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Comment by peruvian | Hacker News Reader

I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan.

I spent a lot of time between 2006-2014 on various boards like /a/, /mu/, /g/, and /int/ until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers. Made me quit the site (well, that and other things).

Sometimes you just want to meme about the latest bad anime episode, not have a poorly researched debate about race and politics.

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>I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan.

I think most of us who grew up on 4chan since '04 feel the same. The cancer of /pol/ and the rise of the 'alt-right' completely took over the culture of the site. It's sad, but I can't bring myself to visit even the SFW boards anymore.

I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in society in general.

There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a different view point, then you will see extreme conservatism concentrated somewhere (in this case, 4chan).

It's a controversial opinion but I agree with you. The inability to even have a discussion with people about left vs right inevitably leads to echo chambers in both camps.

The smaller the echo chamber the louder the volume.

Agreed. I moved from a right wing echo chamber (Boone County, AR) to a left wing echo chamber (Charlottesville, VA) about four years ago. Neither of those communities are currently able to even begin to understand the other.

The extreme left throughout popular media? I watched a neoliberal win the democratic primary this past year. We can talk about whether the media was biased in her favor, but that would strengthen my point: they chose her over the progressive candidate.

I really don't like this sort of "look what you made me do" thinking, especially when the reaction is to their own boogeymen. If the alt-right wants to blame the left for their rise, they should be honest about their origins: culture wars on the internet, not society as a whole.

Agree to disagree I guess. I wasn't even talking about politics. I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years. Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?

EDIT: In the past a progressive candidate wouldn't have even stood a chance, now one of them almost won.

How much exposure to "extreme leftism" would you say you get on a day to day basis at your job, in your informal social interactions, etc.?

Can't speak for the parent. But it's pretty typical in my job to be surrounded by "leftist" ideology. I say this as a big ol' lefty myself.

This question is bait though, to say something like "I don't like that I'm told to hire women over men" has many interpretations.

One is that I'm a sexist pig trying to throw women out because they're women.

Another is that I'm trying to get the best candidate based on skill not gender.

And yet another is that I am propping up the status quo by not altering my behaviour to be more inclusive.

It all depends on how _you_ feel about me saying that. And that's not a good tone for further discussion.

I live and work in downtown Seattle. I'd say "regularly". I don't even know who other conservatives are because we tend to keep that information, as I said, in the closet. I had one friend at work tell me in secret that he was also a conservative. All I'm saying is that conservatism is "unpopular" and sometimes "shameful" (at least from my experience), which is unhealthy.

What are the viewpoints you hold that you refer to as "unpopular" and "shameful" that you're afraid to express to your coworkers?

For me it's not so much the day to day interactions, which are largely apolitical[1], but the culture we consume. For example the latest E3 showcases had quite an emphasis on "diversity". On most days there will be some story about wage gap, harassment or other sexual missteps on the HN front page and various online newspapers. Now that's the daily surface stuff. This is not bad in itself most of the time. I do not deny that some of those social issues are real. But occasionally they go into the other extreme where they start to seem threatening or grossly stereotyping.

And then there is that background noise with shitstorms trying to get people fired over things they said (remember the nasa T-shirt guy? or brendan eich?), products boycotted over guilt by association and so on. But they make you ask yourself "could this happen to me?". Say the wrong thing and get fired because someone is OFFENDED about a joke or affiliating with the wrong people?

I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language. This concerns me because when people push their preferences on the entire platform instead of subcommunities it becomes a cultural monoculture instead of a more compartmentalized system.

[1] The only exception I recall is the discussion about which gender inputs we should support in software forms where some suggested we should support the whole facebook madness.

> I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language.

Like a shit storm being kicked up over the use of master-slave terminology in code or hardware.

How do you interact with "universities"?

Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.

Good point. I guess I don't interact with them anymore, but I'm a conservative who graduated in the arts just a year ago, so its recent history to me. In all of my literature classes, the content was mostly left leaning.

If it's "left-leaning" rather than "extreme left", then I don't quite see the problem. I would expect that students tend to be more progressive (or, more generically speaking, radical) than the population at large. When you're young, you can more easily adjust to changes in society, both on a mental and practical level. As you grow older, you are likely to depend on the existing system more and more (e.g. to support your children, then to pay your pension), and thus more hesitant to turn its knobs.

Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.

> I was talking about the left-wing PC culture that is throughout society for the last few years.

First, I want to note that this has been a conservative talking point for a long time. It's flared up again since 2014 or so, but "PC culture" has been the go-to jab against coastal intellectualism since the early 1990s. That isn't to say that valid criticisms of (coastal, collegiate) intellectualism can't be made, just that the motives for the term "PC culture" are part of a broader and somewhat aged conservative campaign against the perceived liberal elite.

> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?

I can indeed say this with some certainty. I'm in college right now, in a department (philosophy) that conservatives frequently associate with rampant leftism and its intellectual mainstays (pomo, critical theory, &c). This has not reflected my experience at all - many of my professors are philosophical libertarians, and the diversity of ideas is actually broader than I expected going into the major.

I have also had progressive professors, but they have bent over backwards to make conservative students comfortable (even in environments where nobody was on the attack).

Of note: The most overt political actions I've seen recently on my campus have been plasterings of white supremacist posters [1] and the murder of a visiting black student by a white student [2].

[1]: http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/28/umd-white-supremacist-post...

[2]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/21/sean-urbansk...

Edit: Added "recently" to the final sentence. There were some campus sexual assault protests in my freshman and sophomore years that might be characterized as political (even if I wouldn't).

>this has been a conservative talking point for a long time.

It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use.

The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it.

I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.

> I don't see how you can even say this stuff.

I can say it because it's my lived experience. I think you should read my comment again - I have seen hate on my campus, and it is not a hoax. Richard Collin's death is a testament to that.

