...and saying that HN is "our own" - vs. "one modest Province in our Benevolent Overlord Paul's Empire" - is a bit of an issue.
"Pro-science" is not a position, and being anti-science means being anti-humanity.
pro-science also very often veers into anti-humanity as well. we like to pride ourselves that we’re keenly aware of how many unanswered questions we have and the current limits of science and technology — yet it seems increasingly common that when we’re chasing our love for science and technology, more and more we forget how these very topics can strip humanity from a given situation or conversation.
do i think religion is the answer when society’s pro-science stance leads to anti-human situations? absofuckinlutely not. (particularly organized religions. i’d be more open to religions if people could practice it as a personal thing. but sadly the religious always seem to want to inflict their personal beliefs on others.) the answer probably lies more in the region where the science minded get a firmer understanding that the human condition requires us to understand humanity more, not solely science. understanding other humans is a subject in which many of us are kinda lacking. i truly believe they were wise to require a certain number of humanities courses in university. honestly, seeing how terribly many of us in science fields struggle with understanding other humans, we could probably use a few more in the requirements.
in an attempt to tie this rant onto the topic: i’ve maintained for years that even in the best of our current iterations, algorithms are just plain terrible when compared to human curation. billions and billions spent and years and years later, still terrible.
i’m sure some will argue but i strongly believe this is true for just about everything, from news algorithms, music, movies, literature, art, shopping etc… etc… the best recommendations are still coming from other humans, by a significant amount.
What I'm trying to say is that all spaces are "echo chambers" in that they all implicitly have their own tone and angle that all the participants agree to uphold as they join. You don't discuss politics at the dinner table after all.
I'll agree though that it's still very much encouraging of new technologies even those that will be certain to cause problems. For example, people here are far more interested in the cool things they can do using WebAssembly than they are worried about how it will be used to deliver malware and violate people's privacy.
Please consider the contradiction in this quote
From the other comment I figured I should probably point that out clearly.
Whether we agree with that position or not is a whole different beast, but it absolutely is a real and tenable position that people can and do hold.
Wait, this is worded incorrectly right? The pro-science position would be the one claiming that science is the best (or at least one good) way to learn information about the world right? I'd agree in that case that a person can be pro-science.
As for what a moderate-right platform would be, I'd actually point right here at hackernews. It allows discussion around more right-leaning topics, but draws a clear line at outright hate. There's progressives too (hi) but you'll find no shortage of right leaning people either (like OP apparently). The sheer number of libertarians here alone is enough to move the needle right of center.
That's literally every platform. There's no nazi-or-not test to take before you're allowed to use any of them. All platforms allow varying degrees of racist rhetoric ranging from dogwhistles to death threats and I'm not aware of a single platform that doesn't have racists in healthy numbers.
I think a better definition of a far-right platform would be found in its intended audience or in the percentage of racist users/content.
I sort of consider myself a libertarian who sees the need for a social safety net, regulations, strong consumer protection, education, infrastructure, emergency services, and healthcare. You know, a democrat. :D
As for not having a left/right spectrum of political views at all, I think it's somewhat inevitable in a (de facto) two party system, but it's worthwhile to acknowledge that virtually nobody is going to fit comfortably on one side or the other. People have tried for ages to come up with more nuanced multi-axis representations of where people fall within political spectrum, but even then it often just works out to carving out specific flavors of left/right.
I’m not American BTW. Just an external observer who’s just flabbergasted how much a developed country can revolve into questioning of such obvious facts in the name of “both sides.”
> In 2012, D'Souza contributed […] Two years later, D'Souza pleaded guilty in federal court to one felony charge […] He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house near his home in San Diego, five years' probation, and a $30,000 fine.[29][30] In 2018, D'Souza was issued a pardon by President Donald Trump.[31]
Some simple math reveals the pardon came long after his “incarceration”, and the sentence including probation would have been fully served by now (2012 + 2 + 5 < 2022).
Where are you getting your information?
The report concludes that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"
And since you brought up prosecutors, let me ask the obvious question: why have none of the investigations against Trump resulted in charges?
Pot/kettle/black
https://www.acslaw.org/projects/the-presidential-investigati...
- Special Counsel Mueller declined to exonerate President Trump and instead detailed multiple episodes in which he engaged in obstructive conduct
- The investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and established that the Trump Campaign “showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton”
- Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the U.S. election system in 2016
- The Special Counsel investigation uncovered extensive criminal activity
Yes, obstructive conduct. Not collusion with the Russians.
The very fact that Mueller detailed episodes of obstructive conduct and not episodes of collusion reveals how little evidence there is to support allegations of collusion.
And as for the obstruction, remember that an FBI lawyer pled guilty to doctoring an email that was submitted as part of a FISA application used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.[1] And Igor Danchenko, the primary researcher of the infamous Steele Dossier, is awaiting trial for lying to the FBI about the dossier's sources.
So is it really a crime to "obstruct" an investigation that is based on lies? Such an investigation should be shut down.
1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-fbi-lawyer-kevin-clinesm...
I mean the knee jerk response for me is Facebook, though I’d say it’s solidly right overall and not moderate-right.
Gab is certainly "far right", but that doesn't mean those views are uncommon. Centrist viewpoints have shrunk, pulling what was previously considered "far" viewpoints into the mainstream. I think it's undeniable that a website where many (most?) of the userbase would advocate against the peaceful transition of power in the US should be labelled "far right".
