I know it's common to look at the most unhinged people on Twitter and say all leftists are like that, but I really do think most left leaning people would say that it isn't a good outcome for it to be biased in this way.
As a liberal my views haven't changed much over the past decade but the ground has definitely fallen away from me.
I used to be liberal, but then they changed what liberal was, now what I am isn't liberal and what is liberal seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you...
- Abe Simpson
Well yes, because liberalism is about "progress" while conservatism is about "traditional values". Liberalism is constantly evolving while conservatism is not. It is more extreme to fight for trans rights than it is to fight for gay rights than it is to fight for women's rights. If you magically transported a liberal from a decade ago to today, they will inherently be more conservative. Obama didn't support gay marriage until 2012. Very few liberal politicians today would be against gay marriage. Your views not changing means your views are becoming more conservative because they are falling behind the "progress" that liberals are always pushing towards.
And also it is worth noting that according to Pew Congressional "Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left"[1]
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polariz...
Or you'll change your opinion. Either way. Situational morality is actually a sign of progress.
What makes you say this?
The worst i can think of is wanting more equal rights for religious groups rather than special treatment of the primary group (in the USA) - which is seen as an attack by much of the right. Likewise i am concerned by the strong emphasis of rural over urban with respect to voting power and representation. Though i have no easy answer here, so i'm pretty unopinionated - just concerned.
I'd be really curious where i and the folks i know and discuss with marginalize other groups; as i want to correct that, if we do. Obviously no one here can answer that with specificity to my beliefs but.. my curiosity exists nonetheless heh.
With my own lack of doctrine classification i am unsure how to view them. So i tend not to take a stance on it, just like i don't with Christianity.
I'm not sure what support you think the left commonly believes in for Islam. Everyone i know is not a fan of most religions, Christianity included. I view self rights far more important, and many religions or denominations directly challenge that.
Do you believe most leftists are campaigning for Islamic support? This has not been my experience.
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/islamist-students...
Christianity: notoriously tolerant of minorities, supportive of the equality of women, and gay friendly.
There was a point in time where the Islamic world was a world leader in math, science, and technology. Of course, like with anything, time and money corrupts all things. Oil especially taints everything it touches.
I think you are conflating the left's support for minority groups who are demonized and targeted by society for support of the tenets of their respective religions. After 9/11, Muslims were a significant target of hatred and violence. The left, which again is not a monolithic entity, doesn't support islam anymore than it supports judaism or any other religion, it supports people who happen to follow that religion. It's based around humanist tendencies, which the right often doesn't understand. You can hate aspects of a religion while also being against any dehumanization and hatred against people who follow said religion.
Like the other 2 major Abrahamic religions, Islam has some good and some bad tenets. At least in the US, there are some extremely conservative muslims and some - perhaps shockingly - liberal muslims. Being that they are such a small percentage of the US population, there is a lot of misunderstanding and stereotyping of people who follow Islam.
I quite agree with this statement in the context of what i believe. Which is to say i tend to dislike religions and personally i dislike Islam more than most (based on what i observe), but above all i don't want to target people, Muslim or otherwise, based on their religion.
I think this also supports a sister comment i made where i describe being unsure what my stance is relative to Islam. Observationally it doesn't seem "good" to me, but its people are also target of a lot of hate in this country (USA). It makes it difficult to discuss objective qualities of a religion without it bleeding into racism or bigotry against those who practice said religion.
I'm not trying to give an opinion, just stating what I see as a person who doesn't interact with the online political sphere at all.
[1] https://www.frc.org/antisemitism [2] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/black-lives-matters-jewish-p...
Do you honestly believe most left leaning individuals have something against the Jews?
Antisemitism is more common among left wingers than right wingers, so yes. Or alternatively you could say "do you honestly believe most right leaving individuals have something against X" for so many topics, X could be black people etc. Right wingers are more likely to be against those things, but it isn't like all of them are evil, similarly there is more Jew hate among left wingers, but it isn't like most of them hate Jews either.
