Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I've internalized what "orthodox privilege" means but ... yes things that go against the grain often receive push back.

Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?

On the other hand let's say it is Orthodox Privilege then we get to the next step, give it a name and ... tell others they're engaging in 'orthodox privilege'?

Any kinda 'you're doing <insert privilege term>' seems like a non starter.

In the meantime anyone and everyone who gets push back seems to already feel they're oppressed by 'the system' or 'the media' and anyone who views their ideas as poor somehow is biased, pushing an agenda, something is wrong with them.

I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything when talking to other people outside of say macro study and etc.

View on HN

Here's an example from my own career:

I once had a colleague (who is a nice guy, and we got along) who said during lunch that there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing. I offered one objection off the top of my head (that prices serve as a mechanism for aggregating data, and any price controls serve to throw out data, and we should use as much data as possible when making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources). Before I spoke up, this colleague couldn't imagine that there would be any counter arguments to his position. Another colleague later thanked me for speaking up and sharing that different take.

Maybe that's not a good reason to not have rent control, or maybe it is a good reason, but on balance it's not good enough. The problem isn't the debate, the push back, it's Graham's point "privilege makes you blind." The problem is when there are limits to your imagination that an issue you see as simple might be more complex or that the person you're sharing a meal with might have a different, but still legitimate, way of seeing the world.

This is a very good example of blindness. It is possible to advocate that rent control is desirable, and in some quarters it easily forms a supermajority majority political opinion — but anyone advocating rent control should at least be aware of a strong consensus that it is harmful, to the tune of 80-90% of surveyed economists. (I don't have JSTOR at the moment or I'd drag one up — ideally one more recent than Whaples' surveys from the 1990s, though those are an okay starting point too.)

I am reasonably confident that I suffer blindness on some important issue. You should be confident that you suffer it, too.

This example doesn't seem to illustrate blindness as much as difference in priorities.

X% of surveyed economists probably don't disagree that rent controls will have the effect that rent control proponents claim. They likely believe it will have other effects in addition, and that these other effects are, in aggregate, worse than what benefits might also be offered.

By contrast, advocates for rent control probably don't believe that the economists are just making stuff up - they just believe that the downsides of the stuff the economists are talking about are less than the upsides of rent control.

Neither side is blind: they just don't agree on how to weight difference aspects of the results of a policy decision.

I believe both halves of your argument are wrong.

X% of surveyed economists probably don't disagree that rent controls will have the effect that rent control proponents claim. They likely believe it will have other effects in addition, and that these other effects are, in aggregate, worse than what benefits might also be offered.

Rent control proponents believe that imposing rent control will lower rents. With the goal of making housing more affordable. Economists know that it will benefit a few but in the process reduce supply and therefore increase average rents. Creating the very problem that you're trying to solve.

That doesn't match my experience. It is not that advocates for rent control believe that rent control is a net positive despite what economists say. They actively do not believe that rent control reduces supply and increases average prices.

That has held true in both position papers and personal conversations that I've had with people.

Tangentially related. In research, learning positive facts about something makes negative facts harder to remember. And vice versa. This cognitive quirk helps explain why it is hard for people in general to believe that there really are downsides to the things that they support.

I'm not entirely sure that rent control proponents believe it will lower rents. In my experience, most of them acknowledge that it will reduce supply and may increase prices in some areas.

My experience with rent control proponents (being one myself despite the pure economics problems with it) is that most of them believe that there needs to be a "reserve" of properties that are available for lower income people...service workers, teachers, etc...to rent in or near the place where they work.

The basic reason for that is, until recently, the number of people who want to live in a city like SF, NYC, etc. greatly outstrips the supply of housing. Basically, no matter how much housing you build, there is an endless supply of people willing to pay $X to live here, but $X is way over what is reasonable for a cashier, barista, bartender, teacher, etc. to afford.

Now, there might be better ways to solve that problem, but one of the "easier" and more politically possible ones in cities like SF is rent control. The reality is that SF basically can't build enough housing to satiate demand in any realistic timeframe. So what do you do? Bitch about zoning laws and NIMBY's all day and make more and more workers move to Stockton and Tracy? Or do you actually try to do something that is possible to accomplish about that problem (recognizing it isn't perfect)?