> And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.

In other words, we have the most potent tool for confirmation bias and alienation ever conceived by man. Lenses only capture moments, not sympathetic humans.

Periscope is pretty awesome, I watch livestreams of protests, get realtime info on events. What's funny is how often you see something as it's happening, then later when "witnesses" are interviewed about it, how often they straight up lie. I'll take the video.

By the way, many campus sexual assault protests are very political, the ones that demand removing presumption of innocence, both at the university policy and even at the legal level. That is just about as political as you can get.

> Can you say with an straight face that most universities, for example, aren't more extreme left than in the past?

You shouldn't make a claim and then ask someone else to disprove it. What numbers are you basing this belief off of? How do you define extreme left? Do you consider beliefs like evolution and global warming to be extreme left view points?

According to [0] it seems that the number of professors who consider themselves liberal has increased by about 10% in the last 60 years. But the definition of liberal has become much more inclusive over the last 60 years as well, so I am not sure how meaningful this is.

[0] Gross, Neil. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Most of my quick research was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia#cite_...

I don't think the example you give is very poignant: the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members.

I do agree with you that this culture war didn't suddenly appear and divide society as a whole ex nihilo, but that's because nothing ever does. Movements start small and expand That's true of the particular brand of progressivism at hand here as well as the GNU movement or even the adoption of Linux and open source more broadly (those could sort of be said to have originated in a "culture war on the internet").

And I think it would be hard to dispute that the West has seen a very hard cultural push by progressives in recent years. Compare [1] to [2] for example. These are not equivalent examples and they are not meant to be. My point is that the sort of push seen in [1] clearly has implications outside of the abstract internet (Twitter is part of the Internet, but the point is that it has impacts on real life in a way 4chan doesn't). Also, Islamic stuff is perhaps the most obviously conservative stuff, but it's by no means the only one. Asian cultures in general are much more conservative than the West too.

[1] http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/steve-ladurantaye-editor...

[2] https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6jbyu1/serious_pe...

> the fact that the Democratic party (or rather its base) is not fully in line with its very progressive members, doesn't mean that there isn't a hard cultural push by said progressive members.

I was responding mostly to the "popular media" claim, but I take your point.

The question of a "cultural push" is interesting to me for two reasons:

1. It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole, and,

2. It makes broadly agreeable political positions more partisan than they need to be.

I don't know of a way to prove or disprove (1), besides saying that I'm not on the mailing list. I think progressive views tend to be more fragmented and diverse than conservative onlookers realize, and that this contributes to a feeling that progressives are advancing a monolithic program to change America's culture.

On the other hand, I think (2) is pretty worrying. Are gay rights part of the cultural push? What about access to (reasonably priced) medicine, or environmental consciousness?

I think that, apart from the true-believing fundamentalists and hardliners, most people can recognize that many progressive positions are at their core very agreeable (civil liberties for all, no unavoidable deaths, modernize our economy both for our own health and for future generations). The problem arises when those positions become associated with progressives qua some conservative boogeyman, not qua their benefit to society.

> It suggests that there's been a concerted effort among liberals to reshape culture as a whole.

It doesn't need to be concerted. An alternative explanation could be that liberals are more likely to pursue creative careers than conservatives, thus shaping the media (e.g. TV shows and movies) that contribute to the major consensus narrative.

Why that is so is not part of my hypothesis. The point is that the behavior of a system is emergent more often than it is concerted (which is also why most conspiracy theories are untrue).

I don't think there needs to be some central authority figure or a weekly meeting for what I'm describing to occur. Like, there is no concerted effort among suburban dwellers to clog up the roads leading to the city every morning, yet it still happens.

Perhaps "push" is the wrong word, yet it's the closest I can think of. I think the issue is more that liberals are overwhelmingly Democrat (that's hardly a controversial claim, I hope) and liberals tend to have certain values that make them care about individuals first rather than about society first.

I agree that it's all fuzzy, kind of like evolution doesn't have an actual goal. In some sense, evolution is about producing more fit individuals, yet it's not like it's a directed effort (various congenital disabilities still occur). It is "sort of" directed by environmental pressures, sort of like the "push" I'm talking about is "sort of" directed by the "progressive lens" if you will.

To me, it's sort of like a problem of bad goal alignment: suppose that the "goal" is to get out of a maze. For some reason, we get a fuzzy signal after each step that allows us to sort of guess whether it was a good move or not. So far, the right way seems to have been: "West, West, North, East". Some people guess that the pattern is that we had to go West for a while but there was a definite shift towards the East, so we have to go Eastward all the way through from now on. Others, see it as more of a clockwise thing and are guessing that the next move is going to be East or South.

At the end of the day, one of them may be right, or neither may be. But even if the next steps are "go North, then Westward all the way", it wouldn't invalidate the steps made before.

In other words, I don't think that the right way is to say "what would the progressive do? Alright, then let's do exactly the opposite". Rather, I think the problem is that the "push" I'm talking about is due to recognizing a pattern that isn't quite the right one.

I see plenty of conservatism all over Reddit and all of those other places you mentioned. It happens in boring threads on boring articles that aren't politically charged.

What causes the downvotes is the way the ideas are presented. If you write your comment like you're a writer for the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're going to be downvoted. There is plenty of room to discuss conservative ideas without resorting to the rhetoric that Fox News and talk radio have been pumping out since 2008.

I can't tell you how many times i've seen someone make a really good point about, say, the connection between rent control and the housing shortage but in the middle they go off on a tirade about the 'welfare state' and 'handouts' which causes their entire post to get downvoted into oblivion.

I will give you that socially conservative ideas are frequently completely off limits to discussion, and I think thats unfortunate.