Most Jew hate today has to do with Israel, right wing is mostly pro Istrael, so most Jew hate comes from the left.
I appreciate the discussion nonetheless. I'll definitely be curious to talk to people i know (when politics comes up) to see their thoughts on Jews and Islam (as a different commenter pointed out). I suspect that no one i know will be anti-Jew or radically pro-Islam.
Appreciate the points of discussion/anecdotes. I can't say i agree with them, but they were certainly a surprise. Far from what i expected.
* https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...
Pretty much all "I'm only against Israel's policies" is shy Antisemitism. You can easily test this by asking them about other countries that have similar (or much harsher) policies as Israel and see whether the "no no, it's not about being Jewish, not at all" person is similarly upset about those and demands Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. 99% aren't and it really is only about the Jews the Antizionism is just a cloak over the Antisemitism because the pure stuff doesn't fly in polite society, but if you pretend that it's not about the Jews then you can go at it.
To be fair i know little on the subject, and don't claim to. The only reason i said "i can understand .." is that i know it's a hot-button topic. Israel is often portrayed in the west as being overly militaristic towards neighboring areas. The United States itself does similar, depending on who you ask.
I judge both quite harshly on this front. I also know very little about world politics. Both in ignorance and on purpose, heh.
Test them by pointing out behavior that they find abhorrent when done by Israel, and see whether they react similarly (by demanding action against them, denying them a right to nationhood etc). If they do: good. If they don't: it's about the Jews, not about the behavior. And from my experience, they almost always don't, and you really need to press them on the issue until they'll halfheartedly agree that yeah, that is also not good what the non-jewish country does. Case in point: the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" tried to sail from Turkey to Gaza to protest Israel. It's like starting a Journey in the Third Reich towards Stalin's Russia to protest the inhumanity of Finnish policies.
I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of "Driving While Black". Israel is "Being A Country While Jewish". Some cops will pull over Black people all day long and claim that the color of their skin has nothing to do with it, it's just about how they drive. But you'll see them letting white drivers do all kinds of stunts and will quickly understand what the deciding factor is. You can do the same with people's opinions on Israel.
I suspect that's true for most people.
And yes, you hear much about Israel, and less about other barbaric conflicts, but how does this prove antisemitism?
Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.
Personally, it seems absurd in the extreme to think the lefts ideas concerning Israel have anything to do with antisemitism. Anecdotally, I have never encountered it, and my Jewish friends find this idea absurd as well.
Every BDS-supporter is aware of all the other conflicts, they just don't care because no Jews involved. Hell, they'll happily ally with Erdogan and support his regime.
> Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.
Of course, and pulling over Black drivers is perfectly reasonable. But if you concentrate only on Black drivers, it's not their driving that you have a problem with, that's just the excuse you make.
> While antisemitism in the U.S. is often written about through a “both sides” lens, our evidence — the first of its kind in testing hypotheses through experiments on a large repre- sentative sample — suggests the problem of antisemitism is much more serious on the right than the left. This evidence confirms that the antisemitism that has been on prominent display in white nationalist protests is not merely confined to a tiny group of extremists; antisemitic attitudes appear quite common among young conservatives, and much more so than among older conservatives or among liberals of any age.
* https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...
So like how Trump said there were fine people among that crowd, the left in Europe says there are fine people among the crowds that goes and harasses and murders Jews. You shouldn't judge individuals for being from a group, but that isn't what is happening here, they are trying to downplay the acts of individuals just because they belong to a specific group.
This covers many countries, and does have multiple years in many of them, but it doesn't distinguish by political views. Just gender, age, and religious affiliation by country.
You know who says that? The same US intelligence agencies that conspired to censor twitter and who said the hunter biden laptop wasn't real. Who actually supports Israel? Consistently the US right and the Republicans.