Anyway...rent control is interesting in many ways. Just felt like the number of people I've spoken to about it who believes it lowers rents generally rounds to basically zero.

Poster I replied to cited colleague believing "there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing." This remains substantially different than fact: there is broad disagreement. Stating otherwise is the problem.

I further disupte your characterization of the relation of economists to policy priorities, as I believe there are substantial conflict in the forecasted outcomes of rent control, not broad factual agreement between politicians and the cited American economists. However, this is not particularly relevant to the point of this thread, and we will likely not effectively resolve the matter in this forum.

That's an interesting example, but I think to some extent it contradicts the idea of orthodox privilege. When you offered that alternative, it doesn't seem like you were chastised or marginalized; instead, you were thanked for offering a useful perspective (one I agree with!).

There are definitely going to be examples of people going too far, and making wedge issues out of things that shouldn't be wedge issues. But I think it's worth noting that in general, the opinions that are heavily stigmatized are ones that are insulting or hurtful toward specific people or groups.

In this case, it's true, I was not chastised or marginalized.

With a different group of people, I could have been though. I've seen articles written to the effect of "if you are against rent control, you must hate the hard working people who benefit from it."

I picked a somewhat less controversial example, where I did speak up. As a mostly conservative, Catholic person in tech, there are plenty of other times where I understand my perspective is not welcomed, and have not bothered to speak up For a just a few examples: people claiming Catholic nuns are slave labor; people printing random quotes from the Bible and making fun of it without actually studying it; people making derogatory comments about religious people. In all of these cases, the people in question made the comments assuming that everyone around them saw the world a certain way (i.e., was not religious).

I think the anti-religious bias in a lot of technology and leftist spaces is a real problem, and I absolutely take your point on that.

> I've seen articles written to the effect of "if you are against rent control, you must hate the hard working people who benefit from it."

I have too. But I have hardly met anyone who will really be offended at me expressing that rent control can backfire (and I have, among extremely left-wing people). I think the people who are trying to make that a wedge issue are themselves extremists. They exist, but they don't represent a big enough group of people to matter most of the time.

Privilege isn't necessarily bad; it's the lack of access and opportunity that is afforded by privilege that is a problem.

Consider the thread the other day regarding the privilege of beauty: it's not bad to be beautiful, and it's not bad to find beauty aesthetically pleasing, but it becomes a problem when individuals are denied access and opportunities because they lack beauty but where beauty should not be a factor.

I think the issuenis two fold for priveledge - one is that connotationally it sounds like an attack and has occassions of being used as a cudgel. The very name has an implicit "undeserved" applied to it and guilt. Even without any selfish evangalists the terms are pretty needlessly confrontational when they need to be winning others over.

Pointing out "we don't experience it that way" is a very good instance of the concept of privledge. It is good communication period given that they would lack your baseline that the "nice polite old lady" down the street screams racial slurs at them whenever they pass by. Lacking evidence they would have little reason to think that.

But dismissing a point of view entirely because the source is privileged? Bad. Heck even if the view was laughably naive and wrong like "children work in sweatshops instead of going to school afford candy ans junk food since that was what I did when farm working as a kid" is good to know where their points of view actually came from.

When it comes to privledge sometimes they may really know more and not simply have social status denied to others. Someone with an upper middle class upbringing may result in being ignorant at what bread, milk, and eggs are supposed to cost but know that credit card debt should be avoided whenever possible and how to diversify investments and maintain properly liquid buffers for emergencies. Someone from a poorer upbringing obviously wouldn't have the investing skill set due to lacking the prerequisites let alone the education and experience.

It isn't fair but it is real and knowing that is the first step to fixing it. Pretending sensible investing is just a bigotted social construct of priveledge doesn't help while promoting financial education does.

The access/opportunity/etc are what is being referred to as privilege, not the quality granting it. In a world where being beautiful doesn't come with advantages, there is no "privilege of beauty", just beauty

> Privilege isn't necessarily bad; it's the lack of access and opportunity that is afforded by privilege that is a problem.

