Hacker News Reader

This is the web today. I stopped reading comments on most articles long ago because it's always like you described. This does nobody any good. Actually, it does politicians good to keep us separated down the middle. We are at our weakest in this position.

Not helping that modern marketing has taken to game such comment sections (never mind the wider social media field) on behalf of their paymasters.

In a sense the net, first seen as flattening the classes, have instead empowered the elite to make both Stasi and Bernays look like bungling idiots.

Rather than crude manual policing etc, computers can both monitor all activity online (and offline, thanks to the likes of smartphones) and insert data to affect opinions and future activity.

I don't think though that othering policitians as "them" and identifying "the people" as an "us" helps us handle the complexity of social and political discourse either...

Then how do we get the politicians to stop thinking in terms of "there's us" and then "there's the people"?

edit for clarification.

I knew this reminded me something, it's Chomsky (I had to google it):

'The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.'

Oh, wow, yes. A very apt quote.

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

I won't comment on your endorsements of NYTimes opinion writers (I have a very low opinion of all of them, ESPECIALLY Friedman), but I will comment on the trend you're noticing.

I've noticed it too and it affects all layers of the paper, not just the opinion pages. The news reporting has become much worse as well. Distorted, biased, propagandized. Dubious sources. Anonymous political operatives leaking rumors to the NYTimes for pure gamesmanship in their ongoing partisan (and internecine) warfare. The NYTimes has become a pawn in a geopolitical and national power game being played by factions that have very little accountability and no transparency.

On top of this the Times has really raced to the bottom to get more eyeballs on ads. They have succumbed to market pressure to cater to their audience's biases and preferences. They are optimizing for FB shares and retweets just like everyone else in the business. This is destroying our society. The Times will not be judged kindly by history.

I call this the "Fox News-ification" of American society. Fox started it and it worked for them so now everyone is doing it. We're suffering the consequences of it.

That comment seems to be aimed at the argument, not where the author stands (from this piece, it seems like the author stands on the Left). I don't think it's an unfair question to ask - how much of what we're seeing is the result of personal traits, and how much of it is the result of choices that a society makes?

Since the author seems to be advocating efforts to change personal traits (rather than societal systems) as the main focus of combating inequality, I think the types of question the questioner is asking are extremely important (even if the question itself is rather blunt).

The problem being that as soon as you start bringing the left/right dichotomy into the picture, you've lost all hope of having a sensible argument or even an intelligent discussion.

I mean, it's not like it's all that difficult to rephrase the question in a way to be less thought-terminating (and this is literally one substitution, you can imagine even more eloquent ways of phrasing it):

> "Is the problem "single mothers" or is it the people who conspire to create, perpetuate, and steadily increase economic inequality?"

I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely "virtue signaling" as another poster noted. An easy way to vent frustration, maybe. But it's not a question that asks for sensible discussion. It's a "when did you stop hitting your wife?" type of question - one that insults the very people you really want to answer the question. How do you expect to have a reasonable discussion like that?

Sure. It's a question of how much self-censorship you want to impose on yourself in the hope of fostering a good discussion. And how much you are focusing on expressing what you feel vs. starting a conversation with people you disagree with. Different people will make different choices, even in this discussion. For instance, I could rewrite your comment:

> I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely "virtue signaling" as another poster noted. An easy way to vent frustration, maybe. But it's not a question that asks for sensible discussion. It's a "when did you stop hitting your wife?" type of question - one that insults the very people you really want to answer the question. How do you expect to have a reasonable discussion like that?

As something like:

> This type of comment probably isn't the type that would best encourage an open debate with someone on the Right. My personal suggestion would be something that addresses individual policies and avoids a monolithic view of one side of the political spectrum.

It would be more diplomatic, sure. But is that closer to what you really wanted to express? Maybe not.

> It's a question of how much self-censorship you want to impose on yourself in the hope of fostering a good discussion. And how much you are focusing on expressing what you feel vs. starting a conversation with people you disagree with.

Sure, and that's my point: Are you just venting? Fine. You're making a choice to vent your frustrations and not hoping to actually have a discussion. You're making yourself feel better. There's nothing wrong with that, either. We all vent in different ways.