The Canadian government leaned heavily into this fabrication early in 2022 for the trucker protest. They called it white-supremacist (despite videos of the crowd dancing to Banghra with visibly Sikh truckers - one of the largest minorities in Canadian shipping) and accused the event of being anti semitic because one of the organizers blogged something silly about Jews in banking years before. During this time a leftist government consultant tweeted “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier (sic) Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.” and it was ignored until the prime minister was finally forced to acknowledge it.
The are thousands of calls on Twitter for the jews the be pushed into the sea and none of them are from conservatives.
"Far right" has become a term for things the left says but doesn't want to own.
Academics looking at data: https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...
> it was ignored until the prime minister was finally forced to acknowledge it.
Appropriate responses should happen the moment these things come to light.
Yes, I remember that left wing protest where people chanted "Jews will not replace us". Remind me, which president was it that said there were "good people" in that crowd?
His own words: "you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too."
There are many good reasons to dislike Trump but you weaken them by association when you repeat the false accusations and misrepresentations.
"Once you let a nazi in your bar, it becomes a nazi bar."
And does that apply equally to Antifa?
Are you really defending that based on who does it?
Because their motivation is to remove any “undesirable” from their sight, and their definition of “undesirable” is wide and expanding and imminent, at least in the US [0]
In contrast, there has been one single murder in the past 26 years, where a far left activist was charged in the US, although subsequently shot and killed by the police [1].
So, I’m evaluating motivation here.
There’s no such thing as “both sides are bad”. Centrism is a lazy and uninformed view of the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...
No, there's no such thing as "your side is also bad so my side therefore is not".
But both sides can easily be wrong. You don't need to draw false equivalences to condemn two sets of people at once.
So if your image of left is "twitter left" maybe reconsider recalibrating it to "half of hn."
Maybe on economics (I'd say closer to 2/3 left), but on social issues it's overwhelmingly left. What percentage are anti-abortion, for example?
The main split seems to be between old-style liberals who support free speech as a fundamental principle and progressives who believe that speech should often be restricted in order to protect marginalized groups.
Looking at HN, I see a bigger divide on topics such as Cloudflare discontinuing services for Kiwi Farms. I tend to see vigorous discussion that seems civil and then a handful of comments that are "strong" in tone. I really don't see anything as overwhelmingly left in general.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139040227/abortion-midterm-e...
We're really going to pretend the left hasn't been demonizing certain groups and sanctifying others based on inborn traits? Hint: "X privilege" Economic and worker's rights considerations traditionally considered 'left' have, in practice, taken a back-seat.
I don't personally think "punching up is ok" is a valid viewpoint. But even if I did, I don't think white people are "up" or men are "up" in the way that the proponents of punching up consider rich people, or oppressors to be. Skin color isn't oppression. Gender isn't oppression. Oppression is oppression.
Economically, white people and men are clearly advantaged, and money is probably the purest form of power there is.
We can, but present day leftism is doing pretty much the opposite. You can't have race quotas without pushing race. Talking about "white priviledge" is enshrining the idea that your race defines who you are.
I agree we could decide to drop the idea of race. It would be really nice. Humans are always forming out-group hatreds, but it would be very nice if we could not consider another race the out-group. I don't think it's just as simple as just deciding to do away with the idea of race, any more than we could just decide to do away with the idea of money or like, the legitimacy of the court system. Sure, it's a social fiction, but it's self-reinforcing, which means it's hard to coordinate to get rid of.
Like is you could give an example of rhetoric that is suppressed because it’s “right wing”, that would be helpful.
It's not speech about fiscal conservative policies or smaller government that get's censored. It's people telling their viewers to harass Sandyhook parents, or participate in a violent insurrection, or something similar that gets censored.
Playing the victim card without acknowledging TOS violations is intentionally misleading.
When cancel culture was running amok, people were getting fired/reprimanded/harassed for advocating nonviolent protests over riots, for using Chinese words that sound vaguely like an English racial slur, for interviewing Black Americans whose opinions differ slightly from the official narrative about what a Black American ought to think, for throwing a geisha-themed party for your young daughter, for wearing a prom dress inspired by a traditional Chinese aesthetic, etc. None of these are remotely right-wing offenses.
