10 ms·

What is crazy about the the situation in SF is that even 5 or so years ago if you asked me what the "echo chamber" there was echoing I would have said libertari

• gameswithgo 9y ago
  I have no idea what SF is like, so in these discussions I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore. The latter is what I see in my own circle of humans but I live in Texas. I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a libertarian tech-stereotype when I was younger, and in large part it has been from seeing the conservative half of american slide slowly further into insanity and horribleness, seemingly driven by fox news, at least among family.
  • sho 9y ago
    > insane, insufferable far left crazies Definitely this option. And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labelling absolutely everything "left/right" or "red/blue" isn't doing our society real damage. I've never voted conservative my entire life but I have nothing in common with the far left and indeed fear them a lot more than the far right. We need a new vocabulary.
    • cinquemb 9y ago
      >…indeed fear… For someone like Thiel, as it pertains to their life and continued living in this world, what is there to fear? You have multiple generations of people uploading (metadata) in real-time to a multitude of platforms they own/control to some large degree, that they continue to profit off of, and if needed could easily funneled to a tasking queue for metadata drone strikes if they so happen to go abroad (or legalized for domestic usage in the future, possibly with the aid of PMC's). If anything the fear people are increasingly acting on in "public" will only make such future realities more certain as people feel that they need to go to extremes to address any actual or perceived injustice done to them.
    • walshemj 9y ago
      Yes but there are no far left parties in the USA to vote for.
      • acjohnson55 9y ago
        Not only that, but anything that would be considered truly leftist by global standards has tiny support within the Democratic party. What Bernie Sanders advocates, for example, is firmly centrist by European standards.
        • adventured 9y ago
          There is no such thing as European standards. Czech and Poland are entirely different from France and Denmark when it comes to such. Germany and Switzerland are also far different from France. There are at least a dozen nations in Europe with very aggressive hard right parties, often derived from former neo-Nazi parties, that have won a political seat at the table in the last decade. That trend is still continuing. Europe overall has a worse far right problem than the US does and it's getting worse at an alarming rate. Europe even has multiple fascist dictatorships, in Belarus, Turkey and Russia.
          • walshemj 9y ago
            yes mostly former sov block countries where hard right nationisiam has taken hold
      • adventured 9y ago
        The Green Party is a far left US party. To go much further left, you have to enter Venezuela style Socialism. The GP openly advocates for changing essentially everything about the US political and economic system and shifting every area much further to the left ideologically (by much further, I mean it far surpasses what even "liberals" in Congress advocate for).
        • walshemj 9y ago
          so are they are like the SWP in the UK - no they are not. I don't think so I get the impression there like a weedy version of the lib dems
    • pureGuano 9y ago
      I too dislike the right/left classification. It didn't really exist until the French Revolution, and the attempt to stretch it into a universally encompassing political continuum has resulted in an impoverished view of politics, imho. For instance, despite the similarities, I don't think that the prevailing progressivism in SV can be equated with classical Marxism, which is far-left in the original sense, since they disagree fundamentally on the most central questions to the Marxists, which are the centrality of economic class, and private property. I find the links between Fascism and far-right (again, in the original sense) Conservatism to be equally tenuous, given that they radically differ on the attitudes towards tradition and progress. Even the Republicans and Democrats don't really fit the mols. Think about it: what grounds do opposition to abortion and market liberalism have in common, really? Trump doesn't fall neatly onto the line either, and I suspect that the tendency to place him somewhere on the old line has contributed to the rather confused, and reflexively negative reaction that many in the political class have had to his emergence and presidency. It's best to think of political outlooks as clusters of positions in a high-dimensional space. The left-right model is like a poorly-executed PCA -- a reduction that confuses as much as it clarifies.
    • abusoufiyan 9y ago
      You fear the far left (who couldn't even get their milktoast socialist candidate into the Presidential race) more than the far right (who are gaining actual political power in Europe with their openly neo-Nazi parties)? What world do you live in, man?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • resu_nimda 9y ago
    I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore. That's because it's entirely a matter of individual perspective and experience. Everyone takes their own tiny viewport onto a region of millions of diverse people and attempts to claim "oh yeah SF/bay area is like this..." "Oh no I had a different experience so you see it's like this..."
    • sho 9y ago
      There may be millions of diverse people and opinions but there is definitely a dominant ideology, it is definitely far-left, and it suppresses all other political viewpoints. This is absolutely blindingly self-evident in SF and if you disagree I wonder if you have actually been there.
      • adventured 9y ago
        It's also entirely unnecessary to guess at this. We have voting records and financial contributions to campaigns. Both tell the same exact story. San Francisco is as far left as cities get in the US. The mistake being made by the top level parent, is thinking that there was ever actually a wide-spread libertarian burst. There was not. That was nothing more than a media meme for a few minutes, mostly thanks to Andreessen, Thiel and a few others. SF overall has been extreme left for the last 40 years plus. Marc Andreessen for one, has entirely disappeared from the public discussion politically. He's a particularly openly avowed libertarian type in terms of beliefs. There's a reason he shut down like he did, it's the same reason Thiel is being evicted from the inner circles of tech. There is no room for mistakes in the current police state of speech that exists in SV. One mistake, stepping out of line with dogma, and you're done. Andreessen wants to stay in Silicon Valley and wants to maintain his VC firm at the top tier, so he shut his mouth to put it simply. Thiel is unwilling to go along with the political & speech requirements of continuing to exist in SV.
