The funny thing is that everyone commenting here thinks that we're headed towards an authoritarian nightmare, but for different reasons.
It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them.
This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political right" (which is no longer really a relevant tag).
I'm reminded of this amazing review by George Orwell:
"Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right."
When we're afraid, we give power to politicians that promise deal with it swiftly. Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking. Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it.
Has the war on terror stopped? No? When do we get to hop onto a plane without undressing ourselves?
Oh, but now there's a war against viruses? So you have to undress yourself and take a shot.
Next, there will be a war on climate change. You'll have to undress yourself, take a shot, and prove that you only took public transit to the airport, and that you haven't eaten beef for 48 hours prior because it leads to more gas from farts, which is bad for the environment.
When the next financial crisis hits (and it hasn't yet), and a large number of middle class people get wiped out again, there will be legislation to protect retail investors from the volatility of the stork market. You must go to a certified and licensed financial professional for your wealth planning.
The appropriate politician from the left or right will run for office and get voted in because when most people fear something, they vote against freedom.
The difference is that terrorism in the US is a miniscule threat in reality, killing a handful of people a year, whereas the virus is one of the top causes of death over the past two years. Not all fears are unjustified. Climate change already kills far more people annually than terrorism via floods, fires, and droughts. That being said, fear doesn't justify authoritarianism, even when the fear is reasonable.
Similarly, the individual chance of getting cancer by smoking a cigarette doesn't warrant fear. But if you apply this logic to cigarette after cigarette, you may end up in a PSA talking through a hole in your throat and telling everyone not to smoke. Fortunately, as human beings, we can see patterns in large numbers and act on them. We aren't limited to looking at the world through the keyhole of individual risk. We can take a broader view.
I think your system is not an accurate representation. They are talking about an individuals risk of these events killing them. Your system is talking about the cumulative risk of individual cigarettes. This distinction needs to be made because the risk varies greatly by location and ones preparation (mitigating factors).
My 'system' is talking about incremental risks, whether they are across time or across individuals. The point is that these incremental risks are not great in themselves, but when accumulated, they become substantial. If climate change contributes to increasing disease, as is projected, the cumulation of diseases over time become a substantial risk even to the individual, even if they aren't directly affected by flood, fire or drought. And of course even a low direct individual risk can cascade into a societal risk that circles back to affect the individual. Take the chief risk of COVID-19, which is that the local medical system is overwhelmed. When this becomes acute, as it did in Italy, it affects even those who were at little risk of COVID itself, by denying them access to health care in the event of an accident or other illness.
Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population. The infectious diseases they talk about are from expansion of the disease carrier range (mosquitoes and ticks). These have mitigating factors to avoid the infections. There's very little cumulative risk and it's still largely location based.
So this is a far cry from your example of cigarettes and ending up in a PSA. The risk is much higher with cigarettes. As stated by the previous commenter - they are not something to be afraid of.
> Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population.
You're looking at it through the individual lens again. The chances of an individual winning the lottery in any year are near zero, but the chances of there being some lottery winner in any year are near 100%. The chance of any one car trip resulting in an accident are extremely low, yet we still wear a seat belt consistently because the long term chances of an accident are high even if we are careful drivers---we rightly fear the consequences of an accident without a restraint. And the cigarette example, which is only a "far cry" if you grossly underestimate all the cumulative risks associated with climate change.
Simply handwaving away the death toll from insect-borne infection because they don't affect you personally doesn't make them any less real. And of course those aren't the only climate related risks. Drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards are all correlated with increasing thermal energy in Earth's atmosphere. Something we should rationally fear and actively work to mitigate.
"You're looking at it through the individual lens again."
The entire point of this thread - that individuals shouldn't fear these things. Fear is at the individual level.
"we rightly fear the consequences of an accident without a restraint."
Why would we be afraid of a moot scenario? If you have and use a seat belt, then this isn't a scenario to fear. Even then, the occurrence of an accident when being careful is low enough that there is not fear when driving down the road. If there was substantial fear, then we wouldn't drive (like people I know who have a panic attack when driving).
"if you grossly underestimate all the cumulative risks associated with climate change."
They have yet to be fully disclosed/known and materialize. It's reasonable to not be afraid of something that does not yet exist.
"Simply handwaving away the death toll from insect-borne infection because they don't affect you personally doesn't make them any less real."
It's not hand waving. There are mitigating steps to be taken. It's certainly nothing to be afraid of for many people. Again, the component of the comment we are discussing.
"Drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards are all correlated with increasing thermal energy in Earth's atmosphere. Something we should rationally fear and actively work to mitigate."
It's not rational to fear something that doesn't affect you. These things do not affect all areas. You can work to mitigate things without being afraid of them. I'm not afraid of those events as they largely don't affect my area, and I take steps to mitigate any damage from the ones rest do occur.
I think the basic problem here is that you attach strong negative connotations to the word "fear". But fear is useful to us, as in the seatbelt example:
> Why would we be afraid of a moot scenario? If you have and use a seat belt, then this isn't a scenario to fear.
My point was that we wear the seat belt because we fear having an accident without it. Just as we take mitigating actions against disease because we fear facing the disease without them.
> It's not rational to fear something that doesn't affect you.
Sure, if it truly does not and could not affect you. But global warming can affect every person on the planet. There is virtually nowhere that is immune to all of the direct and indirect effects. And even if there were such a place, human beings are interconnected economically and socially, so that if something negatively impacts people in one place, it can indirectly and negatively affect people elsewhere.
> You can work to mitigate things without being afraid of them.
Why would you work to mitigate something that was completely benign? You do it because you fear the possible consequences of not mitigating, the same reason you wear a seat belt. It is exactly this entirely rational fear that public officials use to justify mitigating global warming, the well-founded fear that if we don't, it will potentially cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Fear is an emotional motivation, and can be a cause for taking on the seatbelt. There are also logical motivations, such as the realization that I will be less injured if I have a seatbelt and an accident happens.
It’s not that the action of using a seatbelt is different, but my reason for doing that can be very different. This can also apply to Covid and other risk mitigation. And emotional motivations usually affects us humans more strongly than logical ones, so using them is good when you want to motivate more drastic actions. So most overreaches are motivated by emotional arguments, such as fear. Because of that it’s good to be skeptical about such arguments.