This is the whole problem--the left harms people whose actions/opinions are well within the Overton Window and upon criticism, they retreat to some variation of "we're just opposing objectively horrible people!". This whole game hurts left-wing credibility and it easier for far-right viewpoints to enter the mainstream (is so-and-so an actual Nazi or are they just failing to completely toe the left-wing party line?). It's also just shitty behavior that makes people angry and pushes them rightward, and it does nothing to help left-wing causes.
The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology, however, so not sure why you're bringing it up. If your expectation is that 50% of backlash would be left leaning and 50% would be right leaning, I don't think that's reasonable, but if you think the backlash is because someone is conservative generally, you'd be mistaken.
There are a great many conservatives who can make their ideological arguments comfortably without being offensive. Conservative ideology isn't inherently offensive, but specific human beings say specific things that are reprehensible and when they do, it's called out.
And also when people say not reprehensible things.
> The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology, however, so not sure why you're bringing it up.
Then it's strange that it's been intimately connected with looming war against Russia and China, so many intelligence agencies have so many employees that spend 100% of their time on it, and so many congresspeople are making direct requests for censorship on political lines.
Sure, but we aren't talking about reprehensible things, we're talking about "advocating against political violence" and cultural appreciation.
> The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology, however, so not sure why you're bringing it up
Because it's clearly about punishing deviation from a partisan line.
> If your expectation is that 50% of backlash would be left leaning and 50% would be right leaning, I don't think that's reasonable, but if you think the backlash is because someone is conservative generally, you'd be mistaken.
That's not my expectation, my expectation is that we don't persecute people for moderate beliefs (and no, caricaturing those beliefs to make them sound extreme doesn't count), nor do we tolerate said behavior.
> There are a great many conservatives who can make their ideological arguments comfortably without being offensive. Conservative ideology isn't inherently offensive, but specific human beings say specific things that are reprehensible and when they do, it's called out.
As previously discussed, a lot of people are "calling out" others for utterly innocuous transgressions. For example, my state subreddit is presently arguing that families who homeschool their kids are closet Nazis (that's the very popular opinion on that particular subreddit).
I'm thinking of Kanye, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, etc. These people expressed reprehensible viewpoints and were subsequently removed from various platforms as a result. That's not politics; what they said was reprehensible regardless of political ideology. You can find people who expressed similar political thoughts without the hate, but the people I named can't figure out how to do that and therefore have been removed (to some degree or another) from the communal discourse.
Prom dress controversy: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kassycho/keziah-daum-pr...
Geisha party: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mom-called-apos-racist-apos-...
Professor suspended for using a Chinese word: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...
Asian fusion restaurant incident: https://www.dailywire.com/news/asian-restaurant-in-nyc-force...
These links are just the first things that came up on Google to help you find what you’re looking for. I’m not claiming these links are the best sources.
Man fired for cracking knuckles: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...
Besides, what do any of these have to do with conservative views being suppressed?
Sorry you feel the need to name-call here, but hope you have a better time elsewhere.
Even James confirmed as much, and this is more to my point of how playing the victim card without acknowledging agreement violations is intentionally misleading. And before someone asks, "DiD u rEaD tHe MeMo?" Yes. Yes I did, it's right there:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
> you don't see women in engineering and leadership positions is due to them being biologically incapable.
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
And having read the full document (or even just the bits I quoted in my comment above), you surely also know that he was very explicitly not imputing population-level averages onto individuals. Damore's critics have been very openly lying about the contents of the document; there's no charitable way to interpret their claims.
To be quite clear, I don't think Damore is a hero (his politics are more conservative than mine and I don't think he handled the fallout particularly well), but he was clearly fired for claims he very explicitly didn't make[^1], and his critics are just doubling-down on what can't be described as anything other than trivially-verifiable lies.
