4 ms·

Dunno if this is "new" per se or if I've just seen enough over the years to finally identify it, but a lot of the "correctness" of a political opinion today dep

by jerf 6y ago

Dunno if this is "new" per se or if I've just seen enough over the years to finally identify it, but a lot of the "correctness" of a political opinion today depends not so much on the content, but how it is phrased and whether or not it is in a "proper" environment. If you wrap a heavy interventionalist policy in the guise of "we have to defend ourselves against the Chinese doing it!", you might get one group sagely nodding about how it may be a bit sad but is clearly necessary while another group is angrily denouncing the racism or whatever. Turn around and propose the exact same policy (for the sake of argument) in terms of controlling domestic extremism and "nudging" the masses properly, and the people previously angry will be nodding sagely while the other group is now angry. From my viewpoint, there are very few people left proposing anything like freedom. It's all a fight now over who gets to use the government to impose their views on the US and its individual citizens, not whether views should be imposed by the government. Within my lifetime, this was not the case.

majormajor 6y ago
> Within my lifetime, this was not the case. When was this? I can't remember such a time in my own lifetime. (Views on Communism and the Cold War being the dominant initial one that the government was pushing.)
- jerf 6y ago
  Perhaps I was not clear; I'm not saying that it was ever necessarily what I'd call the "gestalt" or "consensus" view. I'm not sure there was ever a time in the US where that was the case necessarily; always the local concerns have some good reason to override freedom today. But it was at least a voice at the table, and while it may not have "won", it had influence and was a generally credible position. I don't even hear that voice today, and proposing something like "Hey, what if we just didn't force individual citizens to do X?" is just a recipe for getting cancelled because of how you're for or against X, because of course you must be if you think that we shouldn't be using governmental power to enforce it; that, alone, is sufficient proof. Now the only argument is what X should be.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    I'm not sure I even agree with that. Something like affirmative action has been fought against extensively - and often effectively - in the past several decades, as well as other things like voting rights laws where the government attempted to enforce an amelioration of the harms of past racism, and to reduce ongoing harm from current racism. I don't believe the motives of those people were truly "because liberty" versus much more selfish or malicious ones, but it's been not just a credible position but an effective and advancing one. And I don't recall much in the way of truly libertarian-leaning mainstream voices calling against all government policing of behavior, vs just people on different sides calling against the ones they opposed.
    - jerf 6y ago
      Well, how about there was a time when I could propose there was such a time, and wouldn't have immediately been flooded with accusations that the old times were just full of racism and everyone proposing liberty were selfish people who didn't really want liberty. I think there was a time when there was a constituency that really did want liberty. But now all HN can see if someone says they "want liberty" is that they want liberty to do wrong things that must be stopped, and there is no other conceivable reason that someone may be resisting your efforts to control them.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        > Well, how about there was a time when I could propose there was such a time, and wouldn't have immediately been flooded with accusations that the old times were just full of racism and everyone proposing liberty were selfish people who didn't really want liberty. So... when you accuse me of that, are you denying that there were racially motivated actions being taken that harmed significant populations? Because that's quite a claim! Most of my history education came from Bob Jones University "For Christian Schools" textbooks that were hardly trying to indoctrinate any sort of "white Americans are evil" mentality, but if you look at what happened, and who did what to what... it's hard to avoid. It's hard for me to square the claim that people in the past were BETTER about wanting "liberty for everyone" when I look at how they allowed their society to treat people of different races, sexual orientations, people who wanted abortions, etc... I would need more concrete counterexamples, not just generalizations of the past being claimed to be better. Were they any worse/more hypocritical/differently motivated than today? Probably not! I don't know that people change that much. But it's hard to say they were BETTER based on their actions. If there was a time when your claim that people in the olden days were better would go unchallenged, it's probably because the people being harmed in those days weren't very visible to the people you were talking to.
kodah 6y ago
I agree with this. Liberty, for the most part, is a buzzword in America and most people with major party political allegiances either don't believe in it or have a dwindling idea of what it is.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I’d recommend a quick perusal of first amendment litigation in the early 20th century, it will disabuse you of the notion that we’re living in an unusual decline in liberty. For example the old saw about “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” is from a case where a man was prosecuted criminally for protesting the WW1 draft. We live in contentious times, but at least the government isn’t literally jailing people for protected speech and having the Supreme Court affirm their behavior. Or where there’s a standing house committee dedicated to detecting “Unamerican Activities” and creating explicit blacklists for Hollywood actors and writers based on their supposed political beliefs. Or where using the post office to educate people about birth control is a crime. We as a culture have a wildly incorrect view about how free our society was in the past. There have been points in our society where it was literally a crime to be a socialist or birth control advocate; whatever our flaws, we have much more personal liberty in terms of speech and ideas than most seem to realize.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  I'd argue that there is no absolute measure of freedom, or at least, it doesn't matter relative to expectations and feelings of freedom. Expectations and feelings of freedom are widely different today than they used to be -- and we know this precisely because it's a popular thing to say. Everyone complains about cancel culture and mask mandates and vaccination passports and so-on. McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does. There's a deeply libertarian undertone to rural America and it has never gone away. The loss of freedom for socialists in the 1950s didn't matter. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and the subsequent overturn of that case didn't matter. Draft dodging didn't matter. What's going on today does.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    > Everyone complains about cancel culture and mask mandates and vaccination passports and so-on. There are also complaints about “kids these days” stretching all the way back to Plato. People can, and do, complain about things in a way that does not conform with any form of objective reality. We need a more rigorous way of discussing these things that goes beyond common complaints and memes. > McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does. I think you need to read more about the red scare before making such proclamations. 15,000 people lost their federal jobs during the red scare, and hundreds were jailed over their political beliefs. If you don’t think that would have a chilling effect, I’m not sure what to tell you.
tchalla 6y ago
The "Southern Strategy" by Lee Atwater, member of the Reagan administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#"Southern_strategy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#"Southern_strategy... > Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

by jerf 6y ago

majormajor 6y ago

> Within my lifetime, this was not the case. When was this? I can't remember such a time in my own lifetime. (Views on Communism and the Cold War being the dominant initial one that the government was pushing.)

