I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in society in general.
There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a different view point, then you will see extreme conservatism concentrated somewhere (in this case, 4chan).
The extreme left throughout popular media? I watched a neoliberal win the democratic primary this past year. We can talk about whether the media was biased in her favor, but that would strengthen my point: they chose her over the progressive candidate.
I really don't like this sort of "look what you made me do" thinking, especially when the reaction is to their own boogeymen. If the alt-right wants to blame the left for their rise, they should be honest about their origins: culture wars on the internet, not society as a whole.
I don't think the example you give is very poignant: the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members.
I do agree with you that this culture war didn't suddenly appear and divide society as a whole ex nihilo, but that's because nothing ever does. Movements start small and expand That's true of the particular brand of progressivism at hand here as well as the GNU movement or even the adoption of Linux and open source more broadly (those could sort of be said to have originated in a "culture war on the internet").
And I think it would be hard to dispute that the West has seen a very hard cultural push by progressives in recent years. Compare [1] to [2] for example. These are not equivalent examples and they are not meant to be. My point is that the sort of push seen in [1] clearly has implications outside of the abstract internet (Twitter is part of the Internet, but the point is that it has impacts on real life in a way 4chan doesn't). Also, Islamic stuff is perhaps the most obviously conservative stuff, but it's by no means the only one. Asian cultures in general are much more conservative than the West too.
> the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members.
I was responding mostly to the "popular media" claim, but I take your point.
The question of a "cultural push" is interesting to me for two reasons:
1. It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole, and,
2. It makes broadly agreeable political positions more partisan than they need to be.
I don't know of a way to prove or disprove (1), besides saying that I'm not on the mailing list. I think progressive views tend to be more fragmented and diverse than conservative onlookers realize, and that this contributes to a feeling that progressives are advancing a monolithic program to change America's culture.
On the other hand, I think (2) is pretty worrying. Are gay rights part of the cultural push? What about access to (reasonably priced) medicine, or environmental consciousness?
I think that, apart from the true-believing fundamentalists and hardliners, most people can recognize that many progressive positions are at their core very agreeable (civil liberties for all, no unavoidable deaths, modernize our economy both for our own health and for future generations). The problem arises when those positions become associated with progressives qua some conservative boogeyman, not qua their benefit to society.
> It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole.
It doesn't need to be concerted. An alternative explanation could be that liberals are more likely to pursue creative careers than conservatives, thus shaping the media (e.g. TV shows and movies) that contribute to the major consensus narrative.
Why that is so is not part of my hypothesis. The point is that the behavior of a system is emergent more often than it is concerted (which is also why most conspiracy theories are untrue).
I don't think there needs to be some central authority figure or a weekly meeting for what I'm describing to occur. Like, there is no concerted effort among suburban dwellers to clog up the roads leading to the city every morning, yet it still happens.
Perhaps "push" is the wrong word, yet it's the closest I can think of. I think the issue is more that liberals are overwhelmingly Democrat (that's hardly a controversial claim, I hope) and liberals tend to have certain values that make them care about individuals first rather than about society first.
I agree that it's all fuzzy, kind of like evolution doesn't have an actual goal. In some sense, evolution is about producing more fit individuals, yet it's not like it's a directed effort (various congenital disabilities still occur). It is "sort of" directed by environmental pressures, sort of like the "push" I'm talking about is "sort of" directed by the "progressive lens" if you will.
To me, it's sort of like a problem of bad goal alignment: suppose that the "goal" is to get out of a maze. For some reason, we get a fuzzy signal after each step that allows us to sort of guess whether it was a good move or not. So far, the right way seems to have been: "West, West, North, East". Some people guess that the pattern is that we had to go West for a while but there was a definite shift towards the East, so we have to go Eastward all the way through from now on. Others, see it as more of a clockwise thing and are guessing that the next move is going to be East or South.
At the end of the day, one of them may be right, or neither may be. But even if the next steps are "go North, then Westward all the way", it wouldn't invalidate the steps made before.
In other words, I don't think that the right way is to say "what would the progressive do? Alright, then let's do exactly the opposite". Rather, I think the problem is that the "push" I'm talking about is due to recognizing a pattern that isn't quite the right one.
Agree to disagree I guess. I wasn't even talking about politics. I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?
EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.
> I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years.
First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just that the motives for the term "PC culture" are part of a broader and somewhat aged conservative campaign against the perceived liberal elite.
> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?
I can indeed say this with some certainty. I'm in college right now, in a department (philosophy) that conservatives frequently associate with rampant leftism and its intellectual mainstays (pomo, critical theory, &c). This has not reflected my experience at all - many of my professors are philosophical libertarians, and the diversity of ideas is actually broader than I expected going into the major.
