I don't know why you're being downvoted - you're right.
It's not speech about fiscal conservative policies or smaller government that get's censored. It's people telling their viewers to harass Sandyhook parents, or participate in a violent insurrection, or something similar that gets censored.
Playing the victim card without acknowledging TOS violations is intentionally misleading.
> It's not speech about fiscal conservative policies or smaller government that get's censored.
When cancel culture was running amok, people were getting fired/reprimanded/harassed for advocating nonviolent protests over riots, for using Chinese words that sound vaguely like an English racial slur, for interviewing Black Americans whose opinions differ slightly from the official narrative about what a Black American ought to think, for throwing a geisha-themed party for your young daughter, for wearing a prom dress inspired by a traditional Chinese aesthetic, etc. None of these are remotely right-wing offenses.
This is the whole problem--the left harms people whose actions/opinions are well within the Overton Window and upon criticism, they retreat to some variation of "we're just opposing objectively horrible people!". This whole game hurts left-wing credibility and it easier for far-right viewpoints to enter the mainstream (is so-and-so an actual Nazi or are they just failing to completely toe the left-wing party line?). It's also just shitty behavior that makes people angry and pushes them rightward, and it does nothing to help left-wing causes.
When people say reprehensible things, they receive an amount of backlash as a result (sometimes more than is reasonable).
The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology, however, so not sure why you're bringing it up. If your expectation is that 50% of backlash would be left leaning and 50% would be right leaning, I don't think that's reasonable, but if you think the backlash is because someone is conservative generally, you'd be mistaken.
There are a great many conservatives who can make their ideological arguments comfortably without being offensive. Conservative ideology isn't inherently offensive, but specific human beings say specific things that are reprehensible and when they do, it's called out.
> When people say reprehensible things, they receive an amount of backlash as a result (sometimes more than is reasonable).
Sure, but we aren't talking about reprehensible things, we're talking about "advocating against political violence" and cultural appreciation.
> The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology, however, so not sure why you're bringing it up
Because it's clearly about punishing deviation from a partisan line.
> If your expectation is that 50% of backlash would be left leaning and 50% would be right leaning, I don't think that's reasonable, but if you think the backlash is because someone is conservative generally, you'd be mistaken.
That's not my expectation, my expectation is that we don't persecute people for moderate beliefs (and no, caricaturing those beliefs to make them sound extreme doesn't count), nor do we tolerate said behavior.
> There are a great many conservatives who can make their ideological arguments comfortably without being offensive. Conservative ideology isn't inherently offensive, but specific human beings say specific things that are reprehensible and when they do, it's called out.
As previously discussed, a lot of people are "calling out" others for utterly innocuous transgressions. For example, my state subreddit is presently arguing that families who homeschool their kids are closet Nazis (that's the very popular opinion on that particular subreddit).
I guess I'm not familiar with people who are falling into this category you're suggesting. Could you cite some specific examples?
I'm thinking of Kanye, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, etc. These people expressed reprehensible viewpoints and were subsequently removed from various platforms as a result. That's not politics; what they said was reprehensible regardless of political ideology. You can find people who expressed similar political thoughts without the hate, but the people I named can't figure out how to do that and therefore have been removed (to some degree or another) from the communal discourse.
James Damore was fired for violating his employee agreement with Google, because he said the reason you don't see women in engineering and leadership positions is due to them being biologically incapable.
Even James confirmed as much. Trotting him out as an example is more to my point of how playing the victim card without acknowledging agreement violations is intentionally misleading. And before someone asks, "DiD u rEaD tHe MeMo?" it's right here:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Of course, those are two completely different statements, as I'm sure you know:
> you don't see women in engineering and leadership positions is due to them being biologically incapable.
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
And having read the full document (or even just the bits I quoted in my comment above), you surely also know that he was very explicitly not imputing population-level averages onto individuals. Damore's critics have been very openly lying about the contents of the document; there's no charitable way to interpret their claims.
To be quite clear, I don't think Damore is a hero (his politics are more conservative than mine and I don't think he handled the fallout particularly well), but he was clearly fired for claims he very explicitly didn't make[^1], and his critics are just doubling-down on what can't be described as anything other than trivially-verifiable lies.
[^1]: Even Google's legal team knew that they couldn't get him on those bases and instead they argued that criticizing Google's hiring practices implied that some of his coworkers weren't the best candidates for the job thus creating a hostile workplace. Of course, criticizing Google's hiring practices was absolutely pedestrian at Google at the time, although the argument was that Google's hiring practices were biased toward whites, men, etc. This is pretty obviously just pretense to fire him for ideological transgressions.
Hiding behind an appeal to averages does not change the fact that Damore said women [on average] are biologically incapable of being in tech and leadership positions.
