Secondly, I find it so interesting that you come to HN for "contrary opinions" from your self-described "politically far left" viewpoint.
I hold a politically right viewpoint, and I come to HN for the same reason - it feels far left of my own world view.
I think it's pretty cool that HN can serve as a more neutral safe meeting place of minds.
I’m left, but I can listen to people that identify as right on HN and not roll my eyes, because they have good points as well.
If you pick a random person off the street (left/right), your chances aren’t nearly so good.
I suspect that because a huge portion of the HN crowd are educated IT workers / would-be founders, overall there's both a strong support for capitalism mixed with progressive social views. That doesn't really connect well with the political landscape in most of the western world and typically gets you labeled a centrist, regardless of how important those particular issues are to you.
So? I have never seen instances where YC's organizational viewpoint controlled the overall discussion, and I think dang is probably the best moderator on the planet.
Sure, HN has a focus around the "tech startup ecosystem", and that may attract a certain type of viewpoint, but I've never seen that viewpoint pushed from an institutional perspective.
A lot of folks I know find all kinds of things "left wing". A lot of my liberal friends think they are leftists, though most of my leftist friends would disagree. My conservative friends don't really draw that distinction between liberals and leftists, and at the same time my liberal friends often think my anarchist friends to be about on par with literal Nazis, horeshoe-theory wise.
I suspect a lot of the Dem establishment neo-liberals (who are rapidly becoming neocons ala Rumsfield/Cheney) who make up a lot of this site see themselves as slightly left. Rationally left, but not part of the "revolutionary" left.
Which, from my position, puts them fairly close to the Reagan conservatives, if you overlook some issues about gay folks and are took the 80s conservatives at their word rather than their deeds when it comes to race issues. However, I don't find this place to be a meeting of the minds.
I find that HN is a place where I can observe what the sociopaths who have real capital and thus material political power think about the world, or at least what the their sycophantic mandarins work for those folks might think.
I listen to what folks say here because I am genuinely curious about what their alien-to-me understandings of technology and political ethics will do in the larger world.
I listen to folks here for the same reason I listen to left-wing folks digest nazi propaganda, read a lot of history, and try to hear what conversations are happening at the red neck bars and at gun shops I hang around.
Cause that's who has no problem fucking with my world, and fuck with my world they have indeed.
HN is not a place where I think any of my actual politics will find an audience.
Though I am (likely unwisely) communicating now, I mostly just shut up when I am here, unless someone has something worthwhile to say about music.
I honestly had no idea that anyone "left of center" felt they couldn't openly share here, as I have always mentally categorized HN as a leftist echo chamber (hopefully that's not too blunt - it's just my honest perception).
I naively assumed that it was only those more right-of-center that felt their worldviews and opinions were unwelcome here, judging from the instantly dead posts I see of anything remotely right-aligned.
From your short share, I see that the echo-chamber is unwelcoming to a much broader sphere of humans than I realized. I find that super helpful to understand - so thank you for sharing.
It's a problem amplified by Murdoch type media outlets who have weaponised the us-vs-them worldview for clickbait outrage and spread that dumbing down as far across the world as they are able.
For those of us not within that mindset such views seem very childlike and unsophisticated, there's a slew of nuance to the world that doesn't easily reduce to L v. R, "woke agenda" and all that et. al. jazz.
FWiW IMNotACommunist .. but I have an endearing love of this short interaction twixt Piers Morgan ( UK outrage talking head ) and Ash Sarkar for higlighting the pitfalls of not paying attention to what people actually think and believe in.
If I understand you correctly, you feel it's the right-leaning outlets like Fox News that have weaponized us-vs-them mindset?
The origin feels flipped to me, but regardless who started it, I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days - mature discourse where each side is willing to listen and acknowledge the elements of truth and assume positive intent in the other side's positions.
As you say, the media on both sides, including social media, feels extremely childlike and unsophisticated.
This, with Murdoch, harks back in a lesser way to his father, then to his expansion into the UK Fleet Street and eventual transition in US media, in Canada with Conrad Black, in the US pre Murdoch with Hearst, Pulitzer, Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, in the UK pre Murdoch with Alfred Harmsworth and the like.
These are people who have all had large significant media outlets that have engaged in extremely partisan positions with respect to wars, the economy, favoured political candidates and dumbing down discourse.
