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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

This is not a complete summary of the article.

The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal.

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And if I recall correctly, that this is a regular process. Which has led us to this rather extreme point, historically near the extreme for the US.

It is a regular process, but when it works normally, it is self-limiting. The idea is that recently it hasn't been successful, the political opposition hasn't been silenced (it merely moved outside the Overton window), and so as the danger signals grow, the radicalizing response grows, to a point where it is perhaps counterproductive.

What makes it self-limiting? There's always an opponent, someone completing for resources or whatever, that you can use this method to outgroup and purge. That's just one of many mechanisms driving it.

What are the specific counter-reactions you see that limit this as an ongoing/regularly exercised pattern?

Once the enemy is weak enough, the reaction dies down. What indicates a strong enemy? According to the article, among other things, its media presence. In the past, if academia and mainstream media didn't give a platform to a view, it was effectively silenced. Today, such views can reach the wider public via the Internet.

(This isn't really my opinion, I don't have good enough evidence for or against; it's just my understanding of the claims of the article.)

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