I have also had progressive professors, but they have bent over backwards to make conservative students comfortable (even in environments where nobody was on the attack).
Of note: The most overt political actions I've seen recently on my campus have been plasterings of white supremacist posters [1] and the murder of a visiting black student by a white student [2].
Edit: Added "recently" to the final sentence. There were some campus sexual assault protests in my freshman and sophomore years that might be characterized as political (even if I wouldn't).
>this has been a conservative talking point for a long time.
It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use.
The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it.
I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
I can say it because it's my lived experience. I think you should read my comment again - I have seen hate on my campus, and it is not a hoax. Richard Collin's death is a testament to that.
> And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
In other words, we have the most potent tool for confirmation bias and alienation ever conceived by man. Lenses only capture moments, not sympathetic humans.
Periscope is pretty awesome, I watch livestreams of protests, get realtime info on events. What's funny is how often you see something as it's happening, then later when "witnesses" are interviewed about it, how often they straight up lie. I'll take the video.
By the way, many campus sexual assault protests are very political, the ones that demand removing presumption of innocence, both at the university policy and even at the legal level. That is just about as political as you can get.
> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?
You shouldn't make a claim and then ask someone else to disprove it. What numbers are you basing this belief off of? How do you define extreme left? Do you consider beliefs like evolution and global warming to be extreme left view points?
According to [0] it seems that the number of professors who consider themselves liberal has increased by about 10% in the last 60 years. But the definition of liberal has become much more inclusive over the last 60 years as well, so I am not sure how meaningful this is.
Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.
Good point. I guess I don't interact with them anymore, but I'm a conservative who graduated in the arts just a year ago, so its recent history to me. In all of my literature classes, the content was mostly left leaning.
If it's "left-leaning" rather than "extreme left", then I don't quite see the problem. I would expect that students tend to be more progressive (or, more generically speaking, radical) than the population at large. When you're young, you can more easily adjust to changes in society, both on a mental and practical level. As you grow older, you are likely to depend on the existing system more and more (e.g. to support your children, then to pay your pension), and thus more hesitant to turn its knobs.
Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.
You've subbed in "something larger" where I said "broadly representative".
Do you think the protests are broadly representative of attitudes at universities? Because sure, I bet that there are more than just the protesters. But colleges have pretty big populations, so the supporters of 40 protesters can still be a couple hundred people out of tens of thousands.
Agreed. I am making a weaker claim than the one you are objecting to.
My point is that it is not some irrelevant fringe. I've backed that up with other examples, but I can't show it to you more convincingly.
At any rate, I think my point is a response to your question about "interacting with universities" (you didn't ask me, but my point is that doing exactly that won't exactly convince one the claim the other poster made is entirely wrong).
At any rate, I think my point is a response to your question about "interacting with universities" (you didn't ask me, but my point is that doing exactly that won't exactly convince one the claim the other poster made is entirely wrong).
But that's just my point with the scare quotes. How does a single person go about gaining experience with the thousands of individuals that comprise a given university?
And then there's ~10 million undergraduate students in the USA. Extrapolating from a few thousand people that choose to speak loudly isn't going to paint a meaningful picture of their views.
I think one has to see populations as distributed along a normal distribution (a bell curve) or some other probability distribution rather than somehow coalescing to a single "representative individual".
Protesters represent one tail of the distribution on some measure (e.g. "belief in social justice"). The fact that protests get more intense and/or more frequent and/or more populous are indications of a shift in the distribution (picture a normal distribution being shifted along the x axis).
That's what I am pointing to. I don't think everyone has to be in lockstep to be able to talk about what a given group does or believes or what not.
Even if you do something like assume a bimodal distribution with small variance, the mere presence of protests doesn't tell you much.
It's not even particularly clear to me that protests have gotten more frequent. When I was in school 15 years ago there were enough protests; I just ignored them...
Well, yes, if you're asking are there more or less of those things we'd call "protests", then it's not clear at all that there are any more or less than at some other point in time. I mean, I saw a protest on the street the other day: it was two guys and a policeman…
You'll notice however that is a far cry from a representative summary of my point.
Anyway, there are people who've researched this, notably Jonathan Haidt. They created a website to talk about the problem here: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ . And they think that there is a problem of shrinking viewpoint diversity in the social sciences. My experience is that it's gotten worse, but we don't seem to be able to agree on that.
