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Unfortunately your only choices today are this or overt neo-Naziism. You have to stake out the most extreme, divisive, fanatical position possible. If you try to be nuanced and rational you get attacked by both sides.

I think social media has a lot to do with it. We created a global communication medium and then programmed it to prioritize the most "engaging" content, which is of course the most triggering and controversial content. I'm wondering how long it will be before people are literally setting themselves on fire for likes and views.

Oh wait...

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1903978/youtuber-kills-pregnant...

Nope, we're basically there already.

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The saddest part is boring but popular ideas like universal healthcare continually get thrown to the wayside by loud idiots who want to demand nonsense like "latinx"

Good observation, I've felt the same since I encountered this new generation of humans who demand changing speech, and use esoteric terminology and demand other people say and not say things. I don't care if someone believes in social constructivism, that we're born blank slates, that words influence perception more than biology, so on and so forth, but I care very much when people who believe these things believe that anyone who questions - who dares question - them is a villain and an enemy who must be stopped.

A focus on symbolisms like statues and children books and language on Twitter or git repos is being embraced by the powerful corporate interests. Something that actually does an enormous positive for racial justice, universal healthcare, takes a back seat.

Can we agree this is a feature, not a bug?

I see some people say they'd like to be called Latinx. I see no one demand it. I see many more people complain it's used at all.

100% of people who say Latinx support universal health care in my experience. But they have more control over what they say than what their government does.

Only 30% of Latinos have even heard the term Latinx. Using the term is a problem because it’s alienating for someone to use a term for you that you’ve never heard before. Out of the 30% who have heard it, 2/3 think it shouldn’t be used to describe Latinos. Be respectful of people and don’t call them some weird thing some professor made up that the vast majority of affected people either don’t recognize or actively don’t want used to refer to them.

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Let’s not forget that trying to de-gender a gendered language is its own special form of ethnocentrism.

Identity politics type news stories shot up right at the end of the Great Recession, around the occupy wall Street time, when people were the most infuriated that moneyed interests bailed themselves out at the taxpayers expense. Really makes you think...

Here's absolute proof. n-gram frequencies in the NYTimes: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

Occupy, as derision-worthy as it was, saw a broad coalition of Americans--blacks, whites, latino, straight, gay, trans--all get together to push back against Team Elite.

Then the entirely tiny group of people who control the media (and hate us, apparently) got together and pushed endless identity bullshit on us.

It was around the same time that far right identity politics ramped up massively as well.

That's a figment of the media. The "far right" and the huge collection of "white supremacists" that have been drummed up as some huge evil plot in America has, as far as I can tell, zero basis in reality.

Note that basically everything done by white people is a "far right" "white supremacist" plot. E.g., AOC refers to the (hilarious) "insurrection" (the unarmed, leaderless one that waltzed into some of the most protected space on earth with nary a problem) as a "white supremacist" plot.

If you buy that, you're an instrument, played like a fiddle.

I've seen you make a lot of good comments but this comment feeds the problem you're describing.

Either I have to agree with obviously stupid stuff from "my side" or I'm with the nazis? That only empowers the stupid at the end of the day.

I don't think that way, but that's the wider dynamic I've seen in play for years. On one hand you have 4chan /pol, and on the other hand you have "woke" Twitter mobs. The whole thing seems gamified and the participants all seem to be playing a video game where getting attention or scoring a kill (trolling, offending someone, getting someone cancelled, etc.) is the objective. Gamified social media seems to be increasingly pulling the whole culture along for a ride.

Of course maybe I am succumbing to the "the nuts are always the loudest" effect.

Edit: I don't think the Internet per se is at fault. I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the "algorithmic timeline." Social media isn't neutral. It's programmed to "engage" us, which usually means either offending us or luring us into some kind of cult.

Chan culture isn't algorithmic in this way, but it's organized primarily around influencing algorithmic social media from outside and as such operates within the same algorithmic attention-maximization game paradigm.

TL;DR: this is not discourse. It's a video game.

I guess it helps not to spend any time on twitter and avoid most social media in general?

It does and helps keep oneself sane but that doesn’t make the problem disappear. I think engaging IRL is what will get us out of this mess. I hope

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it ramped up during COVID and it’s worse in western countries (actually would like to know if wokeness is affecting non-western locked down countries).

Far left and far right identity politics both started ramping up around 2010. There are quantitative measurements based on word counts of some of this. See elsewhere in this thread.

This always reads to me like it's suggesting the more moderate voices should log off, thereby leaving the platforms to the more extreme voices.

I'm not convinced that's helpful.

Leave twitter to cook in its own juice.

As a more moderate, I would suggest perhaps writing a blog, or commenting on something well moderated like HN or EconLog, or even certain subreddits?

No need to log off completely. Just avoid twitter, tumblr, most of reddit and other outrage platforms.

You can leave Twitter and social media alone, but that's no guarantee that Twitter and social media will leave you alone. That's why I think it's so important for everyone who can speak out against this to do so before it metastasizes to the point where you can't say anything anymore.

Yes, but it doesn't mean that you have to speak up about twitter on twitter.

I think you're right and you're not succumbing to any effects. The nuts are the loudest and wiser people stay quiet, which gets worse when it causes the young and impressionable to think that the nuts have buy-in.

