So when CNN fired Reza Aslan and Kathy Griffin due to pressure from Trump supporters - what does that signal to you? I probably don't agree with any of the three being fired, though I admit I don't know many details because frankly I could give a damn about any of those people. But the point is, people lately love to criticize people on the left for vigilante justice, but fail to see how much is done universally now. What I see is something like Eversor said: increasing political polarization and tensions. The question sensible to ask after that is: what is causing these tensions? Who has a good answer here?

It's probably about time that the US follow the lead of British Commonwealth and European countries and adopt more robust hate crime laws. But the left seems allergic to posing any kind of political solution to legitimate problems and prefers screaming "this is not normal" and "this is not ok" until everyone is blue in the face, and doing nothing about it.

Particularly I wasn't talking about internet communication. What do you do about people in reality who offend you. Keyboard warriors aside.

The sad thing is that enough people can't see the difference between hate speech and free speech. Slippery slope arguments abound. If you don't actively spout final solution memes on 4chan etc. or promoting other forms of violence then I don't really see how you can think the government is really out to get you. OTOH I agree there probably is a slippery slope if you like to traffic in this dark stuff for electoral reasons (see Jon`C's post).

The really sad things is that all those Gadsden flag toting gun nuts really do fail to see the difference between the first and second amendment and will perpetually be averse to any kind of hate speech laws, because they legit believe that any perceived encroachment of speech-even in the context of violent threat-is to be taken as a sign that the Second Third American] rEVOLolution (lol wut?) is underway.

Here are three things, although I don't think this list is exhaustive:

1) an increasingly unequal economy with most of the gains being made by the extraordinarily wealthy and large swaths of the population feeling left behind because they are not being integrated into the new, hyper-competitive globalized economy or the culture that has emerged with it, which creates a cultural dissonance between those who are part of the new economy and those who aren't
2) social media gives a voice and the ability to organize to groups that used to be marginalized, but it also takes away from the media the power and authority to block groups that don't deserve attention from receiving it
3) a political system that's too brittle and too bought out by special interests to tackle the very real problems that Americans are confronting in any kind of serious way making it impossible for Americans to believe that the government is a legitimate instrument of the people to achieve self-determination

On the other hand, the fact that some Muslims outside the US have succeeded in conflating personal offence with self-preservation, there actually is a legit slippery slope argument to be had regarding hate speech laws and things like drawing the prophet. Too bad that it's the most repugnant and hateful people who tend to point this out the most. :-/

So what's the strategy to fight it?



So, I agree with what you're saying here, but maybe I'm confused a bit by your usage of norms. Part of progressivism is particularly not fighting for the norm, you're pushing away from it. Unless if you're using norm in the abstract, as in, we're pushing for new norms?


Why has it been toothless?


Can we say for sure that it has caused more behaviors? We don't exactly have a control here.


Isn't it a contradiction, sort of, to say the people trying to enforce norms are "powerless", yet we see them successful in getting firings? If they're powerless, then there's nothing to worry about? I think the fear is that they actually do have some degree of power and use it?


Well, yeah, I think most of the strategies people employ are pretty poor. My ideal strategy would involve more billionaires and more guillotines. /s but only kind of


Plenty of people do fine outside of college. The real question is, does the University of Nevada want to have students who voluntarily go to a rally to stand next to neo-Nazis and the KKK and chant "**** you ******s". If they do, then personally I would avoid that school. Also, people didn't cover their faces because it's illegal to do so in a public rally here.

I don't mind CNN holding their broadcasters to a standard of behavior, but like, Reza Aslan has been tweeting like an idiot for years. The remarks he got fired for weren't uncharacteristic of the type of thing he tweets (despite his claims to the contrary). If they didn't want a hack academic telling people to **** off on Twitter they shouldn't have given him a show in the first place.

I do agree that the left and right are both contributing a lot to the normalization of internet mob justice and neither wants to take a lot of responsibility for it. GamerGate was a portent of that too, haha

This would be the correct response if the U.S. political system was effectively democratic. It's democratic in that we choose the name leading us, but every study I've seen makes it clear that what most of us wants has no effect on policy, and money wins elections. The left "is allergic" to political solutions because none are actually available.

If as much energy was put into demanding that politicians pass legislation as is put into whiny screeds about cultural appropriation I bet we'd have some legislative victories.

You know what? I agree with you here.



Interesting. Well there's another good thing about face-to-face communication. Interesting how laws here are working to curtail unlimited anonymous free speech in a public space in a way that exposes people for who they are. And they also have the freedom to stay at home and continue to ****post online instead.

Perhaps this speaks to the tradeoff between anonymity and respect for the well being of immediate bystanders: I can post all the garbage I want online, but the minute I threaten you physically by entering your space, I should expect laws to curtail my anonymity. Of course twitter mobs and doxxing are a loophole here.

I know that people on the left and center-left like to pretend that our politics are largely a response to injustices in the world rather than an activist effort to bring about a specific vision of society. And that the power of our perspective rests on the fact that we defend the underprivileged, the powerless and the downtrodden. But I think that's basically horse ****, and probably a reflective of the fact that we've bought into Francis Fukuyama-style End of History politics.

Well, with a Republican majority - not likely to get something like that passed, but I agree with your point, that the left does have some emphases that are a waste of time.



I mean, if they're willing to go to the rally, show their face, then they should be prepared for the social consequences. Though I think the rally thing is just to help identify people to arrest if any serious crimes are committed.