I think that this is something that people who bear privilege (like me, a currently economically comfortable white man) don't realise. I have this privilege; I'm not a bad person for having it, and someone who tells me that I have it isn't accusing me, only reminding me. I can still be a good and empathetic person, and I try to be. It's just important to realise that what I perceive as empathy, by imagining myself in someone else's shoes and proceeding from that premise, cannot fully succeed, since my privilege means that there are shoes that I will never fully understand what it's like to occupy. I should thus pause before thinking I understand such a situation—that's what "check your privilege" means—and make sure that I listen to someone who knows more, from experience or science, in preference to my genuine, well intentioned, but in this respect uninformed feelings.

It’s only a “privilege”, by definition, if you have it and others don’t. So the main point about checking your privilege is recognizing the advantages your privileges confer and how to use those advantages to help those without.

If the problem isn't privilege, but the lack of it, then we should be focusing on that lacking and try to raise everyone up.

But the problem with that is the people with the privilege are blind to what the problems are.

It took a simple conversation with someone of color for me to even begin to understand this. The conversation was something like:

"The 15th time the guy behind the deli counter calls over your head to the person behind you in line instead of you really understand that you are not only different, but invisible to people because of your difference."

Sure, we've all had something happen a few times. But this is an everyday occurrence to people who aren't a part of the dominant group.

To me, a WASP, I couldn't even fathom that ever happening. It's just not part of my lived experience. How could someone just skip over the next person in line? It doesn't make any sense.

But, that was, and is, my privilege blinding me to the daily plight of so many people.

So yes...we should work to "raise everyone up", but simply being the person with privilege blinds us to the problem entirely.

If you mean to find a way to grant privilege to the underprivileged: it's a grand idea, but it's not always possible in practice.

We can't make everyone share the same aesthetic interests, and so we cannot be equally beautiful to all observers.

But we can try to ensure that beauty, and other ultimately irreconcilable privileges, are not overwhelming factors in our quality of life.

> Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?

Orthodoxy is a numbers game not necessarily an accuracy game. Orthodox opinions may be accurate or inaccurate; what makes them orthodox is that they are held by at least a plurality of people in a given setting.

Orthodox ideas have not necessarily been proven and aren't necessarily parsimonious, so they should not necessarily enjoy the privilege of the null hypothesis. Null hypotheses require a lower burden of proof than alternative hypotheses.

If an orthodox position was never proven but is simply widely held, it should have the same burden of proof as an alternative hypothesis. However the way orthodoxy works its burden of proof is lower owing to its greater popularity.

I don't disagree generally.

I just wonder with these discussions usually the issue is that when people disagree it is SO EASY to believe that someone else is 'biased' or in this case using some kind of 'orthodox privilege' .... that's where the 1:1 disagreement often is. We find it handy to believe that someone else is being unreasonable because ... <insert new term for why they are being that way>.

We live in a world where we're inundated by folks who say they're being silenced or etc for all sorts of reasons. This just seems to be a new term for folks to use.

There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced.

> I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything

Yes, unfortunately.

It's a weird situation:

So many people are a victim of being silenced now.

As evidenced by how many people you hear about constantly telling you about it...

Indeed, the internet allows a public figure to simultaneously be a pariah to the mainstream and also have a platform where they reach millions.

> and also have a platform where they reach millions.

Until they're deplatformed.

Absolutely not denying what you or pjc50 are saying (there are far too many who cry wolf, or benefit "inappropriately"), but I can imagine the case where some people may be in the honest situation where they feel they have been silenced because they cannot say what they would like to say.

Individual 1: "I'm being silenced." Group: "What would you like to say that you think you're being silenced about?" Individual 1: "I cannot say for fear..."

The comment sounds like a perfect example of siding with orthodox privilege...

We did hear from victims of silencing back in the day just as well (and not just in the sense of state censorship, which many Americans have this bizarro notion that only it matters).

From Lenny Bruce and Charlie Chaplin, to rap groups, from the Hayes code to book authors (including of masterpieces like "Junky"), from Hoover and McCarthy, to Jello Biafra, and from records getting thrown out of record store chains because they angered some group, all the way back to Galileo being silenced, black leaders (despite having large followings otherwise), etc.