Again, Damore reaped the consequences of his own actions by violating a contract he agreed to. This is intentionally misleading to represent him as a martyr for right-wingers.
Unless, of course, you think the conservative agenda includes promoting that women are biologically incapable of holding teach and leadership positions.
An average man is incapable of being in tech.
An average woman is incapable of being in tech.
There are men and women at the tail who are capable of being in tech.
Because of the difference in averages, there are fewer women than men who are capable and want to be in tech.
---
Collapsing all that to "women [on average] are biologically incapable of being in tech" is disingenuous. Using words like "incapable" implies binariness, ignoring the continuous nature of distributions.
Collapsing Damore's argument into "An average man is incapable of being in tech. An average woman is incapable of being in tech." is disingenious, especially given his quote only speaks to one sex.
But then I doubt you care, especially since your account does nothing but astroturf Damore on HN.
No one is trying to make a point by hiding behind an appeal to averages. That's the point. The fact that you can't support your assertions about Damore's claims (without changing his words) proves my point. :)
You mean the direct quote made above with the "assertions"? Are you intentionally playing dumb?
Here it is (again):
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Can you name others? I literally could not find the controversies for the first two, and it doesn’t appear anything worse than being fired from Google has happened to James Damore.
These links are just the first things that came up on Google to help you find what you’re looking for. I’m not claiming these links are the best sources.
They are both on wikipedia; I read them yesterday. On mobile now, but you can google them easily. They don’t have anything to do with conservatives views being suppressed because we weren’t talking about that. The original claim was that people who get “called out” have reprehensible views—I gave examples of people who were fired or harassed or etc for completely innocuous speech.
Oh dear, you think every comment on HN is a direct reply to the title? No, comments are arranged in a tree structure. For example, the comment you're reading right now is a reply to your previous comment, not to the title. It's not just HN that structures its comments this way--it's a very popular schema, so this bit of knowledge should be really helpful for you on your Internet adventures. Godspeed!
The comments were related to each other, and indirectly to the title. This discussion has descended into obtuseness, and I find obtuseness to be boring, so I’ll dip out.
> When people say reprehensible things, they receive an amount of backlash as a result (sometimes more than is reasonable).
And also when people say not reprehensible things.
> The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology, however, so not sure why you're bringing it up.
Then it's strange that it's been intimately connected with looming war against Russia and China, so many intelligence agencies have so many employees that spend 100% of their time on it, and so many congresspeople are making direct requests for censorship on political lines.
He appealed and it was affirmed by an actual moderator that it was against the TOS. He was allowed back on the platform after deleting the tweet as the linked thread explains.
I gave a couple of examples in my sibling comment. One example began as "right wing rhetoric" (if you consider moderate conservatives to be 'right wing'; I'm not sure exactly how they fit into official taxonomies) and the other began as moderate liberal rhetoric that was adopted by right-wing groups after the fact. I think lazy, out-of-hand dismissal of both kinds is common, but I think the left has cried "right-wing", "Nazi", "white supremacist", etc so often (and over such obviously innocuous stuff) over the last decade that this sort of rhetoric has lost much of its effect (on the other hand, the right is working as hard as ever to make 'right wing' something honest people want to distance themselves from).
I don't think any honest defense of CRT said any of the things you claimed here, where have you heard those arguments?
Things that are "Nazi" or "white supremacist" ideas and ideologies get called out, and those ideas and ideology exist on the right in ways they don't on the left, but those ideas aren't bad because they're conservative, they're bad because they're hateful and discriminatory.
Anyone espousing Nazi ideology is a huge problem, regardless of their political leanings.
> I don't think any honest defense of CRT said any of the things you claimed here, where have you heard those arguments?
I've heard them all over for many years (including on this forum for a good while a few years ago), but I agree they aren't "honest" (and the dishonesty is precisely the problem).
> Things that are "Nazi" or "white supremacist" ideas and ideologies get called out, and those ideas and ideology exist on the right in ways they don't on the left, but those ideas aren't bad because they're conservative, they're bad because they're hateful and discriminatory.
I agree. But the problem is that moderate ideas are being caricatured and labeled as "Nazi" or "white supremacist" so that they enjoy the same social censure that we would give to bonafide hateful ideas.
> Anyone espousing Nazi ideology is a huge problem, regardless of their political leanings.
Yes, but we're not talking about "espousing Nazi ideology", we're talking about people who are espousing moderate ideas that get treated like they're hateful. Consider for example James Damore's "Google Memo" and how it was framed as a hateful, "anti-diversity screed" by virtually the entirety of the media despite that the full text was readily available. His arguments were squarely liberal in nature even if he made some factual errors. Consider Lee Fang or David Shor (both committed progressives).
