Comment by sinxoveretothex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sinxoveretothex | Hacker News Reader

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sinxoveretothex

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.

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