For me it's not so much the day to day interactions, which are largely apolitical[1], but the culture we consume. For example the latest E3 showcases had quite an emphasis on "diversity". On most days there will be some story about wage gap, harassment or other sexual missteps on the HN front page and various online newspapers. Now that's the daily surface stuff.
This is not bad in itself most of the time. I do not deny that some of those social issues are real. But occasionally they go into the other extreme where they start to seem threatening or grossly stereotyping.
And then there is that background noise with shitstorms trying to get people fired over things they said (remember the nasa T-shirt guy? or brendan eich?), products boycotted over guilt by association and so on.
But they make you ask yourself "could this happen to me?". Say the wrong thing and get fired because someone is OFFENDED about a joke or affiliating with the wrong people?
I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language. This concerns me because when people push their preferences on the entire platform instead of subcommunities it becomes a cultural monoculture instead of a more compartmentalized system.
[1] The only exception I recall is the discussion about which gender inputs we should support in software forms where some suggested we should support the whole facebook madness.
> it's not just nerdy white males who play video games nowadays
Not to defend them or anything but the irony is that your indignant reaction illustrates precisely why your viewpoint is so unwelcome to gamers.
Having observed the games industry over many years, the gaming public really does want their comic book-like power fantasies and unrealistic heroes and heroines. The rather unsubtle ways that developers tend to shoehorn diversity into games or self-censor in the name of diversity[0], often at the behest of people like you, damages their immersion in the game regardless of whether they are morally right to feel that way or not. And then people come along and lambaste them for feeling that way, as above. That's not going to win any friends.
One cannot cram broccoli into a filet mignon and persuade people that it's just as good nor can one attempt to dictate what people should think by slipping a message into their entertainment, from their viewpoint, and not expect ferocious backlash.
[0] To avoid being pilloried, I will say this very explicitly: the point is not that diversity is bad. (Perish the thought.) The point is that its representation in media is often done very badly.
+1 to this and not sure why parent is being down voted. It's mindboggling to me that diversity of fictional characters in made up works of art is politicized. It's not affirmative action or discrimination or anything – it's literally just people choosing to create characters that are not white men. And for some reason that's controversial.
I live and work in downtown Seattle. I'd say "regularly". I don't even know who other conservatives are because we tend to keep that information, as I said, in the closet. I had one friend at work tell me in secret that he was also a conservative. All I'm saying is that conservatism is "unpopular" and sometimes "shameful" (at least from my experience), which is unhealthy.
Something that's popular is practically by definition not on the extreme any more.
In most of the developed world the Democrats would be considered a moderate right-wing party, and the Republicans a far-right theocratic extremism party (like, say the DUP in the UK, or CHP in Canada).
What you're seeing is a ground-shift in values, and what used to be considered OK is now considered extreme, and is therefore being shifted into the margins of the discussion.
To put it in sharper contrast: if you started loudly expressing the most mainstream views of the 1700s in today's society, you'd get a lot of people trying to shut you up and, failing that, marginalize you. And, probably, they'd be right to do so.
Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not and that's the point. /pol/ exists largely as a reaction to the suppression of non-progressive thought in the places where the demographic spends most of their time: academia, gaming, and tech.
There are certainly people who believe what they say on /pol/, but the vast majority of them are consciously acting as a parody of what they have been cast to be.
> /pol/ exists largely as a reaction to the suppression of non-progressive thought
/pol/ exists so edgy teenagers (and others who haven't developed mentally past that phase) can attempt to get a rise out of people by posting shallow, far-right tripe.
The level of intelligent discussion there is pitiful.
I parse your comment to mean "/pol/ is childish. People who hold those views are shallow and unintelligent."
I find it interesting that my posting discussing /pol/ - not supporting it, mind you, merely discussing it - elicits a response like this from a brand new account.
My position is that exactly this sort of response to anything that isn't "progressive" is what has caused the rise of /pol/.
Well, I've not really tried to define the term so explicitly, but I think it's fair to say that any position that is held by a majority of Republicans (or Democrats) is not extreme, because it would by definition not be outside the norm.
For example, public opinion in support of same-sex marriage in the US is currently at an all-time high of 64%, with 34% opposing. Being opposed to same-sex marriage is not an extreme position, as it is one that is shared by 1/3 of Americans. Only two years ago it was 42:40 in support. Therefore, the position statement "I believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman" is not extreme.
The bottom line is that many views that are strongly associated with conservativism are likely to result in personal attacks if expressed in the aforementioned settings.
Just look at the flak Peter Thiel has gotten for supporting Trump. Why does donating to a major party's presidential campaign result in things like this [1]?