The Google memo was hateful, anti-diversity, and he got exactly what he deserved (he was fired). According to his LinkedIn[0], he's been working at an unnamed startup for the past 4 years, so it's not like he was "cancelled" in any real sense.
And Lee Fang and David Shor are fine? I literally cannot find either controversy you're referencing on the front page of Google or Google News.
[0] Not sure I'm allowed to post this, but it's easily discoverable.
> The Google memo was hateful, anti-diversity, and he got exactly what he deserved (he was fired)
Yeah, this is flat out wrong. The "memo" (it wasn't a memo, but the media's gonna media) is publicly available and pretty short so we can trivially verify claims that it was "hateful" and anti-diversity. Notably, Damore's position on diversity via the document:
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.
And his position on hate:
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. ... Reducing people to their group identity is bad and assuming the average is representative ignores this overlap. (this is bad and I don't endorse that)
> According to his LinkedIn[0], he's been working at an unnamed startup for the past 4 years, so it's not like he was "cancelled" in any real sense.
I don't know anyone who defines "cancelled" as "permanently unemployable", but in any case I hope we can agree that getting someone fired for minor ideological differences is reprehensible. Maybe you would argue that these differences are very significant, but I don't see anything in the document that would fall outside of the American Overton Window (it's probably more moderate than many of his critics professed viewpoints on diversity, which is pretty obviously the actual reason he provoked such a reaction).
> And Lee Fang and David Shor are fine? I literally cannot find either controversy you're referencing on the front page of Google or Google News.
Lee Fang was harassed by colleagues and pressured to resign because he quoted MLK in support for non-violent protest and for Tweeting an interview with a black man who expressed concern about crime in his community.
David Shor is a data analyst who was fired for citing research on the efficacy of non-violent protest. He was fired because people on Twitter were contacting his company's management on Twitter and demanding his termination.
Of course, if your perspective is that firing someone for these kinds of minor ideological offenses is totally fine (so long as they're able to get another job?), then we're probably going to have to agree to disagree. That said, I doubt very much that the people celebrating or defending these terminations would be so cheerful when people on their side of the spectrum are terminated (and for whatever it's worth, I'm a left of center independent).
I think you’re missing the argument here for the red-team/blue-team stuff.
Regardless of team, if someone says or does something reprehensible, it ought to be condemned. That’s what these people did, and seems like they’ve moved on from there. Their lives go on, but you obsess over one chapter of their lives.
I’m not on either team; I get flack from both. These people were patently not doing anything reprehensible, which is the whole point. Specifically, they were transparently fired/harassed/etc for deviating from the party line.
Agreed. Quite a lot of people think deviating from the party line is reprehensible, but these things are all squarely within the Overton Window irrespective of mine or your opinion.
I’m curious about why you find Fang, Shor, etc reprehensible though.
I’ve said multiple times I cannot find the controversy you keep claiming happened to those two people, which to me speaks more loudly than the actual controversy they supposedly had.
I pointed you multiple times to their Wikipedia pages. Here are some direct links to the specific relevant sentences (I didn't post them before because I was busy and on mobile and I didn't realize how burdensome you would find it to find and skim their wikipedia pages). I'll quote the relevant sections as well in case you have a hard time working those links.
> In June 2020, Fang was accused of racism by Akela Lacy, a colleague at The Intercept. This occurred after Fang shared a Martin Luther King Jr. quote about remaining non-violent and tweeted out an interview in which a black man at a George Floyd protest expressed concern about black-on-black crime. Fang's tweets set off a "firestorm" on Twitter and he issued a lengthy apology
> On May 28, 2020, Shor tweeted a summary of an academic study by Omar Wasow, a black political scientist at Princeton University, that argued riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination likely tipped the 1968 presidential election in Richard Nixon's favor.[19] Some critics argued that Shor's tweet, which was posted during the height of the George Floyd protests, could be interpreted as criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.[20] Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine that "At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety."[21] Shor apologized for the tweet on May 29, and he was fired from Civis Analytics a few days later.
Here's the Tweet that Shor's colleagues felt threatened their safety:
> Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests increase Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. http://omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Voting.pdf
These events were also covered by other media outlets. Like the Wikipedia links above, you can easily find these via Google or any other popular Internet search engine.
So nothing at all to do with conservative voices being silenced, then. Why are we talking about them? You were asked for conservatives who were being silenced for saying conservative things, not generic times people got in trouble for saying things.
Kind of odd you equate racist statements with conservative statements. Why would that be?
We’ve already been over this. I wasn’t asked for conservatives who were being silenced—I was refuting the argument that the people being canceled or “called out” were saying reprehensible stuff. I certainly never equated racist statements with conservative statements. It seems like you’re not following the context of the thread and that’s adding a lot of confusion—clarifying basic thread context is not my idea of an interesting debate (not to mention repeating the same conversation about thread context) so I’m probably going to dip out.