jerf 6y ago
Perhaps I was not clear; I'm not saying that it was ever necessarily what I'd call the "gestalt" or "consensus" view. I'm not sure there was ever a time in the US where that was the case necessarily; always the local concerns have some good reason to override freedom today. But it was at least a voice at the table, and while it may not have "won", it had influence and was a generally credible position. I don't even hear that voice today, and proposing something like "Hey, what if we just didn't force individual citizens to do X?" is just a recipe for getting cancelled because of how you're for or against X, because of course you must be if you think that we shouldn't be using governmental power to enforce it; that, alone, is sufficient proof. Now the only argument is what X should be.
- majormajor 6y ago
  I'm not sure I even agree with that. Something like affirmative action has been fought against extensively - and often effectively - in the past several decades, as well as other things like voting rights laws where the government attempted to enforce an amelioration of the harms of past racism, and to reduce ongoing harm from current racism. I don't believe the motives of those people were truly "because liberty" versus much more selfish or malicious ones, but it's been not just a credible position but an effective and advancing one. And I don't recall much in the way of truly libertarian-leaning mainstream voices calling against all government policing of behavior, vs just people on different sides calling against the ones they opposed.
  - jerf 6y ago
    Well, how about there was a time when I could propose there was such a time, and wouldn't have immediately been flooded with accusations that the old times were just full of racism and everyone proposing liberty were selfish people who didn't really want liberty. I think there was a time when there was a constituency that really did want liberty. But now all HN can see if someone says they "want liberty" is that they want liberty to do wrong things that must be stopped, and there is no other conceivable reason that someone may be resisting your efforts to control them.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      > Well, how about there was a time when I could propose there was such a time, and wouldn't have immediately been flooded with accusations that the old times were just full of racism and everyone proposing liberty were selfish people who didn't really want liberty. So... when you accuse me of that, are you denying that there were racially motivated actions being taken that harmed significant populations? Because that's quite a claim! Most of my history education came from Bob Jones University "For Christian Schools" textbooks that were hardly trying to indoctrinate any sort of "white Americans are evil" mentality, but if you look at what happened, and who did what to what... it's hard to avoid. It's hard for me to square the claim that people in the past were BETTER about wanting "liberty for everyone" when I look at how they allowed their society to treat people of different races, sexual orientations, people who wanted abortions, etc... I would need more concrete counterexamples, not just generalizations of the past being claimed to be better. Were they any worse/more hypocritical/differently motivated than today? Probably not! I don't know that people change that much. But it's hard to say they were BETTER based on their actions. If there was a time when your claim that people in the olden days were better would go unchallenged, it's probably because the people being harmed in those days weren't very visible to the people you were talking to.

kodah 6y ago

I agree with this. Liberty, for the most part, is a buzzword in America and most people with major party political allegiances either don't believe in it or have a dwindling idea of what it is.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I’d recommend a quick perusal of first amendment litigation in the early 20th century, it will disabuse you of the notion that we’re living in an unusual decline in liberty. For example the old saw about “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” is from a case where a man was prosecuted criminally for protesting the WW1 draft. We live in contentious times, but at least the government isn’t literally jailing people for protected speech and having the Supreme Court affirm their behavior. Or where there’s a standing house committee dedicated to detecting “Unamerican Activities” and creating explicit blacklists for Hollywood actors and writers based on their supposed political beliefs. Or where using the post office to educate people about birth control is a crime. We as a culture have a wildly incorrect view about how free our society was in the past. There have been points in our society where it was literally a crime to be a socialist or birth control advocate; whatever our flaws, we have much more personal liberty in terms of speech and ideas than most seem to realize.

nickysielicki 6y ago
I'd argue that there is no absolute measure of freedom, or at least, it doesn't matter relative to expectations and feelings of freedom. Expectations and feelings of freedom are widely different today than they used to be -- and we know this precisely because it's a popular thing to say. Everyone complains about cancel culture and mask mandates and vaccination passports and so-on. McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does. There's a deeply libertarian undertone to rural America and it has never gone away. The loss of freedom for socialists in the 1950s didn't matter. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and the subsequent overturn of that case didn't matter. Draft dodging didn't matter. What's going on today does.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  > Everyone complains about cancel culture and mask mandates and vaccination passports and so-on. There are also complaints about “kids these days” stretching all the way back to Plato. People can, and do, complain about things in a way that does not conform with any form of objective reality. We need a more rigorous way of discussing these things that goes beyond common complaints and memes. > McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does. I think you need to read more about the red scare before making such proclamations. 15,000 people lost their federal jobs during the red scare, and hundreds were jailed over their political beliefs. If you don’t think that would have a chilling effect, I’m not sure what to tell you.

tchalla 6y ago

The "Southern Strategy" by Lee Atwater, member of the Reagan administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#"Southern_strategy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#"Southern_strategy... > Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.