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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

It's the practical erosion of Free Speech. Liberal (small "l" liberal) democracy and liberal science thrives on members:

1. Being willing to admit they may be wrong

2. Having access to a diverse information diet

But the past two decades have shown erosion of not only legal Free Speech, but practical free speech:

* Whereas previously they were just ignored (or even rebutted), today employees, students, and professors are all punished administratively for saying something that contradicts the narrative of the predominant members, or that may be offensive to someone. "If the federal government won't do it, let's restrict free speech on the ground-level."

* It is difficult to broaden your information diet, even intentionally. The platforms of yore that provided a place for free debate are empty, with everyone having migrated to social media where they can form disjoint sets defined by their ideology. Ever try having a dialectic on Twitter with someone of an opposing ideology? Haha, good luck.

* Expanding on ^, folks that aren't actively seeking diversity of thought have no natural avenue of exposure to information that contradicts their ideology. Whatever information delivery mechanism they choose today is, by default, going to agree with them.

* All of the above results in: staunchly maintaining your correctness in the face of opposition is rewarded far more strongly than admitting the possibility of wrongness

* Online radicalization makes in-person dialogue even harder; there are fewer and fewer opportunities for two moderates to debate when the possible participants are further across the spectrum than ever

Although restricting offensive speech has the upfront benefit of not hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings, this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech.

For further reading, I recommend Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703086.Kindly_Inquisitor...

View on HN

I see things almost completely opposite to you. Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. You would get things from your local newspaper, or tv networks. Professionals would work and filter what we see. Today anyone can fire up a blog, twitter, youtube, and start talking about anything. People today thus have been getting exposed to all kinds of ideas, and being taken in by them: the earth is flat, the election was stolen, etc, and believing it.

I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.

"because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable"

I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.

Democracy is built on trusting the populace to self govern. Saying that the populace is too dumb or uninformed to be trusted to self govern is inherently anti-democratic.

Well I think the fascism comes with the conclusion, i.e. "because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable, therefore we must control them"

Whereas something like "because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable, therefore we must provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable" isn't necessarily fascist.

Fascism calls out the problem but has the wrong solutions. It's tied to race, nationalism, authoritarianism, and other tribal aspects that are easy for some to grab onto but really do not have any place being part of the solution.

If you talk to anyone defending the anti-democractic occupation of the nation's capital today, you'll see that their response is typically is pro-fascist in this regard.

Even this morning, they quoted Adolf Hitler at the capital:

https://twitter.com/always_margot/status/1346578062700400647

Fascism does not see the problem, it is the problem.

The grandiose, arrogant, and blind social elites calling out the popular masses to be socially alienated.

Whose social alienation it would be?

Of course such masses will be of service to any any much significant opportunist group.

People will vote even for a devil himself if one promises to get rid them off such elites.

Just like that, 20 years ago, in a country far, far away, the destitute populace decided, in its sane mind, to vote into power not anybody, but an ex-officer from a mafia-like intelligence organisation people worked so hard to remove from power just 10 years prior.

When I say calls out the problem, I mean fascism speaks to the class rift, and tells them all the wrong ideas and solutions. We agree that this is creating even worse problems.

The wealth divide in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, and the solution for the working class (higher education) isn't working like it used to, even making it worse for young people. This has lead to an angry working class who feel justified in blaming their problems on other out-groups, whether that's BLM, democrats, China, Mexicans, tech companies, doctors, lgtbq, etc.

This is what fascism is feeding on in America, and it has to stop.

> When I say calls out the problem, I mean fascism speaks to the class rift, and tells them all the wrong ideas and solutions. We agree that this is creating even worse problems.

There, we are on the same page.

A good historical example I brought up few weeks ago somewhere on HN.

A shameful truth from NSDAP days Germans did not come to admit even to this day is why Kristallnacht has happened.

The prime majority of Germans were not antisemites in thirties, and not even in forties. The image of the schizophrenoid—paranoid antisemite was completely uncharacteristic for anybody, but for single digit percentage of fanatics not unlike the current rightist crowd in America.

So, if most Germans did not drink the NSDAP coolaid, why did Kristallnacht happen?

It happened not because of Jewish people being Jewish as such. It happened because of Jewish people being rich (or being deemed so,) and NSDAP effectively promising complete impunity for looting.

To wrap your head around what's going on now across the Western world, read:

1. Revolutions of 1830: https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1830

2. The Spring of Nations: https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1848

USA now is basically France of early-mid-19th century.

My clumsy prognosis, USA will more or less repeat the route towards the French style liberal state, possibly, with few Napoleons along the way. And if it wouldn't, then it may well end up Weimarized.

I had a read but don't understand the connection. Could you please elaborate?

Think of the "establishment" as the Ancien Régime.

Kings, and governments were replaced like worn gloves in 19th century, but the regime in general was always kind of stuck no matter what angry masses did.

Nobility, bourgeois, wealthy burghers, revolutionary hipsters kept changing, while poor, unwashed masses were kept being oppressed, and handing power to the next group of tricksters out of four above again, and again.

Changing the order of the operands does not change the resulting product.

Guillotines were only finally retired when the collective elite class was compelled to genuinely start improving the situation of downtrodden classes for the fear for their own lives, rather than some romantic altruism.

> Fascism does not see the problem, it is the problem.

Nobody is even close to implementing a fascist system in America. This is the kind of thing people who don't actually know anything about Fascism say. Trump was not a Fascist or even close to it.

Stop falling into the tired rhetoric of the 20th century. New words are needed to name the problem.

The name for the system that you need to start using is "Totalitarian Liberalism". The leader is less important than the sum total bureaucratic control that slowly and "rationally" usurps freedom, flexibility, and leisure time from society for the benefit of the people who have the most influence over policy.

It is not a populist system that benefits the aristocracy and the working class by aligning corporate and state power in the national interest (fascism) nor a system that purports to benefit the working class by giving them the means of production (communism) - it is a system that works to benefit the existing rich by exploiting and undermining social divides, papering over them with rules and laws that marginalize the entire working class while setting it against itself.

From: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1

* strident, often exclusionary nationalism - ("America First") check.

* fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community - ("MAGA") check.

* embrace of paramilitarism - ("stand back and stand by") check.

* led by an authoritarian leader who claims to embody the national will. - check.

* protecting or elevating the rights of the national community above the rights of those seen as alien - ("build a wall", "I don't care, do u?") check.

* removing obstacles to national unity and suppressing those seen as challenging it - (myth of "stolen" votes, "Deep State" narrative) check.

* expanding the size and influence of the national state - (To be fair, this has been the military industrial complex for quite a long time. Nothing unique here) normalized/not unique here

* often, also seeking to expand territory through armed conflict - (Also, already a characteristic of the U.S. forever war to protect its interests globally) normalized/not unique here

Merriam-Webster: Definition of fascism

1. often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge

Don't know where you're getting your definition from.

Wrong, I am strongly against using terms like facist or nazi for the purpose of insulting or otherizing someone you do not like. However he clearly ticks the majority of elements of a Facist leader. You do not know what facism is.

> It is not a populist system that benefits the aristocracy and the working class by aligning corporate and state power in the national interest (fascism)

But that's exactly Trumps presidency? Or at least what he was attempting.

What you're missing is that fascism doesn't align ALL of the groups, just a fraction of each, and blames failures on the ones that aren't in that alignment

Why do you say Trump was not close to fascism? I thought the combination of populism + nationalism + law/order + charismatic leadership + monied interests was close to fascist.

That's a really amazing way of putting it. Thank you.

From the tweet you quoted:

> And for those who want to nitpick what she said, let me just stop you right there—Hitler was right on literally nothing.

This is most likely fake news. Hitler was one of the first world leaders against smoking. So he was right on at least one thing.

See also:

* Rockets * Propaganda films

The US still uses his advancements today

What she quoted, "Who ever has the youth has the future" .. well, that's right.

People are seriously afraid of things like Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology being taught in our schools. It's indoctrinating kids and parent's don't have a choice about it being taught to their kids.

She is literally quoting Hitler to show what the LEFT is doing in schools and how it's WRONG. This reaction is taken entirely out of context.

Those two are the exact same thing with merely different wording, since "we" are defining what is "reasonable", "we" are exerting control.

We are exerting control, but not complete control, and it's certainly not fascism.

Ideally, yes, everyone could understand every concept from the ground up and be able to engage in reasonable discourse about anything.

At this point, the complexity of the world precludes the majority of people from doing that, which is why we have specialization.

Practically speaking, people rely on authoritative sources to gain information about something so they can form opinions and make decisions. Those authorities do define what's reasonable based on different attributes, and in doing so exert control, but that doesn't make what they're doing fascist. It's done because the amount of complexity present in the world requires it.

“provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable” ≠ “defining what is "reasonable"”.

You can help people reach reasoned conclusions without telling them what conclusions to reach.

Are not you then suggesting that the conclusions they should reach to be reasonable? There is nothing that says democracy has to produce a reasonable system, and most people could point to an area where it's not, at least subjectively.

People making suggestions to each other is a fundamental part of democracy. Of course it is not guaranteed to produce reasonable results, but I think we should help it along in that direction.

> You can help people reach reasoned conclusions without telling them what conclusions to reach.

In theory, &/or to some degree.

It's also worth noting that "reasoned conclusions" are not necessarily what is True. Rather than desiring that humanity strives for Rationality, wouldn't it make more sense to aim higher? To instead desire that humanity pursues Truth? This way, we can improve all people: the members of our outgroups and our ingroups.

Millennia of philosophers have searched for Truth, and as far as I can tell we are no closer to definitively finding it. But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective. My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved. I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.

> and as far as I can tell we are no closer to definitively finding it

Perhaps it has been found but not distributed, or accepted. If we found it, would we even know? Would we be willing to acknowledge it, and practice it?

> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective.

This seems like a bit of a false dichotomy to me.

Reality is rarely exactly as it seems.

> My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved.

Perhaps, assuming (at least) we have no major flaws in our premises, or our systems (democracy theatre). I do share your hope though.

> I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.

It may be the best we've got now, but have we put any serious effort into finding alternatives? The horse and buggy was the best we had until someone invented the car; NASA was the best we had until Elon Musk started SpaceX, and so forth and so on.

As we sow, so shall we reap.

No - they are not.

'The News' - which is mostly credible, is mostly not a form of state propaganda.

'The News' in the US, is a 'reasonable' form of credible information.

'Facebook' is generally not a good source of truthful information. It's a very open and free place to communicate, which is wonderful, but it's just not a good truthiness signal.

Enough with this idea that anything but 'everyone on a soapbox' is somehow fascist. Every community has sources that are more legitimately authoritative than others.

When you have a revolving door from the intelligence agencies into the news commentariat, along with speech writers/communications staff for politicians, I think that it's safe to eye "The News" as being at best an unwitting tool of state propaganda, if not an open-eyed broker/distributor of it. I could maybe cut them some slack for eagerly and uncritically repeating the feeds from "unnamed intelligence sources", but when you're paying the nominally "retired" members of the community to help craft the narrative, it's hard to view them as "mostly credible".

It is completely false to suggest that 'political speech writers' and some influence of 'narrative' by state bureaucracies entirely discredits the free press.

'The problem with the press' are their own internal narratives and biases, not any external influence.

The press are generally free to report on what they see, and they do that. It's their opinion that gets in the way.

And ironically, if there are bits they're afraid to report it's definitely not political, it's corporate, for fear of losing advertising revenue.

It reeks of fascist or authoritarian thought - distrust of the people and then "helping them see the light" is a strategy that goes off the rails almost certainly.

> “we must provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable"

There is just the same as “control them” and in practice is how fascism works. The DDR didn’t rely primarily on stasi breaking kneecaps to enforce order.

The latter is just a euphemism for the former, as anyone who has read 1984 can tell you.

Have you seen the crap that people believe and the shitty sources that they're accepting the information from? The Facts AKA barely plausible bullshit is being served to anyone who wants to believe in an alternate yet more interesting reality fitting their own beliefs.