[^1]: Even Google's legal team knew that they couldn't get him on those bases and instead they argued that criticizing Google's hiring practices implied that some of his coworkers weren't the best candidates for the job thus creating a hostile workplace. Of course, criticizing Google's hiring practices was absolutely pedestrian at Google at the time, although the argument was that Google's hiring practices were biased toward whites, men, etc. This is pretty obviously just pretense to fire him for ideological transgressions.
Again, Damore reaped the consequences of his own actions by violating a contract he agreed to. This is intentionally misleading to represent him as a martyr for right-wingers.
Unless, of course, you think the conservative agenda includes promoting that women are biologically incapable of holding teach and leadership positions.
Here it is (again):
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
An average man is incapable of being in tech. An average woman is incapable of being in tech.
There are men and women at the tail who are capable of being in tech.
Because of the difference in averages, there are fewer women than men who are capable and want to be in tech.
---
Collapsing all that to "women [on average] are biologically incapable of being in tech" is disingenuous. Using words like "incapable" implies binariness, ignoring the continuous nature of distributions.
But then I doubt you care, especially since your account does nothing but astroturf Damore on HN.
Occasionally I learn things in the latter discussions.
It looks more like an algorithmic hiccup that was corrected than a ban for violating TOS. Not the same at all.
So yes, he was banned for violating the TOS.
Things that are "Nazi" or "white supremacist" ideas and ideologies get called out, and those ideas and ideology exist on the right in ways they don't on the left, but those ideas aren't bad because they're conservative, they're bad because they're hateful and discriminatory.
Anyone espousing Nazi ideology is a huge problem, regardless of their political leanings.
I've heard them all over for many years (including on this forum for a good while a few years ago), but I agree they aren't "honest" (and the dishonesty is precisely the problem).
> Things that are "Nazi" or "white supremacist" ideas and ideologies get called out, and those ideas and ideology exist on the right in ways they don't on the left, but those ideas aren't bad because they're conservative, they're bad because they're hateful and discriminatory.
I agree. But the problem is that moderate ideas are being caricatured and labeled as "Nazi" or "white supremacist" so that they enjoy the same social censure that we would give to bonafide hateful ideas.
> Anyone espousing Nazi ideology is a huge problem, regardless of their political leanings.
Yes, but we're not talking about "espousing Nazi ideology", we're talking about people who are espousing moderate ideas that get treated like they're hateful. Consider for example James Damore's "Google Memo" and how it was framed as a hateful, "anti-diversity screed" by virtually the entirety of the media despite that the full text was readily available. His arguments were squarely liberal in nature even if he made some factual errors. Consider Lee Fang or David Shor (both committed progressives).
And Lee Fang and David Shor are fine? I literally cannot find either controversy you're referencing on the front page of Google or Google News.
[0] Not sure I'm allowed to post this, but it's easily discoverable.
Yeah, this is flat out wrong. The "memo" (it wasn't a memo, but the media's gonna media) is publicly available and pretty short so we can trivially verify claims that it was "hateful" and anti-diversity. Notably, Damore's position on diversity via the document:
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.
And his position on hate:
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. ... Reducing people to their group identity is bad and assuming the average is representative ignores this overlap. (this is bad and I don't endorse that)
> According to his LinkedIn[0], he's been working at an unnamed startup for the past 4 years, so it's not like he was "cancelled" in any real sense.
I don't know anyone who defines "cancelled" as "permanently unemployable", but in any case I hope we can agree that getting someone fired for minor ideological differences is reprehensible. Maybe you would argue that these differences are very significant, but I don't see anything in the document that would fall outside of the American Overton Window (it's probably more moderate than many of his critics professed viewpoints on diversity, which is pretty obviously the actual reason he provoked such a reaction).
> And Lee Fang and David Shor are fine? I literally cannot find either controversy you're referencing on the front page of Google or Google News.
