Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Dick Costolo, a former chief executive of Twitter, tweeted that “me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business” would be shot in “the revolution.” He deleted the post after, he said, it set off violent threats and harassment

Reminds me of this: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/america-is-...

> One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

> Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game. “We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

Ah yes, the opposite of "totalitarian" is "no questioning how society works at any level other than the political parties".

Makes sense, the totalitarians are always lax about having rules about what you can talk about. It was so much better when there was just "how things are done" and talk that was "unamerican", so much less political.

> about. It was so much better when there was just "how things are done" and talk that was "unamerican", so much less political.

We managed to get a lot of stuff done that way.

Definitely! And now a lot of the children of the people it was done too are getting all "political".

I'm not sure that justifying certain areas of debate or complaint being off limits to normies because "things get done" is an anti-totalitarian stance...

Do you seriously think the present climate is more welcoming to this sort of "questioning"?

Yes, you can tell because more of this questioning is happening in the present climate.

As long as you’re asking the right questions and accepting the right answers, maybe. But if you question the dominant narrative you get cancelled.

And by cancelled you mean people who previously couldn't/didn't critcize you now criticize you?

Like they start questioning your place in society after they questioned your beliefs/values and you re-affirmed them?

Sounds terrible, sounds like the dominant narrative is going to change during a time of economic uncertainty, massive structural failures and the exposure of that same dominant narrative to actual investigation and critique.

Can't have dominant narratives getting disrupted. Scary.

For every Dick Costolo there are 100 execs of small midwestern firms that hire exclusively from the protestant church/christian private school network. Even after Bostock people are still explicitly fired for being gay [1], and before Bostock it was extremely common. To say nothing of huge employers arguing

You literally can't get a job at many firms around Springfield, MO without attending the right (right-wing evangelical) church. And don't expect promotions into upper management if you're not part of the right small group at the right church. This is particularly true in accounting/finance, but it's also a problem in some of the region's tech shops.

Ironically, "politics seeping into the workplace is a left-wing problem" sounds totally insane to anyone who has spent significant time outside of the coastal/metro bubble. It's a huge problem on both sides of the political spectrum.

[1] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/scott-maxwell-commen...

This comment was voted pretty far down, and I don't know, maybe it's a little incendiary? But the idea that hiring in mid-sized midwestern business is heavily conservative-political was news to me, and it's an interesting point.

I love the going-over-the-peak-of-a-rollercoaster feeling of these essays on the topic of whether and how America is tilting toward fascism. They start by discussing disinformation, authoritarianism, the perverse prioritization of loyalty above all else, marching in lockstep, and then... are they going to say that the problem is the guys marching in the street with swastikas saying “we are Nazis?” Or are the real Nazis the ones promoting “transgressive sexuality”?

We have had guys marching in the streets proclaiming to be nazis for decades. They’re scary, but they’re a known quantity. The ACLU has long represented nazis and protected their rights to have those marches, and things have been fine. Liberal democracy works. This other stuff is new.

The guys calling themselves Nazis haven't usually been having their marches in honour of the POTUS whilst the POTUS openly states his court appointees should set aside liberal democracy's verdict on his first term, or plotting to assassinate a state governor he's clashed with.

I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...

> I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...

That’s not what’s being argued.

It probably isn't your argument, but the author devotes enormous amounts of effort to arguing that 'transgressive sexuality' was a precondition to the Russian Revolution (meanwhile, when the actual authoritarians took charge, they wasted no time setting boundaries for relationships based on their concept of the state's needs) and doubles down on it with passages that start off with 'social justice warriors play a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks' and end it with corporate America no longer frowning on homosexuality. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the actual Bolsheviks had a somewhat different approach to bourgeouis institutions than convincing them that people of alternative sexualities were employees and customers they might wish to retain...

It's not insight from Arendt, it's a religious conservative arguing his laundry list of dislikes, from acceptance of homosexuality to -checks notes- mayors not crushing protests must be totalitarian because -spurious parallel-. Totalitarianism isn't bottom up social consensus, and it definitely isn't the mere absence of social consensus around one's own moral values.

That is not the argument the author is making at all. The portion of the article you’re referring to begins:

> Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality.

The author isn’t criticizing non-discrimination—which can be justified by reference to traditional “liberal principles.” He’s criticizing things like Mozilla’s firing of Brendan Eich for his political donations, or declaring judges unfit because they are members of Catholic organizations that reject abortion. Those efforts go beyond non-discrimination to trying to stamp out traditional beliefs in ways that are often at odds with liberalism.

As I said, your own views may not match the author's. One doesn't subtitle a passage 'the desire to transgress and destroy' and cite the 'sexual adventurism, celebration of perversion and all manner of sensuality' in great detail as an illustration of its relevance to the Russian Revolution to argue that Brendan Eich ought not to have felt the need to resign. If he was making a freedom of conscience argument rather than a decadence leads to totalitarianism argument he'd hardly be suggesting that it was lamentable that labourers were sufficiently far from village gossips and 'the church binding their conscience with guilt' to find comfort in sex.

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