Fuckin' love watchin' rich white men compare themselves to the victims of the Great Leap Forward. After all, Paul Graham could, at any moment, be sent to work the fields at a re-education camp in outer Mongolia! That's what they did to Louis CK, right? Seized all his assets, beat him with a rubber hose and set him to conquer the taiga? It's not like he ever won any accolades ever again! "Western countries" have what Karl Popper called "open societies." In an open society you can say whatever you want, and whoever hears it can say whatever they want back. Thomas Rid made the point in Active Measures that disinformation campaigns - wherein a government lies for their own advantage - cannot adequately exploit disinformation because it harms their credibility. After all, anyone who wishes to challenge the status quo can, and any official with less credibility than the press or some rando on the Internet will find their actions curtailed and their dominance in question. "closed" societies, on the other hand, do not rely on credibility to govern. They rely on force. "Heresy" is a crime that requires government force to punish. Full stop. Under an open society a heretic cannot be imprisoned or fined because the antidote to an unpopular idea is a popular idea. Under an open society, a heretic loses STATUS. They lose INFLUENCE. Which, if you have more money than God, is the only thing you truly crave. You want society to reward you for your backward ideas. "If you want my money for your dorm you have to get rid of the windows because windows are distracting." "Children should not be permitted to ask questions about their naughty bits before 4th grade lest they grow up to vote me out." Here's one of JK Rowling's houses: Heretics got it good, man There are no "western countries" that have not largely embraced capitalism. Success under capitalism is money, it's in the name - closer you are to Christ the more of a christian you are, closer to Buddha the more of a buddhist, closer to capital, the more of a capitalist. But since it's an open society? Everyone without money (and their numbers are growing) gets to argue that maybe money isn't the most important thing, and you aren't automatically worth listening to just because you're rich. It's the only meager, Pyrrhic bit of leverage the blacks have left: they may die younger, earn less money, attain lower scholastic achievement and be ten times as likely to end up in jail, but if you, rich person, say the n-word they get to take a flyer at censoring you. Censorship is not heresy. Heresy? That's arguing we haven't always been at war with Eastasia. Gonna be fuckin' cute watchin' all the rich-ass neoliberal fat cats insist they're being persecuted while Putin busily ships all thoughtcrime to the Western Front.
Actually we don't have to imagine. Left-wing heresy hunting just happens to be more visible, because left wing people have the media and other levers of cultural power. But make no mistake, there's a big time cancel culture within the right, as well. For example, Trump any Romney were both pro-choice until the moment they decided to run for president. Not a coincidence. And these days a preacher in a white evangelical church can lose his job for merely pointing out one of Trump's many manifest moral failures. While the right wing cancel culture may not be as evident as someone losing their job because they used the N word 20 years ago, it's no less harmful, because it has stifled completely any possibility of having an honest political conversation among republicans. We need our politics to be open in order to have the debates that shape legislation. Right now we don't have those debates, because neither side is willing to say what's on their mind, and it leads to bad laws written by scared people for the purpose of resume padding and not public improvement. I don't know how this problem becomes more tractable in the Age of Twitter.The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.
I do legitimately think that twitter-ized discourse leads to taking things out of context, really uncharitable reads, and the "boom, x destroyed" style arguments that try to end the discussion as quickly as possible. It makes sense for Twitter where there's really no time or point to engaging earnestly, and it sucks when this bleeds over into the real world. But holy hell the cancel wars are so boring. Paul Graham has billions of dollars, he'll be fine. All "cancelling" is to him is people being pissed of and not reading his blog.
Recently, my daughter's school district apparently made the mistake of posting a picture on FB of three happy young girls, two braiding the thirds hair, without (gasp!!!) the qualifier that the girl who's hair was being braided had given consent. Why? Because she was black and her friends were white. The school backpedaled and apologized for not addressing the micro-aggression one might assume without context. These are actual adults, who in their mind, are deftly navigating heretical waters. I can only hope that these three girls never were exposed to the school's apology and explanation, especially the young girl who in an effort to avoid heresy, they treated like a cultural artifact rather than a human being.