I agree entirely with your statement. It's not about responses, it's about norms. I dislike that image, the one that sets itself up as the resistance to all of these perceived new threat. Those threats are often imaginary, the fight is one about how we live and what we find acceptable. And I think most of the tantrums people throw about Trump are inept and are like a form of scream therapy for liberals. It lets them feel good but doesn't actually work to affect change. It's easy. That's really what it comes down to, fighting on the internet is easy and isn't scary, doesn't threaten you or make you work.

That's an interesting topic. It really has little to do with political correctness and the court of public opinion, though, doesn't it? To the extent that it does, I supported it in my earlier post when I said that the "language police" were fully justified in rectifying what was an endemic problem of sexist norms and outright harassment in the workplace. What I took issue with was the wholesale transplanting of this to impersonal, public media like television and the web, where the imperative to fire somebody for slipping up is far too sensitive and incredibly dubious in utility.

If you were curious, though, in the case of my right wing IRL friend whose views became too dark for even me to stomach, I just had to draw a line in the sand for him and make it clear that so long as we spoke to each other, I didn't want him to spout alt. right memes, and generally gave him the cold shoulder until we could find some other way to connect. It's partially my fault I guess for giving him too much sympathy when I took it to be more of a joke early on, but when I realized how serious he was I think that shunning him was totally appropriate. I don't engage him directly on this issue because personal experience has shown me that to the extent that I try to help him see him how wrong he is, it only reveals his greater problems with depression and he changes the subject, so we just don't talk about it. I don't embarrass him in public because he keeps his views mostly to himself and doesn't cause harm.

Gotta admit, the scream therapy feels pretty good, hence this thread. Can we get back to talking about two scoops of ice cream please....

That said, as everything we do becomes more and more connected to the web, workplace norms are going to merge with the court of public opinion. Which is weird, but it's why, e.g., you have to have people like James Damore fired from Google. There is a good chance he would have been shown the door in the old days just because he attacked HR and its mission head on in an uncompromising way, but without the leaks to social media there's a chance nobody would have ever seen it beyond the small number of individuals he showed it to in a request for comments (which went nowhere interesting). I am told that in Europe there are lots of crazy people like this in the workplace, but people just shrug it off without letting it blow up.

There's probably a reason the rest of the world calls us crazy. That said, he probably should have been fired, all things considered.

OTOH, now he's on his way toward becoming a star for the alt. right. The dynamic at play he is so unfortunate.



https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-thoughts-on-the-google-memo/

Speaking of two scoops of ice cream, the toddler in chief has issued an "I know you are but what am I" today when he called out the "alt. left" for its activities in Virginia.



Source (audio autoplay warning)

Speaking of shaming the police...



http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/08/15/january_daily_caller_video_demonstrates_how_to_plow_through_protesters_with.html

Robert Mercer to Tucker Carlson: delet this!!1

Wow. The tech industry is comprehensively throwing these guys under the bus. And I called it when I said that at some point these guys would be moving to Tor if they can't host their domain anywhere on the public web.

And now more of this "running leftists over is funny" stuff, now from the POTUS himself:

Good. It's about time someone taught them how to behave.

I agree with you there. That's a symptom of laziness in America.. people prefer to resist what's close, and it's easy to Tweetstorm CNN, but it's not easy to go make actual change in your community.

I do like her take, and I think it's possibly correct. Having some questionable ideas isn't the worst thing ever, if the person is willing to dialogue and is willing to change their minds.

However I haven't read the memo (nor do I care to) so I can't say what I would have done in Google's position. I trust though that it was unsavory.

Alt-left was a term invented by liberals to discredit people on the actual left. Now it's been co-opted by right wingers in a false equivalence, tu quoque attack on the left. Thanks, liberals.

Though many liberal sources are finally admitting that it's not enough to just dialogue with Nazis.

Again, still not hearing anything about the DSA, IWW, or any of the other fantastic left-wingers who actually faced the Nazis, as compared to the Neera Tanden liberals trying to take credit on Twitter.

Also, with the alt-left comment it seems you're right, that he only spoke against Nazism to save face and doesn't actually believe in it.

Seriously, the question should be, why was the web hosting service voluntarily letting Nazi websites proliferate for years?

Should 4chan be shut down?

Not so much the text of the memo itself, but more that he lacked the awareness to realize that he had his head up his ass in airing his naive ideas in an authoritative way on a super touchy topic. I can't imagine how dumb somebody would be for thinking this was a good idea.

As far as being unsavoury, probably not any different than the unconscious bias that most of those in his demographic share (and he made an effort to cite sources rather than just ranting, and the language tried to be objective), but he legit thought he was making a good faith argument to debug some issues with HR. lol

Also, according to the experts, his understanding on the topic was not terribly deep and was probably forwarding some potentially dubious claims here and there, so there's that.

In an ideal world I guess he shouldn't have been fired, but then again in an ideal world employees don't instigate wars between the ranks of their company and directly assail the one organization that tries to create unity between the two groups.

Easy: try to increase the value of the company for your shareholders. Their options were pretty limited by the time the thing blew up on Twitter and created a wave of anger within the company.

Nothing of value would be lost. But no since that's not 4chan's intent, I'm more thinking of places like Stormfront.

You mean /pol?

[experiencing technical difficulties]

The problem isn't that they're Nazis, it's lionizing domestic terrorism. Services should shut them down for the exact same reason they shut down Daesh recruitment sites. Nazi terrorism is not better or even meaningfully different just because it's being perpetrated by white Americans.

B-but muh 2nd amendment rights enshrined by Thomas Jefferson represent a moral imperative for us to refresh the tree of liberty by overthrowing the gummint at my ranch!

Gadsden_flag.jpg

dont step on snek