6 ms·

I'm from the midwest, and the thread seemed consistently right-wing and reactionary to me. I don't encounter people with... let's be charitable and call it "con

I'm from the midwest, and the thread seemed consistently right-wing and reactionary to me. I don't encounter people with... let's be charitable and call it "controversial" politics like those of the typical Culture War Thread poster in my day-to-day life, so what exactly does Scott think is an appropriate contrast to the liberal bubble he thinks dominates west coast tech culture? East Texas? A Trump rally?

api 8y ago
I scanned the thread a bit and can second this. I am originally from Ohio the type and extremity of right wing ideas present there seemed far to the right of anything typical in the midwest. There are KKK types and similar in Ohio of course but they're pretty extreme outliers in most areas, especially anywhere near a city or a college. I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell. I think you can attribute that seeming explosion (at least in part) to people suppressing moderate conservatives, who then have a choice between becoming enlightened classical liberals and bearing the cost of that path in social isolation, or joining the more extreme people where they've been banished to (which, for its moral hazards, is a hell of a lot more fun, and a lot less depressing). These people are not beyond help, but if you keep suppressing them, they will become more entrenched in the underground and the fringes, and they will become as fragile and bigoted as the academic marxists and intersectionalists who inhabit the same sorts of places on the far left. The high road takes a lot of fortitude when you are a social progressive who is seen as willing to hear and integrate good conservative arguments. Libel, vandalism, and assault are rampant against people visibly associated with conservatives, at least, they have been where I've lived (in southern Ontario).
  - heurist 8y ago
    I haven't seen a lot of active suppression of right wing views other than the more numerous liberals having more bodies to throw at arguments. If the tables were turned and liberal ideas were less popular than conservative ideas then by human nature we'd likely see the same kinds and amount of individual attacks. It already happens in right wing enclaves. I've been banned from multiple conservative subreddits for making reasonable centrist arguments that conservatives historically agreed with or asking questions that stir the pot in a gentle way. On Facebook and Twitter I get people responding with ad hominems to arguments which are not liberal but which do not toe the current Republican party line. Also, someone was arrested the other day for seriously plotting to murder a bunch of popular Democratic politicians. The grass is not greener, in other words. I have not attempted to engage on many other forums but it seems to me that arguing outside the local groupthink is what makes people angry, more than any particular ideology being the driver. Angry people do stupid things. If you're in the minority party locally, you might feel oppressed even if you could go to the next town over and feel right at home.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      Yeah in my experience it is more conservatives (mostly fundamentalists) who have a persecution complex about it. Which is very differently from those who are or were persecuted. One brings it out and up everywhere as self-justification as they aren't actually being persecuted haven't tweaked their behaviors from even negative receptions. One may call them drama llamas trenchantly but more charitably it is identity based instead of experience based. The other is met with far more guarded pessimism and even with angry backlash tends to be in "friendlier" spaces or stressed. It is more confided than presented usually, more angry than righteous. Actually some degree of trauma territory. These are individual situations based on experiences fundamentally. Ironic inversions of the typical and coexistence of "real" and "fake" persecution behaviors are possible.
      - ethics_gradient 8y ago
        I really, really wish I got a penny every time I get accused of wanting to censor conservatives simply because I criticized them.
- iron0013 8y ago
  I actually mentioned the Klan in my comment above too, originally, but removed it for fear the mods would consider it flamebait. However, I'm not sure folks here on HN are really aware of exactly how unpalatable (to most people) the contents of the Culture War Thread often were.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    I'm pretty lefty. There are certainly some commenters who are aggressively towards the alt-right. There is a much larger groups that is more conservative than most people I know personally. There are a lot of people who I would call liberal. And a few who comment mostly from a social justice perspective. If you don't normally talk to very right wing folks in your normal life (I certainly don't), you are going to read things you would consider shocking. They don't appear to me to be anywhere near a majority. For those who would like to form their own opinion, here is a link to the current thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_18/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_wa...