> I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days
In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors.
Murdoch is more than Fox News. Just ask any Australian or Brit .
It's from the late 80s, but it is still relevant (and it also helps it feel a little above the current political hot-topics of today.
It is certainly the case that many well-meaning, Dem-voting Americans don't seem to know what leftist politics is (having never been exposed to it), and don't seem to realize that they are right-wing. It's an interesting phenomenon, but quite alarming when the consequences for the rest of the world are Not Good.
Strange, because I've noticed over the past few years that HN has been sliding further to the right. Or at the very least it's susceptible to brigading. To be clear, it's not "right winger equals brigade[0]", it's "oh gee someone posted a story about EU external immigration and now the comments are full of people angry about asylum seekers who think the correct solution[1] is to shut down international law and start retroactively deporting citizens".
For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.
[0] I live with right-wingers, so I kinda have to be tolerant of them
[1] If this had been anticipated and dealt with ahead of time, the correct solution would have been to invest in integration and have generous family visas. That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people. The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.
Of course, the ones that cannot tolerate any dissenting opinion will either whine or leave.
The truth is that this sentence is believed by every audience ever convened.
Other side promote engagement. This site still rewards discourse.
> The audience here skews towards those the truth.
The truth is that this sentence is believed by every audience ever convened.
This site definitely skews towards objectivity.
Suppose you have a fairly open border policy. Lots of folks get to contribute to the economy, there’s some cultural exchange, it’s pretty okay.
What if there isn’t a good plan in place for making people integrate with the local culture and you end up with large groups of people whose beliefs and behaviour are incompatible with those of the local population, e.g. calls for religious rule in an otherwise democratic country and increased violence? Not the blown out of proportion election claims in the US, but rather the real question of what happens to people after they cross the border? If that detail is unaddressed then people might grow to desire more closed borders, even if the issues lie elsewhere.
It’s a bit similar to the self-described “pro-life” movement, except when you look past those strongly held beliefs, things get more complex. For example, if children are born in families that can’t really afford them, will there be enough government assistance to school and feed them? What about daycare? What about neither of the people being mature enough to be good parents? That’s setting the personal freedom argument aside for just a second, it’s like they care about the births but don’t have the rest figured out, similarly to the discourse about borders.
I think you’re correct that the right solution would involve focusing on integration.
Integration is primarily a numbers game. Most people don't integrate into the local culture unless they are cut off from their own. If you have so many immigrants that you either need to build immigrant housing or fill up entire towns with them then you don't get immigrans assimilating into the local culture but rather them bringing their own culture no matter what other measueres are implemented. So yes, a good implementation of immigration needs closed borders at least for foreign cultures - these things are not independent.
The EU consists of welfare states. Thus the incentive structure for an immigrant is totally different than in the US. Further more MENA immigration which is what Europe has most of is not the same kind of immigration that the US enjoys. The amount of state expenditure on facilitating and integrating immigrants in western Europe is insane.
Western Europe has bendt over backwards the last 50 years to accommodate people of cultures that have pretty much nothing in common with European culture, values and historically has been the enemy both culturally and religiously - the world did not start in 1945 as many on the left in Europe thinks.
That's a stretch... those welfare states aren't that universal and realistically most people in such situations would be barely above subsistence level.
But yeah, Europe generally gets people who can't get into US with all the outcomes of that.
Also even the illegal immigrants that come to the US is easier to integrate than the immigrants from MENA in Europe. Culturally they are much closer, even though there has been a influx of illegal immigrants from other places than Americas last couple of years.
This is a very deep difference in immigration in EU vs US that is quite foreign to many Americans.
1. A lazy attempt at seeming impartial while holding a subtle, elitist anti-republican opinion.
2. A not-so-subtly marxist or socialist outburst.
Under each comment the top 3 direct replies are an agreeing sentiment that pretends to add some nuance to the discussion. The fourth might be a contrarian (either right wing or conservative) opinion that gets barraged by downvotes and angry responses.
I believe you got this other way around. The US doesn't have a migrant immigration crisis like the EU does, because it's a big isolated island with relatively strict immigration policy. The people who immigrate to the US are exactly the kind of self-motivated workers who do the integration work themselves.
Many here believed that investing in integration will magically make open borders policies work, and the countries did. Less people in Europe believe it now.