I'm also old enough to remember /r/chimpire and other explicitly racist right wing subreddits who had massive support, well before the rise /r/the_donald. Hell, I even remember discussing the organized stormfront propaganda raids. To me, crying about the lack of conservatism is just code for "people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed." I follow plenty of subreddits where there is plenty of conservative thought.

> people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed

Thats a nasty little remark. Keep it civil.

Why is that uncivil? A lot of online discussion seems to be exactly this.

It's especially funny considering the argument of the person calling for me to censor my thoughts is the same person crying that conservatives are forced to censor their thoughts.

I would imagine the comment was more to convey "don't hurt my feelings" than to encourage civility, which is a more difficult concept. For ideologues, good means rational means civil means moral means <insert political ideology>.

Once all words boil down to <ideology> or <not ideology>, a person can't express or precisely articulate ideas, which manifests in incoherent language.

> To me, crying about the lack of conservatism is just code [...]

For some, sure. But there are those of us who are not conservatives who share the view that conservatives have been subject to ubiquitous censorship.

I'm an anarchist, and honestly share about as much with the left as the right ideologically. The behavior of the left today sickens me, though. Even after the election of Trump - who himself is not traditionally "conservative" - has not seemed to have changed the way the left sees the right. The right is not a racist, homophobic, misogynist minority. They are a majority (albeit a slim one), and their views are both less extreme and far more commonly held than seems to be believed by the left.

Can you give me an example of the 'extreme left'? I'm probably well within it, which is why it's hard for me to see what you mean, or think of examples.

So tumblar->extremist xenophobia?

Something that's popular is practically by definition not on the extreme any more.

In most of the developed world the Democrats would be considered a moderate right-wing party, and the Republicans a far-right theocratic extremism party (like, say the DUP in the UK, or CHP in Canada).

What you're seeing is a ground-shift in values, and what used to be considered OK is now considered extreme, and is therefore being shifted into the margins of the discussion.

To put it in sharper contrast: if you started loudly expressing the most mainstream views of the 1700s in today's society, you'd get a lot of people trying to shut you up and, failing that, marginalize you. And, probably, they'd be right to do so.

Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not and that's the point. /pol/ exists largely as a reaction to the suppression of non-progressive thought in the places where the demographic spends most of their time: academia, gaming, and tech.

There are certainly people who believe what they say on /pol/, but the vast majority of them are consciously acting as a parody of what they have been cast to be.

Conservative views are treated as extreme, even though they are not

Do you mean without regard to whether they are extreme or not or are you saying that no conservative views are extreme?

Well, I've not really tried to define the term so explicitly, but I think it's fair to say that any position that is held by a majority of Republicans (or Democrats) is not extreme, because it would by definition not be outside the norm.

For example, public opinion in support of same-sex marriage in the US is currently at an all-time high of 64%, with 34% opposing. Being opposed to same-sex marriage is not an extreme position, as it is one that is shared by 1/3 of Americans. Only two years ago it was 42:40 in support. Therefore, the position statement "I believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman" is not extreme.

The bottom line is that many views that are strongly associated with conservativism are likely to result in personal attacks if expressed in the aforementioned settings.

Just look at the flak Peter Thiel has gotten for supporting Trump. Why does donating to a major party's presidential campaign result in things like this [1]?

1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13307112/peter-thiel-tru...

So can you do the ground work and show that a position like opposition to same sex marriage is actually frequently and casually labeled as extreme?

(I can think of lots of other invectives that people apply to it, I'm just not sure that it particularly gets treated as a non mainstream view...)

I also disagree with the point in principle. We even have a word for it when a majority gets on the wrong side of rational (and goes to extremes), a mob.

> So can you do the ground work and show that a position like opposition to same sex marriage is actually frequently and casually labeled as extreme?

I suppose I could, but I'm honestly not interested in doing so to support a casual conversation on a web forum.

> I also disagree with the point in principle. We even have a word for it when a majority gets on the wrong side of rational (and goes to extremes), a mob.

Actually I'm not familiar with the term "mob" being used that way, and a quick search doesn't seem to support your usage either.

How about 1 or 2 analysis of it as an extreme ideology? Even better if they aren't by kooks.

> /pol/ exists largely as a reaction to the suppression of non-progressive thought

/pol/ exists so edgy teenagers (and others who haven't developed mentally past that phase) can attempt to get a rise out of people by posting shallow, far-right tripe.

The level of intelligent discussion there is pitiful.

I parse your comment to mean "/pol/ is childish. People who hold those views are shallow and unintelligent."

I find it interesting that my posting discussing /pol/ - not supporting it, mind you, merely discussing it - elicits a response like this from a brand new account.

My position is that exactly this sort of response to anything that isn't "progressive" is what has caused the rise of /pol/.

What makes you say that American conservative views are not extreme, in the context of the global internet?

I'm not sure what the "context of the global internet" has to do with my comment.

This subthread is off of devmunchies comment about Reddit and Twitter, and the OP is about 4chan. All of these forums are global.

My point is that American-style conservatism may represent half of Americans, but it's overwhelmed in other developed countries (which, taken together, are larger in population). So much so that I would argue that in the global context, American conservatism is small enough and far enough to one side of the debate that it's accurate to call it an extreme.

>There are certainly people who believe what they say on /pol/, but the vast majority of them are consciously acting as a parody of what they have been cast to be.

What leads you to believe this?

I'm relying only on personal experience. I know several people in real life that are "shitlords" online. They're doing it not because they believe the things they post, but because they've found it to be an effective way to shift the narrative and to throw their political opponents off-balance.

Likewise, I know a few people in real life that actually hold those extreme and (frankly) bigoted beliefs. As far as I know they haven't really changed their online behavior, and they're not part of that in-group.

The "rise of the extreme left throughout popular media"? So the communists and anarchists have taken over, then?

Come on, words mean things. I'm so tired of conservatives calling everything they disagree with the "far left", the "extreme left", and so on, as it muddies the waters for discussion of anything left of the Democratic Party.