Social media has given everyone a soap box, a megaphone and a repeater and the ability to piggyback on other people's shouting directly into people's ears and eyes. Do you think this is a good thing? No one is vetting anyone seriously, no one is being consistently judged on their honesty, accuracy, track record or motives.

It's not entirely about being dumb, more and more it's turning out to be about how much time people are able to commit to understanding what they're reading. This is why people are known as experts in the first place. Do you really think everyone is capable enough to handle the highly nuanced planning and decision making necessary for governing millions of people on the balance of thousands of existing laws and regulations?

Sometimes you can't boil information down into something that everyone can understand in a short enough amount of time which would be what is necessary for each person to play a role in democracy. Just like we pay someone to fix our plumbing we should be paying our politicians to figure this stuff out for us.

We don't have the time or attention span. It's impossible.

> I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.

No it's not. This is declaring a problem -- which I think is a very real problem -- but not suggesting a solution. I don't believe anyone is suggesting fascism is the solution to this problem -- except for you.

But now that you've provided this unreasonable response, it's now much more difficult to discuss it. You've unintentionally provided an example of the very thing we're talking about.

He is suggesting a solution - self governance. Trust the people to make their own decisions, because there is no better alternative. What else can we do, have some committee that decides what the public is allowed to hear? That is fascism.

Nobody is suggesting getting rid of democracy -- this is red herring. This is a bad faith argument about bad faith arguments. It's no wonder people can't decide which direction is up.

In a conversation that is supposedly about how people are being mislead by media we're 2 seconds away of Godwin's law again. It's exhausting.

Seriousness aside, Godwin himself agreed that the law no longer applies after Charleston.

Do you mean Charlottesville?

:facepalm: Yes

Nothing in the world is a binary choice - reducing the potential solutions into either or does a disservice to attempts to find reasonable resolutions. In fact I'd say nearly nobody on earth wants to trust people to make all of their own decisions because those decisions impact other people. The choice to murder someone is not a choice we'd like to allow people to freely make without consequence.

We can destroy anonymity on the internet and punish people who spread malicious provable lies, calls for violence, or hate especially people who do so in an organized fashion.

An idiot who shares something untrue that he ought to have known was false is materially different from someone who fabricates something and ultimately directly and by proxy misinforms 10 million people.

The choice isn't between tyranny or absolute freedom. It's about our actions shaping the bones of society. The current framework isn't mere ground truth we must accept we can reshape it if we desire and perhaps we should.

We should not. Free speech is the only thing that keeps this society glued together, and the actions against free speech taken by the technological elite and it‘s companies over the last several years have primed the landscape for conflict.

You can’t just squeeze the screw tighter on this.

The idea of “I know better than you, therefore I control what you see and say or else” is the absolute height of arrogance.

> We can destroy anonymity on the internet and punish people who spread malicious provable lies

First of all, plenty of the people currently spreading lies on the internet are doing so under their own names and have built some celebrity and a career out of it, so I don't know why you think that anonymity contributes to the problem in any real way.

But more importantly, how exactly do you propose to "punish people" who spread lies? With what form of punishment? Is this a formal system of punishment, or some informal system?

If formal: Under what jurisdiction? How does your proposed system determine the truth, and if it can determine the truth how does it determine which lies are malicious enough to be deserving of punishment?

If informal: How does it differ from what we have today, in the form of people arguing with each other and occasionally trying to get each other banned from social media or otherwise made unpublishable or unemployable?

This seems like an argument from 'my opponent believes something that could possibly be used to justify something bad'. People are not equipped to understand what is reasonable. No one is. 90% of being reasonable is just following with the herd because the world is really really hard to understand. That is an argument against democracy, and also every other form of government involving people at any level. Such is life, at least until some kind of weird technical solution pops up.

To reinforce this point we agree[1] that some experiences can be so extreme as to cause long term psychological damage. PTSD is a really extreme example of not being able to cope with what reality was (due to generally experiencing an extremely bad portion of reality) - so I wanted to reinforce that at the extremes information can be damaging and different people do have different tolerances of how they cope with such information.

I'm not saying that reading a news article is equivalent to PTSD but it's a spectrum and we all sort of need to accept that different people have different abilities and tolerances when it comes to being exposed to extremism and propaganda - heck we'd all probably pride ourselves here as being able to see through the BS of most advertising but we also need to acknowledge that advertising is effective on a lot of folks.

1. As a society in general, I hope you'll allow.

More accurately put, "more people than you'd ever imagine are susceptible to unreasonable arguments".

Too dumb, no. But definitely too gullible - and the is made worse by the profit that is to be made manipulating such people.

What can we expect when our education system values regurgitation over deliberation and cosuming facts versus discovering them?

But the population is too dumb to do a lot of things, "self governance" by believing what Rudy Giuliani lies about on Twitter isn't a valid source.

The same way that there are large pockets of disease outbreak in rich areas of the country because moms with accounting degrees think they're smart enough to be immunologists because they have an internet connection.

We're literally watching democracy die in real time and its directly due to social media and internet disinformation, on top of the already existing radio/tv disinformation.

If it really is fascism vs. fascism (it isn't), why not choose the side where less people die?

Which side is that?

Just a thought, but the party closer to the ruling parties of nearly every other country where average life expectancy hasn't been on the decline, unlike the US.

Here is a comparison of US life expectancy vs a selection of socialist governed nations[0].

US life expectancy may have plateaued, but doesn't appear to be in decline, and it's still above even Cuba, which has perhaps the highest amount of social spending on healthcare as portion of GDP.

Meanwhile, Venezuela and Mexico are in clear declines.

With regards to which extremes of the political spectrum have the highest body counts, I would say the far-left Marxist states are the clear winners, with somewhere in the region of 42 to 160 million killed.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...

Just to clarify it looks like that chart has a number of specifically chosen countries. I'd suggest you add some more western countries with socialized medicine - Canada is well above the US as is the UK and I think those are both pretty comparable to the US in terms of personal wealth... Oh also Sweden is well above, but Sweden tends to be an outlier due to just how well socialism is working there.

Here is a copy of the chart with some additional countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...

Yeah, it was certainly cherry picked to illustrate a point.

Australia is even higher than Sweeden, yet both the UK and Australia are currently governed by conservative parties.

I'm an Australian myself, and in favor of socialized medicine, I just get annoyed by characterization of left vs right as a good vs evil scenario, as our polarized political discussion so often likes to do.

Bo, because that is a false choice.

The answer is instead to support human rights and freedoms, and fight back against attempts to take away our freedoms no matter who is trying to take them away.

Well, one argument would be quality vs quantity, i.e. some people may not weigh all lives equally. Fascist systems seem to be good at promoting such outcomes.

We are a representative republic. Part of that reason is because it is too burdensome to expect the general public to have the information and expertise to be fully involved in governance. We delegate that responsibility to our representatives.

EDIT: I removed a line that was superfluous to my point and was drawing attention away from my actual point.

This gets repeated again and again, but is just wrong.

The USA is both a representative democracy and a republic - the same as most other democracies on this planet.

Republic just means that the government is a public affair - there is no monarch. It's the opposite of a monarchy.

You are missing the point of my comment. The main focus is not the distinction between democracy and republic. It was that we do not govern ourselves directly. We elect people to do that for us because most of us aren't equipped to do it ourselves. The comment I was replying to called that fascism.

I removed the "We are not a democracy." line in my previous comment to refocus it on what I was really trying to say.

These kind of comments always get downvoted but it is pretty accurate. Certainly people like Madison didn’t want a thriving, egalitarian, democratic, civic culture and nation.

"But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable." -- Alexander Hamilton

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-01...

Aha. So you agree.

It's the talk of fascism if we then say "therefore, don't let the people make decisions". I'd much prefer:

"most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" ... and therefore let's help them to understand.

Look at the story and tell me if that’s proof of the population’s ability to self govern or quite the contrary? I’m not really sure.

I think that's unfair. On this website specifically we're very tended towards college educated. If you follow the bright path you can end up being somewhat sheltered to the concerns and the motivations of much of the general population.

This leads to people being blindsided by things like Trump or Brexit. Its important to register that we tend towards a slanted world view.

...and importantly, often unable to understand the perspective of others without resorting to patronizing explanations.

I have imperfectly adopted a principle in discourse: that if I have to resort to patronizing explanations to understand, I'm not working hard enough to understand.

In democracy, majorities also hold power, which they do not in the US

It's not that the populace is stupid, it's that the populace is being fed misinformation.

It is the responsibility of, well, everyone, but especially those in power—journalists, politicians, pundits—to act in some semblance of good faith. To try to inform their audience. To not say things they know to be false.

The people storming the capital right now have been told by (1) the president of the united states, (2) the news channels they watch, and very possibly (3) their religious leaders, that Donald Trump would have won the election if not for a conspiracy to rig voting machines and throw away millions of ballots. So of course, in that case, the right thing to do is storm the capital and protect democracy!

The basic problem is that too many public figures have decided to reject their most basic responsibility to society. And I just don't know what to do about that.

Benevolent dictators is what we all need.

I’m fine with that as long as _I_ am the dictator, otherwise no.

"because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable"

> I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.

Nonetheless it seems objectively true to me. This may just be my biased perspective being substantially smarter than average, but I'm continually surprised by how gullible, uneducated, and uninformed the average person is. In the USA especially - stop skimping on your education system there!

I'm also surprised pleasantly by what humans in the aggregate accomplish, so it's not all doom and gloom.

If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.

Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery

What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match.

Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in

Education has changed. Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured. This is not the case today, where merely speaking disagreement to the majority narrative gets your professorship cancelled and gets students disciplined.

"Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured."

Do you have a specific citation for that? There was Kent State. Before that they were racially and earlier, sexually, ethnically, and religiously, segregated.

What specific time period are you thinking of?

I see this repeated constantly - how many cases have there been? I'm asking genuinely.

Funny you should ask, because I just happened to see Robin Hanson share [0] the exact statistics on this today.

2020: 64

2019: 11

2018: 13

2017: 9

2016: 4

2015: 4

[0] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211

Just glancing at the linked spreadsheet, I see way more than 4 events in 2020 for which termination is pretty clearly justified and necessary, so this trend seems to be driven at least in part by a change in behavior by professors and not just others' responses to that behavior. Also worth mentioning that the majority of the listed professors don't seem to have actually been fired or even disciplined - unsuccessful petitions and the like are included.

it's also the case that some groups have become hyper-vigilant about academic "cancellations" in the last several years, which could account for why so many purported incidents have occurred since more attention is being paid to the issue.

I don't see any evidence that this spreadsheet is the result of someone systematically reviewing every case of a professor or other academic being dismissed, rebuked or whatever since 2014, so I don't really see how it could constitute a trend.

seeing a lot of people in this list "denounced in an open letter", "petitioned for firing" and the like. maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "cancelled".

Even outside of explicit censorship I think that the US education system has been doing a very poor job lately in terms of promoting critical thinking skills. It's too common to see folks come out of the educational system with too much faith put in "both-sides-ism" it's important to empathize and understand different viewpoints but it is lazy to accept all differing views as being equally valid.

In what time frame though?

For instance, Galileo was not treated well for going against conventional wisdom, and nobody liked vis viva because it wasnt newton's momentum.

Are there people losing their jobs and being cancelled for going against the Copenhagen interpretation today?

Back in the 50s and 60s, Pete Seeger was banned from performing to anyone but young children by the FBI because he may have been a member of the Communist party -- including at educational institutions. Is that still happening today? Has that changed or something?

What's the difference in analytic technique that has changed since that time period? People are still writing essays, running experiments and measuring p values. These are still the methods being taught, too

Now tell me which side destroyed education.

The only examples of this that I know of are literal holocaust deniers. I have never seen a professor with an argument that can be backed up with any amount of facts be disciplined.

I say batshit insane crazy stuff all the time that in hind-sight I didn't mean at all. Probably, I should work on thinking more before I speak. But - I like to speak my mind - even if it gets me in trouble some times.

I do think it's a problem that a lot of employees can and do get fired over saying dumb stuff - a lot of times that they didn't mean to say. Does this include Trump's famous "Grab them by the p#$$y" comment? Maybe.

