Would it not be just as annoying to see a slant the other direction, or in any extreme direction?

The parent poster doesn't realize the inherent bias in what they wrote and that you have pointed out.

Boosting both right and left wing content increases your chance to see either type of content, because you boosted them over everything else.

I'm not sure why you wrote that to me. It was already in your prior comment.

I believe their point is that, because the US is generally regarded as 'to the right of' many countries in Europe, for example, a slight rightwing bias looks to us (I'm in the UK) like an extreme rightwing bias. Heck, even a completely neutral stance, as far as the US is concerned, will look like it veers to the right for us. Note that I'm not saying anything about how I believe the twitter algorithm should work, this is just my interpretation of what that commenter meant.

Europe is only a tiny fraction of the world, though.

Compared to India, Japan, Singapore and (depending on the metric) China, the US looks clearly left of center. Compared to most of the Middle East, the US looks extremely left-wing.

Why do you believe it would be annoying to us?

Because all those Right-Wingers are stupid crazy sub-humans without valid opinions right?

The tribalism in the US is insane, I think mostly because they've had one inflammatory President followed by another one. Some could argue that was deliberate to cause arguments as distraction... Worked a treat.

some of those opinions are that others of certain sexual orientations are indeed subhuman and/or should be treated as much, and due to Popper's paradox of tolerance, we don't need to, and shouldn't, tolerate such intolerance

That's one interpretation, which I see used as justification to attack and be generally horrible to anyone who disagrees.

Unfortunately the plight of LGB (and Womens' rights to an extent) has been utterly brushed aside by the continual addition of each letter to the cause and the arguments too hot and aggressive to separate out the underlying causes for fair debate on their own.

you say "attack and be generally horrible to anyone who disagrees", but recall that the thing said "attackers" are disagreeing with is equal or greater animosity towards people on the basis of their sexuality versus their opinions

in other words, it's a reaction to intolerance, specifically a decision not to tolerate intolerance - as we covered before, we don't need to, since doing so will end tolerance entirely (see Popper's paradox of tolerance for this)

I think Popper's paradox does nothing really but talk around an issue by changing the argument. Intolerance is not black and white, it is contextual. You can be intolerant of those who break the law, because they break the laws that hold society together (at a basic level). Paradoxes often aren't so problematic if you take them out of their own frame of reference (e.g. Zeno's paradox & Achilles).

I think the context we are referring to here is really free speech. Should we tolerate speech (opinions) that we despise or disagree with? Absolutely. And here we have the attackers responding to feeling insulted (framed as 'intolerance') by not being accepted/agreed with. Then they respond in kind and no progress is made.

You show me those people responding to equal/higher hostility and I guarantee I can show just as many examples of the opposite. And what I mean there is not "you're side is worse," I mean there are aggressive and horrible actors on both sides, who should not be the frame of reference for debate. But too often they are, and too often examples of hostility as used as an excuse for escalation or to avoid real debate.

It's nice that you personally think those things, but none of those things you personally think override or disprove Popper's paradox of tolerance, and thus none of those things you personally think will convince people to tolerate the intolerance that is, just as a single example, right-wing anti-trans intolerance

indeed, responding to, say, right-wing intolerance of trans people, by not tolerating it, is totally okay, despite your FUD, for reasons described by Popper

don't like your own intolerance of e.g. trans people, and actual attacks on them, to be responded to? maybe keep your intolerance and actual attacks to yourself, problem solved

> Republicans are some kind of lower intelligence being too

You HAVE to be pretty stupid to fall for the really blatant propaganda the GOP uses. Remember that scary migrant convoy they invented just before an election to use to scare people into voting GOP and then it just vanished right after? Have you heard the incredibly stupid things Tucker Carlson, MGT, Matt Gaetz, and Boebert say? People like Carlson are way too smart to actually believe the crap they spew, they knowingly spend their lives telling lies to gullible and/or stupid people to manipulate them.

Of course there is no left wing propoganda to fall for though, right?

Do you wonder how you came to form such blatant negative opinions of your political opposites as a charicature of hate and ignorance?

whataboutism doesn't really address any of the points in the post you're responding to, and certainly didn't answer the questions in that post which were posed to you

Because I don't disagree with those points. But the idea that there is nothing 'noticeable' from the left shows they're a) maybe better at it and/or b) saying things that are believed at face value because they align to beliefs.

For the other commenter to be so entirely blind to their side's propoganda should at least cause pause for reflection.

your supposition regarding a) and b) are pretty unconvincing, they're on the level of conspiracy theorists who say that a lack of evidence is just stronger evidence of the conspiracy

frankly your claims of equivalency are pretty unconvincing, too, but that's neither here nor there, since the topic is one specific side, not "both sides" or how you personally think they're equivalent

anyways, let's get back on topic to where we were before the whataboutism reared its ugly head (and we can both just pretend like you haven't been attacking the commenter themselves): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35397668

> Of course there is no left wing propoganda to fall for though, right?

I'm honestly not aware of similar propaganda on the left. By similar I meant an entire industry designed to lie and gaslight people into voting for people who will cause them direct economic harm. The GOP has made lying an entire industry and an art form. Now they are demonizing trans people in a way extremely similar to the way Nazis demonized Jews.

> Do you wonder how you came to form such blatant negative opinions of your political opposites

I know exactly why I have formed such a negative opinion of the GOP, because I've watched them lie blatantly and egregiously for the last 20 years and I'm really sick of it.

That extreme polarisation didn't start with the last few presidents; it's been the explicit strategy of the Republican Party to demonize the Democrats in every possible way ever since Newt Gingrich became a prominent figure in the 1980s.

Of course it has. And the Democratic party just wanted to get along.

Either way, unfortunately the political bickering fuelled by bots and social media manipulation is in a very sad state.

> And the Democratic party just wanted to get along.

In comparison to the GOP yes.

It was frustrating to see Obama keep reaching across the aisle and basically getting spit on. Democrats have their faults, but Republicans have made it clear that it's impossible to reach any kind of compromise with them.

And Fox News was created specifically for this purpose.

If these ‘distraction-causing arguments’ are affecting real people (read: foreigners, queer people, black people), then they’re worth paying attention to regardless.

Is your assertion that this is all some big conspiracy how you justify not caring?

No, it's that people have bought so heavily into just attacking 'the other' instead of trying to get along and being critical of policy and authority instead. The distraction is the direction to argue with each other rather than against policy/corruption/authority