4 ms·

> If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up. I hear this from people on the right, but there are plenty of right-wingers in there

> If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up. I hear this from people on the right, but there are plenty of right-wingers in there every time I visit. Go into a thread about Afghanistan, and there will be people blaming biden arguing with people blaming trump.[1] Go into a thread about Isreal and Palestine. People are arguing about which one is the true evil.[2] Go into a thread about climate change. People are openly downplaying climate change.[3] The subs I most often see suppressing speech are generally on the right, so it sounds a lot like projection when I hear people making these accusations. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pbzuye/large_explosion_at_abbey_gate_at_the_kabul_airport/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pbzuye/large_exp... [2] - https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/nimqkg/tens_of_thousands_attend_largest_propalestine/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/nimqkg/tens_of_t... [3] - https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pbkpqt/atmospheric_co2_levels_havent_been_this_high_in/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pbkpqt/atmospher...

lordloki 5y ago
I clicked on each of these and while there seem to be a few "right of woke" comments they are massively buried. It could be that most non-woke commenters have either already been banned or now avoid it. This doesn't disprove the original comment.
- falcrist 5y ago
  There are plenty of "right of woke" comments in there, but as far as proof, what would you like to see? There are plenty of folks who haven't been banned, so clearly it's not everyone. Do you have records of all of the people who have been banned so we can directly test the assertion I'm responding to?
screye 5y ago
You make my case for me right here Every example you give here is of intra-left debate within a tiny overton window. Opinions around palestine haven't yet crystallized, because WW2 wounds of the holocaust are still fresh. Similarly, Biden was the most hated of the democratic choices on the left. The far-left is still trying to squareoff between their opinion of biden vs hatred of trump vs hawkish liberal empire building vs mistreatment of afghans by Taliban. The opinions around these topics have still not concretized in the culture war. That being said, I certainly see the direction in which the winds are blowing. __________ On the surface social propaganda dynamics function in a way that is wonderfully elaborated on this post : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183001 (I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup) However, under the surface, real propaganda emphasizes the an insidious ostracization of another community member : the in-group-contrarian. (IGC) (read more here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596617) Propaganda mods will often allow the stupidest of opinions on climate change and racism to stay on. In part, because the community does their job for them by heavily downvoting these opinions. But, the IGC is far more dangerous. They start making too much sense (are usually thoughtful & polite), have a proven 'correct' identity (can't easily be dismissed with adhominems) and have some level of credibility (professional stature in the correct circles). Classic examples of IGCs would be black conservatives (Glenn Loury), Anti-woke academics (Jordan Peterson) or atheist ex-muslims (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Don't read too much into the examples, I don't endorse or even totally agree with most of these people. (The fact that I feel a need to say this, shows the soft fear I have of being called an islamophobic transphobic trump-lover by association, despite aligning with none of those groups) The IGCs are treated far far worse than any outgroup member. Classic gives are that they get called stupid, opportunist, sell-outs,self-help shills and the like. I have heard some vicious anti-semitic and racist stuff being thrown at IGCs by the left-woke establishment, to shut them down before they get too big. The fear of these people is palpable. I feel like I got insta-banned due to having the trappings of a prospective IGC. If a member is too prominent