>There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism

That's the real tragedy here. Intelligent conservative thought has been completely lost to the rhetorical insanity of our current political climate. For a perfect example of this take a look at what has become of the National Review.

The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.

I remain an enthusiastic reader of National Review after ~17 years. What do you think has become of it?

There's probably a phase-change effect where having more than a critical density of these types of obnoxious posters pushes out all of the moderate users.

Frankly, I disagree that 4chan's decline had anything to do with politics. Rather, it was caused by the internet's uncanny ability to turn any discussion into meaningless shitposting. All the /pol/ vs /anyoneelse/ shit-flinging is just a fight between native and cross-board shitposters, and not different from those of yore (back when it was /b/ and /v/ flinging shit).

Your board choice and use of "meme" as a verb tells me you were part of the problem.

It's truly bizarre to see how big of an impact one random, completely irrelevant event (ZoePost, GamerGate) had on the sites culture.

The GamerGate drama turned many subreddits and the non-/pol/ parts of 4chan into right-wing echo chambers.

I think you're conflating causation - GamerGate was an expression of /pol/ culture, not the cause of it. I'm sure that the fact that the event made news spread that culture, but ultimately the ideas didn't change.

I disagree. GamerGate was the cause for the rise of right-wing social media power. Milo wasn't know outside those circles until after the controversy got the mainstream consciousness, and now he's a staple on all of the right-wing sites I frequent.

The idea that the largest gun forum on the internet would be regularly discussing posts by Milo and Gavin McInness would have been laughable before GamerGate. "Based Stickman", "Dave", etc. wouldn't exist if not for it.

From the perspective of the "new right", GamerGate was the first time a community does up against the cultural warfare of the left and won. It was the point where the left went from being counter-culture to being "the establishment". For the first time in generations, the social outcasts were conservatives, not liberals. It's now rebellious and cool to want to marry and start a traditional family. You can be booed off a stage for saying things like "the husband should provide for his family". The right has grabbed this and incorporated it into their identity; the left hasn't figured out yet that they've become what they thought they were fighting. They're the Man.

> Milo wasn't [known] outside those circles until after the controversy got the mainstream consciousness

Yeah, I watched Milo get popular too, going from an occasional guest on Sky News to someone that people riot about... He's pretty amusing for the amount of controversy he generates. However, I don't think he has changed the culture of /pol/ (as OP said), I think he was propelled by it.

> It's now rebellious and cool to want to marry and start a traditional family.

I don't think GamerGate focused on that particular aspect. From what I saw, GG was just about bashing the media and exposing how journalists will work together to push certain narratives. Traditionalism is more prominent within the alt-right, and that wasn't pushed into the media spotlight until Hillary did a speech attacking them around August 2016. By that time, GG had died down and even Milo had pivoted his brand to alt-(right|light) talking points.

>It's now rebellious and cool to want to marry and start a traditional family.

Uh.. what?

I've never actually seen family values being part of the discussion given most GG adherents trend teenage or older unmarried on KiA (the target male demos of video games).

I mean that a traditional family is seen as somewhat counter-cultural today. I don't mean that this is literally a central topic for /pol/.

....is it? I don't know any non-traditional families and I'm in a pretty metropolitan social circle.

For some context for those interested: It's not entirely clear what "traditional family" means, but a plausible definition is married parents with children, where the husband is employed but the wife is not. (This is the direct sense implied by the context of the post originating this discussion, but is also the definition used by many other sources.)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.t04.htm there were ~7 million families in the United States fitting this definition in 2016, which corresponds to approximately 20% of families with children (and thus fewer than 10% of families total). Among said families with children, it is twice as common to have both husband and wife employed (~40%), and it is slightly more common to have a mother with no opposite-sex spouse present (~25%) -- though she may be unemployed.

I was unable to find statistics as to the geographic distribution of different family structures, eg whether they are more or less likely to live in metropolitan or rural areas.

The /mlp/ cancer was much worse than the /pol/ cancer, and the /pol/ cancer was a predictable outcome of increased censorship by Moot after the whole gamergate silliness.

4chan has definitely gotten worse, but /pol/ is just a small part of it. The single worst factor in the last 5 years is (I suspect) the normalization of Reddit and the massive exodus from Reddit to historically "weirder" websites, including 4chan. The existing culture wasn't big enough/viral enough to successfully integrate/indoctrinate the new users.

I feel like this about the Internet at large. Gone are the days when you could go a long time without reading this kind of hate, or even its more moderate variants.

It's not like this hate wasn't always there, but it's near-omnipresent now.

> x.com used to be better

It did. Elon Musk owned it pre merger with confinity. X.com used to redirect to PayPal; still prob does. So x.com certainly used to be better...

Doesn't currently do anything.

Are they being literal about "x.com"? I thought they were just just saying <insert whatever old site you used to use a decade ago>.com

wand3r is, as a joke. sotojuan isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

Somewhere I still have an X.com plastic credit card.

Nevertheless, /pol/ and r/the_donald were one of main factors why Donald Trump got elected. This crowdsurfing phenomenon holds tremendous amount of power.

What's crazy is that in the Bush/early Obama years 4chan was fairly liberal in terms of politics.

I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift? Because it's something I noticed as well.

Something happened that has pushed much of the general internet and large swathes of the "geekier" parts of the net to the right, and it doesn't seem to be letting up. The media ran with the "Russian shills" thing for a while, but it seems to be running out of steam and people I've known for years who used to lean firmly left are now either fairly far right, or left leaning but absolutely hate the left establishment and support the right purely out of spite.

>I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift? Because it's something I noticed as well.