People don't wear seat belts because they've thought to themselves, "I could be injured and therefore less capable if I don't wear a seat belt." They wear a seat belt because they (very rationally) fear death or serious injury. It's interesting that some folks have such a stigma about admitting fear, though. It's like the people who insist that advertising has no effect on them, just all those other weaklings.
Absolutely right. However, it doesn't stop politicial groups or media from using ominous music and dystopian or wasteland images to evoke fear in their audience.
That’s a gross oversimplification of climate change.
You have people dying because crops can’t survive.. people dying because they got misplaced on coastal areas .. people dying because of extreme heat.. people dying on fires …
And that without counting that freeze to death due to extreme cold.. which climate change also causes
> Overall, a total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates.
It's a bit hard to prove who died due to the flood/etc being affect by climate change as opposed to if they'd have died if the flood was less. But I'm not sure ~500/yr is a good number to bet against.
I think fear can do a lot of things, as you say, the loss of freedom. I also think the lack of fear can lead to the loss of freedom. Fear can help us temper our actions so we don't do things that end up hurting us severely or even killing us.
That being said, I would agree that repressed fear can do us quite a bit of harm and I think it often happens because we'll say fear is bad, without just appreciating how it hurts and helps.
Only if the lack of fear is because an authority figure has managed it all for you. This creates the bigger problem of a lack of self-regulation and automatic trust in authority.
This illustrates perfectly the false axis of the idea of right vs left outside of economic spheres (and labor vs capital is more accurate than left vs right in the economic realm).
The spectrum of totalitarianism vs anarchy is a much better axis to use with regards to this topic, IMO. In that light, it is easy to see that all of the post-9/11 fear-mongering and the COVID fear-mongering are run with the same agenda: more restrictions, less freedom.
Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful.
Back in the 60s-80s, the world managed to use the fear of pox to eradicate the disease from existence - and most did so by instituting a vaccine mandate.
Back in the late 70s/80s, the world managed to use the fear of acid rain to ban sulphur emissions (LRTAP convention). In the early 90s, the world managed to use the fear of ozone to ban CFC gas usage.
Back in the Cold War, both major superpowers were too afraid of the other one to launch nuclear weapons to initiate direct warfare, and in the end the fear of global warfare led to comprehensive international agreements on reducing arms proliferation.
The difference is: back then, politicians did the right thing to do based on scientific evidence and indications of issues. These days?! Scientists and activists have warned for decades about the dangers of climate change and the urgency to do something... but until now, all we got is politicians waffling around instead of actually doing anything to combat the real problems we are going to face.
Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful
Disagree. Fear is not the only motivator, and it's a particularly bad one, because it spurs immediate action rather than exploration. Fear of sailing into the unknown is also what kept Europeans in the dark about the American continent for centuries.
What "fear" motivated the construction of the LHC at CERN? Wasn't it fear that caused a lot of people to advocate loudly against turning it on and performing experiments with it?
Overcoming fear drives progress (but it is by no means the only driver). Giving in to fear just leads to regression.
> Disagree. Fear is not the only motivator, and it's a particularly bad one, because it spurs immediate action rather than exploration.
For many problems, the longer you let them sit around the worse they become. Linearly accelerating problems, yeah, you can usually get by with sitting them out.
But exponentially accelerating problems (climate change, infectious agents, consumer debt) require immediate and harsh response, otherwise they become so much more difficult to resolve. The key issue is that most people lack the basic education to understand exponential functions, even after two years of a pandemic.
> What "fear" motivated the construction of the LHC at CERN?
None.
> Wasn't it fear that caused a lot of people to advocate loudly against turning it on and performing experiments?
Indeed, but that one was a "false equivalency" media issue. Crackpots got a lot of media presence despite their claims being outright invalid from the start or being absolute niche opinions, simply because their unfounded fear brought in a lot of clicks from an ignorant and uneducated public.
Coincidentally or not, we have seen the same media issues in the COVID crisis, particularly with Fox "News"/OAN/"News"max in the US or the Axel Springer/Murdoch tabloids in Europe.
Fear and logic can look the same from the outside when logic dictates caution. Do you "fear" fire? You understand it, and know what you can and cannot do with it. Yet your aversion to ever letting it exist outside of very tight controlled scenarios, and perhaps panic if you saw it spreading uncontrollably quickly, would look an awful lot like fear to somebody who didn't understand what fire was.
I think the main difference is that fear is an emotional response. And this important because emotions can often misguide us are also easily exploited. For instance, racism is often a product of fear. People see some group of people engaging in crime at a higher rate than usual, and start to fear all people of this group as criminals even when that fear and prejudice is completely unjustified. And tyrants since time immemorial have used "fear the other group" as a rallying cry for self righteous horrible acts in the name of a better tomorrow that never comes.
So in your examples is it primarily fear driving behaviors, or primarily logic/rationality?
> Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful.
this is critically underrated. dismissing ths current feardriven environment really misses the issue.
what is new now is not fear, but the communication - the market penetration. sowing dissent used to be the game of spies. now any political enemy, foreign and domestic, just has to tweet or facebook.
> However, one thing I must point out is that climate change is a complex problem with no easy solutions.
Indeed, but right now we are doing almost nothing meaningful. We shame people from taking vacation flights once every couple years but don't ban short distance "business flights" for corporate executives with a completely bonkers view on how important they are. We still don't mandate the end of "bunker fuel" burning on ships or the usage of land-line power of cruise ships. Instead of building electrified freight and passenger rail, large parts of the rail network run on decades old diesel engines, large parts of freight runs on trucks and in the US the word "high speed passenger rail" is as inconceivable as "fair minimum wage".
One again I agree with most of what you're suggesting here. One more point of nuance though.
What is the carbon foot print of replacing all the rail and freight? Do we have the funds to make these changes all at once? How quickly can we realistically change out our entire fossil fuel infrastructure?
The first motor car was in 1886, over 130 years ago.
The first mass produced motor car was 1908, Over 110 years ago.
