Will the left survive Millennials? | Hacker News Reader

Will the left survive Millennials?

nytimes.com

35 pointsdanielam63 comments

"In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech."

I really find it shocking that there are laws regarding supposed hate speech with such subjective terms as "likely to offend".

As a registered democrat, this author really captured my feelings about the left. It used to make so much sense, let everyone do what they want, that's being liberal. Now the radical minority is getting louder and more persuasive to younger generations as they dress up these ideas in comedy and media.

The author seems to be pulling things out of context in bad faith. It is unlawful, though not a criminal offense, in Australia to publicly say things likely to offend people of a different race, based on their racial group, provided the statements are not meant "(a) in the performance, exhibition or distribution of an artistic work; or (b) in the course of any statement, publication, discussion or debate made or held for any genuine academic, artistic or scientific purpose or any other genuine purpose in the public interest; or (c) in making or publishing: (i) a fair and accurate report of any event or matter of public interest; or (ii) a fair comment on any event or matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment." (as explained in 18D).

What does "unlawful, but not a criminal offense" mean?

> What does "unlawful, but not a criminal offense" mean?

Generally, that phrasing would describe civil wrongs. Criminal law isn't the whole of the law.

I disagree, the law does provide these exceptions but I (and presumably the author) don't find these exceptions to be comprehensive enough to render the unqualified statement of the author "out of context".

How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.

Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?

To me, the very concept of "hate speech" seems Orwellian.

How so? Some of the time it will naturally arise by combining an adjective with a noun. I mean, there really are people out there communicating their hate for other people.

As a legal concept it is clearly more fraught.

Presumably the legal concept is what he was referring to.

I made my comment because the very concept of made me skeptical of that. "The very concept" is a different meaning than "the legal concept".

And who gets to be the judge of what's offensive anyway? If I were the judge, all kinds of speech would be illegal because I find it offensive: anyone saying anything good about Windows 10 or iPhones, for instance, would be locked up, because that offends me! :-) I had a coworker years ago who I overheard talking to another coworker, and he claimed that he was "offended" by gay marriage and any kind of obvious expression of homosexuality. I, personally, was extremely offended at having to look at him, because he was so fat.

So how do you enforce such a vague law anyway?

> I really find it shocking that there are laws regarding supposed hate speech with such subjective terms

I find it shocking that you're shocked that hate speech is being defined exactly as its proponents meant it to be.

While I agree with you that such a law is poorly constructed and should be fixed, that it exists is not worrying to me at all.

Until recently, it was legal in many places to rape your wife. It is still currently legal to release pollution into the atmosphere without paying for its ecological costs. There are a lot of bad laws on the books, and even more that were on the books 50 years ago. And we're ok. We figured it out.

If thousands of people start getting put in jail for offending folks, I'll get a little more worried. And we'll fix it.

What bothers me is that you are spending energy worrying about a law that may, theoretically, be misused in the future when there are people in prison right now because of bad laws that have been on the books for a long time.

You're lucky that you are in such a comfortable position that you can worry about hypothetical future prosecutions, but I might suggest using that privilege to help people who are already in the position that concerns you.

The reason why people worry about these laws is because of the trajectory.

Historically, freedom of speech was pretty much not a thing, and laws made all kinds of offensive speech (usually offensive to those in power) illegal.

For a while, we had a strong trend of getting rid of such laws and getting more free speech. Freedom of speech, including all kinds of offensive speech, was a key tenet of humanism, and associated social and political advances.

But now the trend is in the other direction. As time goes by, our societies acquire more laws regulating speech, compared to where they were even a few decades ago.

I just can't worry about "it'll-be-bad-later-in-the-trajectory" problems when there are "it's-bad-right-now" problems ready to solve.

Many of the "it's bad right now" problems were started because at some point in the past someone was trying to solve a different "it's bad right now" problem without minding the consequences. Just to give an example, a "tough on crime" crackdown back in 90s to deal with a genuine crime wave, resulting in mass incarceration, especially of non-whites.