at the time of them expressing an IGC opinion, then they get de-platformed (Bari Weiss, Matt Yglesias). The smartest IGCs know to sandwich their IGC view a ton of qualification, express IGC views as a way to point guns in the direction of common ideological enemy and express it sparsely enough to not aggravate too many people. (Contrapoints, John McWhorter). The most dangerous IGCs are those that cannot be deplatformed by a minority, whose ethical compass and merit cannot be dismissed, and are practically pillars of their community ( Total Biscuit RIP, Noam Chomsky, Scott Alexander, Chapelle, Paul G to a lesser degree). This last group is a total pain in the ass to deal with for propagandists.
- falcrist 5y ago
  > You make my case for me right here You were specifically talking about bans and "hard-censorship". Now you've shifted to talking about downvotes. I'm not going to try to hit a moving target. You asserted that "If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up." I dispute this claim. Can you show me evidence supporting the claim? Once we've covered that idea, then I'd be open to talking about whether a system of downvotes and upvotes suppresses the outgroup. EDIT: If you're going to keep adding to your comment, you can't reasonably expect me to respond to it...
  - kodah 5y ago
    With regards to being an IGC, I can say you won't always get banned. In fact, usually it's the folks on the extreme end of the homogenous group that end up doing the enforcement and driving people out. Is it censorship, bullying, harassment, or is this the system working as intended? I guess that's what people have to decide. One anecdotal example I have was from a Slack I was part of years ago. These two men who identified as "allies" went around trying to address what they called "micro-aggressions". At the time they were heavily focused on "gender neutral language". To them, this term was well-defined and solidified because in their group it undoubtedly was. The problem was, the wider community had not decided what "gender neutral language" meant to it. There were outstanding questions like, "Is dude okay?", "am I required to observe this massive list of alternative pronouns?" (at the time, pronouns were much more expansive than they are today). It fell short of low-hanging fruit like not assuming everyone is a man on the internet by default. These folks were pestering and ventured into their own system of micro and macro-aggressions. At one point I remember a Norwegian man was berated and micro-corrected for using the term "ladies". A full on lecture was dumped into a thread where he was trying to tell a story of his own. My chief observation in this specific incident was that not everyone agreed that "ladies" is dated language (including women). This caused people to join camps, the camps fought, and inevitably the primarily tech oriented (and progressive oriented) cultural homogeneity won out, driving out both the people they sought to defeat like actual misogynists but an overwhelming trove of normal people who just didn't agree with specific things. The thing I noted about cultural homogeneity at the time was that it inspires people to think in terms of camps, which makes good people odd bedfellows with bad people (and I mean that on both sides of this particular issue). To this day I do not view "ally" men as trustworthy by default. In other groups I had been a part of similar things happened, but the folks seeking homogeneity attached themselves to Codes of Conduct or Guidelines that became highly prescriptive, and at times, exclusive. They'd seek to moderate one side of this debate but not the other, and with a quickness that was hard to match. They developed a lot of abstract language about systems and power, and ironically enough, used it to boost themselves into power. I've since distanced myself from any group that has overly prescriptive COC's or has a history of them. What makes that interesting is that I'm not someone who opposes gender neutral language, but I disliked how they enforced it. They weren't positive change agents, and they made the assumption everyone who spoke up was an apologist or some more serious label. I hadn't seen these problems for a while, because I really only hang out on specific IRC networks or HN as a result, both of which have fairly reasonable guidelines that prevent a wide spectrum of abuse.