We've built this current system for over 100 years. Rebuilding a new one may also take a similar time line. The tragedy is we may not be able to BUT... you are right.
> What is the carbon foot print of replacing all the rail and freight?
You don't need to replace the rails, only add overhead power. Which, granted, isn't free in terms of CO2, but saves a lot of fossil fuel emissions and particulate matter emissions for those living adjacent to rail routes (which is mostly poor people, so this issue also has a social impact) down the roat.
> Do we have the funds to make these changes all at once?
The US spends more on their military than the next 7-11 (depending on which source you want to cite) countries combined. The US spends twice as much per person for healthcare than European countries, with worse results.
There are way more than enough ways to fund a transportation revolution, and in the worst case the US Government can issue special ear-marked bonds.
> How quickly can we realistically change out our entire fossil fuel infrastructure?
Two to three decades. Which coincidentally lines up with the predictions on when climate change will hit the "irreversibility" point.
A rant like this makes me ask; can we do much better? Want if this is about as good as human cooperation gets?
A rant like this has only one answer, and it’s for society to stop trying. The ranter fails to grapple with details, matters of fact, and reality in general. The ranter is overwhelmed.
While the right certainly had their fear based issues before the pandemic, it’s a bit of a stretch to say the left didn’t.
Trump was going to become a dictator. We had 12 years to go living on earth 4 years ago. Apparently almost everyone is a white supremacist… I could go on.
Why didn’t Obama revoke the patriot act if he was so on the side of non fear? Or allow more whistleblowing.
Media hyperbole aside especially when it comes to US conservative coverage... we still didn't get anywhere close to the measures climate scientists wish we took and we're still chugging onwards with a very slow increase in average temperatures which are in line if not above what was predicted
European perspective here: Trump was definitely trying to make himself a dictator, just look at how he handled losing an election. Please don’t vote him in again America.
He was handed a global pandemic in which it was completely permissible for leaders to take on unprecedented, unlimited emergency powers, and yet he did nothing. He was actually criticized for not using his emergency powers to implement an (unconstitutional) national lockdown. If his true goal was to become a dictator, why did he do nothing when he was given the perfect opportunity?
He made no difference between himself and the state. Used the AG as his personal lawyer. Used his position to secure personal business dealings. And then tried to orchestrate a coup when he lost.
He’s not literally the devil but he’s both so incompetent and corrupt that I’m frankly baffled there is such fervent support for him.
If you read American leftist media from late 2020 to January 2021 you'll find a bunch of breathless editorials claiming that Trump was about to declare martial law and assume dictatorial powers. That was obviously nonsense and displayed a complete lack of knowledge about how the US federal government and military work.
It's lack of trust more than a lack of knowledge. See: the submission title.
I can see how this perspective seems reasonable if you've never been on the boot-end of unjust laws, but a lot of us over here on the left side of the center have good reason to doubt that the good parts of law and order can hold up against a sufficiently inspiring and intelligent dictator. Trump was a fool and squandered what he had. Someone will run with what he built and fumbled in the same way Obama ran with what Howard Dean built and fumbled.
This is actually why I'm wary of calls to abolish the Senate and Supreme Court. They suck when you want to get stuff done, but they also give us time to organize against people who want to install a dictatorship. Our tar pit of a system and people at high levels believing in it was the only thing that stood between Trump and the genocide he'd love to give large parts of his base.
I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Clinton conceded right away and notably did not urge her supporters to storm the Capitol to “rectify” the results.
And regarding governors, recall that most of the swing states were under republican control.
Edit: I noticed now you gave the Russian connection as the example.
Russian interference was indeed the case.
Many people were angry at that but there’s an important difference between being angry at it and saying the Russians “stole” the election as in “had undue influence”, versus just pretending the result was rigged and you actually won an election you lost. That was something Trump did and it undermines the democracy you build your country on.
On the question of collusion the Muller report is quite informing but he explicitly didn’t want to say anything on the matter and left that to Congress.
I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Clinton is not a populist, she part of the establishment, her method of subversion was and is through the institutions themselves, i.e using the media, and the deep state to do the work not the people. Her power base is not the common man or woman.
As to the republican governors, you seem to have confused me with a republican, I am not a supporter of either side of the uniparty coin. I am an actual anti-establishment type, not one that is only anti-establishment when my "tribe" is not in power, or when the "other side" of the uniparty is in power. I am anti-estblishment 24/7, no matter if it is republican or democrat
I was no fan of Trump, never voted for him infact (nor Clinton or biden, or obama, or bush, or ....)
I don’t disagree that Clinton is as establishment as it gets and there were a lot of reasons to not want her in office.
I’m just triggered by the false equivalency, because unlikeable elite as she may be, her politics are more like treatable cancer for democracy whereas Trumps is like acute lead poisoning.
The reason I mentioned the republican governors wasn’t to suggest you were a member, rather to suggest that if we did think those states performed election fraud then we’d expect it to be in favour of the Republican Party, right?
Regardless of all that I hope you have a great weekend :)
If the left really got power we would all get a month paid vacation so we could actually afford to stock up and stay home while the virus dies off. The left is not in any way empowered in this country.
By "all" do you also mean healthcare workers? Law enforcement? Farmers? Military? Utility workers? Garbage collectors? Homeless people?
Even if you somehow locked all the humans in their homes for a month, someone would catch the virus again from a deer or something and the pandemic would start all over again.
The actual point seems to stand. Left, right, center. All have ill-advised proposals. Some are more willing than others to put their ideas on the table and take feedback (not blanket dismissals).
There hasn't been anyone remotely leftist in power for most of a century, so it's plainly inaccurate for /u/givemeethekeys to say:
>> "Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it."
Biden is, at best, a status quo maintainer in a deeply right-ratcheted[0] status quo.
This is the unfortunate side-effect when social and political signifiers become snarl words. I haven't done a science on it, but it seems like most people who use "left" sans detail and don't consider themselves leftist bundle DNC, DSA, and all the other center-left factions into one and imagine them being led by whoever the current DNC leader or president is.
