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The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, a
by WillDaSilva 6y ago
The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn't be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.
- shadowgovt 6y agoWhite supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
- whatshisface 6y agoIt's gained a lot of attention. Is there any real evidence that it's gained traction?
- spacemanmatt 6y agoDon't get out much, eh?
- indecisive_user 6y agoOn the contrary, I've been traveling across the US quite a bit over the last several months, from New England, the PNW, and the South. While I've seen plenty of signs and a few rallies supporting BLM and other progressive causes, I've yet to see, in person, a single sign or rally or any supportive material for white supremacy. I hear about it a lot on the internet but from my travels anyway I haven't seen it yet. Edit: I did see some confederate flags being flown in middle of nowhere Mississippi, but I honestly believe they're not flown as a symbol of hatred (at least not always) as some people had banners next to their flags saying things like "Pride not hate", or the rainbow flag, or other phrases trying to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the flag.
- shadowgovt 6y agoUnfortunately for them, one doesn't really get to choose how other people interpret the symbols one uses, as anyone who's ever tried to do something weird in a protocol and then hope a code comment will stop developers of the future from screwing up the code around the weirdness can attest.
- indecisive_user 6y agoSure, you can interpret the flag however you choose. That has nothing to do with the perceived rise in white supremacy though. Confederate flags have long been flown in the south, and if anything, flying the lgbt flag next to it is new.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- samatman 6y agoThe Confederate battle flag meant "The Confederacy" for five years, and meant "Mississippi" for 126. I'm not from around there, and it isn't my business to defend nor condemn it. I do think taking it as ipso facto evidence of white supremacy is a Yankee mistake.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThat depends, perhaps, on whether one thinks Mississippi stood for white supremacy for several decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state#Mississippi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_...
- tehjoker 6y agoI had one almost happen in my town (in NJ). We had to counter rally to chase them out. There are fewer physical rallies because the ones they try to do are often successfully suppressed. Recall Boston in 2017. Unite the Right (not suppressed and resulted in a murder). etc. If you go to certain left wing rallies, they WILL show up. I have seen real live nazis screaming at my friends at an anti-ICE rally. The problem with these guys is they do have a narrative that is appealing to a certain set of people about nationalism and certain ethnic enemies that care creating the problems. The idea is to prevent their growth and flourishing because if you see them get very common, we are in deep trouble... though given the debate tonight with the president signaling "Stand Back. Stand By." to the Proud Boys, I sense a creeping darkness.
- brightball 6y agoThis is a question that I have wondered about. It feels like it’s just being heavily advertised more so than gaining any traction.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 6y agoIn short, yes, there's quite a bit of evidence of this. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/the-facts-on-white-nationalism/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/the-facts-on-white-nationa... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/white-nationalist-hate-groups-southern-poverty-law-center https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/white-national...
- refurb 6y agoYour first link literally says “FactCheck.org Rating: Experts Disagree”
- shadowgovt 6y agoThere's disagreement, but evidence was asked for, not consensus.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thinkingemote 6y agoThe definition of it has widened to include more groups than before. The original groups are about the same size.
- throwaway894345 6y agoIt seems like the definition is "broadened" but no actual definition is provided. All we can look at is who gets labeled as "white supremacist" and draw our own inferences. Notably, a lot of garden-variety egalitarians--people who are against any kind of racial ideology including critical race theory, "anti-racism", and other left-wing racial ideologies--are frequently labeled "white supremacist" (including an awful lot of people of color, jewish people, homosexuals, etc). We should be very wary of rhetoric that depends on changing definitions of terms without providing precise definitions (see also "racism"). Put differently, everyone's ideas should be criticized on their own terms, but you oughtn't be taken seriously if you don't even define your own terms (and defining them in terms of other poorly defined terms--e.g., "'anti-racism' opposing racism"--doesn't count).
- jawarner 6y agoThe status quo is not explicitly racist, and a lot of people are comfortable with it. The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. Take the prevalence of indentured servitude after the Civil War as an example. I'd recommend "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" for a lucid account of the racial issues in current America. If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy. I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
- goatlover 6y ago> If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy. This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era. It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation. A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.
- efnx 6y agoThe idea has always been widespread but not accepted in the open. In the US the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy has lifted the fear of social recourse for supremacists (racists, sexists, fascists) and I suspect the same goes for other far right parties around the globe.