Another thing is, how much immigration does US get? In Europe, many countries can have a significant fraction (a few percent) of their population immigrate over a few years (for example check how big UA immigration was). That makes integration much harder.
To be clear, I'm not against immigration, but it's a complex topic and I believe you're a bit too optimistic and extreme about it.
>For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.
I don't get dividing people into two neat categories (left and right). And you're welcome in Europe, it would be great to have you and I'm sure you would do well here!
Do you have to defend, or can you just ignore. I assume those statements are still being made, even if you don’t read them. So why not just ignore and move on?
FWIW, Twitter (not saying Twitter is the best or only site) allows you to have a feed of only people you follow. That probably approximates going to another site of only people who share your core beliefs.
It doesn't matter if you interact only with people you follow, given that anyone with a bit of an audience gets plenty of hateful replies.
People have been putting up with being called "literally Hitler" and "literal nazis" (to somewhat match your example) almost since Twitter's inception, and still do, to a lesser degree, though, because levelling the playing field has seemingly made many of those people leave the site. Taking a look around was just short of unbearable because of the rampant censorship and repressive tactics that skewed the site very far into wokeness territory, up until Elon Musk took over. Yet people who didn't abide by it still put up with it, fought it, or downright ignored it.
Of course, I'm being downvoted for this, but (You) can't escape reality, folks. It was a shithole and we all endured it; now that it's free from the clutches of wokeness, it suddenly becomes unbearably toxic. Great. Find another echo chamber where you can mold reality to fit your abject fantasies. This time you won't be able to force them on us, though.
No ads?
There's a concept of "background radiation" expressed in social spaces. Dealing with a constant barrage of people who hate you or your existence[1] is tiring.
[1] Or perhaps they claim they don't hate you in particular, just, you know, anyone like you who they don't know in particular.
On Twitter, I have a make an active effort to not click on the "For you" tab because I'll be bombarded with posts about Trump or "woke" games, which I simply don't want to see. On Bluesky, I can actually discover new content without having to think about my mental health when using the "Discover" feed.
This practice is both educational—it helps you see where you might be wrong after all—and crucial for anyone who wants to actually make a difference in the world. Rejecting the perspectives of 50% of the population out of hand is a great way to lose popular support and elections.
Lolinder has no right to continue existing.
Lolinder has every right to continue existing.
Explain why you feel you personally are required to entertain the idea of both of those options. This is effectively what you are arguing must be done in the context of this thread.
> There are also extremes on both sides that should be recognized and rejected as such.
"No right to continue existing" is obviously an extreme that doesn't need to be entertained. But the existence of that extreme is used to argue that anything short of full endorsement of everything labeled a right is that extreme of denial of the right to exist, which is patently false.
A less extreme formulation that regularly gets lumped in with "no right to continue to exist" is: Some people are born with various shades of physical differences that lead to different mental and emotional states. Those who are different from the majority deserve our love and support, but we should attempt to provide that support in a way that doesn't encourage people to self-diagnose with these very real diversities when they don't, in fact, have them. It's a tricky balance to maintain and one that we hope we can get right, but when it comes to sweeping cultural change it's better to move slowly and observe the outcomes carefully. In the meantime we should try as hard as possible to support those who we do identify as being truly divergent.
I'm willing to bet that a substantial number of people reading the position described above will be unable to distinguish it from "no right to continue to exist", and therein lies the problem.
Your attempt at nuanced discussion falls apart when the context is about whether people should be expected to stay somewhere by "blocking and moving on" comments suggesting they go cease existing.
What you're failing to recognize (to a point that at least appears bad faith) is that it is the extremes here.
This is exactly what I'm warning against. Refusing to see that it's not that simple is why Trump's anti-trans smear campaign works so well. The best thing we can do for trans rights is acknowledge that we recognize it as a complicated issue that needs to be worked through carefully, but internet rhetoric invariably breaks it down into extremes. Given two extremes as the only options, we shouldn't be surprised when people pick the one we wouldn't prefer.
My comments here will be labeled transphobic by a lot of people, to the point where if I weren't writing under a pseudonym I wouldn't write them at all. Never mind that I'm an ally—the fact that I'm the kind of ally that calls out a counterproductive theory of change for what it is makes me an enemy in the current environment, and that is why we're seeing a regression on the national level. Cassandras like me have been warning about this for years now, and it's high time we're heard rather than pushed out of the tent.
