Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

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> What explains the gulf between most Americans’ hopeful outlook on areas and institutions they know directly and their despair about the country they know only through the news?

In their anthropological foray, they notice that people generally get along with local people in local contexts. That's certainly true.

A lot of the acrimony, tribalism, and fear comes from the growing divisiveness of American culture at large.

The fact that The Atlantic needs to don some pith helmets and mix with the locals is itself indicative of the problem. Kudos to the authors for actually doing so, but these aren't migrants trying to learn how to be American. These are people born and raised in America who are somehow on the outside of what The Atlantic considers to be America.

> There is of course evidence that this has happened, in the form of the bigotry that has been unleashed since 2017.

And, ironically, The Atlantic ignores the bigotry [1] it contributes to the situation. The Kevin Williamson incident [2] is very recent and is literally a failed attempt to actually include different kinds of perspectives in The Atlantic. And it seems the institutes of journalism aren't exactly interested, in general, in doing the journalism to accurately represent Williamson's views on the matter [3]. By the way, Kevin Williamson is from these places and writes with a unique take on how these places are and how they could be better.

So when you live in these places and you see hatred for people like you, how are you supposed to be optimistic and excited about the prospects for your children and grandchildren?

[1] "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own"

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigotry

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-twitter-mob-came-for-m...

[3] https://www.weeklystandard.com/kevin-williamson/what-new-yor...

"...So when you live in these places and you see hatred for people like you, how are you supposed to be optimistic and excited about the prospects for your children and grandchildren?..."

Yeah... but that's been going on forever. You see that with Muslims recently. We've seen that with hispanics. Further back, of course, we've been seeing it with blacks and native americans for a long time. That will ALWAYS happen.

The trick is to work out a way to keep moving forward even in the face of tribalism. Because I'm not entirely certain that we can eliminate tribalism. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm not sure that I will be.

> Because I'm not entirely certain that we can eliminate tribalism.

It's fair to say tribalism has always been around. And from that perspective, the current tribalism, including left-wing identity politics, is extremely reactionary.

A few things are, if not new, at least notable in this case:

* These people aren't historically outsiders, they're "heartland" Americans.

* The cultural narrative hasn't caught up to the cultural reality yet. For example, if child of meth heads grows up to be president, he's yet another privileged white president, not an outsider who overcame adversity. "Multicultural" attitudes group him in with Warren Buffett.

* There's no language, even to describe white people short on privilege. There are certainly slurs, but nothing you'd put on a questionnaire.

* The general direction of American culture has been to include more and more, however slowly. This is certainly a regression in that respect. And it seems to be accompanied by an abandonment of the ideal of inclusion qua inclusion. Instead, we seem to have a list of historically disadvantaged groups, telling newly disadvantaged groups that they already had their chance. Again, this is nonsense to an unemployed daughter of opiate addicts.

You're absolutely right, but HN users don't realize that most of America exists outside of their ideological bubble.

> For example, if child of meth heads grows up to be president, he's yet another privileged white president, not an outsider who overcame adversity.

It's racism and nothing else. Thing is, it's OK to be racist nowadays, as long as you're a liberal.

Edit: to the guy quoting the dictionary below me, this is racism in a really obvious way. It is "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race" and it's not okay just because you don't explicitly declare your race superior.

Again, not racism. It's being stereotypical.

Dictionary definition:

>prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

How would eliminating the tribalism subroutine benefit the species? Is a homogeneous global population the most resilient?

Society and civilization is basically what comes out of setting aside tribalism. Tribalism doesn't mean heterogeneity, it means accepting people outside of your tribe as a potential valuable to you, instead of treating them as default dangerous.

>Society and civilization is basically what comes out of setting aside tribalism. Tribalism doesn't mean heterogeneity, it means accepting people outside of your tribe as a potential valuable to you, instead of treating them as default dangerous.

Plenty of societies have extremely durable, endogamous tribal identifiers and they got along fine. This is true of India, China, The Ottoman Empire, and so on.

India, in particular, has some of the most durable and persistent forms of tribalism around, with castes having remained largely endogamus for centuries or more despite living, working, and trading with each other routinely.

Yet this didn't prevent them from alternating with China (itself extremely tribally divided despite the modern attempts to sweep it under the rug and cohere a "Han" nationality) at being the 1st or 2nd most prosperous civilization in the world for most of human history.

Yes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632070...

But more broadly, that's likely also true for culture and knowledge.

