive other Muslims, like separating men and women, because that oppression is just part of their culture, which is an underdog in the West. So if you are a liberal Muslim woman seeking equal rights and treatment for Muslim women, the regressive left will actually fight against you, even trying to get you banned from speaking at a university. It's this perverse redefinition of equality based on bulk statistics that leads to such bigoted reviews that the regressive left ends up with many of the same policies as the bigoted right. A fundamentalist religious group on the right in California sued (and failed) to have yoga removed from schools as a violation of their religion. A regressive left student union successfully stopped yoga classes at the University of Ottawa under the guise it is "cultural appropriation". At Missou, the activists demanded blacks-only housing so that they could explore their culture. Racists on the right also want blacks in their own housing. In the UK, student unions have supported the right of Muslims to separate men and women in lectures as long as they are the same distance from the front. "Separate but equal" was also a policy of the American racist right. The regressive left, led by Anita Sarkeesian, wants to stop sex and violence and scantily clad women in video games. The religious right, led by Jack Thompson, have long fought for this as well. Same policies over and over. Just different rationalizations. They aren't just an extreme version of the left; they've abandoned liberalism for a form of underdog authoritarianism via stereotypes.

hnamazon123 10y ago

If he got this far, this guy is about 2 months away from supporting Trump. Leftism is a religion and leftists are some of the most close-minded people you will ever meet. MAGA

dang 10y ago
Please stop calling names in HN comments, and please stop using HN as a platform for ideological venting. That's not what this site is for.
- hnamazon123 10y ago
  The article posted is literally about ideological differences so.. what? Also, name calling? What? I see that the submission was removed or flagged down. I suspect that has more to do with the fact that it is critical of leftism rather than that it has nothing to do with startups or programming. This community would be much better if you just removed most of these non-programming/non-startup related submissions.
  - dang 10y ago
    This isn't a political bias, but a bias in favor of civil discussion and intellectual curiosity, which burn to a crisp in flamewars. The color of the flames doesn't matter. You've been abusing HN badly by using it exclusively to prosecute politics, often aggressively and uncivilly. That's not a legit use of this site, so we've banned your account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com; we're happy to unban accounts when people want to use the site as intended.
    - hnamazon123 10y ago
      Where did I 'name call' though? Why is this acceptable to you?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795186 I'm not religious but this would seem to be absurdly inflammatory in normal contexts. I think that may even be illegal to put into practice. Also why allow political stories at all if you don't want people exclusively discussing them?

guelo 10y ago

Conservatives love liberals and are super inclusive of them. This is only a problem on the liberal side.

jrapdx3 10y ago

It's hard not to agree with the premise of the article, basically that we should live by the values we assert. Or as often expressed on HN, we should "eat our own dogfood". I guess it's the familiar problem of awareness of one's own biases, and the classic example of the kind of "insight" that few people achieve. Acceptance of others feedback and interpretations of reality is usually essential for such self-development. Likely the author believes the essential components are missing: both the diversity of world views and the willingness to hear them. Reminds me of HN discussions about diversity in tech industries, while widely divergent points of view are expressed, moderators caution us to express experiences and opinions in a civil manner. That can't be too much to ask. Lucky for me I've not had to deal with academia in a long time. Remarks like those in the article give the impression that there is increasing bias and intolerance. Of course that couldn't be uniformly true among institutions and disciplines, but to the extent it exists it would be pernicious. To those on HN who have current first-hand experience in academic environments, I'd love to ask how much the situation resembles that noted in the article. Edit: keeping a good thought the thread's subject can be discussed calmly, better to be able to learn something from it.

kaid 10y ago

It's quite ok if people have prejudices, and even discrimination, or any other thoughts that are controversial, as long as their actions aren't harming another person's property. In my personal observation, the problem of liberalism, is it is trying to enforce a ideology/doctrine in a larger scale, through law making process or extensive propaganda, etc.

sangnoir 10y ago
> In my personal observation, the problem of liberalism, is it is trying to enforce a ideology/doctrine in a larger scale, through law making process This 'problem' sounds like a near-perfect description of the civil rights movement in the 60's. I'm not saying it's the correct tactic for all social ills (as seen by liberals), but it has its use and it has worked before. I fear the problem is that the only tool they have is a hammer.
- kaid 10y ago
  Yes, it worked initially, as those oppressed groups did get some degree of equal opportunities. But today, as it evolved in such a political way, the subtext has changed, different groups of people using it not to gain equal rights, but equal privileges, or rather, supremacy against other groups.

