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I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in s

I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in society in general. There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a different view point, then you will see extreme conservatism concentrated somewhere (in this case, 4chan).

dijit 9y ago
It's a controversial opinion but I agree with you. The inability to even have a discussion with people about left vs right inevitably leads to echo chambers in both camps. The smaller the echo chamber the louder the volume.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  Agreed. I moved from a right wing echo chamber (Boone County, AR) to a left wing echo chamber (Charlottesville, VA) about four years ago. Neither of those communities are currently able to even begin to understand the other.
woodruffw 9y ago
The extreme left throughout popular media? I watched a neoliberal win the democratic primary this past year. We can talk about whether the media was biased in her favor, but that would strengthen my point: they chose her over the progressive candidate. I really don't like this sort of "look what you made me do" thinking, especially when the reaction is to their own boogeymen. If the alt-right wants to blame the left for their rise, they should be honest about their origins: culture wars on the internet, not society as a whole.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  Agree to disagree I guess. I wasn't even talking about politics. I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.
  - Trill-I-Am 9y ago
    How much exposure to "extreme leftism" would you say you get on a day to day basis at your job, in your informal social interactions, etc.?
    - dijit 9y ago
      Can't speak for the parent. But it's pretty typical in my job to be surrounded by "leftist" ideology. I say this as a big ol' lefty myself. This question is bait though, to say something like "I don't like that I'm told to hire women over men" has many interpretations. One is that I'm a sexist pig trying to throw women out because they're women. Another is that I'm trying to get the best candidate based on skill not gender. And yet another is that I am propping up the status quo by not altering my behaviour to be more inclusive. It all depends on how _you_ feel about me saying that. And that's not a good tone for further discussion.
    - devmunchies 9y ago
      I live and work in downtown Seattle. I'd say "regularly". I don't even know who other conservatives are because we tend to keep that information, as I said, in the closet. I had one friend at work tell me in secret that he was also a conservative. All I'm saying is that conservatism is "unpopular" and sometimes "shameful" (at least from my experience), which is unhealthy.
      - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
        What are the viewpoints you hold that you refer to as "unpopular" and "shameful" that you're afraid to express to your coworkers?
    - anon6778 9y ago
      For me it's not so much the day to day interactions, which are largely apolitical[1], but the culture we consume. For example the latest E3 showcases had quite an emphasis on "diversity". On most days there will be some story about wage gap, harassment or other sexual missteps on the HN front page and various online newspapers. Now that's the daily surface stuff. This is not bad in itself most of the time. I do not deny that some of those social issues are real. But occasionally they go into the other extreme where they start to seem threatening or grossly stereotyping. And then there is that background noise with shitstorms trying to get people fired over things they said (remember the nasa T-shirt guy? or brendan eich?), products boycotted over guilt by association and so on. But they make you ask yourself "could this happen to me?". Say the wrong thing and get fired because someone is OFFENDED about a joke or affiliating with the wrong people? I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language. This concerns me because when people push their preferences on the entire platform instead of subcommunities it becomes a cultural monoculture instead of a more compartmentalized system. [1] The only exception I recall is the discussion about which gender inputs we should support in software forms where some suggested we should support the whole facebook madness.
- sinxoveretothex 9y ago
  I don't think the example you give is very poignant: the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I do agree with you that this culture war didn't suddenly appear and divide society as a whole ex nihilo, but that's because nothing ever does. Movements start small and expand That's true of the particular brand of progressivism at hand here as well as the GNU movement or even the adoption of Linux and open source more broadly (those could sort of be said to have originated in a "culture war on the internet"). And I think it would be hard to dispute that the West has seen a very hard cultural push by progressives in recent years. Compare [1] to [2] for example. These are not equivalent examples and they are not meant to be. My point is that the sort of push seen in [1] clearly has implications outside of the abstract internet (Twitter is part of the Internet, but the point is that it has impacts on real life in a way 4chan doesn't). Also, Islamic stuff is perhaps the most obviously conservative stuff, but it's by no means the only one. Asian cultures in general are much more conservative than the West too. [1] http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/steve-ladurantaye-editor-of-cbcs-the-national-reassigned-after-cultural-appropriation-controversy/wcm/47269148-4db0-4a41-904b-ccca2fee9405 http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/steve-ladurantaye-editor... [2] https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6jbyu1/serious_people_who_have_lived_under_sharia_law/djd7bdd/ https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6jbyu1/serious_pe...
  - woodruffw 9y ago