- Chris2048 6y ago> the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy "embrace" by the definition "openly supporting white supremacy"? Or "dared to suggest there where two sides at fault in Charlottesville"?
- shadowgovt 6y ago"Embrace" by the definition "continuing to parrot white nationalist points of view uncritically, and having a white nationalist as senior adviser for policy." https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-white-nationalism/568393/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-w... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advisor)#Leaked_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advi...
- Chris2048 6y agoBy that logic Hillary Clinton is a sexist for remaining married to a sexual harraser, and a vast proportion of the left are who-knows-what-label for uncritically parroting the Covington teen narrative.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe global context is more complicated, but (as my international friends are fond of reminding me) the US has outsized cultural influence on what other countries consider best practices.
- pjkundert 6y agoThe belief that everyone who doesn’t believe exactly what you do is a fascist might not be as widespread as your echo-chamber confirms...
- ribs 6y agoIt is exactly because of social cooling that you heard so little about white supremacy for so many years. The tacit endorsement of one famous person (see if you can guess who!) helped to somewhat raise the ambient temperature for it.
- shadowgovt 6y agoIf true, that raises two interesting questions relative to the socialcooling.com content: 1) It begs the question of whether social cooling should be considered a universal ill. After all, white supremacy is bad, and consequences for publicly embracing it are useful. 2) It begs the question of whether the impact of digitally-originated social cooling is particularly relevant if one thought-leader can upend it.
- raxxorrax 6y agoQuestion answered: Being reactionary to reactionaries is idiotic. It wasn't even an issue 10 years ago and some people fucked it up big time.
- simias 6y agoI'm not sure there is causation here. Far-right ultra-nationalistic movements are gaining speed in many places in the world. I think there are many factors at play, one being that we get further and further away from WW2 and people forget how bad it can get (especially here in Europe). Only the military and very old people in the west now know what a real war feels like. On top of that there's general social unrest and increased inequalities (the infamous 1%), software eating the world etc... I do think that white supremacy, fascism and nazism was really a lot more fringe even only 10 years ago, it wasn't just under-reported.
- Chris2048 6y agoWhat does the rise of nationalism have to do with the war? Do you expect some of these parties to try invading their neighbours?
- wry_discontent 6y agoIt's because this page is using "minority views" as a code word for "ruling class threatening views." Which has always been the case. A minority view that doesn't threaten business interests will face little suppression (see: white supremacy)
- shadowgovt 6y agoI don't think we can assume white supremacy doesn't threaten business interests. Particularly not in the US, where approximately 2 out of 5 Americans aren't white. How many companies are willing to put on the table as their business model "We'll be actively hostile to 40% of our potential customers?"
- jrumbut 6y agoOne business' potential customer is another's potential employee and a third's potential competitor. How many websites have multiple translations available and put effort into accessibility proportional to the amount of the population that could be helped by it? It's not anywhere near 100%.
- wry_discontent 6y agoWhy is it that Facebook ignores white supremacist content and targets Amazon labor union content? For example, SaaS companies aren't going to create white supremacist technology, but they will sell to white supremacists.
- watwut 6y agoPeople in America dont live in random places. You have parts where everyone is white and parts where everyone is black. Then you have parts where one group is severely dominant. For many if not most businesses, their customer base does not have same racial ration as whole America.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI remember reading a story about a Black man attending KKK rallies to understand their argument and successfully convince some of them to leave the group. I think it was Daryl Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have. What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jjice 6y agoDaryl Davis is a really interesting guy. His episode on the JRE is really good and his stories keep you engaged. Even if you don't like Joe Rogan, you should still be able to enjoy his episode because Davis does the majority of the talking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGTQ0Wj6yIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGTQ0Wj6yIg
- BurningFrog 6y agoCalling people you disagree with "white supremacists" has certainly gained ground. But people self identifying as such are extremely rare.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoMany non-identifying white supremacists have white supremacist adjacent ideals such as xenophobia. It's very hard to support with a straight face that the acceptance of the confederate flag in the south does not have racial overtones.
- BurningFrog 6y agoAcceptance of the confederate flag has definitely decreased a lot the last half century. So if that's your measure, white supremacy is not doing well at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoStrawman, but no, it isn't my only measure.
- Lammy 6y agoMany people experience legitimate problems in life to which the've only been offered solutions like xenophobia.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoWhich problem is xenophobia a solution for?