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        It's relatively left but not far-left, and it hasn't really moved much in decades, though the rapid movement of the right end of the Overton Window over the past couple decades (and particularly the past few years) may make it seemed to have moved left to those whose perceptions are driven by distance from the center of their own identity group, and identify with a right-leaning (either conservative or right-libertarian) faction.
  • walshemj 9y ago
    Yes your right the over all sv culture is actually socially liberal wet tory center right UK terms - (Cristian democrat in European terms)
  • friedman23 9y ago
    > I have no idea what SF is like, so in these discussions I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies I'm not a Trump supporter by any means but I remember clearly the morning after the election and seeing people walking through the street in SF on their way to work in tears. If that doesn't point to a presence of insane, insufferable far left (or at least leftist) crazies I don't know what does. It was very difficult not laugh.
    • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      >If that doesn't point to a presence of insane, insufferable far left (or at least leftist) crazies I don't know what does. I think you're mistaking how extreme their political beliefs are with how extremely devoted to their political beliefs they are. Most of these people aren't 'far left' they're just very, very committed to their center/center-left politics.
      • friedman23 9y ago
        Let me tell you, if you shed tears because Trump won the election you are mentally unstable.
        • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
          Well no... they were just very devoted to the election but it's also missing the point. Many people who shed tears over Trump's win are not far left, they're just normal centrist or center-left.
          • astura 9y ago
            Or even center-right. Many of my family, who are definitely right leaning, mildly racist, God fearing, Church attending Christians, we're absolutely devastated at Trump's victory. I fail to understand how "crying Donald J Trump is the president of the United States" equals being an "insane insufferable far left crazy." Even if you mostly agree with him politically, you may still be very upset about someone who boasted about sexually assaulting women representing you/your political beliefs. That's just one example.
  • dizzystar 9y ago
    Apples to oranges. There is no way you live in Austin because that place is very liberal and accepting of people. More so than SF imo. California has some conservative areas as well, but those aren't the big cities.
• scarmig 9y ago
  I remember always getting annoyed at colleagues and Hacker News generally for being technolibertarian fanboys. And now I'm constantly annoyed at the sanctimony and self-indulgence of the "Left," even though I hate granting them that label. Maybe I'm just getting old.
  • sho 9y ago
    > Maybe I'm just getting old. Well unfortunately nothing can stop that, but things have definitely changed. I remember thinking that too.
    • fastball 9y ago
      Nothing can stop [aging] You just wait, SV will figure it out eventually.
      • sho 9y ago
        Well bloody hell I hope so! Finally something useful!
      • colejohnson66 9y ago
        I wonder if there will be an ICO
    • 6487698hhhh 9y ago
      From my own highly biased perspective the right has remained more or less in the same place politically over time, whereas the left has lurched violently towards the extreme on some topics, also tending towards the extreme in its tactics. We are not at war; we are not generally living in autocratic regimes; people generally have freedom to conduct their lives in the way they would prefer; so why is the left acting like we are living in a fascist state? Above all we need honest dialog. If anyone saw Cathy Newman's interview of Jordan Peterson, for example, I cannot see how it helps feminism at all to merely shout down those you disagree with rather than having an honest exchange of ideas.
  • wavegeek 9y ago
• wz1000 9y ago
  > The takeover by the proscriptive far-left Americans have a very weird conception of what "far-left" means. Liberal feel good minority appeasement by billion dollar multinational corporations is as far from "far-left" as you can get.
  • archagon 9y ago
    Just people arguing in bad faith, I think.
    • sho 9y ago
      I hope that I demonstrate through my polite and hopefully-constructive replies that I am in fact arguing in good faith. Once we abandon that assumption then all hope is lost.
      • anigbrowl 9y ago
        http://wondermark.com/1k62/ http://wondermark.com/1k62/
  • refurb 9y ago
    Political views are relative. I could say that there are no hard-right parties in Europe (with mainstream ideals - I'm ignoring the fascist parties).
    • adventured 9y ago
      You can't correctly say there are no hard-right parties in Europe. They're in nearly every European nation and often have large political positions. Ignoring that is like pretending the alt-right Breitbart crowd doesn't exist in the US. Much of Eastern Europe in particular is overflowing with a hard-right quasi-fascist ideology currently.
    • anigbrowl 9y ago
      Fn in France and AfD in Germany are firmly right, and it seems perverse to ignore fascist parties like Jobbik and others considering their relative electoral success, even if you believe that to be a flash in the pan. I spend a good deal of time worrying about this international drift.