I double checked /u/givemeethekeys' post and it's hard to pin down a definition. They mostly seem to want to accuse Biden of being a Republican while also insinuating he's a leftist, so their whole analysis is deeply confused (or confusing as presented).
Given the existence of animal reservoirs, short-lived immunity, asymptomatic carriers, continued transmission after vaccination, and the genetic instability of SARS-CoV-2, this seems like an incredibly naive view.
The only virus we've been able to eradicate — smallpox — was a VERY different beast because it had none of the issues listed above.
Hi there - it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle for a long time now. I had to go back 2 years to find anything else! That's not a legit use of HN, regardless of what your positions are, because it's not in keeping with the intellectual curiosity this site is supposed to be for. In fact, it's destructive of it. For that reason, we ban accounts that are using the site this way. I don't want to ban you, so could you please fix this?
Further explanations are at these links if anyone wants more:
We've spent trillions on all kinds of naive nonsense. What's the worst that could happen, people get a month off and the line goes up thanks to all the stimulus? Oh, the horror.
Mindless cynicism is not the virtuous alternative to optimism. We can do nothing and watch as our health care system continues to collapse or do something. Maybe this isn't it, but you haven't offered a better idea.
It's easy to tear people down for standing up to make a suggestion.
Not all ideas are worth pursuing. Continuing as-is most of the time (like 99.99%) is the appropriate choice. Do you move every time a stranger on TV/street suggests that?
Continuing as-is will mean the nearly full ICU beds will fill up and the already overwhelmed and too-short supply of medical professionals will dry up as they seek other careers. Every doctor I know who hasn't quit is in or approaching a burnout.
The curve of deaths from omicron in the US is already above delta's peak in much less time. Do you imagine this will just pass by without completely overwhelming the health care system? It's too late to do anything for this strain, but I don't want to gamble on it being the last or worst.
"Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking."
Not exactly. I think this is an example of how different perspectives lead to fear being used to drive a law, because it has been used by both sides. Those who agree with the law believe the threat (fear) is enough to justify the law, and forget that it was fear that drove it in the first place, or downplay the fear element.
I realise this was a /rant, but it's still spectacularly misinformed and unhelpful.
If your hot take on politics is that climate change, COVID and the war on terror are all the same thing and this proves the left and right are both the same, then you're part of the problem.
This reads more like a smart person trying to rationalize their cognitive dissonance, when they know deep down they've found themselves on obviously the morally and factually wrong side of an argument and see no way to retreat while maintaining face.
Yours seems like a particularly uncharitable interpretation compared to my reading; I didn't hear them saying D == R so much as both are susceptible to the same flaw of human nature: impulsive overreaction to stimuli we find threatening.
I do agree that's an unhelpful analysis, but only because it happens to be tautological.
Neither the left or the right is arguing that climate change or COVID does not exist. The loud disagreements is about what strategy to deploy. We have nations like Germany that want to use natural gas to combat climate change, and we got France that want to use nuclear. The left leans towards natural gas, the right towards nuclear, both arguing that their strategy will lead towards an end to climate change and that the other side won't. Should vegetarian diet be part of our cultural diet, insects meal, blue agriculture, or should we focus our climate change priority on energy, transportation, heating, industry, futuristic technology and so on.
With COVID we have had more strategy than can be reasonable described in a comment, some which the left favor and others that the right favors. Should we classify the Swedish strategy as "right" and the Danish strategy as "left"? Doctors all over the world disagree on what optimal treatment is and in the end it is the patient outcome that dictate who was right.
The issue is that politicians get voted in because people fear the bad outcome, not because people favor one strategy above an other strategy. Thus the perception from both sides is that the "other" side do not believe that the bad outcome exist.
This is a man elected to the US Senate in 1994. First elected to Cross in 1987. Still there today. Guess which political party he belongs to.
https://youtu.be/3E0a_60PMR8
Folks are literally about to be put on respirators denying they're sick from Covid. They're rarely if ever left wing.
https://youtu.be/WicsWfTm1ZI
So yeah, one side has the lion's share of denying climate change and Covid.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research which demographic has been promoting the consumption of urine as a protective measure against a respiratory and vascular disease-causing virus.
It may be popular to blame politicians, but people need to take responsibility for voting for folks that espouse belief in Jewish space lasers. Whether you think the politician is putting up a front or honestly believes what they're peddling really doesn't matter in the long run if you're filling in the box next to their name on the ballot.
In a global context, the number of people believing in Jewish space lasers is a poor excuse to implement global surveillance and censorship. I rather that each country where those people live in take care of their citizens with the health care that they need, or legal system if those people get violent. I suspect however that fear over people that believe in Jewish space lasers is out of proportion of the actually number and threat of such people.
Do you have any numbers of how large the demographic of Jewish space lasers believers are and the number of incident globally where they caused harm to society?
We're not talking about a global context. We're specifically talking about US politics.
Just one believer in Jewish space lasers elected to Congress is far too many, and we have notably more than one. All from the same US party. And then there's the state level, all from the same US party.
Random folks believing in crazy notions is worrisome but viewable as a marginal percentage of the population, but we're not talking about them.
We're talking about elected individuals with real power who vote on real laws that affect us all. Some of those Congresspeople believe in Jewish space lasers, and all of those delusional folks belong to the GOP.
We can discuss whether it is sanguine to have Congresspeople make stock trades with a clear conflict of interest/insider trading. We can argue about what the top marginal tax rate should be. We can debate the merits of expanding or contracting the social safety net as it regards health care or parental leave or pre-K education/day care.
We're talking about elected officials—and an associated constituency that either support them or don't consider it a deal-breaker—who believe in Jewish space lasers and Democratic pizza parlor child sex and mutilation dungeons.
You can scream "free speech" all you like, but if you cannot see the substantive difference, free speech will not save you.
I think your comment got an unfair downvote. The rant was okay, but it went on to talk about a strawman argument of a measure(beef consumption) before flying. However, the better I'd have put the whole rant(not sure OP agrees, this is just my reading of it), is like this:
We've been reactively forming policies out of fear of extreme bad/negative consequence events. Since, the time window of public/societal memory is limited and there's a cycle of elections and power structure climbing too involved, the policies tend to be ones that are sellable/explain-away-able to the vast majority of the public. And these become the standards till another event occurs and never re-considered.