Lee Fang was harassed by colleagues and pressured to resign because he quoted MLK in support for non-violent protest and for Tweeting an interview with a black man who expressed concern about crime in his community.
David Shor is a data analyst who was fired for citing research on the efficacy of non-violent protest. He was fired because people on Twitter were contacting his company's management on Twitter and demanding his termination.
Of course, if your perspective is that firing someone for these kinds of minor ideological offenses is totally fine (so long as they're able to get another job?), then we're probably going to have to agree to disagree. That said, I doubt very much that the people celebrating or defending these terminations would be so cheerful when people on their side of the spectrum are terminated (and for whatever it's worth, I'm a left of center independent).
Regardless of team, if someone says or does something reprehensible, it ought to be condemned. That’s what these people did, and seems like they’ve moved on from there. Their lives go on, but you obsess over one chapter of their lives.
Just seems overblown for its own sake.
Says you. I say differently.
I’m curious about why you find Fang, Shor, etc reprehensible though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Fang#:~:text=In%20June%202...
> In June 2020, Fang was accused of racism by Akela Lacy, a colleague at The Intercept. This occurred after Fang shared a Martin Luther King Jr. quote about remaining non-violent and tweeted out an interview in which a black man at a George Floyd protest expressed concern about black-on-black crime. Fang's tweets set off a "firestorm" on Twitter and he issued a lengthy apology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shor#:~:text=On%20May%20....
> On May 28, 2020, Shor tweeted a summary of an academic study by Omar Wasow, a black political scientist at Princeton University, that argued riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination likely tipped the 1968 presidential election in Richard Nixon's favor.[19] Some critics argued that Shor's tweet, which was posted during the height of the George Floyd protests, could be interpreted as criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.[20] Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine that "At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety."[21] Shor apologized for the tweet on May 29, and he was fired from Civis Analytics a few days later.
Here's the Tweet that Shor's colleagues felt threatened their safety:
> Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests increase Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. http://omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Voting.pdf
These events were also covered by other media outlets. Like the Wikipedia links above, you can easily find these via Google or any other popular Internet search engine.
Kind of odd you equate racist statements with conservative statements. Why would that be?
I'm sorry again you seem confused, and again I hope you find clarity elsewhere, because this seems to have bothered you somewhat.
This article is useful as it places them in a relatively neutral investigative context.
It is obviously right that racist, sexist, etc bias is pointed out, but that case is not at all helped by complacency in response to political bias towards liberal mores when also clearly present.
What are you talking about?? Reread the article:
OpenAI content moderation system is more permissive of hateful comments being made about conservatives than the same comments being made about liberals.
But let's say what you're claiming is true for a moment. Political ideology shouldn't have been included with race, gender, and religion anyway; it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate against someone based on their political affiliation, as it's 100% a choice, where as disability, race, gender, and religion are not.
Whether you or I approve of or align with that bias is irrelevant.
This is an argument on the merits of specific biases, not an argument that all biases are bad; no person or group operates with the intention of removing all bias, even if they claim to want that.
That's why we have democratic systems, so the mass of those opinions, informed by those personal biases override (in theory, if not always in practice) the opinions of a select few.
That is also why it is important to flush out as much as possible the undemocratic representation of ideological bias (left, right, whatever) in a tool as powerful as ChatGPT, when it has been clearly shown to be present.
But, being against illegal immigration is currently considered "right wing", and in a lot of contexts will get you fired, vilified, and perhaps beaten.
There's your example.
(I'm a child of immigrants, and don't particularly have an opinion of how much immigration is good. I do, though, believe this amount should be determined by legislative process and then tightly enforced.)
Being against legal immigration and implementing policies to make it more difficult to become legal (as the right has done) has lead to the enslavement of immigrant women and other sex trafficking. Being against sane and fair immigration policies is what people react to.
Everyone is against illegal immigration and child sex trafficking, but vary vastly on the solutions.