However, there's this idea that people should basically be able to send out hate speech memos in a company and not be apprehended for "speaking their mind". These are completely different. One of them is premeditated idiocracy. The other is a mistake. We shouldn't confuse the two.

I agree that education has changed for the worse in many ways, but might disagree with you on some of the specifics. Being direct, I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.

>I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.

One of my hobbies puts me among people who pretty homogeneously lean right. They say more or less the exact same thing about the left and on the same list of topics no less. I can paraphrase talking points if you would like. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in beliefs between the left and the right when it comes to the what is right and what is wrong.

I think if you expanded your list of issues slightly you would be very hard pressed to find someone who is not a hardcore partisan from either party that does not believe that the "other party" has it right on at least one or two issues.

I think this exposes some of the problem we're discussing though. Your view that one party is anti-evidence, anti-facts, anti-science betrays enormous bias or at least indicates that your information stream is very biased. There are plenty of examples of policy proposals from either party that can be described this way. Facts and evidence are conveniently ignored in the furtherance of policy, routinely. To say that this party or that party is _mostly_ unlike the other in this respect is itself "anti-evidence" or contrary to the objective evidence.

For example?

If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed.

Yes, arguably because certain political elements have made it their business to make damned sure those organs fail.

When educated people consistently vote for one party over the other, it's absurd to expect the losing party to support improvements to education. You'd have to be, well, poorly educated to think that.

And we all know who loves the poorly educated...

What happened since the 60s in your opinion?

If I were to guess, it seems pubic policy in recent decades has often been founded on shaky ground. Anti-communism, anti-drug policy, various health/welfare policies, and so on are often not particularly evidence based. I can see this leading to a broader acceptance of dual-reality "facts" like we're seeing now. Words and truth lose meaning.

But is that new? I have no idea.

Yes. We had free speech but we weren't prepared for unedited, viral free speech. We weren't prepared for cameras in every ordinary person's hands. We also weren't prepared for our free speech to be archived and searchable forever.

I think it's easy to blame the symptoms of social media for the issues we have. But the internet, video quality bandwidth, smartphones, and social media together have combined to dramatically change who publishes and who finds it over the last 10-15 years.

In my mind, it is going to take us time to adapt, maybe a couple generations. Things will be difficult during that time but I hope we don't make regressive changes in our values based on what is fundamentally (in my opinion) an issue adapting our approach to free speech to the rapid advancement of publishing technology.

EDIT: "most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" -> This is the kind of dramatic conclusion I don't think we should be drawing.

A diverse information diet is a great thing, but you need the context and tools for understanding what you read. That means you need to understand math, science, history, social science, etc. at a somewhat advanced level to make sense of these things.

America has been good at free speech, and we should never give that up. But for free speech to result in advancement of society, rather than goons storming the Capitol, a good education is an absolute requirement, and the government has not given all Americans the opportunity to get a good education. There will be pressure to censor speech because people aren't equipped to process it -- we should resist that and focus on education instead. This is where we should be spending our money; this is what the government exists to do. Give everyone an equal standing to understand these sources of information. We're not doing that, and the results are bad.

Education is the root of the solution for all problems.

It should always be one of the top priorities for any populace.

You can lead a horse to knowledge, but you can't make him think.

An educated populace is also the most dangerous thing to anyone in power (politicians, business operators, etc.). Even without being a coordinated conspiracy, that is a constant force working against improved education.

You don't even have to postulate education being dangerous to people in power (something that I personally find to be more conspiracy than not).

It's enough to notice that there's near zero economic incentives for providing actual education. The market settled on an equilibrium of baseline operational knowledge + filtering through standardized testing, and then advanced operational knowledge acquired through voluntary higher education and on the job. And it continued to optimize accordingly. The only thing that makes people try to teach beyond this minimum is humanistic values, belief in importance of education. Against it works the entire economy, forcing individual teachers and schools alike to find savings, "cut out fat", make lean.

Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide (because it's not just an US phenomenon; we start to see the same problems over here in Europe).

Putting it even more directly - the inevitable outcome of free markets without any competing benign feedback loops is fascism.

So you (hypothetically, as a developer) make six figures? Superb.

How valuable is that when your country goes down in flames because it's easy to make money out of people who believe Bill Gates is seeding Covid via 5G towers?

> How valuable is that when your country goes down in flames because it's easy to make money out of people who believe Bill Gates is seeding Covid via 5G towers?

That's what I keep telling people around me. They're still bewildered that I don't go out of my way to "optimize" my way out of taxes, or that I'm in favor for raising the taxes for my income bracket. And it doesn't even take a civil war - as the income inequality progresses, how long will it take before your close family will start asking you (the hypothetical rich developer) for help? Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?

> as the income inequality progresses, how long will it take before your close family will start asking you (the hypothetical rich developer) for help?

and how much help will you be able to offer, given your prior lack of optimization for this very scenario?

> Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?

"I gave already, it was taken out of my income before I had a chance to spend it, go away now"

Agreed. Everything seems hunky-dory until the guillotines come out, and then all the elites are like "Who? Me?".

Pretty darned valuable, especially when you move it into other assets

Isis may have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria, but that did not mean that the oil stopped flowing

> Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide

Where in the world is there a free market in education?

It's not about free market in education itself, but about everywhere else.

Teachers are overworked and underpaid, they can't afford to go far beyond what curriculum says they should. Parents demand schools prepare kids well for their adult life - which for almost all families means primarily preparing for a decent job. Thus the labor market is indirectly but strongly influencing the curriculum. Labor market demands a way to sort people, so standardized testing and pressure to choose your career at even earlier ages appears. On the other side, governments are embedded in the market reality, they need to manage their budgets and seek savings, so their prioritize, tightening the school system to provide what the market demands.

I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.

> Teachers are overworked and underpaid, they can't afford to go far beyond what curriculum says they should. Parents demand schools prepare kids well for their adult life - which for almost all families means primarily preparing for a decent job. Thus the labor market is indirectly but strongly influencing the curriculum. Labor market demands a way to sort people, so standardized testing and pressure to choose your career at even earlier ages appears. On the other side, governments are embedded in the market reality, they need to manage their budgets and seek savings, so their prioritize, tightening the school system to provide what the market demands.

If there's no slack in the system then how do you propose to expand the scope of function provided by a system running at its limitations?

> I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.

I agree with this, which is why I questioned you. A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.

It's not that people are unable to understand, it's that understanding isn't part of the game. It's about group membership and a lot of that is about knowing the "phrases" that make you seem like a member.

Easy bad ideas make for catchy phrases. The kinds of thoughts that are spreading across the US today would have been stopped by editorial accountability in an earlier era. I'm not sure education is the way to reduce the impact of easy bad ideas, because group members take on the catch phrases without thinking them through.

And back in the 1500s anyone could build a printer and rags for paper and crank out hundreds of broadsheets or pamphlets to be distributed all over town. Which lead to pulp fiction, the open exchange of ideas and the religious wars of the 1500s and onwards.

Open exchange of ideas is not new. It's just faster and cheaper now.

Think about what you're saying. Almost no one could actually do that. You had to be quite wealthy and incredibly well educated.

The point is that it was a step function. The bar suddenly dropped a huge amount. It went from "mostly just the church can produce written works" to "anyone who can afford the people to run a printing press can produce written works". It was a massive shock to the system.

> I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.

Sophisticated people are just as prone to bias and cognitive error as unsophisticated people. The danger with limiting the spread of information is that the task of deciding what to censor is vulnerable to corruption by the interests of the censor.

This is supposed to be why we have a republic rather than a radicle democracy.

People forget, statistically half the population has an IQ below 100. And importantly, to be absolutely clear, that does not mean those people should not have a voice, or that they are “stupid”, far from it. It does however mean that certain issues are overwhelming complex to assume every American can make competent decisions on. Many of these rioters I’m sure don’t grasp how the very system they are protesting works on a fundamental level. If they believe the earth is flat, how can we expect them to understand the electoral college process, or the role of state versus federal government in our election process.

Certainly everyone’s voices need to be heard. When people and their families are struggling, many of them doing the jobs that make this country function, they are ignored. So when a savior seems to come before them, we need to be very vigilant.

We’ve seen these things happen before in history with other demagogues.

We expect in this country that all voices should be heard in order to elect people who’s job it is to lead. That’s the definition of a republic. That leadership should have killed the conspiracies and falsehoods from the start, protecting those of the democracy who are vulnerable, many of them suffering from the consequences of this pandemic.

Instead they sat on their hands. We need to hold our leaders responsible. We need to ask, en masse, for those leaders to hold each other accountable.

We also need to take ownership as a people. Us. We consume this media. We have created these social media companies, and allowed them to spread this stuff. Ultimately each and every one of us is responsible.

Let’s make sure going forward we ask more for those we ask to lead in our stead. Our vote isn’t the only thing we have to do that. We also have our voice and our 1st amendment. Let’s use it to the fullest.

I think you are wrong. While the cost of authoring and distributing content are cheaper than ever and anyone can broadcast to the planet trivially, the ability to actually bring attention to your content has never been more scarce. It is deeply controlled and manipulated by huge confirmation-bias-as-service platforms in every recommender system, personalized ad system, and content feed across the mainstream internet.

Your fellow citizens deserve more credit. They have brains. They really can and almost always do form adequate understanding of reasonable takes on new information.

But when their eyeballs are subjected to consumerist bidding wars and ranking algorithms to inflame, to stoke fear and insecurity, to render feelings of inadequacy, and they are so thoroughly manipulated, then you get information monoculture.

We need information diversity and information vitamins. Instead we’re allowing ourselves to be spoonfed information junk food.

I don't think that's true either. Before, bringing attention to your content required first getting the attention of some huge media organization, then piggybacking off. At the end of the day there's still only as much attention as there are people attending, but the barriers to entry are far lower today.

Meanwhile, our fellow citizens deserve no credit at all, and neither do we. No one has any real idea what's going on, we just either follow the herd or totally gamble. Even if someone was actually able to be correct about complex systems, it would be unverifiable.

The stolen election claim is put forward by the President of the United States, not some random people with blogs.

The president's own information diet is often fueled from said blogs though. These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official, so where do you think he got them from? He regularly retweets and repeats talking points created in the deepest parts of the internet.

> These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official

Do you have a source for this comment? I'm pretty sure he heard about the allegations of fraud from actual purported witnesses who filed sworn affidavits. Those blogs that you're saying he gets the information from have hyperlinks to the documents filed by his legal team. I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.

> witnesses who filed sworn affidavits

Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper.

If intelligence services or elections officials had found something, they would've announced it officially, instead they have announced the opposite. [0] [1]

> I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.

Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet. [2] (and hundreds more)

[0] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio...

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-la-ballots-idUS...

> Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper.

They are poll workers who claim (under penalty of perjury) to have witnessed illegal or election-tampering conduct.

> Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet.

Its presumptuous for you to pretend to know the sources available to POTUS.

>> There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

This from the guy who was fired because he continued to claim there was no evidence when people were presenting evidence of election tampering and begging the government to investigate before the evidence trail grew cold.

If you want to go specific, the blogs got it from Trump's team, then trump got it from the blogs, ignoring whatever his team told him directly

He said it multiple times this morning on The Ellipse, before he instructed his supporters to go to the capitol.

He has tweeted today his displeasure at Mike Pence if he doesn't reject the Electoral College votes.

And he has tweeted moments ago, yet again, that he won in a landslide and that he and his supporters have had the election win viciously stripped away from them.

Whether it's delusional or some malicious intent to incite violence, I think doesn't even matter. He should be impeached, removed from office, and banned from ever holding office again. The priority must be, counting the state certified Electoral College votes, and certifying the result. Following that, Congress could impeach and remove Trump from office in half a day, if they want. Their normal speed is glacial, but that's institutional momentum. They can move very quickly, if they want to, they just usually don't want to.

What? “Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.” Do you realize how elitist and even authoritarian that statement is.

Does elitist and authoritarian imply false?