"If your hot take on politics is that climate change, COVID and the war on terror are all the same thing "
I did not read it like this, but rather that all those topics are used by politicians in the same way. To generate fear, to control people. Neverending crisis. Neverending war. Rigid, emergency exemption laws for all eternity.
Very well described by Orwell in 1984 already.
And supplementing this rant: a very frustrating aspect of all this is these things are predictable at a high level.
* It is certain that in a given lifetime there will be some hostile act that causes hundreds to thousands of deaths.
* When you look at how quickly people can travel the world, it was pretty clear there were going to be some pretty horrific diseases this century. We're thankful that it wasn't Ebola.
* The climate has been a matter of crisis since biblical times.
* Financial markets are obviously healthy, deindustrialisation of advanced economies is a sign of sustainable progress, printing money then handing it out to asset owners has becoming the normal response because it has proven to work very well and isn't causing any social pressures at all (people voted for Trump only due to racism). So maybe the next financial crisis is unpredictable. Things seem pretty rosy in this department. No need to prepare.
Why humans are programmed to wait until midway through a crisis to start identifying the risks is a puzzler. The problems are very obvious unless people listen to mass media.
I was noticing that pattern as well, many people seem to be hurling the same insult but from opposite sides. In a way, it worries me, because the words lose their theoretical meaning and stand more for the assumed malevolence of the other side.
If I could wish one thing on the world at this moment it would be for us to realize that most of the people who we believe are attacking us don't actually believe that they are attacking us, just as they believe we are attacking them and we don't believe that we are.
Yep. I had this conversation with my daughter the other day. She was like "But ... they just think the same thing about what you're saying". I was like "Totally, the only difference is that I'm right, and they're wrong". She was like "how do you know?". That lead to a much longer session of reviewing types of biases and fallacies, the scientific method and various other critical thinking tools I've developed over the years, but whoever is on the "other side" is having the same conversation with their kids, and showing them tools and resources they've developed over the years to decide what information to trust and, to the kid, it's just as convincing!!
This was one of the videos we looked at, I think it's totally on point:
Lol exactly. This is why I try to remind myself to pay attention to how I and others may be feeling underneath, and have even dedicated my professional life to it, because I have honed very strong rationalizing skills.
I find often the people who disagree with me the strongest can also go toe-to-toe with me in finding stories and evidence that confirms our beliefs and if I remember (and have the courage), I try to go deeper to talk about how I'm feeling afraid of this, this, and this, angry about this and this, ashamed of this, and so on, and try to imagine how they might be feeling across those contexts, and more often than not, realize we're both two humans trying our best. But goodness I can avoid going there sometimes, and if I do get there, it can be after a long long discussion with someone, and sometimes one or both of us gives up before we get to that point.
What I find rampant these days is the rather extreme way of thinking “If you are not with me, you are against me.” And I think social media amplifies this, not only by algorithms, but also because text doesn’t provide good context (intonation, stance, emotional transference) , I mean we literally read other people’s thought in our own head, also those whose thoughts we are not congruent with.
HNs rules are great in this sense, to continuously seek out curious conversations instead of the rather solipsist tendency to soapbox.
Now with politics and politicians this a much harder pill to swallow, because their literal job these days is to stand on a soapbox, and we as the public have gotten rather used to it, and voting in those who do the soapbox act the best. This is also because in general it’s hard to choose politicians beyond the local who we can relate to, and be invested in beyond retoric.
I agree that much of the design of social media can contribute to this.
As much as I love this:
> HNs rules are great in this sense, to continuously seek out curious conversations instead of the rather solipsist tendency to soapbox.
I also just thought how HN may contribute to this through design. I'm replying to your post right now and I can only see your post on my screen. While I can click "parent" in the menu to see the chain of replies or "context" to see your post in the context of all the replies, I'm not able to see both a reply box and the context before your post on the same page.
So, it requires me to either keep in working memory what the parent said, and what the grandparent said and great grandparent, or maybe to have a multitabbed approach. Conversely, something like Discourse allows me to scroll up and down to see the previous posts while maintaining a compose window open.
Maybe this isn't the place for such a comment, I guess I just felt frustrated in another thread and worried I'd give a reply that either repeated what someone said before or didn't encapsulate the conversation.
I think these little details really matter in communication and how we often overlook them or discount them.
I agree, what seem like small design decisions can have great impact. I wonder if studies are being done on this. Something like About Face on interaction design, but then specifically on effective communication and discourse.
Ah, I imagine there are, as I remember back in 2006 or so at college, people started studying impacts of chats and such, however, I'm not specifically familiar with any research on it. If you come across it, I'd love to hear of it! Or if you do research and want some ideas / wanna partner on something, I'm also open to that. I don't have professional research background yet have worked on emotions and communications for almost 10 years now, and studied intercultural communication in college after switching from electrical engineering, so I'm quite fascinated by the intersection of computer-mediated communication and how it impacts us emotionally.
edit: Also, I'm not sure what you meant by "About Face," will you explain it more?
"but whoever is on the "other side" is having the same conversation with their kids, and showing them tools and resources they've developed over the years to decide what information to trust and, to the kid, it's just as convincing!!"
I wish. And sometimes they do.
But there are lots and lots of people who have various religious/ideological dogmas. They do not show their kid the scientific method - they preach their truth to them. Because they feel they are right.
It has helped me to realize that most of politics is preference, and preference rarely need be informed by the scientific method, especially when most of our daily choices are preference based.
E.g. who do I love, what should I wear/watch/eat, where should I spend my money, etc.
Our culture has now taught a few generations that people get to decide their own truth, and they conflate preference for truth, and now we are witnessing what this means…
"E.g. who do I love, what should I wear/watch/eat, where should I spend my money, etc."
Ok, my feelings of love are not guided by a scientific method (except analyzing and reflect on what I feel).
But by deciding what to wear, eat, watch etc. I do apply the scientific method. Meaning I test out systematically, what works best for me. And I try to teach this to my children.