    > the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I was responding mostly to the "popular media" claim, but I take your point. The question of a "cultural push" is interesting to me for two reasons: 1. It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole, and, 2. It makes broadly agreeable political positions more partisan than they need to be. I don't know of a way to prove or disprove (1), besides saying that I'm not on the mailing list. I think progressive views tend to be more fragmented and diverse than conservative onlookers realize, and that this contributes to a feeling that progressives are advancing a monolithic program to change America's culture. On the other hand, I think (2) is pretty worrying. Are gay rights part of the cultural push? What about access to (reasonably priced) medicine, or environmental consciousness? I think that, apart from the true-believing fundamentalists and hardliners, most people can recognize that many progressive positions are at their core very agreeable (civil liberties for all, no unavoidable deaths, modernize our economy both for our own health and for future generations). The problem arises when those positions become associated with progressives qua some conservative boogeyman, not qua their benefit to society.
jeffry233 9y ago
I see plenty of conservatism all over Reddit and all of those other places you mentioned. It happens in boring threads on boring articles that aren't politically charged. What causes the downvotes is the way the ideas are presented. If you write your comment like you're a writer for the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're going to be downvoted. There is plenty of room to discuss conservative ideas without resorting to the rhetoric that Fox News and talk radio have been pumping out since 2008. I can't tell you how many times i've seen someone make a really good point about, say, the connection between rent control and the housing shortage but in the middle they go off on a tirade about the 'welfare state' and 'handouts' which causes their entire post to get downvoted into oblivion. I will give you that socially conservative ideas are frequently completely off limits to discussion, and I think thats unfortunate.
- travmatt 9y ago
  I'm also old enough to remember /r/chimpire and other explicitly racist right wing subreddits who had massive support, well before the rise /r/the_donald. Hell, I even remember discussing the organized stormfront propaganda raids. To me, crying about the lack of conservatism is just code for "people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed." I follow plenty of subreddits where there is plenty of conservative thought.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    > people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed Thats a nasty little remark. Keep it civil.
    - WJW 9y ago
      Why is that uncivil? A lot of online discussion seems to be exactly this.
      - travmatt 9y ago
        It's especially funny considering the argument of the person calling for me to censor my thoughts is the same person crying that conservatives are forced to censor their thoughts.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Can you give me an example of the 'extreme left'? I'm probably well within it, which is why it's hard for me to see what you mean, or think of examples.
maxerickson 9y ago
So tumblar->extremist xenophobia?
badsock 9y ago
Something that's popular is practically by definition not on the extreme any more. In most of the developed world the Democrats would be considered a moderate right-wing party, and the Republicans a far-right theocratic extremism party (like, say the DUP in the UK, or CHP in Canada). What you're seeing is a ground-shift in values, and what used to be considered OK is now considered extreme, and is therefore being shifted into the margins of the discussion. To put it in sharper contrast: if you started loudly expressing the most mainstream views of the 1700s in today's society, you'd get a lot of people trying to shut you up and, failing that, marginalize you. And, probably, they'd be right to do so.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not and that's the point. /pol/ exists largely as a reaction to the suppression of non-progressive thought in the places where the demographic spends most of their time: academia, gaming, and tech. There are certainly people who believe what they say on /pol/, but the vast majority of them are consciously acting as a parody of what they have been cast to be.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not Do you mean without regard to whether they are extreme or not or are you saying that no conservative views are extreme?
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      Well, I've not really tried to define the term so explicitly, but I think it's fair to say that any position that is held by a majority of Republicans (or Democrats) is not extreme, because it would by definition not be outside the norm. For example, public opinion in support of same-sex marriage in the US is currently at an all-time high of 64%, with 34% opposing. Being opposed to same-sex marriage is not an extreme position, as it is one that is shared by 1/3 of Americans. Only two years ago it was 42:40 in support. Therefore, the position statement "I believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman" is not extreme. The bottom line is that many views that are strongly associated with conservativism are likely to result in personal attacks if expressed in the aforementioned settings. Just look at the flak Peter Thiel has gotten for supporting Trump. Why does donating to a major party's presidential campaign result in things like this [1]? 1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13307112/peter-thiel-trump-donation-project-include-ellen-pao-sam-altman https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13307112/peter-thiel-tru...
mintplant 9y ago
The "rise of the extreme left throughout popular media"? So the communists and anarchists have taken over, then? Come on, words mean things. I'm so tired of conservatives calling everything they disagree with the "far left", the "extreme left", and so on, as it muddies the waters for discussion of anything left of the Democratic Party.
aphextron 9y ago
>There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism That's the real tragedy here. Intelligent conservative thought has been completely lost to the rhetorical insanity of our current political climate. For a perfect example of this take a look at what has become of the National Review.
- A_COMPUTER 9y ago
  The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.
- Strang 9y ago
  I remain an enthusiastic reader of National Review after ~17 years. What do you think has become of it?

dijit 9y ago

It's a controversial opinion but I agree with you. The inability to even have a discussion with people about left vs right inevitably leads to echo chambers in both camps. The smaller the echo chamber the louder the volume.