- manfredo 8y ago
  I think the key thing people aren't accounting for is the displacement of conversations. There's probably a highly elevated rate of conversations about topics people can't express in person. Regardless of people's opinions of the threads, there's still the discrepancy between most people characterizing the thread as right wing when in reality the majority of participants were left leaning. There's studies that show that people on either extremes of the political spectrum are more likely to see centrist or even moderates on the same side as being on the opposite side of the political spectrum. I see a lot of that happening in the Bay Area. Things like setting up more restrictive hiring flows for white and Asian men is taken for granted in much of the Bay Area when such policies are pretty controversial in much of the country. On the flip side, mainstream conservative views like support for restrictions on abortion is essentially unheard of. I'm sure there are conservative places that are analogues to the Bay area on the other end of the political scale. But that doesn't make it any less of a concern to me.
- belorn 8y ago
  After reading a few of the articles in the new sub, if that is far-right then far-right has a very different definition to the one being popularized. Take this one that has two relative high voted threads and was at the top for a while: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/at8cuq/the_orchestra_blind_hiring_study_is_it_sound/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/at8cuq/the_orches...
  - api 8y ago
    The post you linked is not bad. I checked the poster's comment history and was a bit surprised not to find a raving misogynist who hangs on one of the "men's rights" subs, since in my experience anyone willing to spend hours arguing in favor of biological determinism is grinding some kind of racial or gender axe. I think you found an outlier. Hmm... I almost deleted that... I realize that sounds really really cynical. I've just become so accustomed to organized trolls trying to "red pill" people by sounding rational and balanced at first and then gradually trying to argue people into believing that Hitler was right. So any time I see a level headed argument in favor of biological determinism or some analogous position I always assume the poster is participating in a companion thread on 4chan or Discord somewhere where they're talking about how to "red pill" the target audience. There's a little bit of this on the extreme left too but nowhere near as much and they're not as active.
    - belorn 8y ago
      The linked article can be summerized into a few word sentence: The p-value of a famous study, cited by researchers and media, is claimed to be 0.33. I am completely amazed that from there you interpret biological determinism, leading to red pill, leading to nazi worship, and finally landing at the far-right. I guess that answer my question why people think it is far-right, while my own definition of far-right is no where near that.
      - api 8y ago
        On further thought I think it is this: I question the motives of anyone who invests a lot of their time in the debate and discussion of the merits of various metrics for ranking the value of human beings unless they are on the skeptic side. Generally those who argue for even tangentially defend stereotypes or or metrics that can be used to a priori rank people by quality of meat are at the very least flirting with some kind of totalitarian elitism. Perhaps this is hypersensitivity and overreaction, but I am not sure. I have studied human history. The instant the camel of a priori anonymous judgement of other people gets its nose under the tent, literal hell on Earth follows. Every single time. I do not believe humans are all (physically) equal, but I do believe that it is important to treat people that way by default and to absolutely reject the aggregates-to-individuals fallacy here. That kind of reverse projection of statistics is always problematic or downright erroneous, but here it is also toxic and evil. Save biases from MTBF statistics for hard drives or other inanimate objects. (Even there it is problematic!) Since you can't go from aggregate to individual with humans, what is the value of defending potential means of doing so?
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  >I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell. As far as I can tell, the explosion in extreme right-wing ideology on the internet has come from the "special kind of bubble". The San Francisco Bay and the Boston activist-academic sphere breed ultra-reactionaries like pretty much nothing else, because they teach you to take Poe's Law as a standard of politics: no matter how much it sounds like a parody by the enemy tribe, you really can find someone purporting to be at the ideological vanguard of your tribe going to exactly the extremes you think would be a step too far. In a related matter, as a matter of fact, today the noted Marxist journal Teen Vogue printed an article explaining that Bernie Sanders is overtly reactionary on identity politics, including an accusation that Sanders supports "settler-colonialism" (it's a tweet, of course), and Vox pulled a damn similar move on Elizabeth Warren a week or two ago. The far-right bases itself on agreeing to many of the most toxic frames the far-left has, and then taking the other side. The far-left does exactly the inverse. It mostly just depends which side has "their" mainstream party in office at the moment -- the one out of power, builds a new extremist ideology based on their opposite. It would be easy to say, oh, that's ridiculous, I reject those premises and those frames, but then you find your own fellow-travelers affirming them.