Being reasonable is time consuming, expensive, requires constant education and a mind open to accepting that being wrong is ok. It’s elitist almost by definition. I don’t see how you got authoritarian in the equation, though.

The very notion of putting people in the category of sophisticated and unsophisticated, is a form of classism. It gets into the realm of authoritarianism when we start wanting people to be making decisions for others based on this. This not something we should be doing in a free society.

I don't think it's classist to acknowledge that a lot of people do not have the privilege or time to thoroughly investigate the accuracy and biases of the information they are receiving.

The response to this should be to ensure everyone does have the education and free time to be able to deal with this type of misinformation, but that runs contrary to the goals of those who benefit from the status quo.

Not if it is accompanied with a simultaneous desire offer the populace the tools to become more savvy at understanding the world around them with an education in history, politics, economics, ethics, science, etc.

It isn’t about information diversity. Diversity is sought to counteract the real problem, which is that news isn’t news. It’s entertainment. Journalism no longer presents fact. They present an interpretation of facts, ostensibly spun and sensationalized toward the ideology of their viewers. 30 years ago this didn’t happen. You could watch any of the nightly news shows and walk away more or less with the same understanding of current affairs. That’s not true anymore. Why did this happen? Because infotainment generates more viewers and therefore more ad revenue. It’s also a means for politicians to galvanize the electorate and stir up hysteria to their benefit.

Yes. And a large chunk of population simply aligns based on emotion and do not have the desire to learn. This applies to all categories of people, including myself.

I agree with the first paragraph, but strongly disagree with the second.

Those regimes that filtered information very narrowly constrained ideas to align with the status quo. That was sometimes good, but often held back people with minority views from finding and organizing with each other. Progressive social movements and positive new possibilities have come out of this, in addition to reactionary ones.

What we do have to do is figure out how to have a shared view of the world that is less authoritarian than in the past. People now try to get the private platforms to enforce particular viewpoints through deplatforming and such. I am sympathetic to this as a practical matter, but don't think it is a viable long-term solution, as it will just lead us back to where we were, except with different people calling the shots.

We had more diverse access but less diverse consumption.

I think there’s a difference between diverse information being available, and people actually being exposed yo diverse viewpoints. With engagement driven social media more people than ever have a voice, but individuals are also fed a custom tuned diet of only a narrow range of views.

If you go looking for different opinions you can find them, but most people don’t do that. They let an algorithm generate their opinions for them by excluding anything that might challenge their views from their feed.

Agreed.

With every new communication medium comes new responsibility.

When radio was first introduced, it was rife with misinformation and false advertising. One Dr. Brinkly made a fortune selling fake goat testicle transplants (for treating ED) over the radio, only to relocate it to the Mexican border when he was shut down. He made so much money that he ran for Governor and received 30% of the vote.

We're kind of in the same place right now, but with a much broader medium. How we move forward is anyone's guess.

> Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information.

Yes. And thirty or forty or fifty years ago (remember the Internet itself is more than 20 years old), we had even less diverse access.

However, that does not mean the information we got back then was more reliable than the information we get now. It just means it was harder back then for we the people to spot when we were being misinformed, lied to, or just plain not told about things we should have been told about.

People back then could print anything. We have more population of people in the country, more then ever - and more outlets but it does not change how information is disseminated

- from Thomas Paine Common Sense, to getting all the farmers with pitchfolks to revolt over whiskey tax to the newspaper boy shouting on the corner.

It's really the same coin.

This mindset is terrifying and yet most people here would probably agree with you.

We are headed for dark times unless people like you are removed from positions of power.

Half of the population has a below-average IQ. Maybe 10% of those with an above average IQ are Dark Triad personalities somewhere on the toxic spectrum between narcissism and sociopathy.

Economic values operate to reward them, and to punish - or at least inconvenience - those with less toxic values. So naturally the Dark Triad types have a very strong incentive to exploit the below-average. And the more below average and cognitively unsophisticated they are, the easier it is to exploit them.

This isn't even about Left vs Right. It's about how you design a political and economic system that can handle these challenges without imploding.

A lot of this stuff comes via talk radio, not twitter or YouTube, and that's not exactly new technology.

I think you're confusing cause and effect. The problem is that people don't trust the same "professionals" to "filter" their news. People trusted Cronkite. There wasn't a huge market for "here's the news Cronkite won't tell you." Even when the country got super divided during Vietnam.

Now, I don't know why people have lost faith in professionals. I have my theory, which is that there has been a really significant ideological divergence between the professional class and ordinary people.

Let me give you an example. I don't want to litigate the specific example, but I'm just using it to illustrate. I read a lot of Matt Yglesias. He's very smart. But as far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in culture. Like, he doesn't believe it exists. He doesn't understand why people are attached to theirs. So when he talks about immigration, he draws these dichotomies "well there is the economic aspect of the immigration debate, then the xenophobia aspect."

I come from a country where a bunch of brown Muslims declared independence from other brown Muslims over the particular Indo-Aryan language they spoke. Bangladeshis would flip out if, for example, a quarter of the country was suddenly Pakistani. Not because they dislike Pakistanis. (I.e. Xenophobia.) But they are very attached to their own culture and don't want anyone to come and change it. One of the most powerful forces in the world is peoples' attachment to soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs, etc. Yglesias boils all of that down to "xenophobia."

Now, I'm quite the opposite. I get sad I'm going to die 10,000 miles away from where my ancestors are buried. I'm a bit jealous that my wife's family all lives within 2 hours of where they came over to Oregon on the wagon trains 170 years ago, while mine is scattered around the world in a diaspora. So when I listen to Yglesias, I cringe at some of his takes. I trust him because I've read a lot of his work, but I don't think he understands me or people like me. I can just imagine someone who don't want to put in the effort tuning him out.

The professional class is increasingly full of people like Matt Yglesias. Not just "liberal" in terms of supporting this healthcare policy or that one. Or in thinking the Vietnam was was a bad idea. But "liberal" in terms of not sharing a lot of basic premises with ordinary people, like “is it legitimate to be concerned about culture changing in your community.” It’s very hard for people who don’t share those views on basic things like that to talk to each other productively. I think that's a huge part of eroding trust in professionals.

I enjoyed reading this. But I'm confused. You posit Yglesias as a member of "the professional class", which you contrast with "ordinary people", and in particular, people like yourself.

But in your profile here on HN, you describe yourself as:

> I'm an appellate lawyer. In a past life, I was an engineer at a cognitive radio startup.

I'm puzzled at why you see the distinction as having anything to do with "the professional class".

I think the word you could have used to good effect here is "cosmopolitan". Its meaning is a subtle and probably used a little differently by different people, but I take it to describe a person somewhat like myself who (unlike you) doesn't have much of an attachment to "soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs", but instead sees all of the culture of humanity as their birthright, and who feels free to pick and choose (subject to certain political and economic constraints). I find it personally important to me to be able to combine things I love from different cultures from all over the world, and I confess that I regard those with a strong attachment to whatever they perceive as "their culture" as somehow a little (or a lot!) backwards. I also confess to a genuine irritation with anyone who expresses ideas that suggest that certain culture is "owned" by specific groups of people.

Clearly, we have quite different views of the world and our place in it. But I'm still confused why you put Yglesias and his cosmopolitan views in "the professional class" when it seems (from your being here on HN as well as your profile) that you are also a member of this class. Surely Yglesias is just a cosmopolitan sort of person, and you are not?

If so, it's really about "the professional class" vs "ordinary people", it's about people (like me) who view cosmopolitanism as central to the great hope for a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity, and people (perhaps such as yourself) who feel that belonging to a particular culture (and place?) is central their identity and presumably their conceptions of the future.

> I'm puzzled at why you see the distinction as having anything to do with "the professional class". I think the word you could have used to good effect here is "cosmopolitan".

Let me make clear that I’m not making value judgments here. Obviously I have my views, but I’m just trying to describe what I’m experiencing.

Putting that aside, I agree “cosmopolitan” describes aspects of this as well. But economic trends have caused the professional class to become much more cosmopolitan than it used to be. In the law, for example, it used to be most companies used local or regional firms. Today, stuff is increasingly consolidated in NY/DC/SF. The same is true of the news media, etc. As a result, these industries are increasingly filled with people who were okay moving halfway across the country to pursue opportunities. And the process of moving itself reduces some of those traditional attachments to place.

This is happening internationally. Surveys show that the vast majority of people in Asia wouldn’t immigrate to another country even if they had the chance. So places like Silicon Valley are increasingly filled with people who are a little different than the normal person in the country they left behind.

As for me, I came to DC at age 5 with my parents so it’s not like I had much of a choice. And it’s hard to be “from” DC since everyone here is so transient. Even then, I moved back when my wife and I had kids and we live 10 minutes from my parents.

> Surely Yglesias is just a cosmopolitan sort of person, and you are not?

Yes, I think that’s true. But as explained above, there are a lot more cosmopolitans in my profession than the average place. The median American lives less than 18 miles from their mom. The median American lawyer or journalist certainly doesn’t. I remember scrambling to get a passport when my boss decided we were going to Germany with two days notice. My passport had been expired for years.

> Who feel that belonging to a particular culture (and place?) is central their identity and presumably their conceptions of the future.

And just happiness. I don’t mind if my kids go out somewhere else for college, but I want them to come back to Maryland and raise kids. I travel for work, and my wife and I like to go to random Midwestern cities once a year for vacation, and I really love Japan, but traveling for the sake of it doesn’t do much for me.

Cosmopolitanism is one aspect of how the professional class is different. Religion is another. There are more religious people than you’d think in the professional class, but everyone keeps it pretty DL and churchgoing isn’t a typical weekly activity. Education is obviously another, and that’s got a lot of knock-on effects. I’ve been trying to explain the new meaning of the term “racism” to my dad and he’s pretty perplexed. He never went to college in the US, and prides himself on “not being a hyphenated American.”

For the most part, people can just sort into the kind of life they want. But when the media becomes highly nationalized, it becomes a challenge. I’m politically a pretty liberal person (I was a Democrat most of my adult life) and it’s just hard for me to read mainstream news these days. I stick to Bloomberg which tends to be pretty neutral. I have to admit, I read foxnews.com or WSJ when 10 years ago I would’ve read the NYT. Not because I think “these people are bad” or anything like that, I just don’t want to fight with the impedance mismatch to see what happened in the GA election.

Notably, the local news doesn’t create this tension. The Capital Gazette here in Annapolis doesn’t make me want to flip to Fox.

So I guess the Biharis are what, chopped liver? You should remember that Mujib ended his famous speech with Joy Bangla, joy Pakistan but the last part gets left out.

Interesting I’ve never heard that: https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/dhaka/2019/06/01/ak-...

Maybe I’m understating the actual xenophobia towards Pakistanis in Bangladesh. I’m (inadvertently) rather ignorant some of these things because my knowledge is second hand through family. My parents were strongly pro-independence, and my uncle was in the army.

The biggest thing that I’ve seen in the news haven’t come from lies but from removal of context.

Anything can be made more inflammatory if you remove key details while still remaining factually correct.

- Tim punched Bob

- Bob punched Tim

- Bob and Tim shake hands

Reported as...

- Bob punched Tim

Factually correct but lacking context. Unless the reader knows the entire story be putting it together from multiple reports, this will create a skewed view of any report. This happens all the time with headline circulation where nobody reads the article.

If you’ve ever seen reporting or articles on something where you have deep expertise, you’ll spot it immediately because you know exactly what’s been left out. Nobody else does though.

And honestly, I have no idea what to do about it unless somebody can create a site to aggregate news from multiple sources to highlight what’s missing from each one.

The most promising category of approach seems to me to be an adversarial one. Level 1 is having one side present their case—basically the status quo. Level 2 is having some group of people with a strong incentive to find flaws and what's missing, and with a platform on which to present their criticisms. Level 3 is to have people (possibly from the first group, possibly other members of the second group) critique the criticisms, and possibly iterate that. Level 4 might include live debates, although that has pros and cons relative to written arguments.