I look around me and have neighbors from dozens of cultures and backgrounds, hundreds of opinions and all walks of life. Young, old, sick, healthy, everything in between. How is this homogeneous?

I also remember a time when human decency wasn't shrouded in the pejorative "political correctness".

Both myself and the leadership of The Atlantic listened to what Kevin Williamson said. I think it speaks for itself.

> I also remember a time when human decency wasn't shrouded in the pejorative "political correctness".

Not sure what you're getting at with this rhetoric (no wonder you're a fan of vague, politically-correct statements -- I have no idea what the second part of your comment means). People don't like political correctness because it's a manipulation tool of policy makers, used to misdirect and to prevent unwanted discussion -- like with e.g. the illegal immigration problem, which no one dared bring up before You-Know-Who. Political correctness is also a cowardly and intellectually dishonest mode of discourse.

This post engages in the myth that there exists an America homogenous enough that all of it can suitably be represented by a single media outlet...and when it isn't something nefarious (in this case leftist elitism) is at work.

The problem isn't The Atlantic or the National Review providing specific, sometimes narrow views. The problem is the lack of intellectual curiosity, confirmation bias, and tribalism engaged in by many political consumers.

I don't need The Atlantic to be all things to all people. I'm just pointing out that it's rich to fire Williamson the way they did and then send out a fact-finding mission to discover what people like Williamson think.

Thank you for using the correct definition of "bigotry."

The general population seems to confuse "bigot" only with "racist" or "sexist," for some reason.

The dictionary definition simply isn't accurate to modern usage. 19th century uses of "bigot" are mostly about what we would call a "religious zealot" or "fundamentalist". By the 21st century, most "bigot" references are closer to "xenophobe". It seems to have taken on the meaning of "racist or sexist or homophobic etc.," a generic term for anyone with prejudiced views.

This semantic drift is convenient for those who would like to equivocate between "ideologue" and "xenophobe" and pretend that they are basically the same thing, or necessarily as bad as one another.

They didn't though. Williamson wasn't fired because the Atlantic readers hate white conservative opinion writers, he was fired because Atlantic readers aren't very interested in his particular views.

What you're saying would make sense if he was there for three years, as opposed to, what, three days?

It's still not really "intolerant" to choose not to elevate a particular viewpoint.

People saying Williamson shouldn't be allowed to publish anything anywhere are obviously being intolerant. People saying they'd rather not subscribe to a publication that pays him to expound on vile views? Meh.

Would you mind clarifying which vile views you are referring to?

The Twitter mob that got him fired != the Atlantic's subscriber base.

Which is a textbook definition of bigotry. They're intolerant of, thus do not want to read, his views.

Uninterested != intolerant

You can scream your opinion on topic X all day long, but no one has to listen. That doesn't make them intolerant.

He was employed for what, a week? How did The Atlantic's readership find him uninteresting in that amount of time? And anyway, his hiring made quite an uproar with many of the Atlantic's readership, suggesting they were _very_ interested, but also _very_ intolerant to the end that he was fired. The "uninterested" line doesn't float.

They're not interested because they want an echo-chamber. This is just intolerance, aka bigotry, with extra steps.

It wasn't as if the man's writings were just panned. It was a typical social justice morality crusade.

> This is just intolerance, aka bigotry, with extra steps.

Here we have the classic case of interpreting a definition so loose that it gets useless. Everyone is intolerant of something. I'm intolerant of murderers, so by that textbook definition I'm a bigot, but then everyone would be a bigot and we end up with a synonym for "human" - Is that helpful in a discussion?

No, this isn't a case of that. This is the classic Social Justice Jihadi pillorying someone with an opinion that isn't on the approved list. The man was a writer for a week and was removed because he committed a thought crime.

You're just being needlessly obtuse.

You are equating being pro-life and unconventionally anti-execution with being a murderer.

No idea what he has to say for himself in the wsj since it's behind a paywall, but I did google him. I wasn't familiar with any of this but if this is accurate:

It was Mr. Williamson’s hard-line stance on abortion — namely, that it should be treated as premeditated homicide and punished accordingly, perhaps by hanging — that generated the initial controversy over his hiring.

Well, you know, his time at The Atlantic wasn't destined to end well. Their readers aren't going to allow them to turn into Newsmax.