LyndsySimon 9y ago
Agreed. I moved from a right wing echo chamber (Boone County, AR) to a left wing echo chamber (Charlottesville, VA) about four years ago. Neither of those communities are currently able to even begin to understand the other.

woodruffw 9y ago

The extreme left throughout popular media? I watched a neoliberal win the democratic primary this past year. We can talk about whether the media was biased in her favor, but that would strengthen my point: they chose her over the progressive candidate. I really don't like this sort of "look what you made me do" thinking, especially when the reaction is to their own boogeymen. If the alt-right wants to blame the left for their rise, they should be honest about their origins: culture wars on the internet, not society as a whole.

devmunchies 9y ago
Agree to disagree I guess. I wasn't even talking about politics. I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.
- Trill-I-Am 9y ago
  How much exposure to "extreme leftism" would you say you get on a day to day basis at your job, in your informal social interactions, etc.?
  - dijit 9y ago
    Can't speak for the parent. But it's pretty typical in my job to be surrounded by "leftist" ideology. I say this as a big ol' lefty myself. This question is bait though, to say something like "I don't like that I'm told to hire women over men" has many interpretations. One is that I'm a sexist pig trying to throw women out because they're women. Another is that I'm trying to get the best candidate based on skill not gender. And yet another is that I am propping up the status quo by not altering my behaviour to be more inclusive. It all depends on how _you_ feel about me saying that. And that's not a good tone for further discussion.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    I live and work in downtown Seattle. I'd say "regularly". I don't even know who other conservatives are because we tend to keep that information, as I said, in the closet. I had one friend at work tell me in secret that he was also a conservative. All I'm saying is that conservatism is "unpopular" and sometimes "shameful" (at least from my experience), which is unhealthy.
    - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
      What are the viewpoints you hold that you refer to as "unpopular" and "shameful" that you're afraid to express to your coworkers?
  - anon6778 9y ago
    For me it's not so much the day to day interactions, which are largely apolitical[1], but the culture we consume. For example the latest E3 showcases had quite an emphasis on "diversity". On most days there will be some story about wage gap, harassment or other sexual missteps on the HN front page and various online newspapers. Now that's the daily surface stuff. This is not bad in itself most of the time. I do not deny that some of those social issues are real. But occasionally they go into the other extreme where they start to seem threatening or grossly stereotyping. And then there is that background noise with shitstorms trying to get people fired over things they said (remember the nasa T-shirt guy? or brendan eich?), products boycotted over guilt by association and so on. But they make you ask yourself "could this happen to me?". Say the wrong thing and get fired because someone is OFFENDED about a joke or affiliating with the wrong people? I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language. This concerns me because when people push their preferences on the entire platform instead of subcommunities it becomes a cultural monoculture instead of a more compartmentalized system. [1] The only exception I recall is the discussion about which gender inputs we should support in software forms where some suggested we should support the whole facebook madness.
sinxoveretothex 9y ago
I don't think the example you give is very poignant: the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I do agree with you that this culture war didn't suddenly appear and divide society as a whole ex nihilo, but that's because nothing ever does. Movements start small and expand That's true of the particular brand of progressivism at hand here as well as the GNU movement or even the adoption of Linux and open source more broadly (those could sort of be said to have originated in a "culture war on the internet"). And I think it would be hard to dispute that the West has seen a very hard cultural push by progressives in recent years. Compare [1] to [2] for example. These are not equivalent examples and they are not meant to be. My point is that the sort of push seen in [1] clearly has implications outside of the abstract internet (Twitter is part of the Internet, but the point is that it has impacts on real life in a way 4chan doesn't). Also, Islamic stuff is perhaps the most obviously conservative stuff, but it's by no means the only one. Asian cultures in general are much more conservative than the West too. [1] http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/steve-ladurantaye-editor-of-cbcs-the-national-reassigned-after-cultural-appropriation-controversy/wcm/47269148-4db0-4a41-904b-ccca2fee9405 http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/steve-ladurantaye-editor... [2] https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6jbyu1/serious_people_who_have_lived_under_sharia_law/djd7bdd/ https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6jbyu1/serious_pe...
- woodruffw 9y ago
  > the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members. I was responding mostly to the "popular media" claim, but I take your point. The question of a "cultural push" is interesting to me for two reasons: 1. It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole, and, 2. It makes broadly agreeable political positions more partisan than they need to be. I don't know of a way to prove or disprove (1), besides saying that I'm not on the mailing list. I think progressive views tend to be more fragmented and diverse than conservative onlookers realize, and that this contributes to a feeling that progressives are advancing a monolithic program to change America's culture. On the other hand, I think (2) is pretty worrying. Are gay rights part of the cultural push? What about access to (reasonably priced) medicine, or environmental consciousness? I think that, apart from the true-believing fundamentalists and hardliners, most people can recognize that many progressive positions are at their core very agreeable (civil liberties for all, no unavoidable deaths, modernize our economy both for our own health and for future generations). The problem arises when those positions become associated with progressives qua some conservative boogeyman, not qua their benefit to society.