Yeah, that's obviously rediculous. Someone on the internet wanted a quick hit of moral supremacy and made some poor PR person's life worse for a day. I guess that's pretty emblematic of my feelings on "cancel culture" tho - people on the internet are being annoying but really it's mostly an internet problem. The school wanted good PR, they were needlessly attacked, they apologized anyways because the whole point was to get PR, life moves on. The only people really affected are entertainers where people's perception of them is what they're selling. I personally have a hard time enjoying something like standup if it's from a person who's views I hate. Meanwhile in my state of Florida, they just passed a bill allowing teachers to be individually sued for mentioning anything about gender, but none of the "cancel culture" types like PG seem to be nearly as upset. I guess it makes some amount of sense - people posting online a lot disproportionally care about what people online think. But really, 90% of the time a Twitter mob just makes it unpleasant to use Twitter. Which isn't great, but nowhere near the death of society. And the cancel culture articles almost always paint this as an exclusively left wing problem which is just not true at all. Left wing ppl have the Twitter numbers and can be annoying, whereas right wing cancel culture people are writing their hereseys into Law
Yeah, Graham definitely makes the mistake of thinking it's happening more on the left than the right. That's probably because relative to where he sits, the left has changed, whereas the right has not. The truth is that they have become more similar. Over the course of my life, the US right has always been guilty of purity tests and the hypocrisy that comes with it. It's relatively new for the left. The left used to be a place where progressivism was understood the compass, but irreverence for cultural mores kept people honest and sufferable.
Both the left and the right have abandoned their economic and geopolitical underpinnings due to the expense of running for office. The end result is that the left is made up of rich people who represent wealthy young white people while the right is made up of rich people who represent wealthy old white people. The left must throw sops to poor non-white people in order to be elected while the right must throw sops to poor white people in order to be elected. The thing that turns my stomach is people like Paul Graham think they're suffering under a system created and perpetuated exclusively for his benefit.
I suspect that he's on the spectrum. He has a very consistent Data-like blindspot in his modeling of other people. It's like he sees everyone as Paul Graham.The thing that turns my stomach is people like Paul Graham think they're suffering under a system created and perpetuated exclusively for his benefit.
Or maybe he just lacks empathy. CEOs and entrepreneurs are four times as likely to be psychopaths as the general population. (n=203)
The school acted appropriately. - Somewhere, a bored person with an axe to grind found a pain point. - That pain point was tested for purchase. - The school district rolled over because judo works against choke holds. No one will give a fuck tomorrow. Today? Today there are people desperately invested in making others give a fuck. What's the obsession with labeling this "heresy?" Heresy is, by definition, an assault on orthodoxy (look it up). The entire discussion here is over the consequences of heterodoxy. It's an intellectually lazy argument, an edgelord strawman, in which those in power punch down under the guise of liberty. It's fucking tedious. ZOMFG, a school district had to apologize on Facebook, they'll be burning copies of The Education of Little Tree soon.
If the school district apologized because they showed a picture of my daughter and her two white friends using chopsticks without "context", I would not feel it was appropriate. I would want to transfer her to a different school where people understand why doing so might be harmful to her.
I tried to opt out of letting my son's school ever post pictures of him on Facebook or other social media, as I was told was my right. Then the school called me and said that they can do that, but that they'll have to ask him to leave the room every time they take pictures, which is literally every time they do something fun. WHY Why do we feel we need to post pictures of anything on the internet, let alone kids just trying to enjoy themselves at school? I cannot express how much I despise big social media and what they've done to us as a society. Hatred of Zuckerberg should be one relatively easy thing for the right and left to coalesce around.
We had to sign a release. We did. One of our friends didn't. The end result was the school ceased to take pictures of any kids because the guy in charge of social media thought it was too much of a hassle to see who they had releases on and who they didn't - and we know for a fact that the school had releases for all but one kid. This is one dude who is too lazy to remember not to use pictures of Janie. There's a real need among the grey tribe to view all problems as systemic malice when individual incompetence adequately explains the problem. Take it to the principal and say "my kid's education is being interfered with for your social media channel." DONE. If, against all odds, that doesn't solve the problem, take it to the school board. You have an individual idiot, or a small cadre of idiots, who are allowed to function in their orbit because their idiocy is worth their utility. Raise the cost of that idiocy to those who must deal with it and their idiocy will be dealt with. This isn't rocket science.
