Across the Internet, a Game of Whac-a-Mole Is Underway to Root Out Extremism
npr.org
npr.org
By this definition, extremism and radicalism are equivocated. However, I know many people on the "left" presently identify as radicals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_left).
The article differentiates between the terms "extremism" and "radicalism" by assigning a "political-right" label to "extremists" and a "political-left" label to "radicals".
Stifling the extremes of one "side" while supporting the other "side" is how you implement cultural revolution. It is quite literally a repressive tactic.
The term "Whac-a-Mole" assigns a sense of childishness and fun to the extremism elimination efforts, which disarms "moderates" and dehumanizes cultural revolution.
To my mind the Capitol raid is playing a much larger role in their minds. The thought isn't "we need to create a far left America" but "we came way too close to the peaceful transfer of power being usurped."
In a country with more firearms in civillian ownership then every other countries military combined, Nobody in the Democratic party believes there was actually an insurrection. If there were, there'd be no place for congress or the senate to hide from the nationwide guerilla warfare.
As has happened so many times in politics, political parties get hijacked. The Democrats have been hijacked by foreign interests, the Republicans are in the process of being hijacked by domestic populists.
Er, Senate “districts” are States, it is impossible for them to be gerrymandered. So clearly that's impossible for 2 out of 3.
And while Pelosi is in the House, no one is going to point to CA-12 as much of an example of gerrymandering.
The OP characterizes this as a cultural revolution, but I don't think he made a particularly good case for it. Notably, I think "passively tolerating left-wing extremism while cracking down on right-wing extremism" is pretty weak evidence for CR. Rather, I would argue that CR begins when left authoritarianism begins--when the mainstream, majority viewpoint (the Overton Window) takes a back-seat to the left-wing extremist viewpoint due to intimidation.
If I were to argue that we're on the brink of a CR, I would sooner invoke cancel culture: threatening to get someone fired for espousing mainstream viewpoints (e.g., advocating for nonviolent protest or Tweeting an interview with a black man concerned about black-on-black crime). I would invoke BLM riots (no, I'm not talking about peaceful protests) and a media that refused to challenge the predominant narrative with obvious questions (e.g., "How are we collectively so sure that the cause of the shooting disparity is 'racist police' and not some other factor, to the extent that we are ready to burn neighborhoods to the ground rather than entertain dialogue?") and instead spent months rationalizing the violence. I would also note how remarkable it was that nearly every business in the hardest-hit areas were quick to hang "This business supports BLM" or "PoC owned business" signs, while their suburban and rural locations felt no such compulsion. I would invoke surveys showing chilled speech in newsrooms and the academy or an explicit willingness, pride even, from the same institutions to discriminate solely on the basis of politics.
Ultimately though, while left-wing extremism is concerning, I'm less interested in arguing over the threshold at which it becomes "Cultural Revolution". I think we should content ourselves to note that it is fundamentally illiberal and anti-human and continue advancing the causes of peace, justice, equality, and prosperity.
One strains themselves wondering how anyone could possibly know this as a fact. Take a breath and think about this statement for a second and it becomes absurd in the extreme. This is disinformation par excellence; it sounds great if you agree, but cannot possibly be a fact either way. Bravo
It is constantly amazing to me that although we had a white supremacist president in the US, HN commenters always want to stress how “illiberal and anti-human” left wingers are. If I recall correctly, there are about 525k bodies on that president to be accounted for first
I caught them claiming a complaint about efficacy in the Pfizer vaccine was about safety, after they put me down to try to make sure I didn’t read the study. I read the study and you can go look at my response[1]. The tell of the troll is that he never comes back to finish arguments....
The fact that HN thinks they have a handle on the disinformation here is laughable. This site was featured in a New Yorker article, does not filter out obvious propaganda, and allows anyone to say anything as long as its cordial. To think they could combat nation state level attacks with two people is ridiculous. This is a soft target.
