But no, it's just IT. How wrong I was.
Why can't you lean left on healthcare and LGBT rights, yet more right on certain economic policies and tax issues?
Most alt-right are just deeply ignorant people. But some are malevolent. The base ideology requires people believe vicious things about "the other" who happen to be merely different. They refer to liberals as libtards, and prefer strong leaders like Putin, Kim, Duerte, Erdogan, and even weaker autocrats, as compared to "vile libtards" like say Clinton (who is something like a cross between Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Thatcher). No doubt they'd prefer Putin as president of the United States than a Clinton.
The "alt-right" are not the only ones who are guilty of this, unfortunately. This is a characteristic of the extremes of pretty much every political position or ideology.
Personally, the whole "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality of both of the mainstream political parties is what drove me to vote Libertarian last election. Johnson's campaign seemed a lot more focused on welcoming folks with differing political views (which is unsurprising, given the rather long range of libertarianism from libertarian socialism to anarcho-capitalism, and given the fact that the Libertarian Party is in no position to be alienating voters), which was very refreshing amid both Clinton and Trump basing their campaigns on how bad the other candidate is (and further on how bad the other candidate's supporters are).
The ensuing dissonance upon understanding this punishment is what encourages our low voter participation rates, as well as hyper-partisan politics, tribalism. In addition, there's a pervasive "government sucks" that contemplating a state by state change in voting law, and it would have to be state by state, seems like dark comedy. It would take a lot of political committment way beyond that of voting 3rd party to fix the problem we have in the American political system. Americans are politically lazy, content to not vote, or vote 3rd party, and suffer the inevitable result, engage in political denialism, than the critical thinking required to fix it.
The effect of closed primary elections also enhances this tribalism and discourse problem. It's maybe 8-12% of the total eligible electorate that get a presidential primary candidate the nomination for the two major parties.
Both major political parties sabotaged the Electoral College by stacking it with party loyalists rather than, you know, smart people or even contemplative people or even randomly selected citizens. We could hardly do worse choosing dead people for Electors.
A case to watch is Gill vs Whitford before the Supreme Court next year.
Plus, people have been referring to liberals as libtards since way before the alt right was a thing, and the alt right doesn't really tend to advocate for tax cuts for the rich. They are overwhelmingly racist and white nationalist but not exclusively. And really the root of the ideology is fear of what could happen to whites as a minority group, which is very paranoid and not something I'm personally concerned about, but it's not the same thing as hate. A lot of these people are also mentally ill. The "basket of deplorables" approach to dealing with them clearly did not work. We can be against everything they stand for and still be aware that they're human beings that on the whole are probably more confused than sociopathic or evil.
In another conversation on HN about the social benefits of shaming people, I'd say a possible reason "basket of deplorables" approach didn't work is because it was quickly followed by milquetoast apology. If you want an invidious recipe for political fallout, that would be it. If you're going to try and shame people effectively as a bully you have to stick with it (see Trump).
It's possible for both the parent post and the article to be on the right track. Wealth enables action and technology obviously enables and creates wealth.
It's also difficult to assign this to "Clintonian types" when in general the centrist side of the Democrats has been such an ardent supporter of the growth of the tech industry. They're eager to own the eneconic growth.
Well let's face it, we're all getting a huge break from the government right now in a ton of different ways, so they do get some credit for making the laws incredibly lax around here.
Even Trump's government gets credit until it screws up this sweet deal we're on. And if you wanna see how sweet it really gets, go into fintech. All your opponents with lots of cash on hand are basically operating blindfolded with both hands tied behind their back.
Regulators literally have no idea what to make of us in that space. They largely leave us alone so long as you have even semi-competent legal advice. If you have good legal advice? Well you end up recreating financial institutions in all but name and without any regulation (e.g., Digit).
> simultaneously demonize tech workers as unempathetic racists, sexists, and gentrifiers
I wanna get to the rest of your post, but I just can't leave this alone. I'm sorry to shift the focus here, but we really don't need any external help on this though, do we?
The racist part of the story has legs because folks like the "unnamed" google engineer writing screeds about how no, actually, it's the rich conservatives in the majority who are unsafe. Because tech conferences argue they're a safe space for men who's primary ideological focus for their publications is proving black people thrive under slavery. Because a constant dribble of stories like Kixeye exist to support population statistics that are... statistically unlikely by pure chance..