A tactic that I suspect would be useful is the ability to call out specific things—"Yeah, a bunch of this stuff is arguable and murky, but that thing you said right there is wrong and I can prove it; I will stake a chunk of my reputation on this, and we will litigate the issue, and if I'm successful, it should damage your reputation and boost mine"—combined with people expecting to be in the system for long enough that reputations are worthwhile. ("Wrong" will include "factually wrong" and might also include "against the rules of this system"—it might be sensible to have rules about claims needing to be backed up by certain kinds of evidence.)

I think at least some parts of academia were supposed to work something like this, and maybe a few parts of it actually do.

https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news is based around your closing statement. I make no claim about how well they do it, I just know they exist.

Interesting. "Top stories" are presented with three articles: one "From the Left", one "From the Center", and one "From the Right". For example, an update about the subject of this thread has articles from CNN, Reuters, and New York Post in those respective categories. Looks like the "top stories" are presented with a "headline roundup", presumably written by an AllSides person, which (judging from two examples) tends to say things like "Left-rated outlets were more likely to highlight [...]; Right-rated outlets featured [...]". There are also three general feeds of "News from the (Left|Center|Right)" in parallel at the bottom.

This seems at least like the type of experiment that would be worth trying.

> The biggest thing that I’ve seen in the news haven’t come from lies but from removal of context.

Also, it will be interesting is which "news" outlets label this as riots and which label it as protests.

CNN: And here are the results of the golf tournament between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Biden took the second place. Trump was just one row above the looser.

Reflecting the same joke for Fox News is left as an exercise to the reader.

I would heartily agree and go a bit further.

Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. It is exceedingly difficult to find information presented without some attempt to mislead.

The short version: There are no more Walter Cronkites or Edward R. Murrows the nation trusts to present the news without filter or spin.

That coupled with the algorithmically enhanced echo-chambers of social media you mention, multiplied by two decades of teaching outrage and protest instead of critical thinking and history, gets you this.

> Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence.

Have you ever actually read examples of newspapers and news reporting from the earlier parts of the 20th century? The dishonest, mendacious bias in favor of any media source's ideological preference was extreme to a degree that even today isn't readily visible. Certain media empires were absolutely ruled by their owners and even major papers like the New York Times were often loaded in slant towards certain ideological narratives. Just to name one example: Read about Walter Duranty. Things were even more vicious in the 19th century.... I have no idea where this notion of once fair, objective news sources comes from but it's certainly not rooted in the practical reality (referring in all of this to U.S media and politics, regarding other countries things get more ambiguous and complciated probably).

I think you and GP are talking about different time periods. Walter Cronkite is 50s to 70s, the postwar figurehead when there were like 3 TV channels. That's where the notion of a shared reality comes from. And I guess this was still pretty strong into the 90s, everyone watched gulf war I on CNN right?

Whereas Walter Duranty was a big deal in the 20s & 30s, in much more fragmented & volatile times. Although how much their fragmentation resembles ours I don't know. They had many far-out newspapers but still only a few radio shows, and perhaps a larger role for shared institutions like churches & public schools?

> That's where the notion of a shared reality comes from.

Sure, but that reality was a top-down creation. How much airtime did dissidents get? Socialists? Women? Marginalised people? And I don't mean reporting on them, but stories by them.

I'm not sure this is your position, but one extreme is to describe this "shared reality" as being imposed by force on everyone by one privileged group.

But I'd like to highlight other forces. One was technological, 3 TV channels or whatever was all they could do, and this implied that there was going to be a pretty high degree of conformity. You couldn't broadcast weird Italian movies because only a few percent were interested. The 4 big car companies who bought the ads which paid the bills really didn't want to be associated with anything partisan, they all needed to sell to everyone.

Another was historical / emotional. The nation had just emerged from this gigantic world war, and it was a spectacular victory, which gave enormous prestige to the huge centralized machines built to fight it. They built a lot of similar machines back home, big corporations with a commander-in-chief who wasn't a self-made robber barron, he was promoted up the ranks. Big unions, and big regulation.

This experience also squashed a lot of earlier differences. You say "Women? Marginalised people?" but this seems like a modern take, I think they would have said "Irish? Polish? Jewish?". These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one, I mean, a Catholic could be elected president, that was a big deal.

But all of these are gone now. So perhaps 100 years ago is a better guide than 50 years ago.

Perhaps "creation" was too strong a word. So no, it wasn't so much being imposed as it was a natural (albeit unfortunate) consequence of technology, which you point out, and post-war sentiment, which you also point out! I agree with you, I'm just saying it wasn't a good thing. When there's so few voices, there's only so much they can say.

> These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one

Shared by white people, for the most part.

I'm not sure what you mean in your penultimate paragraph. "identities and divisions eroding" is only partly true, surely. You could certainly argue the opposite is true - see the women's lib and civil rights movements for examples of people fighting back against conformity.

Note that I try not to say this consensus was either a good or a bad thing, only that it existed. It had pros & cons, and trying to weigh them up overall seems a bit of a distraction. I'm glad I don't live under it, although perhaps those who did were also glad not to live under earlier systems. But we don't get to choose when to be born, so we are not obliged to reach a yes/no vote.

Right, the experience of black people was pretty distinct, 20s-60s-now, and those are really interesting stories. And there's a fractal of smaller group stories, too. But I think the story arc from hyper-partisan 19th C news-politics to Walter Cronkite to Twitter can be understood (to a large degree) before zooming in that far. Although once you do, then indeed, the present tendency to focus on smaller groups' stories does look like part of the same Cronkite -> Twitter arc.

Don't forget the repealing of the fairness doctrine in 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)! People act like it's some big coincidence that polarized news really emerged in the US in the 90s....

> Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence.

No, they haven't. News organizations have always had strong political and narrative-driven tendencies, what has changed is that the media is more diverse in bias and thus the illusion of neutrality that came from the period where the major national media spoke with nearly uniform bias and agenda is lost.

When major news outlets take orders from the DNC on what to cover and what not to, that isn't the same as having ordinary bias.

When other outlets shill for the RNC, that isn't the same as having "political tendencies."

In the past, these maneuvers would have been considered conflicts of interest and a violation journalistic ethics. Today, we don't have many practicing journalists. We have "here's a lefty and here's a righty, let's watch 'em argue on screen" passed off as news.

Until the early 20th century, most newspapers were openly owned by political parties. And it was ad driven tabloids that ended that system, not strong examples of journalistic ethics. The strong connection between the two never vanished though, the media companies just got more powerful.

Strong disagree. During the tenure of GW Bush, I saw the mainstream media attack him daily in a way I had never witnessed before. It seemed to transform from debate to contempt and hate.

For second Bush. News were posting. Daily death counts In Middle East.

The moment Obama was elected those counts stopped.

We all want to believe that nice guy on TV. Is honest and neutral.

This is almost never the case.

Perhaps that was just fatigue coinciding with a new admin.

Notice how in the first few months of the pandemic the daily stats were front page? Like, every day and multiple times per day. Now we just occasionally get the "USA breaks single day record" second or third level heading with no specific numbers.

But, I promise you in 4 years people will be remember this as "Remember when the media was reporting the pandemic deaths non-stop when Trump was in office but it _suddenly_ stopped when Biden was in office?"

Just like people seem to remember when "Mitch Mcconnell" overrode Obama's veto. The veto both houses and both parties overrode. 97-1 in the senate.

An easier explanation is that it isn't numbers fatigue but a pattern based on the party of the administration. This seems the easier explanation because the supposed audience "appetites" and "fatigues" reflected by editors seem to crest in a predictable way, surveys of industry participant political leanings, industry organization donations, evaluation of article messaging, recordings of CNN editorial meetings, etc.

I think the easiest explanation is fatigue. It requires no conspiracy as it just happens on its own; it set in like 6+ months ago on the pandemic.

Couple that with people remembering things how they want, or believing what they want to hear, and Bob is you uncle.

Would that have anything to do with the disaster of the Iraq War, by any chance?

No. Reporting the news doesn't require weighing in or attacking anyone. Moreover, the "attacks" began well in advance of GW's inauguration never mind the Iraq War.

You haven't addressed why you think it was largely unjust criticism.

I don't think "News" should include criticism. There is a very important place for it along with news, but I think it is important to keep them as separate concepts. Honestly, right now what is presented as mainstream "news" is probably best described as entertainment.

What should "News" consist of?

What has happened. Is this really that hard of concept?

Perhaps because it was deserved? If the leader of the world insists on taking abhorrent actions, what's the neutral position?

A root cause behind this is a shift from news as a public service (something closer to the modern-day BBC) to an info-tainment business that must turn a quarterly profit.

> There are no more Walter Cronkites or Edward R. Murrows

I don't think there can be economically, without regulating (supply limiting) news media.

They were debatably on par with politicians. But increase the number of news outlets, and the importance of any anchor decreases.

Consequently, their ability to ask hard questions without losing access to their sources decreases.

Fox News was specifically designed and built to be the media arm of the Republican party. This was by design, created from the ground up as a long term play. In its case, it was not a natural shift of narrative influence or a trade-in for the viewer numbers.

Rupert Murdock called on Republican political strategist Roger Ailes in 1996 when creating Fox News. Ailes launched and then ran Fox News as its CEO for decades.

This is the same guy who worked as a media adviser to basically every successful Republican presidential campaign.. Nixon, Reagan, Bush.. and even Trump (before Ailes died, and after a sexual misconduct scandal finally got him canned at Fox).

Ailes was so influential as a strategist that he was even credited for one of Bush senior's wins back in the day. And he built and reigned at Fox News for 20+ years.

So we had a major republican political operator put in charge of a news network by a global political operator (Murdoch) who only got US citizenship as it was a requirement for US television station ownership. And who had a history of using his media empire to shape political narrative for influence.

The frustrating thing is that Murdoch's influence shaping has always been more about accumulating power than towards spreading specific ideology. In Australia in the 60s and 70s, he backed the faction pushing for universal free health care, free college education for all Australians, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources.

Sounds very un-Fox-like, doesn't it? It was the in-road to political power, the faction that would get him the most influence by supporting. There was a write-up some years ago in the UK that delves a bit more into his history (as he has also been peddling influence in the UK for decades as well):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a-man-of-selfish-lo...

But tying this back to Fox News.. he came to the US, built a TV network and used that foundation to build a news station. This was a push to become a major political controller by building and embedding Fox News as the media arm of the Republican party.

They used this to condition their base. The lead-up to today is decades of people turning on FOX to watch Geraldo, sticking around for the news, then wandering off with talking points stuffed into their heads by influencers with an agenda who were presenting the news.

And the strategy was so successful that it generates mimics to the model. The most evil I see is Sinclair Media buying up local news stations and putting the same talking points into the mouths of local pundits across the nation. There's a creepy video compilation that highlights the tactics of this influence machinery by showing clips from each of these local news outlets with different talking heads each repeating the same points.

I completely agree. To be a bit more explicit, the extent to which institutions abandon objectivity is the extent to which we lose an agreed upon set of facts. It's really tragic that the hard-earned credibility of these institutions are being hollowed out for relatively little short-term political capital to the great detriment of our whole country and indeed the world.

I cannot believe someone would look at the current situation and think to themselves "they decided to do this because they weren't allowed to offend people on college campuses." If anything the current situation is caused by a lack of moderation and instead giving absolutely everyone the same level of authority and deference online, regardless of whether they deserve it. Every bozo gets their own twitter and substack and people follow it if they want to, and it leads to delusional and violent people finding leaders to follow. 20 years ago these people would have had much less opportunity to speak and reach followers, not more, and things were better then.

20 years ago we started an un-ending war in the Mideast that stemmed from a lack of critical evaluation of what the intelligence community was telling us. For you to say things were better then.. for whom? And even if I were to agree with you I'm not sure it's appropriate to lay the blame at the feet of information technology. Social and cultural evolution happens (has happened) without mass adoption of the Internet.

> 20 years ago we started an un-ending war in the Mideast

Or, given the conflict starting from the first Gulf War and continuing up until the second, maybe 30 years ago.