A dirty secret of many Republicans is that they're pretty okay with illegal immigration as it's been in the 80s and 90s. Pseudo slave labor, deport as needed, etc. Needless to say, this seems unethical (even if the immigrants in question might be okay with it).
We have no better solution than to let our legislature fight this out. But, whatever laws they come up with need to be followed and strictly enforced. Failure to do so has led to abject misery, and it will only get worse.
You might not agree with the law, but the alternative is leading to far worse suffering. Ironically, the fentanyl crisis will probably turn the tide, rather than pedestrian ethical concerns.
(I'm quite old, so don't really have a dog in this fight, aside from a general well wish for the young.)
As a percentage of the total population, now is the highest level of immigration the US has ever experienced going back to the founding of the country.
The previous maximum was prior to the 1924 immigration act which effectively banned the practice for 40 years.
The most famous anti-fascists were and are communists, which are, arguably, responsible for more deaths than the nazis.
There absolutely is a horseshoe phenomenon here.
Regarding communists and fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fascism
It's like saying the nazis were socialist because they have "socialist" in the name.
Don't get me wrong, wikipedia has value; it's just not a trustworthy source for certain topics. At the very least you should take a peek at the "history" tab to see alternative viewpoints.
I only ever hear it from what seem to be sincere liberals/progressives, and often in the context of dismissing claims of liberal bias. In fact, that seems to be exactly how it was used in this very comment chain.
Hmm, the joke doesn’t work as well reversed.
> The most famous anti-fascists were and are communists
You are equating Anti-fascists to communists, which is ... a position.
The most famous anti-fascists are the democrats. Not the American Democrat party - anyone who believes in the ideals of democracy, personal freedom, and equality.
They might be the most numerous ones, but the anti-fascism has pretty much always been claimed by the communists, they even built a famous anti-fascist protection wall to stop the fascists from sabotaging their economy. Very few democrats felt the need to talk about themselves as anti-fascists, that's a far-left thing. Democratically minded people act anti-fascist but don't speak of it. Communists speak of anti-fascism while they torture political opponents to death.
Democracies usually don't call themselves The Democratic Republic Of X. Communist dictatorships do that. Democracies don't build a border wall and call it an anti-fascist protection-wall, communist dictatorships do that.
When someone loudly and repeatedly exclaims how holy and pure they are, my alarms are going off. Yours aren't?
Even if I did: there has never been an “anti-fascist republic of whatever”.
Like all sane people I oppose fascism, but I don't put "anti-fascist" in my Twitter bio, wear antifa t-shirts, or run around loudly telling everybody about how much I hate fascists, because why should I need to? Of course I'm an anti-fascist, who the hell isn't? It feels as unnecessary as having to tell people that I'm "anti-genocide" or "anti-pedophilia".
It's also true that communist regimes have always used "anti-fascism" as an excuse for their atrocities, just like fascist regimes have used "anti-communism" to justify their atrocities. The original Antifa was an offshoot of the German Communist Party, and (as GP pointed out) the Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". That doesn't mean that all anti-fascists are communists, but history is what it is.
Don't take any of this as my denying that there are still fascistic forces in our world that should be opposed. If "anti-fascism" is an important part of your identity and you feel the need to tell the world about it, good for you, I'm not going to stop you, but personally I don't see the point.
I dunno, we make quite a few WWII movies about heroic Americans storming Normandy's beaches and whatnot.
Because most people find being challenged very tiresome and uncomfortable. People who are high in openness actually enjoy being challenged, but they are a minority (and it's definitely a spectrum).
I don't know why anti-authoritarian lefties today are so eager to embrace this legacy, or at least its symbolism.
In many well meaning liberals heart, there is a strongly held but rarely publicly discussed belief that they alone belong to the well-meaning, high IQ class. Any other worldview or ideological flavor is always understood by this type as simply incorrect, perhaps caused by failures in morals or intellect. Talk about a buzzkill.
Drug use (including alcohol) is probably the most common way for people to seriously and irreperably destroy their lives.