So can you do the ground work and show that a position like opposition to same sex marriage is actually frequently and casually labeled as extreme?
(I can think of lots of other invectives that people apply to it, I'm just not sure that it particularly gets treated as a non mainstream view...)
I also disagree with the point in principle. We even have a word for it when a majority gets on the wrong side of rational (and goes to extremes), a mob.
> So can you do the ground work and show that a position like opposition to same sex marriage is actually frequently and casually labeled as extreme?
I suppose I could, but I'm honestly not interested in doing so to support a casual conversation on a web forum.
> I also disagree with the point in principle. We even have a word for it when a majority gets on the wrong side of rational (and goes to extremes), a mob.
Actually I'm not familiar with the term "mob" being used that way, and a quick search doesn't seem to support your usage either.
This subthread is off of devmunchies comment about Reddit and Twitter, and the OP is about 4chan. All of these forums are global.
My point is that American-style conservatism may represent half of Americans, but it's overwhelmed in other developed countries (which, taken together, are larger in population). So much so that I would argue that in the global context, American conservatism is small enough and far enough to one side of the debate that it's accurate to call it an extreme.
>There are certainly people who believe what they say on /pol/, but the vast majority of them are consciously acting as a parody of what they have been cast to be.
I'm relying only on personal experience. I know several people in real life that are "shitlords" online. They're doing it not because they believe the things they post, but because they've found it to be an effective way to shift the narrative and to throw their political opponents off-balance.
Likewise, I know a few people in real life that actually hold those extreme and (frankly) bigoted beliefs. As far as I know they haven't really changed their online behavior, and they're not part of that in-group.
I see plenty of conservatism all over Reddit and all of those other places you mentioned. It happens in boring threads on boring articles that aren't politically charged.
What causes the downvotes is the way the ideas are presented. If you write your comment like you're a writer for the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're going to be downvoted. There is plenty of room to discuss conservative ideas without resorting to the rhetoric that Fox News and talk radio have been pumping out since 2008.
I can't tell you how many times i've seen someone make a really good point about, say, the connection between rent control and the housing shortage but in the middle they go off on a tirade about the 'welfare state' and 'handouts' which causes their entire post to get downvoted into oblivion.
I will give you that socially conservative ideas are frequently completely off limits to discussion, and I think thats unfortunate.
I'm also old enough to remember /r/chimpire and other explicitly racist right wing subreddits who had massive support, well before the rise /r/the_donald. Hell, I even remember discussing the organized stormfront propaganda raids. To me, crying about the lack of conservatism is just code for "people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed." I follow plenty of subreddits where there is plenty of conservative thought.
> To me, crying about the lack of conservatism is just code [...]
For some, sure. But there are those of us who are not conservatives who share the view that conservatives have been subject to ubiquitous censorship.
I'm an anarchist, and honestly share about as much with the left as the right ideologically. The behavior of the left today sickens me, though. Even after the election of Trump - who himself is not traditionally "conservative" - has not seemed to have changed the way the left sees the right. The right is not a racist, homophobic, misogynist minority. They are a majority (albeit a slim one), and their views are both less extreme and far more commonly held than seems to be believed by the left.
I would imagine the comment was more to convey "don't hurt my feelings" than to encourage civility, which is a more difficult concept. For ideologues, good means rational means civil means moral means <insert political ideology>.
Once all words boil down to <ideology> or <not ideology>, a person can't express or precisely articulate ideas, which manifests in incoherent language.
It's especially funny considering the argument of the person calling for me to censor my thoughts is the same person crying that conservatives are forced to censor their thoughts.
The "rise of the extreme left throughout popular media"? So the communists and anarchists have taken over, then?
Come on, words mean things. I'm so tired of conservatives calling everything they disagree with the "far left", the "extreme left", and so on, as it muddies the waters for discussion of anything left of the Democratic Party.
>There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism
That's the real tragedy here. Intelligent conservative thought has been completely lost to the rhetorical insanity of our current political climate. For a perfect example of this take a look at what has become of the National Review.
The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.
Can you give me an example of the 'extreme left'? I'm probably well within it, which is why it's hard for me to see what you mean, or think of examples.
It's a controversial opinion but I agree with you. The inability to even have a discussion with people about left vs right inevitably leads to echo chambers in both camps.
The smaller the echo chamber the louder the volume.
Agreed. I moved from a right wing echo chamber (Boone County, AR) to a left wing echo chamber (Charlottesville, VA) about four years ago. Neither of those communities are currently able to even begin to understand the other.
There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a different view point, then you will see extreme conservatism concentrated somewhere (in this case, 4chan).