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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.

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.
  - che_shirecat 9y ago
    did we watch the same E3? When did an emphasis on diversity become an "extreme left" viewpoint? Why are you feeling threatened by efforts to undo some of the marginalization of URM in popular media? I don't understand why video game enthusiasts like yourself feel like they're being threatened by more women and minorities in your games - there's still plenty of white male characters and it's not a attack on your identity but more of a fairer redistribution of representation. believe it or not, it's not just nerdy white males who play video games nowadays.
    - jakelazaroff 9y ago
      +1 to this and not sure why parent is being down voted. It's mindboggling to me that diversity of fictional characters in made up works of art is politicized. It's not affirmative action or discrimination or anything – it's literally just people choosing to create characters that are not white men. And for some reason that's controversial.
maxerickson 9y ago
How do you interact with "universities"? Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  Good point. I guess I don't interact with them anymore, but I'm a conservative who graduated in the arts just a year ago, so its recent history to me. In all of my literature classes, the content was mostly left leaning.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    If it's "left-leaning" rather than "extreme left", then I don't quite see the problem. I would expect that students tend to be more progressive (or, more generically speaking, radical) than the population at large. When you're young, you can more easily adjust to changes in society, both on a mental and practical level. As you grow older, you are likely to depend on the existing system more and more (e.g. to support your children, then to pay your pension), and thus more hesitant to turn its knobs. Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.
- sinxoveretothex 9y ago
  > Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative. You have to assume that a protest is representative of something larger. It's not like there's the normal population and then there's a few hundred people crazy enough to protest for reason X. Much more likely, they have a network of support, people who aren't as convinced as them, but who do agree with them to a large degree and those people have their own network with whom they sort of agree and so on and so forth. The same applies for any group, no matter how extreme really. EDIT: Also, I live in Montréal, Canada. I can assure you our universities are infested with "leftist thought", even the engineering ones (and having visited the humanities ones, the infestation can be shockingly intense). There is one wall in UQAM (like, in the school, facing some gathering space) where someone wrote "let's throw the blood from our diva cups in their faces". There absolutely is something going on.
woodruffw 9y ago
> I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just that the motives for the term "PC culture" are part of a broader and somewhat aged conservative campaign against the perceived liberal elite. > Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? I can indeed say this with some certainty. I'm in college right now, in a department (philosophy) that conservatives frequently associate with rampant leftism and its intellectual mainstays (pomo, critical theory, &c). This has not reflected my experience at all - many of my professors are philosophical libertarians, and the diversity of ideas is actually broader than I expected going into the major. I have also had progressive professors, but they have bent over backwards to make conservative students comfortable (even in environments where nobody was on the attack). Of note: The most overt political actions I've seen recently on my campus have been plasterings of white supremacist posters [1] and the murder of a visiting black student by a white student [2]. [1]: http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/28/umd-white-supremacist-posters/ http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/28/umd-white-supremacist-post... [2]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/21/sean-urbanski-faces-murder-charges-university-mary/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/21/sean-urbansk... Edit: Added "recently" to the final sentence. There were some campus sexual assault protests in my freshman and sophomore years that might be characterized as political (even if I wouldn't).
- A_COMPUTER 9y ago
  >this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use. The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it. I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
uw_rob 9y ago
> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? You shouldn't make a claim and then ask someone else to disprove it. What numbers are you basing this belief off of? How do you define extreme left? Do you consider beliefs like evolution and global warming to be extreme left view points? According to [0] it seems that the number of professors who consider themselves liberal has increased by about 10% in the last 60 years. But the definition of liberal has become much more inclusive over the last 60 years as well, so I am not sure how meaningful this is. [0] Gross, Neil. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Most of my quick research was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia#cite_note-Gross1-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia#cite_...

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.
- che_shirecat 9y ago
  did we watch the same E3? When did an emphasis on diversity become an "extreme left" viewpoint? Why are you feeling threatened by efforts to undo some of the marginalization of URM in popular media? I don't understand why video game enthusiasts like yourself feel like they're being threatened by more women and minorities in your games - there's still plenty of white male characters and it's not a attack on your identity but more of a fairer redistribution of representation. believe it or not, it's not just nerdy white males who play video games nowadays.
  - jakelazaroff 9y ago
    +1 to this and not sure why parent is being down voted. It's mindboggling to me that diversity of fictional characters in made up works of art is politicized. It's not affirmative action or discrimination or anything – it's literally just people choosing to create characters that are not white men. And for some reason that's controversial.

maxerickson 9y ago

How do you interact with "universities"? Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.

devmunchies 9y ago
Good point. I guess I don't interact with them anymore, but I'm a conservative who graduated in the arts just a year ago, so its recent history to me. In all of my literature classes, the content was mostly left leaning.
- majewsky 9y ago
  If it's "left-leaning" rather than "extreme left", then I don't quite see the problem. I would expect that students tend to be more progressive (or, more generically speaking, radical) than the population at large. When you're young, you can more easily adjust to changes in society, both on a mental and practical level. As you grow older, you are likely to depend on the existing system more and more (e.g. to support your children, then to pay your pension), and thus more hesitant to turn its knobs. Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.
sinxoveretothex 9y ago
> Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative. You have to assume that a protest is representative of something larger. It's not like there's the normal population and then there's a few hundred people crazy enough to protest for reason X. Much more likely, they have a network of support, people who aren't as convinced as them, but who do agree with them to a large degree and those people have their own network with whom they sort of agree and so on and so forth. The same applies for any group, no matter how extreme really. EDIT: Also, I live in Montréal, Canada. I can assure you our universities are infested with "leftist thought", even the engineering ones (and having visited the humanities ones, the infestation can be shockingly intense). There is one wall in UQAM (like, in the school, facing some gathering space) where someone wrote "let's throw the blood from our diva cups in their faces". There absolutely is something going on.

woodruffw 9y ago

> I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just that the motives for the term "PC culture" are part of a broader and somewhat aged conservative campaign against the perceived liberal elite. > Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? I can indeed say this with some certainty. I'm in college right now, in a department (philosophy) that conservatives frequently associate with rampant leftism and its intellectual mainstays (pomo, critical theory, &c). This has not reflected my experience at all - many of my professors are philosophical libertarians, and the diversity of ideas is actually broader than I expected going into the major. I have also had progressive professors, but they have bent over backwards to make conservative students comfortable (even in environments where nobody was on the attack). Of note: The most overt political actions I've seen recently on my campus have been plasterings of white supremacist posters [1] and the murder of a visiting black student by a white student [2]. [1]: http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/28/umd-white-supremacist-posters/ http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/28/umd-white-supremacist-post... [2]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/21/sean-urbanski-faces-murder-charges-university-mary/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/21/sean-urbansk... Edit: Added "recently" to the final sentence. There were some campus sexual assault protests in my freshman and sophomore years that might be characterized as political (even if I wouldn't).

A_COMPUTER 9y ago
>this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use. The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it. I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.

uw_rob 9y ago

> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past? You shouldn't make a claim and then ask someone else to disprove it. What numbers are you basing this belief off of? How do you define extreme left? Do you consider beliefs like evolution and global warming to be extreme left view points? According to [0] it seems that the number of professors who consider themselves liberal has increased by about 10% in the last 60 years. But the definition of liberal has become much more inclusive over the last 60 years as well, so I am not sure how meaningful this is. [0] Gross, Neil. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Most of my quick research was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia#cite_note-Gross1-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia#cite_...