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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Question is if it's a bad thing or not. I mean, people with questionable morals or worldview have been hanging out for all of human history. We could complain that ostracizing people who became members of the Klan makes the Klan happen, but at least then they're over there being racist at Klan rallies and not in the middle of the public square.

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Who gets to decide what a questionable moral is? The offenses in the article seem to be a whole lot less severe than being a member of the KKK.

Where is the line? If I make a donation to the Republican party, does that mean I have questionable morals? Roughly half the country is Republican, do they all have no morals?

That is what the article is trying to grapple with.

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Right now, in this era, with this Republican party? Yes, yes it does. ;)

It's obvious half the country has questionable morals (or at least values or sense). A little under half the voters elected Donald Trump president.

Please don't take HN threads further into partisan or political or ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Demonizing people who have a different upbringing, culture, and worldview as being wrong just because they don't share a set of values with you is to be part of the problem.

It's a modern analog of a European explorer viewing native Africans as savages because they don't have the same culture and values that you do.

That's an interesting point of view that ignores the fact many of us grew up in conservative Republican families.

I grew up in a socially conservative Republican family, and became liberal in my late teens. And that's exactly why I am against ostracizing people who hold conservative Republican views.

I became a liberal today because liberals took the time to have civil conversations me about my intolerance, and I realized that liberals were right. I am grateful to the people who did that for me, and I want to extend the same courtesy to others.

Pragmatically, if liberals had ostracized me or "canceled" me, it's quite likely that I would still hold those intolerant views today. By taking the stance that "we don't talk to Republicans", liberals are cutting off the only mechanism by which Republicans become liberals. And those people who you alienate instead of converting become angry, and that anger motivates them to go to the polls. Do you want Trump to get re-elected? Because what you're doing is contributing to Trump getting re-elected.

Your points are very well stated and need to be reiterated loud and clear if we are to have a hope of bridging the divide in the U.S. Bravo!

> It's obvious half the country has questionable morals (or at least values or sense).

My guess is that ~80% of the US believes that this is true.

> It's obvious half the country has questionable morals

Just because someone disagrees with you or has different priorities or ideals doesn't make them bad people. If anything, this says more about you than it does about them.

Admittedly anecdotal, but this woman was deradicalized thanks to online dialogue:

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/events/unfollow-deradicalization...

I would say that isolating people definitely does not work.

The problem here is that the popular perception of which ideologies are considered "radical" is swiftly expanding.

The Westboro Baptist Church has been held up as an example of the "radical" Christian right for over 10 years. They know that they are reviled and play it up to keep getting attention. Meanwhile, if you read the stuff that Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal wrote (both are mentioned in this article) - it's clear that they both thought they were not taking positions that are out of the mainstream liberal view of acceptability. And if you talk to people who would not consider themselves "woke" they would find their writings to be very tame as well. This is why this situation is so interesting - these so-called "radicals" didn't begin to consider themselves different until they were suddenly isolated for expressing things that didn't seem very radical at all.

If you think that Klan members were ostracized from society (rather than being local centers of power) and that all they did was harmlessly rally outside of public places, you seem not to know the first thing about the Klan.

Even if that was just a hastily/poorly chosen analogy, there's still a point to be made: groups of powerful, immoral people do not stay on the sidelines of society for long.

Bad example. The Klan was very empowered.

The problem is when all of the progressives opponents start banding together, there might just be more of them than there are progressives and then, whoops, game over. There are a lot of centrists and liberals that the progressives have alienated.

(You know you have a problem when even Barack Obama is stepping up and criticizing "woke" people: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50239261)

Your "when even" isn't particularly accurate. Obama was always a relative centrist. It's just that many consider it radical to think that we should do simple things like provide most people with access to healthcare.

The "even" in "even Barack Obama" isn't about him being super far left, then "even" is about the fact a former president has to be the one telling people their tactics aren't working.

And then they go on to ignore his advice because he is insufficiently left. Which ironically proves how prescient his advice is.

The pendulum always swings

> even Barack Obama

I mean, he's not particularly leftist, is he? If anything he represents a pretty centrist liberal (as in Liberalism) position?

If that's the case, then it's a fight that was going to happen sooner or later, because it's not as if progressive opponents were sitting back and letting culture change without protest. If anything, calling out people for bad behavior is a reaction to the realization that a lot of "centrists" were just closet racists, who may not advocate for some form of supremacy or other but sure were donating and voting for it when the opportunity came.

The problem is when you start canceling more and more and more people to the point where they have nowhere else to go.

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