It was 8 years of a Democratic, fairly liberal president. People like to rebel against whatever is in fashion. The right wing is now "edgy" because it rails against the prevailing political power

The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken over our media in the past decade. Be prepared for a radical push back from Trumpism by the subsequent generations that grow up under the current political climate. I imagine the pendulum will swing back with a vengeance after this one.

I am not sure why would you call someone who drones children liberal.

I find that "liberal" standing alone is useless these days.

You really need to prefix it with "social" or "economic".

>The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken over our media in the past decade.

Absolutely false, kids do not watch Fox News, and I'm not sure what you mean by 'taken over our media'. The generation of kids now posting on 4chan actually group up watching shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which took one sentence sound bites from people, put labels (you might know which ones) on them and made them into a huge spectacle.

>The generation of kids now posting on 4chan actually group up watching shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which took one sentence sound bites from people, put labels (you might know which ones) on them and made them into a huge spectacle.

It's two sides of the same extreme, both of which have driven people to the far right (Trumpism) and left (Antifa) respectively. Stewart is a perfect example of this childish false dichotomy created by the media to set people against one another. There's clearly a lot of money in tribalism.

As far as 'taking over our media', what I meant is the rise of far right talk radio and things like Alex Jones being taken legitimately. These things have made it impossible for a normal person to filter out the nonsense these days.

> It was 8 years of a Democratic, fairly liberal president. People like to rebel against whatever is in fashion. The right wing is now "edgy" because it rails against the prevailing political power

I'm 33. From my perspective, the GOP has been steadily gaining power my entire adult life. Obama's election in 2012 seemed mostly a result of the GOP choosing a fairly lame candidate and Obama's own personal charisma.

I'm not sure it makes sense to "rebel against" the faction that has held the House for only 4 of the last 22 years.

I think it's a combination of several factors:

The skewed, unequal recovery since the recession has tons of people extremely bitter about the state of the economy and our country. Theoretically our economy is doing much better than it was in the 80's, but only a few cities are experiencing growth. This general sense of stress and displeasure among many people amplifies bipartisanship, and our two-party political structure just makes that worse.

Right now, it is mostly seen as bad socially to hold non-PC viewpoints. With increased bipartisanship, it's only natural that the side with non-PC viewpoints would grow on an anonymous forum.

The internet has become a massive avenue for media. People are constantly bombarded with unfiltered, unedited information that shows that our economy isn't for us, the media isn't for us, our employers aren't for us, heck, even our police and neighbors aren't for us. It just amplifies any us-vs-them mentalities that people have.

Propaganda. State actors would aim for media that is both popular and anonymous. 4chan is a great avenue for that.

Liberals and media are running with the propaganda angle because it sounds sexy and starts a faux Cold War, but I really think the real issues are our economy and media. People need to feel safe. If they don't, instability occurs on both sides. Sanders was a huge upset too, and shows us that it's everyone who feels pressured, not just the right.

It was quite possibly gamergate in 2014. I don't think dragging up the whole culture war here is valuable, but clearly a large portion of the gaming community were left feeling mistrustful of the gaming media. That war continues as background noise at this point, but is still a powerful influencer on many left-vs-right subjects.

I've never really understood gamergate. I vaguely recall there were some accusations of favouritism by games journalists towards some female game makers. What I don't understand is how this spiralled out of control. Was it mostly fueled by people jumping on a bandwagon or is there something I'm missing?

With the disclaimer that I don't fully understand Gamergate myself, and the following account sounds possibly incomplete, it seems like a workable summary of part of the subject. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g9tit/e...

Edit: I suppose I could note, some of the Youtube personalities who (I have heard) supported the movement are currently staunchly anti-feminist. I'm not certain how central they were to the movement at the time, but they may be relevant to the comments others have made involving the impact of the group.

I'm on mobile so I didn't read the pdf.

But I'd say related to the itle is overly PC people highly vocal aka SJW as people say. It's the left equivalent of far right.

The other thing I think is US style politics as a Canadian it amazes me that is is so absolute you're Democrat or Republican. Most western countries have multiple political parties covering many shades politics.

People in the USA from my viewpoint seem to have become convinced they can only be one or the other. And it seems there is a huge gap between the two parties more than I can recall seeing.

The other thing is the US president is treated like a king he's just a politician. In western countries with prime ministers he can be thrown out easily and most people don't care who the person is.

Age also seems to be a big part maybe it's a Millenia/Boomer thing big groups with opposing views.

And of course there seems to be a huge lack of trust about what to believe. The tackiness most paranoid websites which years ago were called trashy tabloids are now seen as actual journalism. A person claiming to be a conspiracy theorist acts as if it is a badge of pride.

Overall I don't know lack of education, no mentors, lack of direction, lack of a moral guide.

it amazes me that is is so absolute you're Democrat or Republican

This may be true in general but isn't true of alt-right communities who coined the "cuckservative" meme. They were no fans of the GOP.

The contrarian aspect of 4chan is important, but I think theres more to it than that. Contrarianism on 4chan during the Bush years wasn't nearly as violent and widespread as it's been lately, and I think it goes back to gamergate, which was the first time a lot of 4chan users experienced politics having an effect on something central to their culture. The only groups speaking out against "SJW culture" happened to be far right wing groups, so they listened and adopted the rest of the platform. There was also always an undercurrent of racism (spamming the n word goes back to the early days of /b/) and the alt right gave these people a community, and talking points for a bunch of other issues.

> There was also always an undercurrent of racism (spamming the n word goes back to the early days of /b/)

You are conflating message with actual sentiment. Using racist language is simply a subset of inflammatory language and trolling. Calling people a retard or a faggot fulfills similar goals. It does not really tell you much whether the anonymous poster actually discriminates based on those attributes or just uses the language to maintain a vulgar atmosphere. Slur words will always exist, attempting to ban them will just make the political correctness treadmill spin faster.

> which was the first time a lot of 4chan users experienced politics having an effect on something central to their culture.