Or, given the US deep involvement in the immediately preceding Iran-Iraq war, maybe closer to 40 years ago.

Or...

> 20 years ago these people would have had much less opportunity to speak and reach followers, not more, and things were better then.

20 years ago was the disputed 2000 election, 9/11, Department of Homeland Security, Gitmo, invasion of Afghanistan, lies about WMD, invasion of Iraq, etc. So no, I wouldn't say things were better then.

It’s truly amazing how quickly people forget.

Reminds me of the rapid increase in housing prices now and concerns about a bubble. I mean, 8-9 years ago it was non-stop articles about how nobody would be fooled again by a housing bubble.

Respectfully, this is wrong. I’m afraid you are artificially constraining the argument to symptoms, not a cause.

We’ve seen headlines on this site showing how we have access to more kinds of information than ever.

Society HAD been pressured to toe the line even harder back in the day. Internet has no TV censors, though the most visible properties do.

It’s ridiculous to suggest we’ve become more protective given book burnings, anti-Dungeons and Dragons, anti-comic book, Bible thumping paranoia that used to exist.

What we’re seeing is American incompetence to comprehend more than just their speech is wrong. Their entire agency is wrong.

When political forces beat us over the head with economic correctness, which has lead to decades of growing inequality, and the Fed relied on a policy of worker insecurity to keep people in their jobs, this has little to do with Main Street tolerance for alternative ideas (they’re everywhere) and everything to do with tried and true human nature to maintain economic power in the hands of a minority.

Humans evolved quite a bit before language. What is language anyway except muscle agency emitting random sound forms? Then of course we normalize on them, effectively constraining our syntax systems organically. Even linguists agree.

This has little to do with suppression of speech and everything to do with top down control of productive agency altogether.

The undermining of agency for the masses, sequestered in the hands of a minority has nothing to do with speech. We say a lot of diverse shit. But spend our time securing the wealth of oligarchs.

That all sounds plausible, but I am skeptical that today is significantly different from other historical periods or nations that had/have similar tribalism. Look back far enough and you'll find rich stories of senators murdering each other. Sure, ancient Roman history, but relevant today. Many societies of the past have had our same divisions.

Rather than making conjectures about why today is different, it might be more helpful to investigate why some time periods weren't rife with tribalism.

You don't need to go that far back in the mid 1800's one Senator beat another Senator almost to death on the Senate floor.

Anecdotes (US History) are useful for building hypotheses, but I like statistical evidence for testing those theories. Unfortunately, our best source of democracy data (Rome, at least 52 Greek city-states, Greek leagues, etc.) may be 2k years old. Obviously, we don't know much about the media of the day, so it'll be hard to test some of the modern social media theories. Maybe we could compare the behavior of different municipalities.

The tribalism part is easy: prosperity. Just like a fed snake is calm, so an extremely prosperous society is peaceful.

A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil...

In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down.

So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.

>hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings

This is irrational and hostile. Regardless, what's unfolding is not a result of people more frequently experiencing normal social reactions to their public statements and actions, nor a result of the exceptional and justly criticized cases where those reactions are based on error. That line of criticism is usually just a dishonest way to excuse other behaviors, like we are witnessing here, that are dangerous to society and poisonous to discourse.

The practical power of "that's offensive" is so much stronger than "we should allow free speech". I'd love for a better and more succint method of conveying the threat that putting "offensiveness" on a pedestal puts to science and democracy. Do you have one?

It needs to be made clear that the path of progress is littered with hurt feelings, and that the importance of our feelings is significantly dwarfed by the collective good of science and democracy.

Your whole post here could be applied to the folks storming the capitol with equal ease as it could be applied to the stereotypical "triggered" university student.

So it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power as to how we got to the point where the President is inciting those rioters... the President is literally telling them to be offended, and to be angry. Speech promoting violence. How is that speech not itself a threat to democracy?

The supreme court has ruled that speech presenting "imminent public danger" is not protected (i.e. free) speech.

Aren't you inadvertently proving their point here?

The fact that it applies to both perhaps suggests validity, no?

But we don't see an anti-Trump politician encouraging a set of counter-insurrectionists... so we're looking for what's DIFFERENT about the Trump side here, not something that applies everywhere.

    It needs to be made clear that the path of 
    progress is littered with hurt feelings, and 
    that the importance of our feelings is 
    significantly dwarfed by the collective 
    good of science and democracy.

This is a false dichotomy.

The human race is not a zero-sum game with "feelings" on one side and "progress" on the other!

Don't lose sight of why we're making all of this progress in the first place.

We are not building more highways and inventing more computers just for the heck of it. We are -- or should be -- doing it to improve the happiness of ourselves and those who come after us.

Y'know, happiness? One of those pesky feelings you mentioned?

He did not present a dichotomy. He said one is more important than the other, and that is correct.

We used to teach our children to "have a thick skin." "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me." When someone took offense we told them to "grow up."

Being offended, especially on behalf of someone else, is useless. Teach people not to take offense. They'll be happier.

Buy that saying is lie. It is simply not true. It is just something said to kids when adults don't want to deal with situation. It is good for adults to say that, because then they can continue to watch tv unbothered.

Words to affect people and if you don't respond to insult, you will be bullied and insulted more and more. You will not have respect and you will lose ability to influence what is going on with and around you.

In addition, men used to hold duels over words, so it was not even historical standards.

> When someone took offense we told them to "grow up."

Yes, some adults were enabling bullies like that. Especially if they themselves did not like the target. But it still was exactly that - enabling.

Just letting it go or being submissive is not functional strategy to deal with these issues.

    Teach people not to take offense. They'll be happier.

Nonsense. Again, not a dichotomy. You can have "thick skin", a strong sense of self, not easily be harmed by others' words and not be an asshole.

Yes - this notion is the actual thing that is becoming lost to many in our culture over time. People constantly excuse each other for being pointless assholes by lamenting that the 3rd party is just too sensitive, which can certainly be true, but usually the 3rd party is just reacting like any emotionally normal person, and may or may not have "thick skin", which is an independent quality.

We also teach children (still, I hope?) to not say anything if you don't have anything nice to say, and to walk a mile in someone's shoes before judging them, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So yes, teach people not to take offense, and also teach people not to be offensive. Being offended on someone else behalf helped us get rid of slavery, helped end the holocaust, gave us many of our social programs that support the poor - it's not wrong to see injustice and call it out, even if it's not happening to you.

Would you really rather live a pleasing fiction than face a sad or uncomfortable reality? Would you be okay if we just pumped you up on some concoction or other and called it a day of it caused you to be happier?

Sorry, what? Nothing I said had anything to do with denying reality, achieving happiness at all costs, or anything like that. I'm certainly not in favor of that.

I am expressing my belief that progress and happiness pair pretty well -- they should not be at odds with each other.

In addition to earning a living, it's why I got into this industry. Is that not why most of us are here? Aren't we here to write code that makes things better for people? Perhaps not on world changing levels, but hopefully on some level even if it's just making the file upload box on some fourth-rate social media site a little easier to use?

>Would you really rather live a pleasing fiction than face a sad or uncomfortable reality

This is never said or implied.

Except not everyone has the same type of happiness. This is why the declaration of independence does not say "life, liberty, and happiness", it says "life, liberty, and _the_ _pursuit_ _of_ happiness". There's an implied statement there that not everyone, or even most will be happy, but we should be free to be able to seek what makes us happy. You don't have a right to happiness, but you have a right to be able to try to make yourself happy.

> This is irrational and hostile.

The way I interpret this argument is this: the world wasn't meant to be pleasing all the time. Excluding unpleasant facts from one's information diet because it hurts their feelings is what the OP is arguing against. It is absolutely possible to present hostile/offensive statements that are also true. Feel free to agree/disagree, but it's quite rational line of thinking.

DC is filled with a violent mob that feels uncomfortable with the truth that Trump lost. They are lashing out because they do not have the emotional fortitude to deal with their hurt feelings.

Getting angry when a stranger makes a statement that you disagree with is not a normal social reaction, or at least it wasn't until recently. The possibility of error is just one reason that it shouldn't be.

Yes it is. Heck if you look in the history books there are plenty of examples of people not just being criticized but actually being murdered over the statements they make. Which statements draw social ire may change over time, but you can't seriously be suggesting that until recently nobody got offended ever.

People used to fight duels.

> 2. Having access to a diverse information diet

I am fully for it, but I believe the ones who need to change the informational diet are not ones who you think they need.

If today's events make any surprise to HN readers. I will tell them they spent not last 4 years, but like 20 years under a rock, and have no idea whatsoever what moves the political pendulum to the right with such force. And they don't want to hear why it is so.

Here on HN, 3 years ago I said that US is inching ever closer to the second civil war, and the point of no returns gets gets more, and more visible.

Then, I was told that such talks are not welcome on HN, and it's below the esteemed patrons of our establishment to think of such lowly matters.

Voila, sealed ears, what they lead to. Not only on HN, but across the elites of entire Western world.

The last U.S. civil war had the politicians from the southern states seceding.

Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting?

Because all I see are rioting by people who have lost any upward mobility they might have once had.

They'll be burning Teslas next but that doesn't make it a civil war.

You had rioting people who lost any upward mobility at exactly the same time the sitting Vice President and Congress were explicitly voting on the certification of the result of the election. They were backed by 150+ Politicians who were going to refuse to certify their results. These rioting people then committed several felonies of much greater legal concern than anything in the BLM protests and subsequent rioting.

> These rioting people then committed several felonies of much greater legal concern than anything in the BLM protests and subsequent rioting.

Come again? The BLM riots went on for months, multiple people died, a section of a major city was occupied for weeks (two people murdered by the self appointed security force), a police precinct was burned down (as well as many building in several cities), etc. And you’re talking about the the grave felonies involved in a single day of occupying a public building...

You are downplaying this event which is natural considering it's literally the worst look possible but the reality of the BLM protests in DC which turned violent is in no way comparable to what we've seen today in broad daylight. You want to rush the capitol building with a mob during the certification of our next sitting President? This isn't a gas station in Wisconsin. It isn't a sound idea regardless of your politics. I'm honestly surprised they weren't squashed by police sooner.

To the downvoters... tell me where I’m wrong. The reaction to what I’ve said kind of highlights the “two groups living in separate realities” discussion here. There is much pearl clutching today about occupation of a public building, somehow placing the mayhem caused on a level far above months of rioting, looting, and dead bodies.

> Because all I see are rioting by people who have lost any upward mobility they might have once had.

Isn't this what ultimately fuels all civil wars?

> Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting?

What is the biggest social crisis there now, for every opportunistic force to take advantage off?

One need to be very, very blind not to see it coming, especially living in a major US city.

I still don't see how you are connecting the dots. A lot more needs to be in place for civil war.

Pretty sure the monied interests have no desire for civil war — the opposite was the case in the mid 19th Century.

> A lot more needs to be in place for civil war.

True, really a lot. In needs a nation on the edge for it to decide to turn on itself. And a nation on the edge it is.

> Pretty sure the monied interests have no desire for civil war — the opposite was the case in the mid 19th Century.

And so thought monied interests of the Old World when a wave of civil wars sped through the continent, and the Spring of Nations happened after few decades of turmoil.

And historians err here, taking desirable, for believable. "The Two Terrible Decades," aren't called that for nothing. They were devastating for both of Europe's Old, and New Money. It were the same upper classes socialites who wrote the term in the history books after all.

> In needs a nation on the edge for it to decide to turn on itself

It would help if there were some geographical lines, as well. Are you envisioning the next civil war will be simultaneous sieges of all the major cities in the US?

Are you envisioning the next civil war will be simultaneous sieges of all the major cities in the US?

No, most likely the same North-South split, with a bit of interior, vs exterior element to it.

Gun control or land use causing inequality and social calcification?

I think s/he might be referring to COVID but it is pretty unclear.

COVID epidemic is not a social crisis, but you certainly can spin it as one.

They're gonna have to link up with the left to go burning teslas, but instead they'll fight the other people without upward mobility.