• superioritycplx 9y ago
  The democrats' last presidential campaign cost over $2 billion. The money definitely wasn't all spent on printing flyers.
• pfarnsworth 9y ago
  10-12 years ago, there was no tech in SF. Zero. It was mainly financial companies or workers for Levi's, Gap, etc. All the best tech companies were in South Bay. It was Twitter, Zynga, Yelp and quickly followed by Uber, Airbnb, and all the other cool startups that brought tech into SF and probably the cause of that shift. SF started giving tax breaks to tech companies in the late aughts, and then it started the huge migration of tech startups from South Bay to SF. Before that, it was rare for tech workers to live in SF. Most would live in South Bay and come up to SF to party on weekends. Also, salaries went crazy in the last 8-10 years. Once all these rich tech workers came to the city that thought they knew best because they were rich and young, that's probably what caused the shift.
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    Having been here since the dot com boom in the 1990s I have to disagree. Large firms headquartering in SF is a relatively new thing, but there were plenty of small firms attracted by VC money but which didn't come out of the Stanford orbit that has shaped SV.
    • pfarnsworth 9y ago
      I've been here since the 90s as well, and I can't think of a single major company that came out of SF until recently. Not enough to cause a huge shift in where people worked.
      • anigbrowl 9y ago
        ...that's why I specifically cited small firms?
  • metaobject 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. SV has been host to tech companies (for the varying definitions of "tech") throughout the decades, from early processor and PC companies, video game companies, early internet companies, and Web 2.0 companies.
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  This 'takeover' is imaginary. What happened was that people who were sick of libertarianism and techno-utopianism (in some cases because it wasn't the first time they'd seen those ideas wax in significance in the bay area) began to vocally push back and argue that many of the ideas of libertarianism and techno-utopianism are flawed. I suspect you'd also find a pretty close correlation between intensity of left-wing rhetoric and economic insecurity due to rising rents and other factors.
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  SF has been dominated by what passes as the American left (with the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party being the local “conservative” establishment) for several decades. This has not radically changed recently.
• psyc 9y ago
  (Disclaimer: I do not intend anything in this comment as a judgment.) In my view, exactly what happened is that a generation of feminists used the internet (esp. blogs and social media) very effectively. You can look to gaming culture, not as a primary source of this necessarily, but at least as a convenient observable thermometer and timeline. Again, I don't mean to suggest that gaming was the source of all this, but you can watch the dissemination of the ideas, and the predominating cultural shift, by reviewing the timelines of the Penny Arcade Dickwolves controversy (2010-11), and GamerGate (2014). A more direct connection is that the central figures in GamerGate did in fact offer anti-harassment consulting services to SV technology companies.
• GhostVII 9y ago
  I suspect that it is mostly the leadership of a few large companies has become more far-left, and the beliefs of the employees at those companies hasn't changed much, people just don't want to express their beliefs if they don't line up with the companies leadership.
• saltcured 9y ago
  Alienation is good way to describe the experience of California. In a sense, it is the most fundamental characteristic in our identity. S.F. and California as a whole has also been a crucible of multiculturalism and socioeconomic tension since missionaries first accosted the natives, redefining itself with each wave of arrivals including fur trappers, ranchers, farmers, prospectors and Chinese laborers of the gold rush and railroad age, the Okies of the depression, and black and hispanic laborers for WWII. The city has also been a west coast stronghold of finance, lawyers, and corporatism at least since the gold rush era started creating locally concentrated wealth. These forces have shaped and continue to shape both politics and popular culture. To a first order, what is happening in S.F. or S.V. within the blindered tech employee sphere is much the same. Local experience is warped by the continued influx of youngsters from outside. We have been having an endless September far longer than the internet's version. They dilute and revise popular culture as much or more than they are themselves inculturated. A longer term economic trend has been the wind-down of military bases and defense-related manufacturing in the S.F. Bay Area. This has affected economic immigration into the region by removing one large source of conservative outsiders (those young ex-military folk with tech training and a new-found awareness of the local economy) and also a selection of jobs funded by military contracts and including hands-on engineering and industrial tasks. Meanwhile, the dreamers continue to immigrate on their own, much like youth flock to Los Angeles with dreams of the entertainment industry. This alienating, pod-people replacement process ought to seem like it is accelerating right now partly due to simple demographics. There are more youngsters to flow in as part of a general pulse of young people in America, compared to the dip in the population curve we experienced through Gen X around the first dot-com cycle. In almost every context, young people in their 20s are more liberal, more naive, more idealistic, and more outspoken about their opinions. Having more such people at once is very visible, just like it was in the 1960s with the boomers. I wonder how the vanguard of the 60s felt when they started to hear that they were "too old" to be trusted by the growing wave of hippies and yippies.
• redthrowaway 9y ago
  Hell, just look at HN. This place was pretty damned libertarian not five years ago. The sea change to identity-driven progressivism has been swift.
• abusoufiyan 9y ago
  Can you get the rest to leave too? Tons of engineers who are willing to not be lunatics and would love the cheaper housing if you could get all your conservative friends to leave.