I don’t think anyone said those views were uncommon, just that they were far right.
If we say that Gab isn't far-right, it's kind of like saying Grindr isn't just for gay men. That may technically be true, but in practice it's not.
Also, judging Gab by its ownership, if you look at the Wikipedia page for Gab, and go to the Antisemitism section, Gab has made multiple antisemitic statements officially. Straight from the company. The owners of the site are far-right.
Gab only exists because far-right people get banned on other platforms for breaking hate speech rules.
The far-left as a group barely exists compared to the size of the far-right. Far-left would be advocating for violence to dismantle the neoliberal system, these would be your anarchist-types.
In real life, I've never met anyone on the "far-left" when you describe it this way, while I've met plenty of openly racist and LGBT-phobic Republicans who are pro-violence: the kind of people who want to, I dunno, be a part of a coup and enter the Capitol building? The kind of people who cheer when Donald Trump tells police to rough up the suspects a little more.
What Republicans call "far-left" is just progressive center-left people nonviolently advocating for equality. They don't get banned from the generally non-political platforms because their speech isn't hateful and it isn't violent. Facebook/Twitter/TikTok happily take their money and call it a day, they don't care about politics beyond the money those politics bring in.
Platforms like Parler are much more blatant than Gab about banning liberals who join simply for existing. I guess you could say that Gab stays true to its policy against censorship, but that policy is there to benefit the far-right over anybody else, and I think that's an important detail.
And, by the way, if you head over to Gab’s homepage it’s all right-wing political stuff. None of the suggested homepage topics are non-political. It isn’t teenagers dancing or funny skits or cat videos like TikTok. I think that’s evidence showing that Gab isn’t just some impartial algorithm. It’s curated.
In the US, the right wing is often bound up with co-opting Jews via the term "Judeo-Christian" and supporting Israel, even it its worst abuses of the Palestinians. They often call-out left-wing antisemitism, which often tries to take the form of "anti-Zionism" (but whose information is often traced to antisemitic channels).
So antisemitism doesn't by itself demonstrate far-right leanings -- even though the far right is also full of literal Nazis and those who call them "very fine people". But Gab is certainly happy to play host to those, too.
First, I 100% agree with you that what the mainstream right categorizes as the "far left" is really anyone "center left" that they disagree with (or even slightly right, as many mainstream neoliberal Democrats fall on the "political compass" (though take that with a grain of salt)).
However, there are absolutely folks on the far left advocating for violence as a means to their goals. I see more of them online, obviously, than in real life (though I do know folks who do black bloc, destroy property, etc.), but it's really hard to know to what extent that's an artifact of their tactical differences with the far right. Many on the far left (including anarchists, out-and-out communists or AnComs, and even some DSA types) embrace anonymity, decentralization, and _not_ documenting their efforts as core tenets of achieving their goals.
On the other hand, the far right's strategy is to beat their chest and embrace highly visible patriotic pride, which they then use to create associations between say, the flag, and their more extreme political beliefs. Then, they dog whistle and gaslight the other side about the full extent of their own and their opposition's goals as they move the goalposts towards the right to distort the mainstream view of the center.
Theoretical unknown numbers aside, I believe the latter tactical posture has been significantly more successful in the far right achieving their goals in the political mainstream. I also believe the far left's tactics have hurt them significantly in being accepted by the mainstream (and in talking to many of them privately, they often see this as a point of pride, that they're unwilling to compromise with the "normie" Democrats who e.g. sold them out throwing Bernie under the bus during Clinton's ascent to nomination). E.g. even as a small minority of the overwhelmingly peaceful BLM protests in 2020, just a few guys in black bloc throwing molotovs enabled the mainstream and far right to immediately write BLM off as a violent, communist, antifa movement that was a threat to democracy, capitalism, and the American way of life. So why throw them at all? What good did that do? (And could it have ever been enough to offset the negative PR?)
Even the slogan that many on the mainstream left embraced--defund the police--was a terrible messaging position that AFAICT almost always required immediate clarification of why that didn't mean "we want to abolish the police, all criminal statutes, and let society run wild doing whatever they want". I think it would've been a lot harder for the right to attack them if they'd have gone with something like "fund community outreach [for POC and mental health]". And then they could have even found their $$$ in the police budget later (a trick Republicans use all the time). Hell, they might have even found alignment with Republicans in the wake of mass shootings to actually address mental health on a national scale (something I'd argue is critical to our long-term well being as a country, regardless of your stance on their relation to mass shootings).
ANYWAY, I got a bit off the rails there, but far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others. (I'd also argue that these transgressions are largely tolerated on those platforms in a way that the far-right is not, leading to an increase in demand for an increasingly fractured of ecosystem of "alternative" platforms where extreme ideas evolve and grow, rather than being diminished and ridiculed in the light. But that's a debate for another time.)
The site received extensive public scrutiny following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018. The perpetrator of the attack, Robert Gregory Bowers, had a history of making extreme, antisemitic postings on the platform, as well as messages indicating an immediate intent to cause harm before the shooting.
Is there such thing as a moderate-right social media platform? Does far-right mean "not supported by a majority of right-leaning people", or does it mean "extreme from the perspective of an average left-leaning person"? I'm not going to either defend Gab or put it down, but even if you deconstruct your statement, it's the product of an information bubble. And it can have different meanings depending on what type of information bubble you live in.