Not quite. cartoon child porn has always been seen as a canary in the coalmine. If they go after that, which other deviant thing will next be branded as a thought crime?

4chan is radically free speech. Any political movement that restricts free speech in any way at all will have that as a black mark on them. The philosophy is that only deeds matter, words are free. If you post on /b/ that you'll shoot up a school tomorrow nobody will give a fuck. If you then continue to actually shoot up a school tomorrow then a) that's the actual crime b) great lulz will be had.

>You are conflating message with actual sentiment

Yeah, thats a fair point.

>cartoon child porn

I think you're misunderstanding what i'm saying here. Gamergate was a massive controversy that played out over the course of many months, was covered on national news networks and ruined many careers. It was a galvanizing event that brought people together in defense of their hobby. Cartoon child porn is a symbol of the belief system that you've described, but I don't think its possible to say that defending it galvanized the 4chan user base like gamergate.

"If you then continue to actually shoot up a school tomorrow then a) that's the actual crime b) great lulz will be head."

Really? "Great lulz will be head(sic)"?

I can't fathom what kind of person sees stuff like this and thinks to himself: "Yeah cool man! Exactly the type of community I want to be a part of!"

Like, are these all just bored kids? Adults who never developed empathy and have nothing else to do with their life?

> You are conflating message with actual sentiment.

Whether or not people who act like racists are actually racist doesn't matter at the end of the day, they have the same effect.

I think part of the reason is the changing demographics of the geekier parts of the Internet. As hitherto absent groups of people entered geekdom, it produced a defensive reaction.

The way I see it, it is easier to express liberal sentiments than to actually walk the talk. Kind of like how it's easier to profess feminism when it doesn't require any effort from your side than when you are married and have kids and are expected to equally share household responsibilities.

I know several software engineers who always smile and nod when politics come up, they have been here forever but the last few years has pushed them over some tipping point where they became vocal.

The social "tax rate" of things you must do in order to be a "good person" according to the establishment left got way too high. So if your choices are to make excruciatingly sure you don't accidentally forget the TQQIAAP part of LGBTQQIAAP alliance, or fuck all that noise and stop caring about what the left thinks, well, a bunch of folks are going to stop caring about what the left thinks.

What caused the shift? The fact that 8 years of Obama didn't help the working class, and millenials are kind of in a shit situation.

It's pretty simple, we moved left too fast for even many on the American left, and there was a backlash. Most people want to do the right thing, and the left's brand is "nice for people" but past a certain point people need to have some social, political and economic stability and the changes just came too fast and hard for that.

I was a straight-up supporter of Occupy Wall Street. I know a lot of people who were. We all changed.

I think the thing is that 4chan is mostly anti-establishment. Obama promised CHANGE (anti-lobbying, supporting lower classes) and at the same time bringing troops home, something that would also appeal to conservatives. Plus he was fairly open and media-savy which provided a lot of material for memes, e.g. the situation room photo when they got osama.

When he failed to achieve his promises - certainly due to republican blockades to some extent - he was seen as a disappointment and trump became THE spanner in the works of washington.

Another important polarizing issue is the vocal social justice movement in colleges, on tumblr, in the media etc. Since it is seen as infringing on free speech where it matters to 4chan (games, porn, unfiltered non-PC conversation, trolling) they are seen as a threat. If the left does not radically defend free speech, even when it is unpleasant or could be considered as hateful while the right promises small government and has crazy libertarian subcurrents then this is actually more value-aligned, at least on the surface, with 4chan interests.

I don't think a timeline where bernie had been the 4chan favorite would be inconceivable.

They don't like being told what to do or say. That's pretty much their main tenet. So when the liberals started policing them they rebelled.

The chans (or at least the political parts) are fundamentally anarchist (which reflects the structure of the board). Since there are only two successful parties in the US, neither of them anarchist (or even libertarian) in any substantial respect, the intersection of chan politics and US politics manifests in weird ways.

It seemed like most of them supported Ron Paul.

>the Bush/early Obama years

That was 4chan's "Ron Paul for President" and "Jews did 9/11" phase.

4chan was never liberal.

Citation needed.

You will never get citation for that. I've been following those two communities for last three months before election happened (and few months after) and what I can state is onyl empirical. The things they do are amazing. More than 25k+ people working 24/7 to elect Trump is big influence. Note that they were all unpaid and did it by their free will. They even had paid members from opposition (ShariaBlue) to influence their opinions and destroy hegemony of site, but they failed. What do you think who financed this study? You think they were bored so decided to study /pol/ just so they have something to do?

Pro Donald sites had much bigger influence in election than most of people will ever realize. Trump himself acknowledges them and his team follows them because news get there fastest.

I was following /pol/ since Trump's campaign started, back when I was certain he was just a sideshow distraction. Donald Trump's twitter account even winked at /pol/ at one point by tweeting what a 4chan poster asked, as well as copying their meme images. There was and is a very close connection there. It would be difficult to quantify the notion that the absence of /pol/ would have lost Trump the election, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.

This is a statement without a lot of actual backing. Folks claim it, but it's difficult to prove.

Meanwhile we can prove that Republicans suppressed certain types of voters post VRA-repeal. We can prove that laws banning felons from voting impact some groups more than others (unfairly, I might add). We even have evidence (if not conclusive proof) that spearfishing attacks on US voting staff changed voter rolls.

It is part of /pol & the altright's rhetoric that they're a large and influential body. They certainly can grab media attention. But I don't think we really see them in particular exhibiting political power.

I agree that those are issues that should be addressed, but if you feel that Trump's rise wasn't legitimate, then I urge you to spend some time in an area of the country that voted for him. There are many, many areas of the country where people feel like their quality of life has been on the decline for decades and who have lost faith in normal politicians. The "altright rhetoric" may not be influential to you, but it is very influential to a large chunk of the population.

Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind.

Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegotiating all trade agreements, a.k.a. "winning". The entire campaign was a big lie. Trump lies on a scale that is not comparable to what regular politicians do -- his salesmanship skills allow him to tune in to whatever people want to hear. When the connection between campaign promises and policy gets totally severed democracy dies.

White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump.

> White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump.

1. Blaming outsourcing and illegal immigration is not racist. If American citizens need to compete against people who are willing to work very hard for less than minimum wage, that hurts the wages and quality of life of Americans. Our labor laws exist for a reason.

2. Many people were aware of how non-political Trump sounded during the election. People didn't vote for him because of his eloquence, but because he was the only major contender that acknowledged many issues that our country had. Like you said, rural America has every right to be angry, and Trump was the only Republican that tried to tap into that.

1. There is no clear evidence that illegal immigration has a meaningful influence on wages. Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do. For the past 30 years wages haven't kept up with productivity growth, I'm sure you've seen the charts. Meanwhile expenses for housing, education and healthcare have exploded. Framing immigration as the primary cause of economic stagnation is wrong, because it is a minor influence at most. The way Trump talked about immigration was transparently racist, and it's the same Southern Strategy rhetoric we've seen time and time again.

2. Voters didn't choose Trump just because "he acknowledged issues". This election was a referendum on race, and that's what got Trump in office. See for instance https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak...

1. I didn't say illegal immigration was a major cause of low wages, but it definitely does have an effect, especially among lower class workers. You say "Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do," but the issue is that Americans refuse to do it for minimum wage. Why would someone do backbreaking labor for near minimum wage and no benefits when they can work at a gas station making more? For Americans to do those jobs, wages would have to go up. Corporations would be forced to do so if illegal immigration didn't keep wages down.

2. That site that you linked to is ridiculous. They measure racism by peoples' beliefs in self-determination and whether or not illegal immigrants take jobs. Which they do. If there are 10 million illegal immigrants in a country of 300 million doing lower class work, and those people aren't equally distributed across the country, you can bet there will be pockets of land where lower class wages are suppressed. And you can bet that, within those areas impacted, views towards illegal immigrants will be more negative.

At the core of your argument is this premise:

> Corporations would be forced to do so if illegal immigration didn't keep wages down.

But no one is forcing corporations to hire undocumented immigrants over people authorized to work here; in fact, they're pressured not to. It's illegal!

That's why "illegal immigration" is cast as a racist issue: it's often a hand-wavey dog whistle blaming people of color for economic issues while absolving (generally white-owned) businesses of any responsibility.

1. If H1Bs are shown to have depressed wages of computer programmers etc., why would it not be logical to expect illegals to depress wages?

If there were 12 million fewer people in the USA (the laughably low "official" number of illegals in the country), would demand for housing be less? Demand for doctors and related health care?

Even former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich, in TV interviews, admitted that "Undoubtedly access to lower-wage foreign workers has a depressing effect [on wages]".

2. Quoting 1 article from a progressive magazine (which incidentally, endorsed Hillary Clinton) to "prove" the voting behavior of over 100 million people is kind of ridiculous.

1. How would you separate that effect from the well-documented and systemic collusion to depress.wages and reduce employee turnover that already affects our industry?

As for the count, do you have some reasources that aren't secretly written by daily stormer folks?

re 1: so only the computer-related companies are smart enough to understand and then take advantage of such effects?

The count has remained unchanged since the late 1990s/early 2000s. Yet there are many who have crossed over the southern border each year since then. Therefore ...

Let's split this by paragraph. Sorry to fisk your post so much.

> re 1: so only the computer-related companies are smart enough to understand and then take advantage of such effects?

I think maybe you're misunderstanding me. Apple, Google, Oracle, and others have engaged in a wage fixing cartel that was exposed a few years ago. A big long summary was laid out here: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

> The count has remained unchanged since the late 1990s/early 2000s. Yet there are many who have crossed over the southern border each year since then. Therefore ...

I'm not sure what you're referring to here or if you're suggesting I disagree with the amount of "illegal" immigration being on an uptick. I think it is, but data I've seen suggests an impression that it's a function of the country's total population, not a trend that rises out-of-proportion. Further, the rules for immigration (and the various visa quotas) have not fixed ("remained unchanged") since 1990. It's eye-rolling, incandescently hot cow pies ripped right off of a poorly sourced Breitbart article comment section to suggest they are.

Our economy has grown substantially as a result of business owners exploiting labor that has no legal recourse for mistreatment, cannot easily push back on unlivable wages, and does not receive health insurance. And it's outrageous.

I think, you don't know anything about the H2A labor program, which is for ag workers. It's as much a wage fixing cartel as anything else. News article that can server as a quick backgrounder: http://www.southeastfarmpress.com/tobacco/north-carolina-gro...

Not really sure how to respond to the rest of your comment. I am stating that I do not believe the "there are 12 million illegals in the USA" statistic, because it has been repeated for about 15 years at this point, with no change. Yet areas that did not have illegals 15 years ago, now do; thus it seems the number of illegals has increased.

I'm sorry, but I have to agree to Gizmo on this one.

While outsourcing and illegal immigration are policy issues worth discussing, there were plenty of overtly racist issues that Donald Trump touched upon. There's nothing racist about "Lets shore up our border policy". Maybe even the wall isn't racist... at least, some aspects of the wall... as far as infrastructure spending, hampering the drug trade, etc. etc. We all can agree that MS-13 is crossing the border and trying to sell drugs in our country... right? That's just a fact. I don't think a lone wall helps, because MS-13 has catapults, drones, and submarines to bring the drugs over. But I'm perfectly willing to talk about the benefits of physical boarder security. A wall is just a part of the picture

However, there's something racist about calling a US Judge an unfair Mexican Hombre. Donald Trump is racist. Period. His supporters may or may not be, and his policy decisions aren't all racist. But without a doubt, Donald Trump himself is a racist who sees the world in black and white.