jeffry233 9y ago

I see plenty of conservatism all over Reddit and all of those other places you mentioned. It happens in boring threads on boring articles that aren't politically charged. What causes the downvotes is the way the ideas are presented. If you write your comment like you're a writer for the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're going to be downvoted. There is plenty of room to discuss conservative ideas without resorting to the rhetoric that Fox News and talk radio have been pumping out since 2008. I can't tell you how many times i've seen someone make a really good point about, say, the connection between rent control and the housing shortage but in the middle they go off on a tirade about the 'welfare state' and 'handouts' which causes their entire post to get downvoted into oblivion. I will give you that socially conservative ideas are frequently completely off limits to discussion, and I think thats unfortunate.

travmatt 9y ago
I'm also old enough to remember /r/chimpire and other explicitly racist right wing subreddits who had massive support, well before the rise /r/the_donald. Hell, I even remember discussing the organized stormfront propaganda raids. To me, crying about the lack of conservatism is just code for "people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed." I follow plenty of subreddits where there is plenty of conservative thought.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  > people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed Thats a nasty little remark. Keep it civil.
  - WJW 9y ago
    Why is that uncivil? A lot of online discussion seems to be exactly this.
    - travmatt 9y ago
      It's especially funny considering the argument of the person calling for me to censor my thoughts is the same person crying that conservatives are forced to censor their thoughts.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Can you give me an example of the 'extreme left'? I'm probably well within it, which is why it's hard for me to see what you mean, or think of examples.

maxerickson 9y ago

So tumblar->extremist xenophobia?

badsock 9y ago

Something that's popular is practically by definition not on the extreme any more. In most of the developed world the Democrats would be considered a moderate right-wing party, and the Republicans a far-right theocratic extremism party (like, say the DUP in the UK, or CHP in Canada). What you're seeing is a ground-shift in values, and what used to be considered OK is now considered extreme, and is therefore being shifted into the margins of the discussion. To put it in sharper contrast: if you started loudly expressing the most mainstream views of the 1700s in today's society, you'd get a lot of people trying to shut you up and, failing that, marginalize you. And, probably, they'd be right to do so.

LyndsySimon 9y ago
Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not and that's the point. /pol/ exists largely as a reaction to the suppression of non-progressive thought in the places where the demographic spends most of their time: academia, gaming, and tech. There are certainly people who believe what they say on /pol/, but the vast majority of them are consciously acting as a parody of what they have been cast to be.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not Do you mean without regard to whether they are extreme or not or are you saying that no conservative views are extreme?
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    Well, I've not really tried to define the term so explicitly, but I think it's fair to say that any position that is held by a majority of Republicans (or Democrats) is not extreme, because it would by definition not be outside the norm. For example, public opinion in support of same-sex marriage in the US is currently at an all-time high of 64%, with 34% opposing. Being opposed to same-sex marriage is not an extreme position, as it is one that is shared by 1/3 of Americans. Only two years ago it was 42:40 in support. Therefore, the position statement "I believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman" is not extreme. The bottom line is that many views that are strongly associated with conservativism are likely to result in personal attacks if expressed in the aforementioned settings. Just look at the flak Peter Thiel has gotten for supporting Trump. Why does donating to a major party's presidential campaign result in things like this [1]? 1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13307112/peter-thiel-trump-donation-project-include-ellen-pao-sam-altman https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13307112/peter-thiel-tru...

mintplant 9y ago

The "rise of the extreme left throughout popular media"? So the communists and anarchists have taken over, then? Come on, words mean things. I'm so tired of conservatives calling everything they disagree with the "far left", the "extreme left", and so on, as it muddies the waters for discussion of anything left of the Democratic Party.

aphextron 9y ago

>There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism That's the real tragedy here. Intelligent conservative thought has been completely lost to the rhetorical insanity of our current political climate. For a perfect example of this take a look at what has become of the National Review.

A_COMPUTER 9y ago
The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.
Strang 9y ago
I remain an enthusiastic reader of National Review after ~17 years. What do you think has become of it?