But you can’t listen to them now. Any underlying reasonable argument, policy or beliefs are now turned into monsters after they’ve turned all their opposition into monsters. They’ve become everything they claim to be protecting against. They must be fought before they can be heard.

Corollary to #1: Being willing to understand that two conflicting views on the same topic doesn't mean one of them has to be wrong

And sometimes they are both misleading.

I used to think if I read through media with opposing biases then I'd understand the real story. But in most cases there's just a huge amount of relevant context missing even if the articles are factually correct.

In the same way that you can present statistical data in a way to support a view when the data doesn't actually support it despite being factually accurate.

It's kind of like this meme with two people seeing a number, one saying 6 and other saying 9 - except in reality it's neither; it's a piece of a shadow of a large pretzel. Real-life issues are complex, multidimensional beasts. Disagreement between honest people often comes from them not realizing that what they know and believe is a projection, a dimensionality reduction. Same is with the news - they usually offer what amounts to projecting a 42-dimensional object into two or one dimensions.

> Although restricting offensive speech has the upfront benefit of not hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings, this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech.

Given that lies about the election, protected by free speech, have stoked these riots maybe you should consider whether it's really a problem of not enough free speech.

I’m really glad to see this as the top comment: I think your analysis is spot on.

Anecdotally I’ve been reading a lot of old news (60s-90s) and it’s amazing to read as a retrospective. It has given me context for how we arrived to present day and it’s funny to see some of the same social phenomenons repeating themselves.

Same, I'd highly recommend Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Constitution of Liberty if you haven't read it already, along with Cato's letters and the the Federalist papers. It's honestly amazing and depressing how accurate they were but I suppose human nature is timeless.

In a race to get better test scores schools stopped implicitly teaching critical thought. Its easier to teach kids how to follow a set of steps to achieve a goal (math equations) rather then teach them the logic behind the steps such that they can independently come up with those same steps on their own. Yet the latter increases critical thought miles more.

In middle school I had a week long course on how to identify the trustworthiness of online sources that talked over topics like what does the site gain by pushing one narrative over another, are they selling anything that might make them artificially favor a view point over another, checking multiple sources but identifying common trends in arguments or even common site themes that might suggest the sites are ran by the same entity.

In highschool in another district all I got on the topic was "wikipedia bad because it can be edited by anyone".

And all of us in quieter nations, who have been laughed at for not having "real" free speech, are wondering what you are on about...

I don't. A civil war in US is no laughing matter. US has nukes.

This matters both because some could end up being used if the country ignites, and also because US serves as the linchpin of the MAD doctrine, which kept the world relatively stable for over a half century now. US becoming unable to credibly deter other nuclear nations would probably not cause a nuclear war, but would definitely leave space for other big powers to make big changes in the geopolitical landscape.

Wouldn't the points you make also describe the limitations of free speech in society at any point prior to, say, 1980? Except in that case they would be limitations imposed by the lack of technology.

     It's the practical erosion of Free Speech

It's more like the result of free speech.

Or at least it is, in a woefully undereducated country with large segments of the population that reject science and value ignorance.

Careful, vetted, fact-based reporting is incredibly laborious.

It takes orders of magnitude more time, money, and effort than it takes your uncle Steve to fire off a group text message with a bunch of conspiracy theories or share his anti-vax opinions in yet another wonderfully insightful all-caps Facebook screed. And yet, they are treated with the same level of respect in a country like this.

Further restriction of free speech at the government level is not the answer. That would be even worse than what we have now.

The problem is, there is no answer. This is simply where our values and our ignorance has taken us.

" this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech."

This is completely upside down.

This is not the 'erosion of free speech' - it's actually the 'explosion' of it.

Free from any kind of filters of credibility, people can now promote whatever fictions they want to promote.

When fictions are emboldened by those in positions of legitimate authority, aka The President, the truth falls by the side.

The ratio of 'noise to truth' has blown up, and it's mostly a result of our ability to communicate in a more direct manner.

The voices of mostly uninformed individuals, free to express themselves on the soap box, are now much louder. That's not a slight: we're all busy and have different roles in life. We can't be experts in everything, ergo, most of us are not legitimate sources of truth on that much. We allocate those responsibilities to people within whom we entrust a certain degree of trust. Like the free press as one example, Science as another.

Far from 'restrictions' on speech, the internet itself, Facebook, Twitter - whatever their policies provide for 100x more communication than existed before.

We used to get information from news, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers - and some gossip from the neighbours. Now the 'gossip, youtube and TikTok information' factor is 10x greater - and that's mostly a function of free expression.

Random people on Facebook will 'like' and 'propagate' whatever 'science' they want to believe is true - which is obviously not going to result in rigorously verified information, rather the opposite.

'Good or Bad?' - that's a more complicated issue - but what we are seeing now is 'much more expression' not 'limited expression'.

I challenge anyone here to demonstrate, over the last 25 years, how there could possibly be fewer channels and sources of public information and expression.

Edit: I should add that obviously there are issues with freedom of expression, on campus, and the in the commons with certain forms of shaming for certain opinions, but that's an entirely different issue from 'public information' and 'how people are misinformed' about things like election results. The public commons is several orders of magnitude bigger than it ever was. It's not even comparable to 25 years ago, this is a completely different era we live in.

Can’t believe I had to scroll so far to find a comment like this. This is absolutely nothing to do with a limit on free speech but a failing of education and the explosion of free speech on social media.

To be flippant, there are more village idiots than ever before and they are all talking to each other on the internet.

The solution to this, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education and a shift of American politics to the left. America doesn’t have a left and a right, it has a far right and a right. In the UK American democrats would be very comfortable in the UK Conservative party.

'Free Speech' is one of the HN 'trigger' issues, so there won't be any actual discussion of the issue here, sadly.

To wit a top comment is talking about 'suppressed speech' when we have 100x more avenues to speak and express ourselves, and more people have voices than ever before, by several orders of magnitude ... is evidence of that is abundant.

YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Blogs, the fact we can now access information from around the world, the readiness 24/7 nature of information, any book, from anywhere, people from around the world interacting on Facebook.

Only 25 years ago it was literally unthinkable - I was alive then and nobody was predicting this. If you wanted to learn about 'Russia' you went to the 'Library'. Now - you can read Russian News, videos, TikToks, Instas, communicate with Russians, heck - you can even work with them.

HackerNews itself is an amazing opportunity for information clearing and individual expression that did not exist in any form 25 years ago! The very comment you are writing is 'revolutionary' in the broader picture of time. There was nowhere to do this before. Nobody could interact with people from around the world about 'daily tech news'.

It's not even a debate how much more expression there is today.

To your point about 'education' - obviously that would be wonderful, but that's not going to be good enough.

Just look at the issue here: we have incredibly more power as individuals to express ourselves publicly - and a 'very educated' HN board can't seem to grasp that.

We're just starting to grasp the power and influence of Social Media - and now that Trump has shown 'what can be done', I'm afraid it will be an 'arms race' of misinformation for a while.

Our system depends on integrity: that your doctors is certified, professional, moral. Same for your teacher. The Judge. And the same applies to information. We 'fact check' books, reports. We certainly expect that in the Scientific domain. So we must have that for public information as well. Which is not to say we won't have other expressive channels, but randoms on 'TikTok' just can't be a source of news, other than the experience they might be able to grab on their phones (which FYI can be enlightening).

So yes, education, but we need credibility in our institutions as well.

I see people are blaming “political correctness”, “mainstream media”, schools coddling children, a lack of “critical thinking”, and “cancel culture”.

In other words: this magically aligns with everything you already believed.

I’m someone’s complete lack of surprise.

"Information diet" is a useful analogy. Imagine you eat a diverse diet of candy, ice cream, potato chips, cookies, doughnuts, and fruits and vegetables. You can make your own analogies about what news sources are junk food, but you can see how trying a little bit of everything in an environment that is full of bad choices is detrimental. We all have limited stomach space and attention.

This subthread is in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661674 but I've detached it in a feeble effort to reduce the steam coming out of our server.

This diversity of thought stuff is poison, but a lot of these people here seem to lap it up.

How is diversity of thought poison? I wouldn't want to be a part of an online forum or friend group where everyone thought the same way.

Diversity of thought means, in this case, you can find enough people that share your exact believes.

Less diversity as in-for example-a small village means you have to find compromises with your neighbors.

It is both ludicrous and offensive to suggest that the things we're seeing now are in any way a consequence of curtailing hateful speech.

he is sent here to say things that lead us to accept the deeds done by white nationalists

people have different thoughts! some people want an ethnostate for white people and some people dont! we just disagree. too bad that censorship caused all this to happen!

I would add

3. The anonymity of online identity.

People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous.

Perhaps this is a version of mob psychology/dynamics where the anonymity of the collective causes people to act in ways that they normally wouldn't.

> People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous.

I don't know about that. I see people on FB who are accurately identified by their real name who have no problem whatsoever expressing "F*ck your feelings" to people who are ostensibly their friends. Lack of anonymity doesn't seem to have helped.

I purposely used the word "perceive". I think people, even with their real names on the account, view themselves as more "anonymous" online.

Speech aside, what about looking through a lens of personal responsibility?

Some people don't take responsibility for offending others, they'd rather place the blame on the person who heard them. You think that's rather a minor problem, ok. Let's skip past the question of offensive speech for now...

Let's talk about preserving a democracy. What happens when people no longer feel any responsibility for citizens having trust in that democracy? They use their speech to weaken it (this is a much broader group than just Trump) and now, with Trump, even to incite violence if they think it will benefit themselves. Fault and responsibility seems to clearly lie with them and their choices, they shouldn't be able to dodge that responsibility by redirecting to abstract discussion of the pros and cons of restrictions on speech.

You are dodging the direct "how did we get here?" answer of "people are making blatant shortsighted power plays" by talking about people's "iddly-widdly-fweelings." That's ridiculous.

This is an interesting point, thanks. I definitely perceive an increasing lack of personal responsibility across the board honestly. A lot of the identity politics/victim one-upmanship stems from this IMO, but I'm glad you presented the other side of it, that people don't want to take any responsibility for when they are actually an asshole either. Not to "both sides" it, but I believe it's deeply concerning how people seem to have fallen away from proper introspection. Which can manifest in bad ways on both sides indeed.

Strong disagreement.

1. In the past, the wrong speech would result in both government, and private sector censure. You're selectively omitting the civil rights struggle, the communist witch hunts, the german witch hunts that preceeded them, the history of internment and concentration camps in this country, the suffrage struggle...

We didn't somehow magically arrive at the world of 2020, without a lot of people being punished for their speech.

2. Our information diet was never as diverse as it is now. Media, prior to the age of the internet, was much more of a monoculture of ideas than it is now. New, radicalizing information arose in university halls and books and rallies, not on the television.

3. People are no more, and no less willing to admit that they were wrong today, as they were in the age of, say, segregation-forever Jim Crow south.

This coup is not the result of offensive speech being restricted, or hurt feelings. It's the direct result of a few people with media and political influence actively directing their followers to undermine our democracy.

This could have happened in any decade - but it happened today because of the particular personalities involved. You elect a president that is very vocal about his lack of respect for the law, the election process, the presidency, or democratic institutions, and this is what you get. The only reason it is happening in 2020, and not 1920, 1960, or 2020 was because the personalities on the ballot in those years had respect for those things - or at least, were adults who managed to check their worst impulses.

When he said that he won't accept the results of any election that he didn't win (back in 2016), do you still think he was confused, or kidding, or misunderstood? He was just being honest. You can't let people who profess such ideas within reaching distance of political power, because they will happily burn the world down around them to retain it.

This is the opposite of that. This is free speech coupled with poor education and misinformation spreading like wildfire to large amounts of people via the internet.

The solution, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education (schools for the next generation and reskilling and educating for adults paid like a job via a stipend) and a shifting of American politics to the left so you actually have a left and a right like most democratic countries.right now you have a far right and right wing party.

I agree with many of your points. What has happened in this country is tragic. Our media hasn't helped by constantly pouring gasoline on the flames and the pandemic has kept us from even being able to really talk to and address one another, ESPECIALLY people who live in cities.

