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Great and relevant comment from nicbou in the other thread:[0] Someone brought an interesting perspective in another thread and I can't shake it off. The other
by forgingahead 6y ago
Great and relevant comment from nicbou in the other thread:[0]
Someone brought an interesting perspective in another thread and I can't shake it off.
The other side keeps deplatforming them. Their legal cases are rejected. The mainstream media refuses to take them seriously. We're not even listening to them, because it's science and they're *ists if they disagree. We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right.
We are slowly squeezing a significant segment of the population out of public debate, and they are powerless to stop it. Is it surprising that they are furious about it, and explode in unpredictable ways? Wouldn't you do the same?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691709
- ves 6y agoThe American far left has a long history of being squeezed out of public fora and you don’t really see them storming the capitol. They don’t debate and they know they’re right. What’s the point in keeping them?
- idanman 6y agoYeah you are right. Instead they burn down businesses and riot in the streets and go attack far right rallies. It seems both far left and far right are embolden these days. No science on either side. No one wants to listen to the other side. Not a good situation.
- jachee 6y agoI don't need to listen to the Qanon conspiracy theories, racist rants, gun worship, law enforcement deification, homophobia, transphobia and other dehumanizing speech of the far right. There is literally nothing of value to be gained.
- idanman 6y agoThis is a free country you can listen to whatever channel you want and let them listen to whatever they want.
- wpm 6y agoYup and if I owned a platform I wouldn’t be obligated to let them use it. So what’s the problem?
- gnusty_gnurc 6y agoSeems like the whole “you have to bake my cake” argument went out the window. Do I have to feed the enemy?
- deathlight 6y agoNo food for "the enemy". No air travel. No payment processing for their businesses or political causes they support. You can earn your social credit points back by kowtowing to Xi the Great - wait wrong country.
- wpm 6y agoSexuality is a protected class like religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on. Politics isn't. This is a very simple concept, yet I find myself having to explain it to a lot of people.
- idanman 6y agoNone at all. When the democrats are in office you kick out far right. When the republicans are in you kick out far left. This way you avoid getting regulated. It’s a free country and your company it’s all good. It opens up opportunities for other companies to come in and take the business. Oh wait... are you a monopoly?
- drak0n1c 6y agoThe grassroots WalkAway group was removed from Facebook today. It was not about Q and had only encouraged rallies and protests, and did not condone breaking into government buildings. It was a repository of hundreds of thousands of video and text testimonials from ex-Democrats explaining why they felt alienated, often by seeing events/individuals they felt were covered unfairly by the media or by cancel culture in their private life, and their lived experiences of why they left the party. Is that not useful information?
- anigbrowl 6y agoI dispute your contention that it's a grassroots thing, that's one of the most astroturfed political campaigns I've ever seen. It's a formula: minor right-wing celebrity announces they're going to city X to 'clean it up' or highlight some deficiency, makes a bunch of posts about it on social media announcing their itinerary, inevitably attracting some opposition from annoyed locals. Then they livestream the local opposition and say 'look how unreasonable these people are, #walkaway.'
- tehbeard 6y agoA victim of the algorithm perhaps? Or too many links on the social graph to the more problematic elements. I don't mean to rationalize its removal. It sounds like a project that should exist, one that serves as a mirror for introspection. This isn't something new or that "the left" only does. In much the same way we see lgbtq groups closed because the algorithm or human moderator believes queerness == explicit sexual content rather than "a bunch of other humans"
- mckirk 6y agoIt's fairly unsurprising that the extreme parts of the spectrum aren't listening to each other, given how far removed they are from each other ideologically. What's way more worrying to me is that they aren't listening to the people that try to understand their perspectives, but keep them grounded in reality. It seems to have become an 'either you are with us, or against us'-situation for a huge number of people, sadly.
- mellosouls 6y agoThe American left own most of the major media platforms (and all the ones people are being censored on) and the far left spent half the year rioting.
- bufferout 6y agoFox News is the most popular cable news though?
- mellosouls 6y agoCaught me before edit. Yeah, there's plenty of bad on the right; but its extraordinary that some on the left don't see our own massive freedom of speech and behaviour issues, as in the comment I replied to.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoIt's definitely news to me that Facebook is owned by "the American left".
- gitrog 6y agoLiberals, aka centrists, own most of the major media platforms. Actual leftists (especially radicals) tend to get silenced as much as far-right individuals do. Only "moderate" opinions are marketable on the mainstream media.