There are a lot of well-meaning well-intentioned people who do great harm. The adage "the path to hell is paved with good intentions" exists as an observation of this.
I've done more to advance LGBT acceptance by quietly listening to people in deep red states and then (after listening to them!) helping them to see the other perspective than 100 internet commenters raging about how everything comes down to extremes.
You can label me whatever you like, but I'm going to keep up my approach, because it's obvious that the mainstream left's approach is a total failure.
What diversities are you talking about here?
For things like autism and ADHD I see very few people suggesting that self-diagnosis is reliable.
For gender and sexuality, there isn't a test for that, what do you expect people to do? From there, being cis or trans, straight or gay is a direct consequence of gender+body or sexuality+body. Do you think there's a significant rate of false positives for trans/bi/gay? I haven't seen evidence of that being the case.
Do you have something else in mind?
I expect kids to be given a chance to go through puperty before being encouraged to make permanent changes to their bodies. Teemagers in general are still finding themselves and usually have opinions differrent from those they will have when grown up.
> Do you think there's a significant rate of false positives for trans/bi/gay? I haven't seen evidence of that being the case.
Perhaps that's because you have shielded yourself from it. This is exactly the problem with (social media) bubbles, both ones created urself with excessive blocklists and more systematic manipulation of what can be shared.
Nobody's doing permanent changes to kids that haven't gone through the age of puberty. Sometimes blockers are used to delay the effect of puberty itself, but those are the opposite of a permanent change.
And as far as my question goes, that just pushes the it down the line by a few years.
> Perhaps that's because you have shielded yourself from it. This is exactly the problem with (social media) bubbles
Well I've never seen someone try to put together even a couple detailed anecdotal examples either. And there are a lot of flat out lies that get spread and even get on the news so I'm not going to accept a vague claim of "it happens".
Unless you're talking about state-sanctioned murder, this is just emotive rhetoric with no relevance to what people are actually disagreeing on.
You can exist without
- others being forbiden from expressing opinions that you find distateful
- your personal wishes being financially supported by everyone else
- being given a platform to target children with your views
- whatever facet you define yourself with being represented in every media ever made
Framing it as the "right to continue existing" in order to make "the other side" seem more extremist is exactly the kind of thing an extremist does.
If it’s just going to keep getting worse and worse, what’s the final destination?
this is unfortunately what (mostly right wingers) decry as "bubbles" and "echo chambers", but I think if the left is going to win hearts, minds, and political power it needs to focus on engaging its own people on its own issues rather than waste time and energy endlessly fighting with the right.
also, inviting conservatives in to find common ground is largely a trap anyway, and has shifted the overton window a good deal to the right because people feel that "okay, maybe we can come to some sort of compromise". the writer a r moxon put it very well: "meet me in the middle, says the unjust man. you take a step towards him, he takes a step back. meet me in the middle, says the unjust man."
on the other hand, I've read that when people complain that their kids went to college and got "brainwashed with liberal ideas", what actually happened was that they met gay people, and black people, etc, and realised that most of what their parents were getting off conservative media was bullshit at best and hate-mongering at worst. so maybe the real solution is to welcome conservatives, but hold the line on making no space for conservative ideas and attitudes.
There's nothing wrong with having conservative ideas and attitudes. But are you able to express them without bigotry? Are you able to be pro-life without calling women sluts and whores, for instance?
The answer for some conservatives is no, including our president elect. Nobody is required or even expected to tolerate that, and in fact tolerating it only spreads intolerance.
How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true? Or even being constantly exposed to folks who you tangentially know presenting a constant barrage of ideas that you find stupid and mean in ways that explicitly target you and yours?
After many years of being around that (I'm a queer/non-binary, an atheist, and politically far left) I stopped enjoying it and just started blocking folks.
I still seek out contrary opinions- that is why I regularly look at HN.
However, in my daily feed of stuff like "pictures of my nieces" and "birth/death announcements from my larger community" I don't really feel like I need to be confronted by folks who consider me to be literally demonic.
And, for the record, I don't expect those same people to be constantly subjected to my own opinions.
So it doesn't feel sad for me: if you consider places like "churches" or "chambers of commerce meetings" to be "safe spaces" for particular kinds of folks, then it just seems "normal".