This is utter madness and it has to stop. We have to start to see each other and people and not adversaries. You might like something I wrote last night about how the American mind has been fractured:

https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...

These are the same people and ideologies that made up the white supremacist dominionist militia movements in the 80s that were only treated as a threat after the OKC bombing and have been purposefully allowed free rein under Trump. This aint cause of fucking "cancel culture"

These people who are storming the capital are doing it on the back of a lie, that Trump won the election. That is a lie that is perpetuated by numerous forms of alternative media. How is this the result of an erosion of free speech? If free speech was eroded, these alternative media sources wouldn't be able to incite violence with their lies. Your analysis doesn't make any sense.

It's a symptom.

You're not seeing the connection because you aren't thinking at a high enough level of abstraction. The entire social media and entertainment edifice is built on the objective of telling you what you want to hear. This basically generates a rapidly polarizing schism with a tendency toward radicalization, anda natural aversion toward established info sources on course correction, because if they didn't get it right the first time, or second, or third time, then why give the benefit of a doubt?

You can argue these people weren't looking for truth in thefirst place, but you're missing out on that the "Truth" is not the same to all people, and as it turns out, you rely on the fluid nature of non-bubbled organization and communication to ground disruptive social energy and disharmony.

> The entire social media and entertainment edifice is built on the objective of telling you what you want to hear.

I agree. See my comment here[1]. I simply don't see how that is the result or evidence of too little free speech. The opposite seems true. The problem isn't that people can't say what they believe. It is that people have the freedom to knowingly lie in order to corrupt the beliefs of others.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662297

they were forced into echo chambers because mainstream channels are their own echo chambers.

thus the 2 realities the top post is referring to.

They didn't leave the mainstream channels because they weren't allowed to speak. They left the mainstream channels because truth was not compatible with their worldview.

Ah, but is there any avenue for you to speak to them?

No, because they left the mainstream channels. I am still watching the same basic channels, following the same basic reporters, and reading the same basic news that I did 5 or 10 years ago. They are the ones who left for alternatives. Just look at the recent moves from Fox News to OAN or Newsmax. They will go wherever they hear what they want to hear. If I went to those places to talk to them, they would go somewhere else.

Have you tried any other sources? Because if you actually had, it's not that they're telling people what they want to hear. It's that they're showing the exact same things, except with the full clips and contexts.

Go watch the George Floyd body cameras. All of them. The full 1 hour (30 min per officer). The story is ENTIRELY different than the one that was fed to us.

This wasn't about George Floyd. It was about who won the election. What are your "other sources" saying about that?

The mainstream channels have constantly and blatantly lied to us about absolutely everything. Or have you forgotten Weapons of Mass Destruction, 15 days to flatten the curve, or the complete silencing of the Hunter Biden story (and it turns out he IS under active FBI investigation).

People don't trust those channels because it's so easy to look at literally any other non-mainstream source to see how we've been constantly lied to.

I think your underestimating how much of this is on mainstream news channels. Watching CNN arguably part of the liberal media you can hear people question the validity of the election an put forth conspiracy theories.

“Sudden discovery of 50 thousand votes”, and suggestions that “Democratic counties reporting last” means they can arbitrarily add votes as needed.

This isn’t some extreme view it’s being endorsed by both elected officials and pundits. I am genuinely concerned that people have forgotten just how fragile democracy is and are trying to score political points at the expense of critical institutions.

> I am genuinely concerned that people have forgotten just how fragile democracy is and are trying to score political points at the expense of critical institutions.

That's assuming the losing minority still wants democracy. Maybe they just want King-for-Life Trump.

an alternative hypothesis is that they voluntarily isolated themselves into echo chambers because they didn't like the reality that the mainstream news was reporting

Just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean you were "forced" into believing falsehoods.

News outlets act like they have a monopoly on truth, which you even believe, yet it's the truth about useless facts. Get CNN or Breitbart to report on Apple child labor, expose wall street, or expose the impact of consumer products on the environment and then I'll listen.

political news is a waste of time and probably a net negative for an individual. That's MY truth which you won't find on CNN or breitbart's twitter feed.

I actively avoid political news (it sucks it is showing up here on HN).

CNN does cover apple child labor: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/17/tech/apple-microsoft-tesla-de... and consumder products on environment: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/23/world/plastic-pollution-2040-...

EDIT: I don't like CNN fwiw.

CNN Business and CNN World are different than the main CNN Politics tv channel, right?

I was mainly talking about political news, I do occasionally browse some mainstream business news.

> CNN Business and CNN World are different than the main CNN Politics tv channel, right?

There is no “CNN Politics” TV channel, nor is there a “CNN World” (“CNN International” is a thing, though) or “CNN Business” (there used to be CNNfn, but its been gone for more than a decade) channel.

“Business”, “Politics”, and “World” are sections of the CNN website; the corresponding content would generally all be covered, on TV, by the main CNN channel.

The truth is most news and media organizations who have established television networks (MSNBC, CNN, FOX, Whatever else) also have separate editorial for linear programming and digital news. They don't serve the same purpose or the same audience. It's why you can find CNN digital as less biased than CNN linear or Fox News digital might call a state early because their analysis says one thing but the talking heads say another.

Why would Apple's labor violations be under CNN Politics? Apple is a business, not a political party.

The current nature of information flow made it easy for them to lie to each other. It isolated them from opposing viewpoints, so they went into an echo chamber of their own.

This is always the problem with suppressed speech. Nonsense will still be spewed, but no one reasonable gets a chance to counter it with analysis and cool it down.

Zeitgeist is broken.

Their speech wasn't suppressed. It was simply that they didn't want to hear reality. CNN almost never turns away national politicians. The Sunday politics shows constantly have balanced or right leaning panels. They aren't being silenced. They just want to go somewhere that tells them what they want to hear.

This is absolute nonsense. You are trying your damndest to espouse the HN screed of "Free Speech" but it's got nothing to do with why conservatives have raided the Capitol. Conservatives have raided the capitol for the same they raided Wilmington in 1898, the courthouse in Colfax and why they attacked Ellenton. And that reason is because they feel that white hegemony is under attack, and since democracy can't be used to secure it, it has to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...

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

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

Yea, America has gone through worse. It will survive this.

You're trying to blame something you don't like on something else you don't like, but it doesn't fit.

The censorship and punishment you claim as new is plainly and obviously not a recent development, look at how socialist and capitalist ideas have been treated for the last century. Or how American evangelism has treated "dangerous" ideas for even longer than that. https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-Noll/dp... , for instance. Never have we been a country full of people willing to admit we're wrong. But we're increasingly a country of people being pandered to by those who want to make a buck telling us we're not actually wrong.

I think you'd more easily make the OPPOSITE argument, that our norms about what is acceptable speech have eroded too far, that we've taken free speech to an unhealthy extreme (such as how our tech platforms will happily amplify the speech of extremists - in fact, they PREFER to do this, because their algorithms have figured out that it gets more ad views).

If it's acceptable for politicians to respond to losing popularity by claiming fraud - as Trump has been doing for months - then you are on the path that leads here. If the resulting violence is not acceptable, but you ALSO don't want to restrict Trump's speech with stronger norms, what do you propose instead?

How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?

Maybe the problem is more an unequal distribution of "freeness" of speech across the society; grouped as the ruling political class, the opposition political class, and the distribution of thought in the populace.

The ruling class says whatever it wants with belief that there can never be any negative results for any action they take (max "freeness"),

the opposition can't talk about anything in a substantive way because all they do is react to the inane and random political grenades thrown by the ruling party (very constrained "freeness" really. Being forced to respond to propaganda-maximizing controversy after propaganda-effectiveness-maximizing controversy is a record that sucks to play and is definitely forced onto the air more than everyone wants -- and the targets of the propaganda blame the wrong people for why they have to keep listening to it ... )

the people are left with no meaningful political voice (0 freeness of speech) because there's virtually 0 correlation between anything being talked about in the political dances and anything that is actually sufficiently practical to talk about as to be worth the cognitive attention required to talk about it ... You can't have free political speech when there are no political engagements worth talking about ...

The "team sport" that is the current political landscape is not at all a fun or useful game -- some amount of fun and usefulness is gonna need to be found and introduced to the process of defining government to help move out of this ...

I don't really think so - because I don't see the splits that way, as many of the people angry about "reduced speech" are people with extremely high levels of speech as members of the ruling political class, like Ted Cruz - but this is somewhat similar to one of the theories about the modern American Right's appeal in the South - increased opportunity for minorities is seen as a threat to the folks used to having it all their way. Increased speech for previously-censored groups is interpreted as censorship of themselves.

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that the anger component here was related to any specific party complaining about loss of political speech in a disingenuous way -- I was more attempting to diagnose the current overall bad state of the politics as being a result of the way that pressure is put onto "freeness" of speech when an authoritarian regime actively creates an engine that makes reasonable discourse difficult or impossible ...

People express themselves politically through voting. These people in particular had every form of expression available to them. They discussed whatever they wanted, and I can provide you with links where you can see those discussions

I clarified in my other comment -- I wasn't trying to imply that the violence here was a consequence of the extremists involved having any legitimate claim that their free speech has been curtailed.

I think this riot is best understood as being actively organized by the current ruling party.

I think there is a clear free speech issue in the current politics though -- systematically devaluing the potential for productive political talk is a form of free speech restriction -- it's a ddos attack against rational discourse - which has the effect of reducing the value of political discourse in general.

A good example for your point would be McCarthyism. The idea of a more ideal free speech society we had in the past is probably naive, and that's likely true in the US and elsewhere.

I doubt that this is a technical issue. Sure, the internet, social media and filter bubbles will have an influence. But there are so many political forces at play, so many angles under which the situation could be explained.

> How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?

That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course?

But here it is for certain that this specific coup hinges on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And it follows what he says all the time.

> That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course?

> But here it is for certain that this specific coup hings on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And what he says all the time.

Even there it's both, I think. Trump is part of a trend towards valuing immediate power over everything else, and being willing to play dirty to keep that power. His followers listen to him in large part because they've been primed by the media for decades to distrust the "mainstream" (where "mainstream" apparently doesn't include some of the people with the largest audiences, but actually just means "people who disagree with you").

The mystery is just how those people maintain the cognitive dissonance of being "pro speech" and "pro democracy" when they've tuned out everything else and are just focused on power in what they perceive as a war...

From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy:

> Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napolean went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last labourer struck it for the last time with his pickaxe. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

Has been a few years, but War and Peace takes indeed one extreme position in that debate. That's in the whole book, including the chaos of the battles. It's a great perspective, thanks for citing it here.

Sure, that follows. In an environment where the US-american public would be immune to someone who can rack up 100 lies in 5 minutes, someone like Trump would not have followers. So an individual can influence history as much as the environment permits. On the other hand, people are forming that environment and again and again there are specific situations where a single person seemed to change the course of history. Does that count as paradox? I always found that part of historical perspectives fascinating.

> The mystery is just how those people maintain the cognitive dissonance of being "pro speech" and "pro democracy" when they've tuned out everything else and are just focused on power in what they perceive as a war...

Yes, that is a fascinating mystery. But one has to keep in mind: Many of the people that just tried a coup today and effectively tried to dismantle the democratic system in the US by installing a dictator will think of themselves as defenders of democracy. There will be of course hard right wing nationalist terrorists in that crowd - the last pro-trump protests have shown that - but there can only be so many of those.

> today employees, students, and professors are all punished administratively for saying something that contradicts the narrative of the predominant members, or that may be offensive to someone

Didn't we already go through this during McCarthyist red scares?

Thank you for putting into words my exact thoughts on this matter. This is indeed exactly what's occurring and I'm not sure of what a good solution may be. Perhaps extending freedom from retaliation by employers to freedom of speech guarantees would be enough, especially educators.

What kind of backwards logic is this? The fact that insane falsehood-spewing nutters can find a wide and exclusive audience (who have the freedom to choose not to listen to the non-nutters) is proof of the lack of practical restrictions on free speech, not proof of the erosion of free speech.

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