- eyeball 6y ago>The American far left has a long history of being squeezed out of public fora and you don’t really see them storming the capitol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mrleiter 6y agoIt's generally not worth talking to extremists, either to the left or the right. These people have enormous violent potential.
- readflaggedcomm 6y agoIt is safer to ban those less likely to commit violence.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoThis reminds me of a question I think about from time to time, starting with some of the epic threads I used to witness on the USENET political groups: Are people online actually open to talking? I get they write messages, and a lot of messages. But it strikes me no one ever actually changes their mind. They just yell at each other till they move on to another hill to yell from. It's all so tiring, it's like when I used to watch some friends do prep for school debates. They're just practicing arguing, the topic itself is secondary to the argument. I'm probably too cynical, but I also know every time I try to have a real discussion online, it ends badly.
- throwaway201103 6y agoNo I feel the same way. When online discussion turns into debate, nothing is achieved. People use canned, cliched arguments and it's just a back and forth trying to have the last word until someone gives up.
- newsbinator 6y agoExcept on HN, where I can learn something and change my view. Or convince somebody else of something and nudge their view. Well, 25% of the time.
- throwaway201103 6y agoHN has a lot of discussion that doesn't turn into partisan debate. When it does, it's the same as anywhere else.
- tshaddox 6y agoThat does, of course, seem to imply that there is no scenario in which one can in fact be right about something and know it and that other people can be wrong. Would you use this same phrasing about, say, flat earthers?
- guscost 6y ago“The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn’t work out.” -Chappelle
- dane-pgp 6y ago> in case the First one doesn’t work out. That's a nice idea, until someone thinks "doesn't work out" includes "I don't get the electoral result that I wanted".
- guscost 6y agoIf only the world were as simple as your tidy little vignette.
- h0l0cube 6y agoAt a minimum, I'd wager that those that stormed Capitol Hill, wouldn't have done if the election had the opposite result. I'd further wager that any protest in the counterfactual would have been a much smaller scale, and much less violent. 2016 being an example of Democrat supporters accepting an election result they didn't like - with officials taking a legal approach into their plaint with the election campaign (i.e., Russian interference) based on trying to build a case on evidence... not making indefensible claims about a conspiring deep state.
- v64 6y agoFortunately this is a discussion about a business curating their own platform as opposed to censorship by the government
- acomjean 6y agoThe problem is when you can’t agree on the facts it’s hard to even discuss things. “Alternative truths” which have been disseminated widely and used to storm a capital (where there were deaths). It could have been way worse. Being involved in online organization of something like that probably isn’t great for your brand. Politics has a problem on both sides were business gets more ear than people.
- paul7986 6y agoIn politics what the heck is true? For me nothing (bunch of drama junk pumped out from both sides and the media) so i just listen directly to what the politicians say/do/treat others and their track record on issues i care about.
- anigbrowl 6y agoIsn't this the same segment of the population that says things like 'fuck your feelings' on the regular? Their legal cases were rejected because they were deficient or substance free. They were provided with copious explanations of why. They were invited to allege fraud or broad substantial claims, and asked straight out by judges what their actual complaints were, and they backed away from the hyperbolic claims they were making to the public. Mainstream media refusing to take them seriously? Maybe that's because they have proved serially unreliable and/or outright dishonest, despite being given enormous leeway. Maybe year after year of calling media in general 'the enemies of the people' and expressing approval for the murder of journalists eroded their popularity, you know? Trump supporters are not hapless victims by any standard of the imagination. The plain fact is that they (and in particular their leader) have lost legitimacy and credibility and are refusing to accept the fact. And I have to say that to a large extent this loss has something to do with many of them (and in particular their leader) being assholes for the last 5 years. I mean, do you think scientists need to give flat earthers more latitude?
- ordu 6y agoI think you are too much concerned with "they brought it on themselves" and too little with "the substantial segment of the population is squeezed from a debate". The latter is a bad news even if you are 100% right with the former.
- anigbrowl 6y agoI fail to see why I should be concerned with people who have evinced an utter lack of concern for me. I've participated in many discussions and debates with such folk over the years, but my patience has limits.
