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Comment by ppf | Hacker News Reader

>Why don't contributors openly reject this stupid system (not the rules themselves, which sound fine) and unseat these self-proclaimed procurators is beyond me.

Have you tried doing that? How do you like being hounded out of your job, and probably your profession, by a braying mob?

Edit: I also find it bitterly ironic that the Progressive Bay Area-centric Hacker News is now saying how bad all of this is, after being the complicit champions of it.

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HN users are not monolith. Probably most of us aren't in the Bay Area, many are not even from the USA. Many people here wouldn't give a single fuck about some twitter mob because they live in countries where people are more tolerant of opposite views (and finding out your acquaintance votes other party will get him friendly jab, not excommunication).

> and finding out your acquaintance votes other party will get him friendly jab, not excommunication

I've long argued that the US should have lots of parties, and adopt pluralistic voting, but then I stopped when it seemed to me that countries that already have this system don't have demonstrably better political outcomes. But your comment pushes me back to the other side of the argument now. It occurs to me that if we didn't have only 2 sides, practically, maybe policy discussions wouldn't be so damnably acrimonious and win-lose.

Sweden and Switzerland seem pretty great IMO. I think the trick is proportional voting instead of first past the post.

The main problem that arises with large multi-party systems is that the ruling party needs to form a coalition to govern and that may require cozying up to some extreme small party and giving them influence outsize of their numbers.

It seems to me that the two-party system in the United States is, practically speaking, the same thing. Within each major party there are smaller caucuses, such as the Freedom Caucus, which are more extreme than the party as a whole and exercise outsized influence because the larger party needs them to maintain its big tent. "Big tent" == coalition.

> where people are more tolerant of opposite views

For now yeah but the tides are changing everywhere. Europe (and the US) fought facism, so we had a period of time where politics where mostly shades of purple/blue/red. Now facism is on the rise again, and we're seeing that across Europe, from Spain with Vox to Sweden with "Sweden Democrats". With the rise of these parties, you're seeing more and more of excommunication, as being tolerant of intolerance will only lead to more intolerance, not tolerance.

I love this argument, just because it completely flips reality on its head. The intolerance that is being discussed is that of the Progressive US Left, who cannot tolerate any dissention from the current state of "politically correct" (here I use it's original definition). What you are describing is the reaction to it. It's a masterstroke of political reasoning, when you find a way to define your own shortfalls as stemming from the "other side".

Edit: I should add, it's amusing while it doesn't affect me, but the ramifications are horrifying.

You're talking like the leader of the right in the USA was tolerant of any different viewpoint than his own viewpoint around him. He's publicly rejected and shit on people very publicly that were his allies/staff for years the moment they have a dissenting opinion. Come on, not a left or right thing.

You're talking like the current president of the USA came out of nowhere, and was not at all a public expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo.

The president doesn't need to accept dissent from his staff. Just hypothetically, if Obama's health secretary said that being transgender was largely a mental illness, or his head of domestic policy said that we need to close the southern border, does he need to tolerate that? Just to be very clear - those are completely hypothetical - I am not sure what actual "dissent" caused Trump to fire his various staff members, but it is unrelated.

Yeah, the primary intolerance is done by the champions of Popper's maxim, who weaponized it and use it to cast away anyone who disagrees with them.

I keep saying: the paradox of tolerance applies recursively. To preserve tolerance, the intolerant must be removed from the community. However, if in the process of removing the intolerant, you cause collateral damage on innocent, tolerant people, then you become the intolerant that needs to be removed.

"Too little cancel culture? Nonsense, we need more of it"

The important to thing to realize about cancel culture, CoC enforcement, and various efforts like this, is that it's very occasionally about making the world a better place, and very often about people who want power doing everything they can to seize power.

Even the "Black Lives Matter" movement is distracted from the goal of making black lives matter with a laundry list of progressive demands like dismantling the "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure" that are tangentially related at best. (Indeed, the entire premise of contemporary intersectionality demands one surrender the possibility of delivering meaningful reform on an incremental basis, in service of forming a bloc dedicated to seizing power wholesale.)

> that it's very occasionally about making the world a better place, and very often about people who want power doing everything they can to seize power.

More specifically, by exploiting and weaponizing the good nature of others. This is why they went after geek hobbies specifically: science fiction, open source, comics, cartoons, video games, and tabletop RPGs -- because geeks are sensitive and accommodating, and shouting at them how racist and sexist they are is bound to make them stop and reflect -- leaving them wide open to further attack. Had they chosen to attack pastimes rife with actual racists and sexists -- tailgate parties in rural Georgia, say -- they'd be routed, because racists and sexists don't have the fucks to give about their behavior.

As I've said elsewhere, "SJWs" aren't really geeks. They are more like mentally deranged normies who long to sit at the cool kids' table, but don't stand a chance of ever sitting there, so they take over the geeks' table, because better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation doesn't speak for the Black Lives Matter movement.

You must admit this is very confusing. Which of those two groups are the good guys? Who does speak for them?

Back in the days when Occupy movement was starting, and 4chan people were trolling Scientologists, this was lauded as a new era of social movements - decentralized. No central organization to squash, anyone can pick up the label and carry the fight.

What we got was also predictable, though. If anyone can fight under any banner, if nobody owns the banner, there is no possibility to come to a compromise, to settle the differences. The proponents of a movement will pick the most benign shard as an example to defend and popularize their cause; the opponents of the movement will pick the most extremist shard as a justification to fight back. Everyone feels their survival is at stake.

That's like asking who speaks for feminism, Occupy, or the gilets jaunes. They're decentralized.

That's a fine point, but I was just told someone DIDN'T speak for them.

They don't. No single person or organization can speak for a decentralized movement.

Does this mean that the movement does not mean anything specific?

Supposing your thesis to be true, the fact that you have to make that distinction only supports the claim I made. The foundation’s efforts are one key thing that distracts the movement from what I would assume to be the foundational goal of preserving black lives (specifically by seeing that they are no longer exposed to the direct, acute threats that tend to occur when interacting with police.)

It seems then we are not in disagreement over substantive matters, but over minor questions such as phrasing.

We seem to disagree whether a significant number of people in the BLM movement pay any attention to the BLM Global Network Foundation.

>HN users are not monolith.

This is correct. Quite often, a group which is portrayed as hypocritical is not hypocritical at all: rather there are just many opinions within the group, and they conflict with each other. As you've said, the [group] is not monolith.

Fortunately, I am one of those people. I also despair as I watch the tendrils of US-style partisanship spread here.

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