api 8y ago

I scanned the thread a bit and can second this. I am originally from Ohio the type and extremity of right wing ideas present there seemed far to the right of anything typical in the midwest. There are KKK types and similar in Ohio of course but they're pretty extreme outliers in most areas, especially anywhere near a city or a college. I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell.

microcolonel 8y ago
> I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell. I think you can attribute that seeming explosion (at least in part) to people suppressing moderate conservatives, who then have a choice between becoming enlightened classical liberals and bearing the cost of that path in social isolation, or joining the more extreme people where they've been banished to (which, for its moral hazards, is a hell of a lot more fun, and a lot less depressing). These people are not beyond help, but if you keep suppressing them, they will become more entrenched in the underground and the fringes, and they will become as fragile and bigoted as the academic marxists and intersectionalists who inhabit the same sorts of places on the far left. The high road takes a lot of fortitude when you are a social progressive who is seen as willing to hear and integrate good conservative arguments. Libel, vandalism, and assault are rampant against people visibly associated with conservatives, at least, they have been where I've lived (in southern Ontario).
- heurist 8y ago
  I haven't seen a lot of active suppression of right wing views other than the more numerous liberals having more bodies to throw at arguments. If the tables were turned and liberal ideas were less popular than conservative ideas then by human nature we'd likely see the same kinds and amount of individual attacks. It already happens in right wing enclaves. I've been banned from multiple conservative subreddits for making reasonable centrist arguments that conservatives historically agreed with or asking questions that stir the pot in a gentle way. On Facebook and Twitter I get people responding with ad hominems to arguments which are not liberal but which do not toe the current Republican party line. Also, someone was arrested the other day for seriously plotting to murder a bunch of popular Democratic politicians. The grass is not greener, in other words. I have not attempted to engage on many other forums but it seems to me that arguing outside the local groupthink is what makes people angry, more than any particular ideology being the driver. Angry people do stupid things. If you're in the minority party locally, you might feel oppressed even if you could go to the next town over and feel right at home.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Yeah in my experience it is more conservatives (mostly fundamentalists) who have a persecution complex about it. Which is very differently from those who are or were persecuted. One brings it out and up everywhere as self-justification as they aren't actually being persecuted haven't tweaked their behaviors from even negative receptions. One may call them drama llamas trenchantly but more charitably it is identity based instead of experience based. The other is met with far more guarded pessimism and even with angry backlash tends to be in "friendlier" spaces or stressed. It is more confided than presented usually, more angry than righteous. Actually some degree of trauma territory. These are individual situations based on experiences fundamentally. Ironic inversions of the typical and coexistence of "real" and "fake" persecution behaviors are possible.
    - ethics_gradient 8y ago
      I really, really wish I got a penny every time I get accused of wanting to censor conservatives simply because I criticized them.
iron0013 8y ago
I actually mentioned the Klan in my comment above too, originally, but removed it for fear the mods would consider it flamebait. However, I'm not sure folks here on HN are really aware of exactly how unpalatable (to most people) the contents of the Culture War Thread often were.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I'm pretty lefty. There are certainly some commenters who are aggressively towards the alt-right. There is a much larger groups that is more conservative than most people I know personally. There are a lot of people who I would call liberal. And a few who comment mostly from a social justice perspective. If you don't normally talk to very right wing folks in your normal life (I certainly don't), you are going to read things you would consider shocking. They don't appear to me to be anywhere near a majority. For those who would like to form their own opinion, here is a link to the current thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_18/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_wa...