Unfortunately those small minorities of nuts have a way of taking charge[1].

[1] https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...

yeah i am afraid of another Robespierre just as much as i am of another Mussolini. and at this point i am not sure which side is closer to taking over.

I’ve been saying for years that if inequality keeps growing then whether we get a far left or a far right totalitarian will depend on which side fields the most compelling demagogue first. The ideology won’t matter as long as pitchforks are being handed out.

I’ve been thinking this kind of thing since the 2008 bank bailouts. I’ve also wondered if that was when America collapsed and we are just living through a slow unwinding period.

The problem wasn’t the crash. Crashes happen. The problem was that banks were bailed out and the we pretended there was a recovery. There wasn’t. It was a largely paper recovery, basically fake. Yes unemployment went down but the quality of the jobs were poor, housing inflation ate any gains, and inequality exploded.

Trumpism was just a superficial symptom. If things don’t improve we will get someone much much worse.

the wider dynamic at play is the loss of trust in institutions due to the internet and the massive information unleashed thru the web.

One can see that same dynamic when the printing press was invented. Suddenly, the old power structure did not control the narrative. Within 100 years of the invention of the printing press in 1450, and its spread by 1500, there was a major conflict all over Europe over very minor religious dogma differences of opinion (wars of religion).

We are about 2/3rds into that cycle with the internet, which was borne around 1960 and came into true widespread use around 2005 (Facebook, etc).

Lets hope we have learned our lessons.

Why not be attacked by both sides? Why not live your morals and not desire to be in a group?

It's tiring.

Close the tiring tabs.

Seriously, the amount of “this” that I see online is 100x what I see in real-life (per interaction). Outrage engagement drives it and if you have found yourself tired of arguing with people you’ve never shared a meal with, just close the tab. Let them be outraged without you.

As often happens, Randall has nailed it: https://xkcd.com/386/

Have you seen the recent article in the NY Times about labour relations at Smith College, where a black woman who graduated from an elite Connecticut prep school managed to get four local employees fired over allegations of racism and sicced her Twitter army on them? There was an external investigation that found no fault with the fired employees and no systemic racism, yet the solution was to implement sensitivity training for the staff.

Me? I was told by a genderqueer woman at a sister college of Smith during a job interview that she does not get along with older men.

My wife? She is a faculty member at another Amherst area college and was told by a colleague that she is held in high regard because she is BIPOC. That is shit so tasteless that you can't make it up, so it must be true.

The atmosphere at colleges in the Northeast is fucked up beyond description, and playing ostrich is just that, hiding from reality. Unfortunately, reality won't change anytime soon.

That article was probably in a tab that I closed.

Good for you that you can close tabs, unfortunately that article is an account of daily life for many academics and university staff. Read it, you cannot discuss labour relations at colleges in the Northeast (and I guess many Silicon Valley companies) without taking this article into account.

Close the tiring tabs.

Unfortunately it bleeds into real life, work, and family/friend connections. You can't close work, or your siblings.

Move to a red or at least purple county. Where I live now I only know how my precinct voted because I looked it up. It’s amazing.

There might be some interesting macro-scale effects if Cancel Culture causes conservative Democrat voters to move to purple counties/states and turns them slightly but consistently blue.

Isn’t that the story of OR and WA? I mean prior to cancel culture.

Or California? California used to be solid red state.

You'll be tired either way. Life is tiring.

You're subscribing to a life of pain. Maybe some can weather that storm, but most can't.

Joining a group that's willing to scream "oppression!" at every convenient target is also living a life of pain. At least if you're sincere, they can only cancel you once.

There's a third option that is neither "publicly align myself with extremists" nor "publicly align myself with the grey area in between", and that is not to participate in the game at all.

Also, I've been on the receiving end of a mob before; "you can only get cancelled once" wasn't exactly true for me. Sure, the public figures who initially called you out will stop eventually -- they know when they've won the battle. But their followers? They're like that annoying kid at school who kept making the same joke long after it was ever considered funny. They'll happily continue harassing you until the end of time (or until you're able to make yourself disappear).

> ... and that is not to participate in the game at all.

Well, WOPR did say that

> "The only winning move is not to play."

Or we could be have like sane rational people and not indulge either sides insane society destroying extremes. you don't defeat extremism by adding to polarizing the situation even more.

The irony of downvotes on this above comment above mine comment.

There is a third option. Most people are stuck with this. It is staying quiet and saying nothing. Because there is unity in extreme right. And there is unity in extreme left. And there is no unity in the center so these extremes can pick off each individual center person who says something.

I’ve been wondering if a radical, dare I say even Trumpian, centrist politician who is willing to pick vitriolic fights with both extremes is just what our times demand.

I really believe that Republicans can elect some of the craziest Qanon believers precisely because the Democrats refuse to forcefully denounce the craziest whims of their radical base, and are tainted by association, even though almost none of the national-level Democrats are nearly so extreme.

"A Center that Can Hold" from mid 2018:

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-center...

> A fiercely independent thinker, Viereck (who died in 2006 at age 89) was mostly without a political home.

I haven't finished reading it, but it doesn't seem all that encouraging as a source of ideas for building a center if the article's protagonist never succeeded.

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