The sexist part of the story? Gosh maybe if our industry stopped doing so many things that enable abuse of women, the narrative might not be that we enable the abuse of women. Similarly, if we paid women more or less equally within rank and gave them equal opportunity in the workforce... This problem might exist to a much lesser degree. Uber's ripping itself apart not because some women choose to speak out; it's because the public is discovering obviously unethical and probably illegal behavior.
Tech gets special attention, I grant. It's outsized, growing fast, and is consuming and reformatting other INDUSTRIES as its primary fuel source rather than more traditional business models.
> I would definitely consider him to be part of the Democratic establishment.
This is an excellent example of a perception gap. See, I've always seen him as fringe because of his views on transgenderism, his decision that racial slurs are free speech he should exercise, etc.
Unlike, say, Clinton or Obama who've obviously changed their opinions on this subject (or decided to portray an image largely indistinguishable from someone having changed their image) Maher has continue to expand upon it. Maybe he was center-left when he started, but it's difficult to say he's on the left side of the cultural equation these days.
Can you prove this? I'm curious. I don't entirely disagree, but I sure would love verification.
I think that whole thing about "unconscious bias" is very real, and it's quite fair to rigorously examine our biases and accept constructive criticism of them. There's also a matter of perception lagging behind reality, and reality being difficult to assess because of availability biases.
> But that doesn't stop people from continuing to paint us specifically with too broad a brush,
Deep apologies for going so far on a tangent here, but I'd like to encourage you to step back from these for a moment.
Firstly, don't be that person and allegations aimed at said people don't really apply to you? If you accidentally behave in a way that lines up with these allegations, then own it, accept the censure, identify what steps you'll take to correct yourself then execute on them.
> I think it's because they have an issue with us personally, and that's probably due to negative stereotypes about "geeks".
I'm sure that there is a bit of this still lingering in the world, but by-and-large the stereotyping about "geeks" has ended. Geeks rule the damn world. Geeks dominate the news cycle. In terms of combating anti-intellectualism? We're winning that handily.
Here's the part where I sorta agree with your previous statement, even if I wouldn't bet the whole farm on it:
One of the reasons that the extreme-conservative-and-extreme-liberal rhetoric is amplifying so much lately is that fact-and-experiment-driven flexibility is actually gaining so much cultural mindshare from more dogmatic methods of thinking. This empirical method is decried by both sides of the aisle as "centrism" or painted as anti-humanist. I don't believe it is, but such is the defense mechanism of those those thoughts. Examine the rhetoric of a "nationalist" or a "monarchist" or even a "communist"; exclusion is baked into their doctrine. It's why these ideas are so tenacious.
As these more dogmatic groups get backed further and further into corners, they seem outsized cultural impact more and more desperately to avoid the perception that they are in decline.
To this end, enduring slings and arrows while focusing on doing the right and fair thing, with an eye towards incremental improvement, is exactly what folks attacking our community hate us doing. Part of the reason they're eager to amplify our failures at self-policing is because they're flustered by the fact that for the most part the valley has calmly agreed that the current situation is in fact illegal and untenable and started taking steps to correct it.
These steps can't happen overnight, nor can they be "one simple thing." We both know that. But dogmatic thought thrives on the notion that if you just listen and do whatever they say (often without any pre-planning at all) then it'll all go away.
Looping this all back around to the topic, it's up to us to figure out how to use the power-disparity we're developing (and that's precisely what a difference is technology is) to make the world a better place. Criticism needs to be in our lives to remind us that we're shaping things that can affect generations and generations to come.
(The official story was that low skill IT jobs are sent off shore to help the bottom line. This, the official reason for a service and information economy to tech transfer its crown jewels, never made any sense. Consider that software craft is mostly learned on the job, thus gutting the entry level insures future deficits in higher levels. And further that by near universal account, outsourced software projects are technically subpar and subject to multiple rewrites. All this while entire floors at investment banks' IT departments were 'let go'.
You do the math.)
Some have even rolled their own internal cloud infrastructure services like mini-Azures or a mini-AWS and systems like Hadoop but using entirely custom tech, not just an instance of an open source solution. There is almost nothing going on in the big tech giants in terms of core technology development that some banks somewhere aren't also doing.
You might split hairs or come up with some technical definition to avoid classifying them in this way, but if you do you will be deluding yourself. The Banks have found that in many areas they cannot rely on external technology companies to meet their needs, so they have to meet them using internal resources and roll a lot of their own tech.
You be the judge!