The scientific method applied to preferences is probably not the scientific method (in regards to control experiments (unless you have clones and access to the multi verse:)))
The very basic idea of the scientific method as I learned it, is: testing ideas by experiment.
If it looks cold outside, but not too cold - I have the idea that a medium warm jacket of mine is enough. And then outside I see if it was adequate or not and next time under similar conditions I change accordingly, or go back to the house that instant.
Sounds like common sense and it is. But not everyone is doing it.
I seriously got shocked by people telling me, they walk in shoes hurting them, but they did so because of style. This sounds like insanity to me, even though I know in their specific setting it makes some sense - as style is important in their circles. But that just means those circles are far from science and rationality, if it leads to people wearing clothes not adequate for the weather and being cold and uncomfortable.
“ I seriously got shocked by people telling me, they walk in shoes hurting them, but they did so because of style.”
Determining what to optimize for is basically what preference is. Some prefer attractiveness and aesthetics over comfort, and in most cases there is no option that optimizes all variables due to complex cross talk…
After you choose which subjective preference to optimize for, you can definitely employ the scientific method to try to parse that further, but that comes after the preference:)
"After you choose which subjective preference to optimize for, you can definitely employ the scientific method to try to parse that further, but that comes after the preference:) "
I think I can apply the scientific method also to preferences. Meaning if it really makes me happy, to be accepted in certain circles where the conditions are bad shoes, then so be it.
But personally I decided years ago, that this is not the case for me.
Actually, wanting to be comfortable all the time is irrational. You should intentionally make yourself uncomfortable occasionally in order to avoid becoming too "precious". Hypothermia is an old friend of mine.
I don't think it's necessarily about them being right or wrong in the scientific sense. It's the communal disgrace that comes with having raised an apostate child. Being factually correct or incorrect is subordinate to communal standing.
This happens because there's a lot of cultural bias towards being centrist, being perceived as the reasonable middle. People like that a lot, it feels good, so whenever such people try to describe political disputes it's tempting to try and describe both parties as the same when arguably they're not.
This Substack article is a good case in point. It makes it sound like there's two sides, both demanding censorship, and Substack standing in the reasonable middle. But in reality they're only describing one side. They say:
"In the online Thunderdome, it is imperative that you are not seen to engage with ideas from the wrong group; on the contrary, you are expected to marshall whatever power is at your disposal – be it cultural, political, or technological – to silence their arguments"
Are both sides here trying to silence the other?
No. One side is and we've seen that a lot, hence why this post exists and that's partly why Substack has taken off. But the most "extreme" view promoted by sceptical Substackers on vaccines is that mandates are immoral and people should be free to decide, for various reasons. They aren't arguing that people promoting vaccines should be forcibly censored. At least I've never seen any such arguments, not even in comments.
"It’s [always] the other side who shuts down criticism because they know they can’t win the argument."
Is it? Again, people flagging red alerts over problematic COVID policies or data aren't trying to shut down criticism of themselves, in fact they routinely highlight and engage with it by writing long responses to people who disagree with them (knowing full well they'll never get a response).
In reality, one side here speaks but never listens whilst simultaneously working hard to ensure nobody is allowed to disagree with them. And the other side does not.
So whilst I applaud Substack's take, their framing of it is curious and maybe doesn't bode well. They aren't sitting in the middle here because there is no middle. There's one group that wants to wipe the others out completely and will use any tactics available to do so, and then there's Substack that's sheltering those people from the storm.
This seems to be the public perception: only one side demands censorship. This isn't quite true and only shows you how well one side is at publicizing that they're being censored, which, ironically, means they're censored -less-.
Palestinian accounts on facebook have been deleted for years when they were trying to report on occupation. Facebook also deleted all the accounts of Nicaraguan socialists trying to counter the Western narratives about their election. Anything on social media that is anti-imperialist, especially when it comes from the actual global south, has been silenced, and also silently silenced - because it' not part of the mainstream discourse, so people often don't realize it's gone because they never knew it was there to begin with. It was easy to quietly sweep under the rug.
The new right isn't so easy to quietly sweep under the rug, because it's loud and it's next door to many people in the West, so you notice when the posts are gone, people yell about it and call wolf - which means they have the voice to yell, and the power to cry wolf.
It's an old (very, very old) insight that rules for censorship are made with the the excesses of the right as legitimation for it, and then used against the left. Which is why, on the left, it would be pragmatically and strategically smart to stop clamoring for the censorship of the right. We're just handing the agents of control the tools to silence us with.
Well, I was using vaccines as an example because it's mentioned in the article (which appears to be prompted by some flak from the Guardian).
I don't know about Palestinians and Nicaraguan socialists. Are they demanding that their critics be silenced? I doubt they're in any position to even imagine demanding that.
"It's an old (very, very old) insight that rules for censorship are made with the excesses of the right as legitimation for it, and then used against the left."
Maybe it's old because it's no longer true? I'm approaching middle age now, and the best examples of right wing censorship I can think of are all related to sexual morals and porn. But at least in the UK left wing parties usually support censoring that stuff too, e.g. here's an old article about the current head of the UK Labour Party being concerned about internet porn and other Labour party figures supporting the idea of internet censorship:
If the left has ever been the side of free speech it must have been some time before I was born. I suspect the reality is that the people who want censorship are typically those in power or most aligned with power, and that swings back and forth over time.
> the best examples of right wing censorship I can think of are all related to sexual morals and porn
While those topics do come up for censorship here in the US, some people are also demanding to remove topics related to race and other interpretations of history, and sometimes for curse words.
For example, two trending topics in the US today are Dan Bongino getting kicked off YouTube and the book Maus being restricted/removed/relegated in a school district in Tennessee, and people complaining from both sides of being censored.
Parent seemed to not be talking about vaccines, but that censorship only was being applied to one "side."
So this comment was intentionally describing issues that are from different sides to point out that (A) it doesn't only happen to the "right," and (B) the fact that we hear about it so much from the "right" might actually be because they're censored less. Then (C) they describe that this is potentially even an intentional pattern used by more middle-leaning "left" to justify censorship against the "right" and then leverage against their own, more radical, side.