The 18C provision of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act he mentions was brought in in 1995, a little early for the "millennials" he wants to decry. Nor does someone walking out of a speech strike me as even tangentially linked to censorship--it seems quite the opposite, yielding a space to someone else because you don't want to either be there silently or interrupt and argue. Yeah, maybe the left would be better off if the young had a more nuanced view of privilege and controversy, but we'd sure as hell be better off if the older generation could contain themselves when making any criticism and stick to reasonable, evidence-based discourse, not a condescending string of random criticisms towards them dang kids.

> a little early for the "millennials" he wants to decry.

The author is a woman.

To be fair, NYT op-ed has a long and storied history of middle-aged white dudes writing about kids these days. Easy mistake.

What's wrong with older, more experienced people expressing an opinion about the politics and behavior of younger, inexperienced people. Seems like a reversal of common sense to assert that elders have nothing to say to or about the generations that come after them.

Well said. These parts are striking to me:

> In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.

> But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy?

The reactionaries on the side I lean to have mostly settled down, but the reactionaries to the reactionaries are still primed to explode.

One can't even gently suggest that a person's words, probably said with good intentions, support an -ism or -phobia without getting a tirade about censorship in response, and an accusation of being a "social justice warrior."

Such tirades are a necessary correction to the insanity that "social justice" has become. Once the influence of these so -called warriors declines then hopefully the discourse will settle down.

On my side, it calmed down because people criticized call-out culture.[1] How does one criticize reflexive fury toward social justice activism without being lumped in with the "warriors"?

[1] For example: http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/call-out-accountability/

We can remind people that there are "sides within sides" and that we should allow people's positions to change.

> Such tirades are a necessary correction to the insanity that "social justice" has become. Once the influence of these so -called warriors declines then hopefully the discourse will settle down.

Well put. I think the only thing that will curb their ambitions to become the thought/speech/culture dictators of the world will to use all of their own tactics against them, in spades. They might not be so eager to destroy the lives and careers of others if it incurs the risk of having their own lives and careers destroyed.

Thing is, accusation of some -ism or -phobia can easily blow up. You may not have that intention in mind, but in the age of social media, such things can be very hard to contain, especially once the Internet mob forms. And consequences can be pretty severe (say, losing one's job). So, while any particular interaction might not involve this directly, it's always something that's part of the picture.

It's kind of ironic to write participation in public discourse is growing so perilous in one of the most prominent papers on the planet. She apparently does not feel particularly stifled.

Or she chose to speak up anyway, knowing full well how this might backfire but still choosing to do the right thing?

That's perfectly in keeping with my second sentence. Someone who felt stifled would not choose to face the potential backfire.

The Millennials are not the ones rigging DNC elections. The Millennials are not the ones running the institutions passing absurd sensitivity requirements. It is unfair to make this a generation argument when in reality its much deeper. What it ultimately boils down to is to what degree an individual deems it appropriate to silence dissenting points of view. To some the answer is none and to others, legitimizing an opposing view is interpreted as a form of oppression in and of itself. Age doesn't appear to have much of a correlation with ones stance on that spectrum.

Uh... the Democrat Presidental primaries were "rigged"? Would you care to be a little more specific?

I'd guess this is what they were referring to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-san...

Also:

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/30/10_ways_the_democratic_prima...

The media was given the objective of wrecking Sanders' campaign. Our theoretically independent media is, in practice, the propaganda mouthpiece of the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party.

Will the New York Times survive Baby Boomer hot takes?

The opinion piece is dripping with hypocrisy. If Yassmin Abdel-Magied wants to walk out of the author's speech and go blog about her discomfort, so what? That's a form of speech too, and we shouldn't be trying to discourage it.

I defend the author's right to say all this, but the shallow "Millenials should talk less and smile more" angle really doesn't speak to me.

Geez. People these days don't seem to understand a simple fact.