ebola1717 10y ago

This is a messy and poorly constructed argument. In the abstract, sure the author's not wrong that the academy lacks conservative voices, but what concretely are we missing? In economics, the contributions of conservative thinkers is clear. What's the equivalent for conservative voices in sociology? That in fact, blacks are poor because of their culture and not ongoing structural racism? I honestly feel that any worthwhile conservative arguments are being made by center-left thinkers. This particularly is incredibly disingenuous: > I suspect many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends. The comparison to Muslims is an awful false equivalence. First of all, discriminating against someone because they hold intolerant beliefs is categorically different from discriminating against someone based on their religion (and let's be honest, given that Sikhs and other South Asians get targeted, it's really a racial issue). Second, he's postulating this without any evidence. Lots of academics grew up in the South or the Midwest, and a lot of great universities are in those areas as well. Thirdly, even if someone doesn't know an evangelical personally, they are exposed to Jerry Falwell, the Bush administration, Fox News, Kim Davis, etc. If Kristoff wants to make the claim that individual conservatives shouldn't be judged based on the plethora of conservative thought leaders that represent them in the media, he needs to provide an actual argument for that distinction. If he doesn't want racists, homophobes, misogynists, etc. in the academy, he needs to provide examples of the useful discourse we are missing out on. Frankly, the center-left vs hard-left feel like the debates we should be having as a society, e.g. how do we reconcile the racist history of our most esteemed institutions with our modern values, or how do we deal with the consequences of tech rapidly eliminating the livelihoods of millions of working class citizens.

jdminhbg 10y ago
> Thirdly, even if someone doesn't know an evangelical personally, they are exposed to Jerry Falwell, the Bush administration, Fox News, Kim Davis, etc. Even if someone doesn't know a Muslim personally, they are exposed to Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi regime, ISIS, Hezbollah, etc.
- ebola1717 10y ago
  Which is why I said that if this is the argument Kristoff wanted to make, he has to make that argument. The equivalence you're trying to draw is a very poor parallel, and needs a lot of work to turn into a coherent argument: 1. The elected officials and thought leaders of a group are much more representative of a group's beliefs than rogue actors. 2. The point you're trying to make is that evangelicals may not be a monolith. That's a completely fair argument abstractly - but what does it mean concretely? After all, Evangelical is much more specific than Muslim. Specifically, in the context of the last 30 years of American politics, Evangelicals have been a socially conservative movement, often standing in the way of gay rights & women's rights. "Muslim" is just a much broader term, and doesn't carry that political weight. If your argument is that there are evangelicals outside of that movement that aren't bigoted that deserve to be heard, well you have to explain what that group looks like. Also, you have to change your thesis to "We need more moderately right leaning people in the academy" which as you can see is a much less bold and interesting claim, and is one about goal posts, not the intolerance of the left. 3. Internal politics are more reliable. The average American can understand more of the nuance of what's happening in their country because it's reported & discussed more, and competing sources are more readily available. 4. Let's be honest, it's not like the academy is swimming in Muslims either. Kristoff agrees that blatant homophobes, racists, misogynists, etc don't deserve to be hired.

Frozenlock 10y ago

It's too late for leftists. The leftist narrative lost with Gamergate. All the domains used to crumble in face of the leftists. They went after individuals and tried to get them fired. They virtue-signaled even in Github repos. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 Everyone who wasn't inclusive enough got attacked. You career was in jeopardy if you ever dared to think something a little outside the norm. Politics, scifi, comedy, STEMs... Every and all domain fell. Except gamers. Gamergate was when everything changed. This is when being more-progressive-than-thou stopped working. The pendulum stopped moving left. To anyone who's been paying attention (and old enough to understand), this was a major event. Everything since then was just going through the motion. An immense building crumbling down while everyone inside it is trying to get to the top. "I'm more tolerant than you; I accept trans in my bathroom!" If you are even slightly interested in history and sociology, you should be very attentive to the next few months/years. As a more libertarian/right-wing individual, it is a glorious thing to see. I just hope that the leftist didn't push the pendulum so far that it's going to come back with a vengeance and destroy everything it its path.

deleted 10y ago
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tomjen3 10y ago

I wouldn't hire a religious person as a faculty member because to be religious today you have to make so many failures of basic reasoning that you are unsuited for the position.

tzs 10y ago
So you wouldn't hire Donald Knuth?
- tomhoward 10y ago
  Or Freeman Dyson? Or Roger Penrose?
  - tomjen3 10y ago
    Good counter argument, I change my stance. Also I can (theoretically) hire Dyson, since he is still alive.
    - tomhoward 10y ago
      Good on you. FYI you can theoretically hire Penrose and Knuth too - they're all alive. You may find it interesting to read Einstein's discussions of religion and spirituality too, in particular this quote: I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Eins...
- tomjen3 10y ago
  You are right, that belief was wrong.
dang 10y ago