Not necessarily defending the idea, but comment seemed relevant to the parent, to me.
I would like to hear a long-form version that actually spells out your argument. I think we’re headed towards an authoritarian nightmare because politicians worldwide seem to be interested in tearing up the democratic process. Others seem to think we’re headed towards an authoritarian nightmare because YouTube takes down some videos. These things don’t seem comparable to me, but your comment makes me think I’m missing something important.
They're not comparable if you see YouTube as just a company. But you can look at it differently. It is also an organization with total authority over a widely used realm of global public discourse. It can use that power to determine what you hear and see, including both censorship and promotion via "the algorithm". It has massive economic and political influence. Careers are built on its platform, and it has effectively unlimited resources to manipulate politicians and effect policies to its benefit. All this, and it is 100% undemocratic, unresponsive in nearly every way to even those within the organization much less the greater public.
To be clear, governments turning away from even what is mostly limited representative democracy is very worrying. But it's also fair to worry about corporate power.
They’re interrelated - YouTube is an arm of the media industrial complex as much as the New York Times is. What it chooses to broadcast or not affects the public consciousness.
I think what you're missing is that social media companies are now essentially acting as government propaganda outlets and actively suppressing dissent. Some people believe that the current pandemic justifies suppressing "misinformation", but obviously once the government has that power they're going to use it for other purposes as well.
I think it largely comes from a lack of empathy that has been cultivated for a while now through the loss of social cohesion. It seems like across the board (families, friends, local communities, spouses etc), people are suffering socially and turn to insular groups on social media to cope.
Yeah, I think the only way out of this is empathy.
You don't have to think both sides are morally or rationally the same to have empathy for both sides. The alternative is either mass slaughter or mass displacement, at the extremes. You can't eliminate your "enemy" without either murdering/displacing them or somehow coming to terms with them (ideally, being friends with them). MLK got this right, and he was able to say this without compromising in one iota his stances on social justice, class justice, etc.
Why should one have empathy with people who deny other peoples' basic human rights simply because of their gender, sexual orientation or religion?
Back in 1939 the world decided they had enough of my ancestors (I'm German) and put a stop to bigotry by using force. These days, such views can get you elected to US Presidency.
> Why should one have empathy with people who deny other peoples' basic human rights simply because of their gender, sexual orientation or religion?
Because it's easier to stop them believing that, if you understand why they're doing that in the first place. And understanding why they might believe that, is empathy.
Trick question, they will not have empathy for you either way.
The paradox of tolerance is not a novel idea, and people from Plato to Popper have chewed through it, and it is pretty much incontrovertible by now that the only way that a society can remain open and tolerant is to not tolerate intolerance.
> Why should one have empathy with people who deny other peoples' basic human rights simply because of their gender, sexual orientation or religion?
Because people disagree about factual matters all the time, and if you're just going to fight people who disagree with you, you'll be fighting literally everyone for the rest of your life, and a stable society might well become untenable.
> Back in 1939 the world decided they had enough of my ancestors (I'm German) and put a stop to bigotry by using force.
That's a pretty weird take. You think countries fought Germany because of its bigotry, and not because it was an aggressive expansionist regime that invaded them?
Hateful ideology without followers is just that: ideology to be forgotten in the dustbin of history.
It is one's own choice to believe in hateful ideology like racism, sexism or transphobia. No one forces anyone to believe in any kind of ideology - therefore the focus and the blame should be on the people who willingly decide to believe hateful ideology (and, obviously, the spreaders of such ideology).
The US has been willing to go to war to fight the Nazi regime. For me, it is inconceivable how wide swaths of the US could have ended up with welcoming the successors of the Nazi ideology, not even a century later.
I am not saying responsibility does not exist. But no one lives in a vacuum. Everyone grows up in *an environment* they cannot choose for themselves, where one gets their beliefs and morality primed. Some are brainwashed one could say.
Still, they are people that should have compassion, that you can call onto.
> No one forces anyone to believe in any kind of ideology
I think you don't understand the common working of religious societies very well, or people in general that would not allow their beliefs to be questioned or think in absolutes.
People do not exist outside their circumstances. Being raised in religion/hateful worldview, without contact with outsiders and shunning doubtful members of group (alienating and shunning are really popular in such circles, in more or less vidible manner) doesn't give to many options in what to believe. Also, such ideas are not viewed as -isms inside such groups, they are often "fruit" of a whole tree of ideology and dogmas.
>The US has been willing to go to war to fight the Nazi regime. For me, it is inconceivable how wide swaths of the US could have ended up with welcoming the successors of the Nazi ideology, not even a century later.
The people who spent their early adulthood shooting at literal nazis generally held beliefs that would have the group you endorse in your profile calling them nazis today.
I'm not sure how you can call the current quibbling about race ethnicity "the successors of the Nazi ideology". Ignoring the "believes in literal superiority of one race" types who are a rounding error, most of the people getting called racist today say things that 1990s sociologists would have published without thinking twice.
Help me out. Watch Schindler's List (famous movie) and after, let us know if you still feel that, and in what ways how, the US is welcoming the successor of Nazi ideology. I'm not seeing it. Not even at a glance.
> how, the US is welcoming the successor of Nazi ideology. I'm not seeing it. Not even at a glance.
The guys in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us"? A Presidential candidate (and later President) openly mocking a disabled person on stage? Said President who sees immigrants as a threat and has no problem being backed by literal white supremacists, antisemites and KKK members? Who made first popularity with spreading the myth that Barack Obama was not a citizen of the US? Who openly called for the illegal locking up of a political opponent? Who disrespected the freedom of the press and the independence of the legislative and judicial branch that forms the pillar of a democratic society? Who invited if not outright ordered his backers to disrupt and prevent the orderly transition of power to his democratically elected successor? Who continually and baselessly accused vote fraud?
The Trump Presidency, its campaign and its voter base was and is filled with Nazi ideology at its core.
Still not seeing it. Nazis lined up people and shot them because of who they were. A literal economic machine was created to kill millions of people. But, hey, the president apparently mocked someone. Seriously? That is included in your comparison to nazis?
> Nazis lined up people and shot them because of who they were.