---------------

As far as "not touching on rural America", there's a point about honesty. Trump HONESTLY can't do jack diddly crap about the situation. He just talked a big talk and is going to fail to deliver. He's blamed say... the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has eradicated it.

The TPP: Designed to encourage say, US Cotton Exports to Vietnam (Vietnam actually buys US Cotton to make T-Shirts and other textiles. So they were rewarded under TPP) would have improved the marketability of Rural US workers. Period.

Donald Trump destroyed the TPP however, and now China's RCEP has received major support in the region. The USA could have been the leader in Asian trade, but Donald Trump gave it up to appease his right-wind supporters. And without any US trade influence in the Asian region, our (current) Asian partners will inevitably join China's RCEP and the USA will LOSE.

--------

Rural America would have benefited from TPP, and China would have lost. Case in point: China wasn't even ON the TPP. A huge portion of the TPP was about securing exports for the USA (especially enticing our Asian partners to buy US material instead of Chinese material)

So yes, why don't we talk about trade and outsourcing. I am perfectly willing to have that discussion with you without resorting to calling people racist. There are plenty of actual issues to discuss here that would benefit Rural America if people figured them out.

But Donald Trump's racist talks drowns out the truth. That's a fact. He isn't helping.

-----------

The worst part is how Donald Trump is selectively racist. He constantly beats the drum on "Radical Islam Terror", then visits Saudi Arabia FIRST. The home of Wahhabi Islam, the specific sect that raised Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attackers. Case in point: around 15 of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian.

Of course, Donald Trump gotta take care of his Saudi Arabian Hotels, so maybe that's not a surprise. Its clear Trump is in it for the money.

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_mediu...

Guess what words Donald Trump forgot about during his trip to Saudi Arabia? He never once uttered the words "Radical Islamic Terrorism".

That's the worst part of it all. I think the conservatives maybe have a point about "Radical Islamic Terror". There are certain sects of Muslims that seem to be more violent and aligned to Al Quadea, AQAP, and ISIS. They're all Wahhabism / Salifi Jihadists... a minor sect that only constitutes 0.5% of all Muslims.

But it doesn't help if the President is a opportunistic coward, who is unable to say those words when its most necessary.

1. Yes. It is. It's not brown people from another country making decisions shaping American employment markets or legislation. That's squarely local business owners who could act in compliance with the law, but since they're (often white and) wealthy we shrug and mumble about invisible hands. Folks would rather lash out at vulnerable aliens near them than the lawmakers and business owners who continue to exploit them. Mostly because the alternative is punishment from those who hold power and a mighty sum of congnitive dissonance. ("Wait, if I voted for you then you did this to me... and then I voted for you again...")

What's more, the intersection between the jobs that illegal immigration fills and what locals can legally work is low and has been shown to be low over and over.

2. Trump awknowledged and embraced fears the American religious extremists have been trying to seed w.r.t Muslims, a process conservatives are complicit in since it's such an easy fear to appeal to. Beyond that... He panned a health care law the Republicans have been sabotaging to tank it so they can say it would surely tank. And... What else?

Again, look at the data. A majority of Trump supporters don't vote around nationalist economics. Separate data had people pro-ACA (where it wasn't sabotaged, for example in Pence's watch) but anti-"Obamacare." You tell me what that suggests.

I'm not sure that predicating your campaign on lies reduces it's legitimacy if you actually hold the popular mandate even as those lies are exposed.

Fortunately, that situation doesn't describe us.

I'm definitely not arguing that no one voted for him. But I do think we keep seeing examples of structural manipulations of the system to alter vote outcomes. Republicans haven't been particularly subtle about this.

And actually, my dude, there are a ton of people studying this and the altright is by no means Trump's largest individual support block. There's quite large and very thoughtful investigations with raw data available.

Again, I repeat: if you actually crunch the numbers the altright is not only a minority of Trump's supporters, but a faction that's almost vanishingly small. This sort of shows up in practical measurements of their gatherings.

Now, unopposed I think they'll grow. That's what fascism is all about at this stage and really their principle message is that they want power and they'll fix white people problems by any means necessary.

But they weren't particularly effective this last election cycle compared to the more direct manipulations we see.

Racist language and some forms of culture war, e.g. against censorship of extreme porn, has always been present.

> Sometimes you just want to meme about the latest bad anime episode

That's what happens 99% of the time. If you get baited by the 1% of the time that pol leaks then maybe you need a thicker skin. And people DO respond with "go back to /pol/" half the time anyway. At the same time /a/ has threads about traps (crossdressing), yuri and other things that would ostensibly be considered degeneracy by /pol/.

While some things may have changed it's not that they are omnipresent.

> until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers

I guess this is actually a response/reaction to the extreme political correctness coming from many places around the World. I think this will last until "society" redeems free speech and people actually begin to have real dialogs.

I would buy this if not for the fact that:

1) simply asking for a modicum of respect is often conflated for political correctness

2) liking the wrong kind of music or finding the wrong hairstyle attractive garners a person this kind of treatment - which is the context GP is referring to

and

3) these words are used as silencing tactics in the same way 'racist' and 'bigot' are

I could also argue that it's hard to be a hate speech judge when everything can be a trigger if you get offended.

I don't think if it was a matter of just asking for respect on the individual level, it would go this far. But who knows.

This 4chan phenomena is probably due to their incapacity to articulate on the real world, when in the real world they are already taken as wrong just by playing an opposite moral or political value, or in most cases, for being "privileged".

KEKistan would be the nemesis of PC's "safe space" world, I guess.

Not saying that I agree with all that, just reflecting. I only think that only real dialog will balance this. Not force, not laws. Dialog.

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