It's just unfortunate that many people choose to make internet comments the location of their venting. Worse, this becomes the sort of discourse that we come to expect from any sort of public internet forum. We don't expect reasonable discussion: We expect angry people yelling about the other team and how their team is the best team. It's become a stadium full of drunk fans.

> It would be more diplomatic, sure.

Eh, not really: I never mentioned left/right in that chunk of text on purpose (because I think both "teams" do it). So your rewrite is actually significantly less diplomatic because it singles out one group of people who previously were part of a larger group.

Might seem annoying of me to call you out on this (and I fully understand why you assumed that given the context of our discussion), but I think it's an important correction nonetheless.

> Eh, not really: I never mentioned left/right in that chunk of text on purpose (because I think both "teams" do it). So your rewrite is actually significantly less diplomatic because it singles out one group of people who previously were part of a larger group.

You were directing your remarks at the writer of the comment and those that write similar comments. Not everything is a Left/Right divide.

I'm not sure where you find issue with the comment "This type of comment probably isn't the type that would best encourage an open debate with someone on the Right" since you're saying that making the comment about the Right shuts down discussion and that you would remove it. I think it's more diplomatic to comment to make about the author than saying something like "I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely 'virtue signaling' as another poster noted."

But perhaps that brings about another point - different people have different opinions about what kind of discourse is more diplomatic and which is less. I think my revised version of your comment is obviously more diplomatic; you disagree. You think your revised version of the NY Times comment is obviously more diplomatic; it's quite possible that the author would disagree.

Regarding Brooks, I've read him quite a bit as well. At this point it has become a source of entertainment to me to find out with each article how he will manage to take a factual premise and reasonable arguments to arrive at a nonsequitur conservative platitude. Around 3/4 of the way through the column he consistently takes a turn from reason, apparently hoping we won't notice that his conclusion does not follow from the rest of the article. I used to do the same on my homework when I didn't understand the material.

If you aren't reading the articles to the end (not to suggest that you personally aren't) it would be easy to feel the commentators are unfairly jumping on him. But I think they have also observed the same pattern and feel that he is playing a softly-spoken rearguard for odious views and policies.

If its any consolation I'm conservative for the most part and feel the same way. Why does it seem that nobody ever considers that it is unlikely complex problems have a singular specific root cause? Its never a little out of column A and a little out of column B in their minds. Corruption absolutely exists and children from two parent households do better statistically speaking. Why does one preclude the other?

Much easier to just vent "virtue signals". Especially after having spent 12h+ on multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet.

That makes sense when I was working 60 hour weeks it was pretty much impossible to be informed about much of anything.

The good news is that there are sensible people on both sides who recognize that most problems are complex. We can be voices of reason within our tribes rather than joining in the two-minutes hate and blaming the other side for everything under the sun.

I would happily vote for any politician, party be damned, who talked about the importance of listening to multiple perspectives, compromising and not simply wielding a narrow majority like a club against the losers.

This has a lot to do with how "cause" transitions into "blame" and then "carrot/stick" systems that end up being only the stick.

Historically speaking the prejudice against single parent families and single mothers has been punitive to the point of some extremely dark places: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/07/cathol...

So a lot of "jumping the gun" goes on: as soon as it looks like the discussion might be heading in the direction of criticising single parents, get your retaliation in first.

This. 100% this. One of the major reasons I enjoy reading HN is for the comments. I find that comments here are much more insightful, and more importantly, much more respectful, than you find elsewhere on the web. I suppose HN comments still lean to the left but I find it much more tolerable when everything is not painted in a political light.

HN would be just like Reddit or even NYT without the fantastic moderation keeping everyone in line. It's not easy maintaining a positive culture in an online community, even in places like this.

Thomas Friedman and David Brooks have been dangerous idiots and tools of the most regressive forces in society since they started writing. They have none of the attributes you've ascribed to them and never have.

They've advocated for war and economic oppression, for a living, for decades.

To answer your question, yes, the the problem is, in fact, people (right wingers and otherwise) who conspire to create, perpetuate, and steadily increase economic inequality.

Wow! I didn't think I'd see a reply that does the exact thing the parent talked about. It's like a meta-meta-comment.

On the other hand, it has the distinct advantage of being the truth, rather than propaganda.

Indeed. Seems like a reasonable defense to me.

thank you for saying this. I wish you hadn't been down-voted.