People do lose gigs, have talks cancelled, have book contracts dropped, shows demonetised, and so on because of mob reaction, or because of some angry special interest group, or because of some vocal bloggers, or whatever.

Is the argument that they aren't completely stomped, so they should be thankful?

Or that how someone be a victim of silencing and still be able to talk about their silencing and have it know?

I feel like it goes both ways. I don't buy into the idea that 'any' friction is 'orthodox privilege' or anything else. In the meantime it is standard operating procedure / so easy for most humans to assume that any real friction is some sort of system or an act of bad faith.... and couldn't possibly be because of something else.

>People do lose gigs, have talks cancelled, have book contracts dropped, shows demonetised, and so on because of mob reaction, or because of some angry special interest group, or because of some vocal bloggers, or whatever.

Does it matter whether the reason for the "cancellation" came from a mob, or only what the reason actually is?

If a group of crazy incoherent people get a Nazi cancelled by shouting "they're a Nazi!", and the person really is a Nazi, does it matter that they're a bit crazy and incoherent?

>If a group of crazy incoherent people get a Nazi cancelled by shouting "they're a Nazi!", and the person really is a Nazi, does it matter that they're a bit crazy and incoherent?

On principle, for me, it does.

For one, I don't want "groups of crazy incoherent people" dictating their terms.

Second, I want all voices able to being heard, and adult audiences judging for themselves if they like to hear them. This includes access to book deals, speaking halls, conference spaces, etc. This includes Nazis or people in favor of the extinction of all mankind, fans of royal government against democracy, fans of Bieber, the KKK AND black panthers, and so on. As long as they don't act illegally/violently.

Third, the tricky part is not agreeing with silencing a Nazi (which many will agree, some will disagree because they favour free exchange of ideas, whatever they are, but in any case it would be popular to do so).

The tricky part is determining who is the "Nazi" (that is, the person to be silenced). And on that front, the tide turns very easily. Under Hoover a open leftist could lose their job. In the 50s a black rights supporter in the South could loose business deals, concert and writing gigs, get cancelled, etc. You think that this can happen from now on only on the "bad" side? Doesn't history taught you how fast the tides can turn? There was Obama just 4 years ago, and now it's Trump, for example...

I'm not going to pretend that when people who say incredibly stupid, harmful, and provably falsifiable things that they deserve a pass for it. They can say what they want in the venue they want if they can find the support for it. People have a right to speech. They don't have a right to a venue or a platform, and they don't have a right from the consequences of their speech. If you're going to say something that is incredibly stupid and insensitive, then you shouldn't be surprised when you aren't invited to speak in most venues.

The venn diagram circle of those who believe that people with power deserve to have the right to reach the most people with their speech almost completely overlaps the circle of those who are currently whining about being demonetized because they're saying stupid, harmful, and reprehensible things.

This is literally the world they championed. They just thought that they would be the ones making the decisions.

Well, one approach is to find people in the same reference class who have spoken and, for speaking, faced serious consequences. For example, they got formally punished (kicked out of a group, demoted, fired) for it, and a sympathetic journalist gave them a platform to tell their story about it later.

This Twitter thread (oh lord, how did I end up citing Twitter multiple times in this conversation?), by the founder of an online magazine that seems to specialize in stories of this sort, has a long list of examples. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1282215876553400321

how about considering that the people telling you they're being silenced is a group of privileged folks unaccustomed to being pushed back upon publicly, with "cancel culture" as the reactive appellation for that push back?

The fact that the set of people complaining about this includes people famous for openly discussing controversial ideas that they have received pushback and worse for in the past sort of refutes that.

Do you really think this is the first time anyone has pushed back against Noam Chomsky? Salman Rushdie had a fatwa declared on his life over a book he wrote. I think these people are very well accustomed to being pushed back upon publicly.

no, most of the noise is from people who aren't as well-known or intellectually rigorous as chomsky and rushdie (whether you agree with them or not). these well-known rhetoriticians expect and likely welcome the pushback (obviously the counterarguments, not the threats on their lives). theirs is the exceptional context, not the exception that invalidates the general condition.