lordloki 5y ago

I clicked on each of these and while there seem to be a few "right of woke" comments they are massively buried. It could be that most non-woke commenters have either already been banned or now avoid it. This doesn't disprove the original comment.

falcrist 5y ago
There are plenty of "right of woke" comments in there, but as far as proof, what would you like to see? There are plenty of folks who haven't been banned, so clearly it's not everyone. Do you have records of all of the people who have been banned so we can directly test the assertion I'm responding to?

screye 5y ago

You make my case for me right here Every example you give here is of intra-left debate within a tiny overton window. Opinions around palestine haven't yet crystallized, because WW2 wounds of the holocaust are still fresh. Similarly, Biden was the most hated of the democratic choices on the left. The far-left is still trying to squareoff between their opinion of biden vs hatred of trump vs hawkish liberal empire building vs mistreatment of afghans by Taliban. The opinions around these topics have still not concretized in the culture war. That being said, I certainly see the direction in which the winds are blowing. __________ On the surface social propaganda dynamics function in a way that is wonderfully elaborated on this post : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183001 (I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup) However, under the surface, real propaganda emphasizes the an insidious ostracization of another community member : the in-group-contrarian. (IGC) (read more here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596617) Propaganda mods will often allow the stupidest of opinions on climate change and racism to stay on. In part, because the community does their job for them by heavily downvoting these opinions. But, the IGC is far more dangerous. They start making too much sense (are usually thoughtful & polite), have a proven 'correct' identity (can't easily be dismissed with adhominems) and have some level of credibility (professional stature in the correct circles). Classic examples of IGCs would be black conservatives (Glenn Loury), Anti-woke academics (Jordan Peterson) or atheist ex-muslims (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Don't read too much into the examples, I don't endorse or even totally agree with most of these people. (The fact that I feel a need to say this, shows the soft fear I have of being called an islamophobic transphobic trump-lover by association, despite aligning with none of those groups) The IGCs are treated far far worse than any outgroup member. Classic gives are that they get called stupid, opportunist, sell-outs,self-help shills and the like. I have heard some vicious anti-semitic and racist stuff being thrown at IGCs by the left-woke establishment, to shut them down before they get too big. The fear of these people is palpable. I feel like I got insta-banned due to having the trappings of a prospective IGC. If a member is too prominent at the time of them expressing an IGC opinion, then they get de-platformed (Bari Weiss, Matt Yglesias). The smartest IGCs know to sandwich their IGC view a ton of qualification, express IGC views as a way to point guns in the direction of common ideological enemy and express it sparsely enough to not aggravate too many people. (Contrapoints, John McWhorter). The most dangerous IGCs are those that cannot be deplatformed by a minority, whose ethical compass and merit cannot be dismissed, and are practically pillars of their community ( Total Biscuit RIP, Noam Chomsky, Scott Alexander, Chapelle, Paul G to a lesser degree). This last group is a total pain in the ass to deal with for propagandists.

falcrist 5y ago
> You make my case for me right here You were specifically talking about bans and "hard-censorship". Now you've shifted to talking about downvotes. I'm not going to try to hit a moving target. You asserted that "If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up." I dispute this claim. Can you show me evidence supporting the claim? Once we've covered that idea, then I'd be open to talking about whether a system of downvotes and upvotes suppresses the outgroup. EDIT: If you're going to keep adding to your comment, you can't reasonably expect me to respond to it...
- kodah 5y ago
  With regards to being an IGC, I can say you won't always get banned. In fact, usually it's the folks on the extreme end of the homogenous group that end up doing the enforcement and driving people out. Is it censorship, bullying, harassment, or is this the system working as intended? I guess that's what people have to decide. One anecdotal example I have was from a Slack I was part of years ago. These two men who identified as "allies" went around trying to address what they called "micro-aggressions". At the time they were heavily focused on "gender neutral language". To them, this term was well-defined and solidified because in their group it undoubtedly was. The problem was, the wider community had not decided what "gender neutral language" meant to it. There were outstanding questions like, "Is dude okay?", "am I required to observe this massive list of alternative pronouns?" (at the time, pronouns were much more expansive than they are today). It fell short of low-hanging fruit like not assuming everyone is a man on the internet by default. These folks were pestering and ventured into their own system of micro and macro-aggressions. At one point I remember a Norwegian man was berated and micro-corrected for using the term "ladies". A full on lecture was dumped into a thread where he was trying to tell a story of his own. My chief observation in this specific incident was that not everyone agreed that "ladies" is dated language (including women). This caused people to join camps, the camps fought, and inevitably the primarily tech oriented (and progressive oriented) cultural homogeneity won out, driving out both the people they sought to defeat like actual misogynists but an overwhelming trove of normal people who just didn't agree with specific things. The thing I noted about cultural homogeneity at the time was that it inspires people to think in terms of camps, which makes good people odd bedfellows with bad people (and I mean that on both sides of this particular issue). To this day I do not view "ally" men as trustworthy by default. In other groups I had been a part of similar things happened, but the folks seeking homogeneity attached themselves to Codes of Conduct or Guidelines that became highly prescriptive, and at times, exclusive. They'd seek to moderate one side of this debate but not the other, and with a quickness that was hard to match. They developed a lot of abstract language about systems and power, and ironically enough, used it to boost themselves into power. I've since distanced myself from any group that has overly prescriptive COC's or has a history of them. What makes that interesting is that I'm not someone who opposes gender neutral language, but I disliked how they enforced it. They weren't positive change agents, and they made the assumption everyone who spoke up was an apologist or some more serious label. I hadn't seen these problems for a while, because I really only hang out on specific IRC networks or HN as a result, both of which have fairly reasonable guidelines that prevent a wide spectrum of abuse.