- Lammy 6y agoI didn't say it was a good solution or one I would ever offer myself, but I think a lot of the young-white-male-to-alt-right pipeline falls in to this when nobody else seems willing to hear them out except to tell them which ethnic group to blame.
- mschuster91 6y ago> White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies. Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave. Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThis strongly suggests social cooling is a positive effect.
- mschuster91 6y agoAs long as it is used against Nazis, definitely. I mean, we can all agree that Nazis are bad. The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
- xenihn 6y agoFirst they deplatformed the Nazis, and I did not speak out -- for I was not a Nazi. >The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure. Legitimate according to who? Isn't any opposition to a government illegitimate opposition? Or exclusively legitimate, depending on how you feel about the concept of government itself. I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now. I really like how the information is presented in this SocialCooling site. As you have pointed out, the effects are good if they lower the voices you disagree with, and raise the ones that represent your views. My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it. Fortunately for us, picking the winners isn't hard.
- 6y ago
- Constellarise 6y agoThe key thing here is white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US
- shadowgovt 6y agoWell, a subset of the state.
- Constellarise 6y agoThe US was largely founded on white supremacy and it has been part of the state institutions for two hundred years. It didn't disappear at the end of the civil war, or in the 1960s, or in 2008.
- shadowgovt 6y agoNo argument there. In the same span of history, the 13th-15th Amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, and Loving v. Virginia also happened. As with so many gigantic institutions, the US government is not uniformly supportive of or disruptive of white supremacy, over time or within an era.
- Constellarise 6y agoThe state and the government are not the same thing; the police is and always has been racist and is the enforcers of state power, for example.
- shadowgovt 6y agoI'm afraid I don't know the definition of state you're operating under, so I don't think I can evaluate claims such as "white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US."
- jgacook 6y agoFederal immigration control almost exclusively focuses their attention on deporting and denying asylum to Latino refugees and asylum seekers. Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide. This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities". I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.
- AI_WAIFU 6y ago> White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction Well obviously, the definition expanded: https://i.imgur.com/gW9sQoM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gW9sQoM.jpg As far as I can tell the number of people who are part of the KKK hasn't gone up any appreciable amount. In fact, calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy" and then deplaforming "white supremacists" is an excellent example of this social cooling.
- shadowgovt 6y ago> calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy" [citation needed]
- AI_WAIFU 6y agoLitterally the picture I linked, would you like more examples. Here's another where they redefine the "white" in white supremacy to mean more than having white skin. https://cdn.cnsnews.com/styles/article_big/s3/2020-07/whiteness%201_0.png https://cdn.cnsnews.com/styles/article_big/s3/2020-07/whiten... I can keep going if you want me to.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe pedigree of that image is that it started as a list created in a facilitated focus group on race and race relations. It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?" Later, it was shared with the inaccurate description of being a list of negative aspects of white culture. It's kind of funny really; the pedigree of that list being considered a list of negative things is white people making assumptions about the intent of a list assembled of things white people self-attributed to white culture. Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
- munificent 6y ago> White supremacy is a minority view This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted. If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!). But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number. And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
- lightgreen 6y ago> If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number. I very much doubt so. The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists. If you have data which proves otherwise, please share.
- munificent 6y ago> The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists. And what of the Kochs and Waltons? Either way, you're only thinking about the 0.01%. But consider the many many more people in the 1%. Big fish in small pond types that are part of the Old Boy's Club in your local area. People that wouldn't call themselves white supremacists or even racist, but also wouldn't really want Black folks joining their country club. If you don't think deep-seated racism is profoundly prevalent across large areas of the US, you are probably just in the position of having enough privilege to be oblivious to it. I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere. You just have to scratch the surface a bit to see it.
- lightgreen 6y ago> I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere Or you are biased to see it everywhere. Maybe it's true, maybe it's false, but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists, and I did not see any evidence supporting these statements.
- tootie 6y agoThat one really rings false. Minority opinion holders are gathering online in record numbers. I'm thinking in particular of the nut jobs like anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, but also fan bases for obscure culture (reddit saved The Expanse) or the support for non mainstream political figures like Ron Paul or Andrew Yang. If anything, their ability to brigade online forums makes them seem far more prevalent than they really are.
- filleduchaos 6y agoThe people who effected that progress often did so under constant, actual physical attack and various forms of blacklisting.