You were asked for conservatives who were being silenced, not random people who had said inflammatory things, as that's the entire topic being discussed here. It's clear you can't come up with any, since you had to move the goalposts away from "conservatives" to "people you generally think got short-changed on the Internet".
I'm sorry again you seem confused, and again I hope you find clarity elsewhere, because this seems to have bothered you somewhat.
If you see a problem with some rethoric itself then surely you can argue against it direcly, no? Then what's the point of calling something a "right-wing rhetoric" other than to label the speaker as part of the out group and thus not worth listening to.
No, it's the argument by association that's appalling, because it's dishonest. The rhetoric is usually just wrong. Being wrong is superior to being dishonest. Wrong people can be corrected.
Not OP, but consider illegal immigration. It is apparently leading to a surge in child sex trafficking, among other ills.
But, being against illegal immigration is currently considered "right wing", and in a lot of contexts will get you fired, vilified, and perhaps beaten.
There's your example.
(I'm a child of immigrants, and don't particularly have an opinion of how much immigration is good. I do, though, believe this amount should be determined by legislative process and then tightly enforced.)
Being against legal immigration and implementing policies to make it more difficult to become legal (as the right has done) has lead to the enslavement of immigrant women and other sex trafficking. Being against sane and fair immigration policies is what people react to.
Everyone is against illegal immigration and child sex trafficking, but vary vastly on the solutions.
Re "Everyone is against illegal immigration", I don't think that that is close to true at present. You will search in vain to find a left-leaning Congressional Representative that will pronounce that they are against illegal immigration.
A dirty secret of many Republicans is that they're pretty okay with illegal immigration as it's been in the 80s and 90s. Pseudo slave labor, deport as needed, etc. Needless to say, this seems unethical (even if the immigrants in question might be okay with it).
We have no better solution than to let our legislature fight this out. But, whatever laws they come up with need to be followed and strictly enforced. Failure to do so has led to abject misery, and it will only get worse.
You might not agree with the law, but the alternative is leading to far worse suffering. Ironically, the fentanyl crisis will probably turn the tide, rather than pedestrian ethical concerns.
(I'm quite old, so don't really have a dog in this fight, aside from a general well wish for the young.
Beyond that, I was a "far-left" Green for most of my years.
I've not changed much, but the world sure has.)
Okay, but that doesn't change the fact that you mixed up the terms here. If the right wanted to really stop immigrant sex trafficking or child abuse, they would be promoting for fairer and easier immigration laws.
we need to return to the very high levels of immigration we had in the 19th century, it would really help our population and economy to grow. it will help the country a lot in the long term
> we need to return to the very high levels of immigration we had in the 19th century
As a percentage of the total population, now is the highest level of immigration the US has ever experienced going back to the founding of the country.
The previous maximum was prior to the 1924 immigration act which effectively banned the practice for 40 years.
If you read the article you will see examples of imbalanced moderation that conservatives have pointed out for ages with unfortunate dismissals (like yours? am I reading you correctly?) in response.
This article is useful as it places them in a relatively neutral investigative context.
It is obviously right that racist, sexist, etc bias is pointed out, but that case is not at all helped by complacency in response to political bias towards liberal mores when also clearly present.
That's my point; it's not clear there's any political bias taking place here.
What are you talking about?? Reread the article:
OpenAI content moderation system is more permissive of hateful comments being made about conservatives than the same comments being made about liberals.
The argument conservatives provide is the idea that they're overly censored on platforms; how permissively they're spoken of (hatefully or otherwise) is unrelated. If anything, it's in alignment to their ideology, not against it.
But let's say what you're claiming is true for a moment. Political ideology shouldn't have been included with race, gender, and religion anyway; it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate against someone based on their political affiliation, as it's 100% a choice, where as disability, race, gender, and religion are not.
I'd dispute religion not being a choice and that it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate as you suggest, but, regardless, this seems like semantic cartwheels to avoid the clear, evidenced point that bias is present.
Whether you or I approve of or align with that bias is irrelevant.
No it’s not irrelevant; bias is good when it hinders horrible things and supports great things.
This is an argument on the merits of specific biases, not an argument that all biases are bad; no person or group operates with the intention of removing all bias, even if they claim to want that.
But as we all operate with bias, what appears to us to be good or bad is necessarily informed by it and makes subjective claims about which political biases are for the common good opinion only.
That's why we have democratic systems, so the mass of those opinions, informed by those personal biases override (in theory, if not always in practice) the opinions of a select few.
That is also why it is important to flush out as much as possible the undemocratic representation of ideological bias (left, right, whatever) in a tool as powerful as ChatGPT, when it has been clearly shown to be present.
If you could give an example of rhetoric that is suppressed because it’s “right wing”, that would be helpful.