You cannot control events that happen to you, but you can control how you react to them.

I sadly clicked through to the article where the millennial walked out of the talk. What a histrionic, self-absorbed rant that was.

You really wanted to say "kids these days", didn't you?

What a useless comment. I personally think that self absorbed, histrionic people come in all ages.

Just look at the frequency of the use of the personal pronoun in that article (the article written by the person who walked out). It's "I", "I", "me" over and over.

The self-absorption displayed in that piece is a symptom of the success of the middle class in the 20th century. To put it bluntly, some people have become weak. Millennials cannot shoulder all the blame, either - it is also a failure of the people and institutions that raised them.

Would love to see this person's face when (if?) later in life she has her pot-kettle-black moment.

I chose to stop reading after this:

It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.

If I was a more motivated prankster I'd love to send this person a mirror.

Well, the left sure won't survive millennials in the UK. The parties on that side of the political spectrum seem to be really bad at picking good leaders and unable to win popular support for a pretty long time...

Oh, it's about the social justice thing. In which case, it probably will. Social justice warriors are an issue, but there's still a decent part of the left who utterly hate them and their obsession with 'identity politics', and I can easily see a more libertarian left party or group getting popular in the near future.

This is about the left, not about millennials. In the past it was the right condemning behaviors, but now it's the left. The left has taken on the motto of "intolerance for intolerance"; what that really means though is, if I don't agree with it it shouldn't be allowed. The left aren't advocating for free speech, but for specifically allowed speech. And that's more dangerous than the alleged bigotry they think they're stopping.

This is like saying that the right wants a white-only country. Sure, some do, but not most. Very few on the left are against free speech.

Most of the people I've seen who make this argument don't seem to differentiate between "I don't want certain speech in my living quarters" or "I don't want certain speech in this specific course" from "I don't think this speech has any place in society".

Free speech doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want wherever you want. It means you have a right to say it somewhere. And I have a right to have conversations that exclude you.

From piece in the guardian:

>It was a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of “others”, simply because it is useful for one’s story.

I thought the talk was about fiction, which by definition is made-up stories, so how could they exploit the stories of others? Stories of other people would be non-fiction. I'm guessing the quotes around "others" is the key to the mystery here.

"Others" in this context refers to your out-group. For example, if I am a straight white male, then it is kosher for me to write a fictional story about fictional straight white males because they are part of my group.

But if I try writing about a fictional gay black women, then I am exploiting the groups of gays, blacks, and women.

> exploiting the groups of gays, blacks, and women

Ok, that I can follow (I don't really agree with it). But what she said was "exploit the stories" of your out-group. Since the work is fiction it's nobody's story. Not my group's nor my out-group's. I guess the claim is your "group" retains the exclusive right to produce works of art that feature a fictional representation of someone or something related to your group.

The whole "cultural appropriation" thing is, essentially, an assertion that there's some kind of implicit intellectual property like relationship that one has with one's culture and its collective experiences. So when you need to "use" a culture that's "not yours", you have to ask for permission, and conform to the rules that the other party frames their grant of such around.

That opinion piece in The Guardian was quite a read - a real view into how some progressives think. It was also mercilessly slammed in the comments section, which gives me hope that the dogmatic excesses of the left will not prevail.

To the general question, probably. It survived the boomers, who in the 1960s succeeded the socialists and New Dealers of the 1930s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left

Not sure what direction it will take, it would surprise me to see the Newest Left revive Basic Income and other dormant redistribution ideas.

It might be interesting that we may well see a division closer to statist vs libertarian as a divide in the future.

I'd enjoy us not trying to map the whole political spectrum onto a binary distinction.

The parent may have been suggesting a spectrum instead. Tools like that found at politicalcompass.org can take us away from the currently oversimplified left-right notion of politics, while still being easy to understand.

In general, the identity politics is actually winding down as most leftists shift steadily towards economic radicalism in our analyses of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com