- ordu 6y ago> I fail to see why I should be concerned with people who have evinced an utter lack of concern for me. Because you are on the same boat with them. If they overturn the boat, you'll fall into the water. I do not say that it is easy to be concerned, it is hard, because it leaves mind in the state of uncertainty: there are no known ways to tackle the problem. There are different ways to deal with it, but all simple ways (like throw them all over the board) are not acceptable and probably wouldn't work (some tried and it didn't turn well). These simple ways could bring mind into the state of peace: everything is decided, no uncertainty, they are the bad guys, we are the good ones, but what is more important to you: the peace of mind or a thinking process constantly seeking for ways to tackle a problem? People mostly choose peace of mind, because they have other problems to worry about. I do not blame them, anxiety is a thing that makes life worse. But as for me, people might be better if they learned how to live with uncertainty without having to worry about the part of uncertainty that is out of their control.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago> We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right. Election officials and reputable news sources have repeatedly stated why there is no reason to believe the election was stolen. There is no assumption about who is right, only repeated proof. Without a platform to spread disinformation, there would have been just a few dozen people who believed otherwise, and the raid on the Capitol would not have happened.
- newguy1234 6y agoThey aren't being squeezed out of the debate. They simply leave those platforms and move to alternative platforms instead. I'm personally a conservative myself and have left twitter for parler and gab instead. Many are doing the same. There are also a lot of other communities as well.
- MiguelHudnandez 6y agoWouldn't the audience self-selecting based on political alignment limit the discourse to a few predictable takes for any given issue? Did many leftists and centrists go to parler? (The same limitations will likely occur at the original platforms as populations leave)
- bbeesley 6y agoI opened a parler account to see what it’s like. Everything suggested to me was right wing pseudo news sites and pundits along with republican lawmakers. Aside from a small amount of gaming content I couldn’t find anything vaguely interesting.
- saagarjha 6y agoI mean, isn't it inconvenient to constantly be hopping platforms as they get deplatformed?
- threatofrain 6y agoIf conservative legal cases are being rejected in the current judicial environment, how can we be sympathetic? Trump and the GOP have broken records in nominating federal judges. And science is not an American institution... if one distrust the science of every major nation then what’s left? If one distrusts all reporting outlets and international signals for COVID or climate change, then what’s left? The web may be full of misinformation, but in some ways it’s also a golden age for education.
- h0l0cube 6y agoWhen 2016 election was won by Trump, it was at most a minority viewpoint that the election was rigged - in fact I've never heard of it said. Trump lost the 2020 election, and it was presupposed that the election will be rigged, leading to violent protests in complaint of the election result. The real problem is that there's an epistemic crisis whereby people have lost trust in long-lived and functioning institutions, and that has been fuelled by conspiracy theorists, some of which have been given credence by the sitting president (e.g., Alex Jones).
- welcome_dragon 6y agoThe word "rigged" may not be technically correct for what people were saying about the 2016 election but there were people in Congress who opposed certifying and/or counting the electoral votes because of ... mostly Russian interference. https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/electoral-college-vote-count-objections/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/electoral-college-vo...
- h0l0cube 6y agoI agree with that, but there's a big difference in scale between political manoeuvrers in Congress and a hostile rabble invading Capitol House - and the millions of aggrieved voters that support them.
- eyeball 6y agoPelosi: "Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts." https://mobile.twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/864522009048494080?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/864522009048...
- thu2111 6y agoMinority according to who? I feel like practically every US news source was flooded for years with wacked out conspiracy theories alleging that Putin controlled everything and had "hacked the election". It was all garbage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jonathanyc 6y agoWho is “we”? I would have been on the fence between Bush and Biden and I feel nothing in common with domestic terrorists who would invade the Capitol and attempt to destroy our democracy. The mainstream media refuses to take seriously issues raised by libertarians/paleoconservatives like getting rid of qualified immunity. I don’t see Cato Institute people trying to stage a coup. The mainstream media compared Bernie’s victories to Hitler’s conquest of Germany and said on live TV that they worried if he won there’d be executions in Central Park. Bernie Sanders didn’t incite a riot and then call the rioters “good, special people.” This is such a bizarre false equivalence, like claiming I should weigh equally the opinion of my doctor and a patient at an insane asylum.
- fxtentacle 6y agoI believe that's spot on and not only for "the other side". By now, there seem to be a lot of fragments that used to be part of "the left" but were alienated or pushed out over disagreements about gender issues. The discussion if feminism should a) create equal chances or b) also correct past wrongs by inverse discrimination has been around for a long time. But only recently has it become so divisive.
- zug_zug 6y agoI don't think conservatives are kicked off of anywhere. I don't think anybody who's making sincere debate arguments is kicked out of anywhere. What's happening is that people who copy-paste/reshare conspiracy theories without even bothering to read the wikipedia/snopes article first are being rightly downvoted. I think of Trump's fan base seems more like a religious minority than a political group. And like any religious group debate really isn't the answer to fantastical beliefs.