The Holocaust did not happen over night, it built upon years of dismantling the democracy of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis took power in 1933, the Holocaust began in 1941 - that's eight years.
> But, hey, the president apparently mocked someone. Seriously? That is included in your comparison to nazis?
The Nazi ideology was based upon declaring people unworthy of the right to live - and disabled people actually were murdered prior to the Jews ("Aktion T4" and others).
I'm not going to call Trump a full-blown Nazi, but the parallels between his Presidency and the years both prior and past 1933 are clearly present. Especially the part with fanatic supporters willing to commit murder and violence in the streets for their ideology. "Never again" especially means to prevent what led to the Holocaust in the first place.
I don't think empathy has anything to do with it, and I think that both-sidesing is one of the biggest challenges we face.
The trend that I see as most damaging is denialism as a mainstream philosophy. Denialism leads to distrust and fuels libertarinism, which, by it's very design, is a philosophy of decohesion.
The beginnings of my education on denial came from people fighting one of the largest denialist projects in history, but the strategies across all forms of denial are very similar. It's worth studying in-depth:
On the contrary, studies have shown that this comes from an excess of empathy. Studies have shown that when empathy is controlled chemically, increased empathy correlates positively to increased tribalism.
Personally I have major dystopian rhetoric fatigue and think thr answer is that they need to collectively shut the hell up about authoritarian nightmares. Not in a censorship way but a "You people are being paniced dumbasses again in a way completely unhelpful even if you were right, and the sooner this stupid zeitgeist ends just like the 'terrorists planning on hitting the remote Iowa small town petting zoo' the better!" way.
The construct has become a worse than useless intellectual trap in multiple ways.
1. It immediately catastrophizes with the favorite of bird cage liners everywhere, bad extrapolations taken uncritically as gospel.
2. Instead of clarifying as a common touchstone frame of reference it becomes dystopia definition creep that undermines the very notion of bad outcomes as things to be avoided. Satirically succicently summed up as "Oh no, having to get a job by applying online is being enslaved by technology! Having to buy groceries? Enslaved by corporations!" "Abundance of food supply? Oh no! Overpopulation and obesity!"
3. It leads to the uber-dumbness of accelerationism and being so stubbornly married to being right about bad outcomes they outright seek to cause the "inevitable" as twisted vindication. It is doomsday prognostication but even stupider. Notably accelerationists have always been wrong about their "inevitable". The Manson family's "Helter Skelter" and dumbass idea of an apocalyptic race war.
What should be done instead of dystopianizing? Point out the actual non-remote hypothetical bad effects and the situation for why it is likely. "Counter situations" exist to many solid ideas. Levies when they hold and are overrun turn the "protected" area into a reservoir instead of letting the water potentially wash away. Conversly below sea level the natural tendency is towards flooding as waters will go towards you instead of away when they are unbound.
"Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right."
So true.
My view is that the more involved "the system" gets in people's lives with laws dictating what can and cannot be done (for increasingly trivial things, or by abusing the legal process!), the more people will be negatively affected. People mostly only care about what affects them, or only see what affects them.
This essentially lead to a simple majority forcing a substantial minority to do, or refrain from doing, something. Yet the members of that majority may find themselves being similarly forced as a member of the substantial minority on a different subject.
Social (global) media means that that One Thing You Oppose can now be found quickly. Don’t like X, well X is happening somewhere. Whereas information used to be much more siloed, and therefore problems at least seemed much more local.
> This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political right" (which is no longer really a relevant tag).
I find it interesting that when someone goes the extra mile and posts a long and we’ll thought out article attempting to undo this massive divide cause by this mistrust that within the first few comments you find someone stating in a very condescending way that republicans are idiots.
You’re doing more harm than whatever good you think you’re doing. Nobody is going to be shamed into believing your beliefs. That should be clear by now.
> It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them.
Shared enemies makes for strange bedfellows. If some group in power is threatening groups B and C, even if B and C otherwise hate each other they will band together and fight for their own survival.
Creeping censorship will ultimately always self-defeating for this reason. You'll win some early victories against the extreme fringe that no one supports, but it never ends there.
Wondering to what extent the growing "left vs. right" divide is mostly artificially created as a distractionary strategy to keep attention away from the very real and growing divide of the Have's and Have-not's. And prolong the unfettered capitalism that nowadays is best-served with flawed democracies or even outright autocracy.
I think what you've hit on is that the real struggle, which is between labour and capital, has been replaced by a grab bag of issues that pitch themselves as being anti-authoritarian.
The left/right divide has been traditionally on the "very real and growing divide of the Have's and Have-not's".
Republicanism vs monarchy, socialism vs capitalism, libertarianism vs authoritarianism, anarchism vs fascism...
It always has been about "power be in the hands of the many" vs "the few". Often there is much nuance to be added, both in the moment and over time as categories are gradual, complex and changing. Some have been more consistent or radical, some focus on a narrower part or are generally more moderate. But it's the same essential struggle but has different faces throughout history.
There is also the issue when hierarchical side dominates, then the divide seems almost arbitrary, because you only get to have radicals of one side and moderates who keep trying to put band-aids over things.
Your distinction is just as artificial as left vs right. Fanatics and fundamentalists also always think everything they aren't obsessed in is a distraction deliberately engineered to undermine their oh so important cause.
Common enemies unite. It doesn't matter what divides you, if you only fight against what unites you. Coalitions and compromises are normal in a healthy society. It's more insane that people are willingly poison society, just because someone has a different stance on an unrelated topic.
The "political right" (which doesn' really include classical conservatives) is correct on the topic to err on the side of freedom in regards to information. I believe there is freedom to be gained through individualism and collectivism both, but the topic of censorship doesn't touch that in my opinion.
It is as you said, this even connects people that have different beliefs about sensible policy.
Yes, I think what you've said encapsulates my personal opinion (not from the OP but what I believe nonetheless): that classical conservatism is no longer the "right wing", that it has been entirely supplanted by libertarianism.
It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them.
This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political right" (which is no longer really a relevant tag).
I'm reminded of this amazing review by George Orwell:
"Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right."
https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/