manfredo 8y ago
I think the key thing people aren't accounting for is the displacement of conversations. There's probably a highly elevated rate of conversations about topics people can't express in person. Regardless of people's opinions of the threads, there's still the discrepancy between most people characterizing the thread as right wing when in reality the majority of participants were left leaning. There's studies that show that people on either extremes of the political spectrum are more likely to see centrist or even moderates on the same side as being on the opposite side of the political spectrum. I see a lot of that happening in the Bay Area. Things like setting up more restrictive hiring flows for white and Asian men is taken for granted in much of the Bay Area when such policies are pretty controversial in much of the country. On the flip side, mainstream conservative views like support for restrictions on abortion is essentially unheard of. I'm sure there are conservative places that are analogues to the Bay area on the other end of the political scale. But that doesn't make it any less of a concern to me.
belorn 8y ago
After reading a few of the articles in the new sub, if that is far-right then far-right has a very different definition to the one being popularized. Take this one that has two relative high voted threads and was at the top for a while: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/at8cuq/the_orchestra_blind_hiring_study_is_it_sound/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/at8cuq/the_orches...
- api 8y ago
  The post you linked is not bad. I checked the poster's comment history and was a bit surprised not to find a raving misogynist who hangs on one of the "men's rights" subs, since in my experience anyone willing to spend hours arguing in favor of biological determinism is grinding some kind of racial or gender axe. I think you found an outlier. Hmm... I almost deleted that... I realize that sounds really really cynical. I've just become so accustomed to organized trolls trying to "red pill" people by sounding rational and balanced at first and then gradually trying to argue people into believing that Hitler was right. So any time I see a level headed argument in favor of biological determinism or some analogous position I always assume the poster is participating in a companion thread on 4chan or Discord somewhere where they're talking about how to "red pill" the target audience. There's a little bit of this on the extreme left too but nowhere near as much and they're not as active.
  - belorn 8y ago
    The linked article can be summerized into a few word sentence: The p-value of a famous study, cited by researchers and media, is claimed to be 0.33. I am completely amazed that from there you interpret biological determinism, leading to red pill, leading to nazi worship, and finally landing at the far-right. I guess that answer my question why people think it is far-right, while my own definition of far-right is no where near that.
    - api 8y ago
      On further thought I think it is this: I question the motives of anyone who invests a lot of their time in the debate and discussion of the merits of various metrics for ranking the value of human beings unless they are on the skeptic side. Generally those who argue for even tangentially defend stereotypes or or metrics that can be used to a priori rank people by quality of meat are at the very least flirting with some kind of totalitarian elitism. Perhaps this is hypersensitivity and overreaction, but I am not sure. I have studied human history. The instant the camel of a priori anonymous judgement of other people gets its nose under the tent, literal hell on Earth follows. Every single time. I do not believe humans are all (physically) equal, but I do believe that it is important to treat people that way by default and to absolutely reject the aggregates-to-individuals fallacy here. That kind of reverse projection of statistics is always problematic or downright erroneous, but here it is also toxic and evil. Save biases from MTBF statistics for hard drives or other inanimate objects. (Even there it is problematic!) Since you can't go from aggregate to individual with humans, what is the value of defending potential means of doing so?
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explosion of shockingly extreme right-wing thinking on the Internet in recent years... really since about 2008-2012 as near as I can tell. As far as I can tell, the explosion in extreme right-wing ideology on the internet has come from the "special kind of bubble". The San Francisco Bay and the Boston activist-academic sphere breed ultra-reactionaries like pretty much nothing else, because they teach you to take Poe's Law as a standard of politics: no matter how much it sounds like a parody by the enemy tribe, you really can find someone purporting to be at the ideological vanguard of your tribe going to exactly the extremes you think would be a step too far. In a related matter, as a matter of fact, today the noted Marxist journal Teen Vogue printed an article explaining that Bernie Sanders is overtly reactionary on identity politics, including an accusation that Sanders supports "settler-colonialism" (it's a tweet, of course), and Vox pulled a damn similar move on Elizabeth Warren a week or two ago. The far-right bases itself on agreeing to many of the most toxic frames the far-left has, and then taking the other side. The far-left does exactly the inverse. It mostly just depends which side has "their" mainstream party in office at the moment -- the one out of power, builds a new extremist ideology based on their opposite. It would be easy to say, oh, that's ridiculous, I reject those premises and those frames, but then you find your own fellow-travelers affirming them.