A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if it can prevent this level of harm.
I actually agree with that. But I don't see the logical progression from that to locking people in cages and forcing them to buy from the least trustworthy people on earth as the solution. During Prohibition in the US did lives stop getting destroyed by alcohol?
I see a lot of lives seriously and irreperably destroyed by criminal records and long prison sentences that otherwise could have been productive.
> A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if it can prevent this level of harm.
Would you advocate for government banning processed sugar? Sugar behaves like a drug in most ways, including addictiveness (psychological and physiological), euphoria, etc. Untold levels of harm are caused by people to their own bodies and the healthcare system at large by over indulging in sugar and products containing such. Diabetes is a true living hell that never stops one it's started.
Following that logic, it seems like the government should jail people for sugar use, but that obviously seems absurd (reductio ad absurdum).
I do not want to defend Prohibition, but AFAIK it has a persistent effect on alcohol consumption patterns in USA by lowering per-capita consumption of hard spirits (that was significantly higher before).
But when you see the effect of these libertarian policies in American cities the results speak for themselves. Harm reduction and lax enforcement have really destroyed some communities, and this was simply not as large a problem in the 50s or 60s.
There's really no better poster child for this phenomenon than San Francisco. It was the economic center of the technology boom and unlike New York or London of centuries past, completely failed to become a "center of the world" city despite having the “center of the world” economy. By most accounts, it actually functions less well than it did before the internet was invented.
No doubt there would be some damage from libertarian drug policies, but it would look a lot more like alcohol does, which IMHO would be less damaging to society and people than prohibition and heavy handed legal punishments is. People do need help with alochol issues sometimes, and it does sometimes destroy lives/families, but we don't make it orders of magnitude worse by treating them like criminals. (although we did try it in the US a hundred years ago and it didn't go well like we thought it would).
I think there is strong empirical evidence that drug liberalization sounds good but has failed where tried. If an American city can turn it around (as SF had a great chance to do) I'll change teams and stop talking about the issue.
Now imagine the inverse. We find somewhere a thriving city with "draconian" drug policies. Would you reconsider your position?
^ That's bait, we all know Singapore exists…
I myself wonder how many of the liberal flag bearers would change their "views" without protest if they saw another ideology becoming dominant. We've seen this happen with gender blank-slatism. It has been fully adopted by most western institutions by osmosis, and the priorities of a 60's or 70's liberal were put in the back seat without objection.
The article isn't even about ChatGPT, it's about the moderation endpoint that OpenAI provides.
You're moving the goalposts. The LLM doing moderation is trained on human responses to Internet posts—literally human censorship training an LLM to introduce bias at scale.
It's the definition of a belief. Beliefs are structural components of cognition. But also they are not the same thing as reality.
People should be educated about this concept. Without the education, it is impossible for people to tell the difference between a deeply held belief and reality.
When you are in the minority, your beliefs are challenged and you get comfortable defending them and getting along with those who don't hold them. The same cannot be said of our liberal order. Some genuine self reflection on the part of our current liberal order is badly needed.
>In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?
>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.* When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.
-"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt p. 334
There's a whole TED talk about it (same author as the above) that goes into the differences in morality: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
I'd like to see the end of racial politics, but there are too many con artists mostly (but not entirely) associated with D party that gets votes and money by inflaming people across racial lines.
That's a serious claim. Do you have anything to back it up?
Amazon's scrapped resume AI[1] had a gender bias. Do you think that those developers 1) had a gender bias and 2) did the work to inject that bias into their AI? Do you disagree with the [reported] conclusion that the bias was due to the training data?
If you think that the bias in Amazon's AI was not the result of deliberate human action, what leads you to think that the bias of ChatGPT was the result of deliberate human action?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...
People on the left shouldn't rejoice either. The left and the right wing are mostly the same, and both follow similar approaches to marginalize people who they feel are undesirable, so it'll eventually come back to bite the left too in due course.