It's mostly distressing that a lunatic like that can get the time of day, let alone a paying job as an opinion writer. Speaking of "tribalism," I don't think his views are likely representative of his own "tribe." It's just that the discourse has degraded to the point where plenty of people get off on hearing something they think will offend the right people.

> It's mostly distressing that a lunatic like that can get the time of day, let alone a paying job as an opinion writer.

That's who you've got remaining on the right. Take a look at sane conservative writers like Jennifer Rubin at the Post. She wrote as a conservative for years under Obama, and now she's suddenly labeled a leftist traitor now that she's critical of Trump. She didn't change, her party did.

Or just look at the economy. Fox News can't find reputable economists to come on air and say a trillion dollar tax cut and increased spending by a trillion is going to balance the budget. No one will say that because it's nonsense, yet that is the policy they have to sell.

Or look at the President's legal team. You'd think a billionaire President would have the pick of the biggest DC firms to represent him in the case of the century. But he is left scraping for guys like Sekulow.

The only people willing to toe a line like that are extremists, or people who are easily duped. Not people you would label experts or competent.

It's what Brennan meant when he called the US a kakistocracy - a government by the shittiest.

Have you taken the time to investigate KDW's actual views on abortion or capital punishment? Are you aware that he opposes capital punishment? Have you ever read some of his columns? Do you know that he's the walking, talking definition of a Never-Trumper? Have you ever read some of his brilliant theater reviews for The New Criteron? Have you read his excoriating, searing take down of white identity politics and the populist right (The White-Minstrel Show)? Have you read his heartbreaking and nuanced piece of the opioid epidemic (How Prescription-Drug Abuse Unleashed a Heroin Epidemic)?

Edit: removed personal comment.

I don't remember attacking you personally, so I'd appreciate if you didn't attack me. I'm not going to engage with this kind of response.

I'll just close by saying yes, I have read much of what you mention, and maybe that says something about you that you would immediately assume and then attack based on wrong assumptions. Maybe some time for some introspection?

If someone links you to article, you can generally get through the paywall, so here is Williamson's own take on his situation:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-twitter-mob-came-for-m...

The short summary is that he actually does not believe that abortion should be punished by hanging as you suggest. An excerpt:

"The purported reason for our “parting ways,” as Mr. Goldberg put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural piece. The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”

Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent conversation online and on the podcast indicated—to say nothing of the few million words of my published writing available to the reading public—I am generally opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation. Such provocations can sometimes clarify the terms of a debate, but in this case, I obscured the more meaningful questions about abortion and sparked the sort of hysteria I’d meant to point out and mock."

> The short summary is that he actually does not believe that abortion should be punished by hanging as you suggest. An excerpt:

It wasn't really my suggestion, it was a quote from a larger NYT article. Sorry, I should have sited it, but it hardly seems crucial to what I was saying: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/business/media/kevin-will...

Evidently the decision to fire him was informed by more than a single ill-considered statement. (Of course it was.) Let's be honest, from the viewpoint of an Atlantic editor, hiring a guy who thinks it's a funny joke to make would have been as bad as hiring a guy who actually believes it. The problem appears to be that The Atlantic did not do proper due diligence before hiring. That is bad for everyone concerned.

> Let's be honest, from the viewpoint of an Atlantic editor, hiring a guy who thinks it's a funny joke to make would have been as bad as hiring a guy who actually believes it.

The Atlantic hired Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is far more extreme on the other side of things. It wouldn't have hurt to have someone to counterbalance him.

Te-Nehasi Coates went from being a nobody to a prominent writer during his tenure at The Atlantic. It's possible their readership would enjoy a conservative "counterbalance" of some kind in addition to the conservative contributors they currently employ, but if there's a group that's likely to be offended in a big way by jokes (or sincere, heartfelt positions) that involve hanging people, this is it. The only anomaly here is that the guy was hired in the first place.

> far more extreme on the other side of things

If you say so.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not trolling. I cant recall a single trolling article from him. He is serious. And also, there was nothing that striked me as extreme in his articles. He is also remarkably not emotional in his writing - he does not go out of his way to elicit emotional response the way Williamson does.

Nor he is having serious argument, pardon joking, pardon serious, oh really just a joke but I kinda mean it in his writing.

He didn't say it was funny. He said it was ridicule. Getting people all worked up in their ignorance was the goal. His error was being too effective in practice.

What you've described sounds a lot more like a candidate for an AM radio gig than The Atlantic. You've got to wonder if the editor in chief vetted him at all.

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