The fact remains that both Chomsky and Rushdie signed the Harpers open letter and are hence two of the people publicly advocating on behalf of the people who have been silenced. You simply can’t honestly claim that this is an overreaction from people who aren’t used to pushback.

no, it's a rejection of your argument from authority, not a supporting claim of "overreaction from people who aren’t used to pushback". if you think there are other substantial coutnerclaims, please make them.

You said: “the people telling you they're being silenced is a group of privileged folks unaccustomed to being pushed back upon publicly, with "cancel culture" as the reactive appellation for that push back?”

Which I interpreted as: “the only people who complain about cancel culture are unaccustomed to pushback” and disproved by counterexample.

It occurs to me now that perhaps you didn’t mean “all”. You meant “some”. That’s called nutpicking and it means your original claim wasn’t substantial enough to discuss in the first place.

This could almost be a Yogi Berra quote- "So many people are silenced nowadays, it's all you hear about"

This logic only follows if we assume censorship is applied to everyone, equally, all the time.

Someone saying "hey, look there are a lot of instances of people being censored over there, we should be concerned about it because it could affect us" cannot be refuted on the basis that the speaker isn't being censored.

It's like refuting someone saying that a bunch of people are ill on the basis that the speaker isn't ill themselves. Illness is something that occurs to individuals, not to society. Same with censorship. It isn't some absolute where people are totally censored or totally free to speak their mind. It's distributed unevenly across society. When understood as a distribution rather than something binary, it becomes obvious that instances of free speech about censorship doesn't disprove the existence of censorship, nor does it say anything about whether or not we are becoming a more censorious society.

I agree it's hard for people to be truly silenced nowadays. If you have something you really want to say, you can probably find friends and jobs and news outlets that allow it.

But the question of orthodoxy is, which things can you say without optimizing your life for them? If you have an average job and average friend groups, which opinions can you express without a risk of losing them? The answer will vary depending on exactly what's "average" in your area, but in most places it's going to be a much smaller set than the opinions you could in principle say.

> There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced.

I'm going to quote Paul Graham's Twitter here:

"Many fans of cancel culture have mentioned that it's mostly powerful people publishing opinions about it, as if that were some kind of contradiction.

Of course it's mostly powerful people who are speaking openly about a phenomenon that gets less powerful people fired."

I think there is a lot of yin and yang to that though.

1. Folks who shout they are being silenced, to some extent obviously aren't and usually follow that up with some direction to ... their ideas they're being silenced.

2. Anyone who is really silenced, who do we hear about it from? Group 1.

Outside of say a government straight up banning speech or outright removing it... I have real trouble weeding out who / what is truly being silenced and what the issue really is.

And I'm highly skeptical about Group 1's ability to tell me honestly about Group 2.

In certain high profile cases certain groups tried hard to silence certain people but - for better or worse - failed horribly, kind of like an Streisand effect, only

- not initiated by the person themselves but by someone else

- and working for the benefit of the person who was attempted silenced.

> Folks who shout they are being silenced

Many aren't arguing that they themselves are being silenced. They are arguing that others are being silenced either out of sympathy for those being silenced or recognition that the force silencing the less powerful may one they have the power to silence the person speaking out.

Those of us that still have a voice should be pro-active in speaking out for those that don't lest we one day find ourselves without a voice as well.

"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." – Martin Niemöller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

I think a lot of people’s reaction today might be more like: “First they came for the communists, and because a lot of people spoke out about it, I assumed they didn’t actually come for the communists and I got sick of hearing all of their dumb communist whining, and that’s why it’s actually a good thing that we came for the communists.”

First they came for the Nazis, because the Nazis were coming for black people, and I said .. sure, go ahead, we don't want those Nazis around.

Did you check that the people they came for really were Nazis, or did you just believe the accusations?

“ne chital, no osuzhdayu”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so...