As the father of a minority you are allowed, and equipped, to enter the fray and say "how dare you apologize for my daughter doing perfectly normal things." That provides the school the coverage to roll things back, and deflects the battle from them to you. You have the standing to raise this issue, they don't. Who is this "people" you're condemning here, by the way? You're acting as if the vast arrayed forces of the proletariat are indicting John Galt for thoughtcrime, instead of acting as if a 20-year-old unpaid intern is simply trying to navigate a minefield of entitled Karens. It takes a real lack of perspective to turn an HOA meeting into Dunkirk.
Every night when we sleep, our autonomic nervous system bathes our neurons in acetocholine to wash away frail connections. The process decreases the tendency to misfire by reducing spurious pathways, thereby effectively strengthening the paths that are actually useful in our lives. Long have we analogized that we "offload" much of our brain function to the Internet - we externalize our memories, we externalize our decision making. In this analogy, social media inhibits our natural forgetting. It is the digital equivalent of insomnia, the equivalent of never being able to rest and reflect. Social media is what happens when we refuse to allow natural processes to restore our perspective.
Stolen from part of a hackernews comment: I'm curious how he can look at anti-"critical race theory" laws and "don't say gay" laws, which quite literally restrict freedom of speech among academics and teachers, and _not_ view this as a damaging and dangerous politics"
But that's part of the problem, right? No one sees that what's good for the goose is good for gander. I read both the NY Times and the Wall St. Journal almost everyday. One is a funhouse mirror version of the other, except you don't know which is the undistorted image. Or if they both are. The media spheres occupied by either side would have you believe that all of the country's problems are solely the fault of "the left" or "the right", while neither wants to get at the root of the problem, which is mostly that we lack a unifying set of agreed upon principles by which to live. Free speech is great, but only if we sort know the rules of the game, and while no topics are illegal, some are just not acceptable in society ("Jews will not replace us", e.g., to pick on conservatives again). Ideas aren't to be feared, and we should be able to debate any ideas, even if just to confirm to ourselves that they're bad. But unruly mobs are to be feared, and we've seen plenty of evidence of what unruly mobs are capable of over the last several years. It is unfortunately much easier to coalesce around an unruly mob than around a political or cultural debate.
The difference between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times is that the WSJ's editorial board is worse than the NYT's but interferes with their coverage less. The NYT's editorial board is better but interferes with their coverage more. Ultimately, the WSJ does a better job of separating fact from opinion. The whole promise of "free speech" is that the rules are constantly under renegotiation. The current spate of recalibration is due to society expressing that they are sick of white male bullshit. Since white males have infinitely more media access than anyone else, we hear a truly one-sided discussion. For the first time since the '60s someone other than white men are raising their voices and the white men are outraged. The morass over "cancel culture" and "heresy" is not over the lack of debate, it's over the fact that white men are not being allowed to say whatever the fuck they want to say without having to suffer any debate.Ideas aren't to be feared, and we should be able to debate any ideas, even if just to confirm to ourselves that they're bad.
Your analysis of the difference of WSJ and NYT tracks very well my experience with them. Also the comments sections are very unique. NYT is full of people trying to prove how smart they are despite how little they might know about any given topic, while the WSJ is almost entirely "Literally every problem America faces is the fault of the Biden crime family." They've yet to discover a problem that can't be summed up that simply. Not sure why I click on them, but I can't help the voyeurism sometimes.
Yeah the WSJ comments are like Youtube if Youtube was only watched by Principal Skinner and Mr. Burns. Both John Carreyrou's Bad Blood and Hope & Wright's Billion Dollar Whale discuss at length how their reporting for WSJ's investigative news division was generally at odds with the WSJ's editorial stance, and how they kept expecting it to be a problem yet it somehow never was. The NYT, on the other hand, brought us Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. If I could figure out how to pay for just the journalism in the WSJ I would. Well, that and Mansion because it's the most gobsmackingly out-of-touch bit of reportage I see on a weekly basis. They do more than lean into the stereotype, they roll around in it like a dog with a gopher carcass.