It’s kind of funny since before the Nazis, Communists were the original archetype of a violent fringe political movement that had lots of people murdered for no good reason. People were terrified of Communists and resolutely devoted themselves to making sure to stop Communism as fervently as possible, by any means necessary. Considering the millions of people murdered by Communists this is even a completely understandable and justifiable impulse. This is exactly why the Nazis exploited this fear.

I gotta say I really don't see a lot of 'arguing other people are being silenced' as much as alluding to it, and then citing their own circumstances, so that's still kinda Group 1.

As far as 'they came first for the communists'... I just don't see that as a situation ... at least not generally in the geography or areas I'm thinking of outside big state sponsored acts. Not at scale, and not anything more than people disagreeing or wanting to host someone else's content ... and frankly when you dive into it, it's often not just some banal content, or just someone with a new idea. It just never pans out that way...

I'm not sure I buy into any friction anywhere being 'orthodox privilege' or persecution.

That’s an excellent counter-argument in the general sense of promoting freedom of speech.

It’s a fairly bad counter-argument in the case of specific celebrities claiming loudly on national TV or in the national press that they personally are being silenced.

My position is not at all settled. I pity, rather than envy, the famous; their adoring audiences can turn on them in an instant if their preferences are not socially acceptable, which prevents them from being true to themselves.

There's an amusing parallel with the justification Foucault gives for his focus in the first volume of "The History of Sexuality".

He points out that, for a very long time, people speaking/writing about sexuality have tended to make some sort of gesture at the fact that we can't or aren't supposed to talk about these things.

You can find a gloss of this "repressive hypothesis" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality#Volum...

I'm not sure that's a compelling argument.

In both these cases, individuals are talking about broader societal trends. It's not a contradiction if they aren't talking about their own specific experience (i.e. "I'm silenced, therefore I can't talk, listen to me talk about how silenced I am"). An 18th-century writer discussing sex may contribute to the counter-argument that by virtue of their writing about sex, it isn't as taboo a subject as they imply. But in and of itself, it isn't proof that such a trend does not exist.

I didn't really try to make an argument, nor even say I agree with Foucault here--just that I see a parallel and it amuses me.

Caveats: 1) I read this over a year ago, 2) found it enough of a slog that my understanding feels pretty fuzzy, and 3) am still undecided/chewing on the main argument

My impression is that Foucault wasn't trying to deny a trend, but to highlight a number of other trends (including the explosion of discourse around sexuality) to open the reader up to challenging or re-framing their received knowledge about sexuality at the time. His focus is very much on all of the power and control dynamics at this nexus. It's a little hard to distill what I mean by that--because it includes actual sex and sexuality, the science/study of it, who is speaking, whose sex is being spoken about, what kind of sex it is, social/class dynamics, etc.

I think you misunderstood what is meant by orthodox privilege. It's not just that orthodox ideas are easier to speak, it's that someone who is largely orthodox doesn't realize how hard it is to express unorthodox ideas, because they personally feel free to say whatever they want.

Pushback and civil disagreement isn’t what Paul is writing about here. The use of the notion of “privilege” as a baseball bat might be something Paul’s trying to turn around onto the typical bat-wielders here, but it’s not a convincing move to me either.

> Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?

It isn't necessarily bad. Novel ideas should face a higher standard of proof than orthodox ideas because a lot more is known about how orthodox ideas really work (including their faults) than about novel ideas.

But there are a couple of ways in which this push back can get really pernicious:

1) By focusing on person rather than the idea. If the orthodoxy views the world as filled with people who are rotten to the core but successfully mimicry as decent, it makes sense to watch everybody for the slightest transgressions and attack the person with full strength when you notice one.

2) By emphasizing ideological unity. Suppose someone has an unorthodox idea and the orthodoxy denounces it. In a pernicious orthodoxy everybody must join in with the denouncing. You are already suspect merely if you don't join. If you try to say something like "hey, actually this has some merit", you are the next target. In extreme cases (e.g. Stalinism) you are the next target if you didn't denounce vigorously enough.

And of course the very idea that orthodoxy can be wrong must itself be orthodox! Otherwise from the POV of orthodoxy there is absolutely no point in engaging in real argument with those who question it.

On the Internet, "the grain" his highly localized. Eroding discourse is only hastening that localization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com