The only thing we can do is pay attention to what our eyes and ears tell us.
Really? Perhaps people on HN have lives and dislike engaging with hostile actors on the Internet.
>after they put me down to try to make sure I didn’t read the study
If you think I was putting you down, I sincerely apologize. I simply meant that anyone who understands the science well should read it. Nothing more. The insight of the knowledgeable on contradictory information is most helpful in challenging times.
I am surprised you appear to have engaged in a vendetta based upon a misinterpretation.
You have yet to come clean about the obvious disinformation you are spreading, and seek only to redirect the conversation to something interpersonal instead of factual.
Setting the interpersonal aside, How can one claim in good faith that they are representing the truth, when they demonstrably lie about the content of their citations to further their argument and refuse to reconcile with that?
State actor or not, you are using troll tactics to spread disinformation, and it is blatantly obvious. Receipts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26480280
I’m amazed that they think that two moderators could combat nation states. Such hubris.
Opposition American politician, Eugene Debs, with over a million votes (alleged extremist) imprisoned by autocratic President Woodrow Wilson for passing out pamphlets against the war entitled “ Anti-War Proclamation and Program”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debs_v._United_States
In the ultimate twist of fate the advocates for censorship get censored by Facebook:
https://twitter.com/jimmy_dore/status/1354572535799504901?
An academic conference on censorship gets censored by Youtube:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce...
Every Web forum (this one quite notably included) has some kind of ground rules for moderation because if you don't have them they become overrun with pornography, hate speech, or some other kind of content that puts off the majority of users -- in other words they were never radical free speech zones in the first place. If we were talking about sending people to jail for sharing PizzaGate conspiracies I wouldn't support it, but I don't really see what benefit there is to Facebook or Twitter tolerating such content, and with something like 10% of Americans saying they at least partly believe in QAnon it is getting hard to act like the problems arising from this content are irrelevant or just a sideshow.
Why is the punishment morally revelant to the principle of freedom of conscience? I bet there's a lot of people who would much rather go to jail than lose a Twitter account.
10 years ago if you told me people who describe themselves as patriots would be embracing Putin's disinformation campaigns in the US, going so far as to attack the capital to overturn an election, I wouldn't believe you. But here we are.
This is just incorrect. Bolt action and muzzleloaded rifles are both extremely common and not semiautomatic.
That being said, "semiautomatic" is usually a useless scare-word thrown in by people who have no clue what they're talking about.
That period was also heavily dominated by Islamophobia in the US with firebomb attacks on Islamic Centers and random brown people getting assaulted and called "terrorists".
Heck, a mere 4 days after 9/11 happened a Sikh was shot for being mistaken as an Arab Muslim due to his turban [1]. Which actually makes no sense but hate rarely does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memori...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
Are these people average Americans? [0]
No offense, but this sounds a lot like the argument how Trump supporters are allegedly just a "loud minority", a claim that's factually disproved not just by results from the public votes of two presidential elections, but the fact that he won one of them and only barely lost the other one.
Where does the "average American" fall in that context? Is there even an "average" when the only two valid political choices have become distilled down to a superficial "We are not the other party" forcing everybody to pick between two allegedly completely opposing sides?
It's easy to look at someone and pass judgement. It's expensive to get to know someone, especially if they are very different than you are. Learning to judge someone by the content of their character is a difficult thing to ask of someone.
Imagine having to get to know Ed Gein. At the very least if you listened to the mans life, you'd be questioning if there really was a god or if nature really had any sanity, given the developmental trauma he experienced. It's way easier to see a guy wearing his mother's skin on his face and go "yep, crazy". It's harder to look beneath that and go "How the hell did society fail you?".
That is the reason why his message resonated so well. Not because he was color blind, that is naieve. It is because he pointed out, and very rightly, that ignoring the black community or any community of people over racism creates a lost opportunity.
What did or didn't resonate well is not really the point of the discussion but now that you bring it up, you'll remember one of King's least popular positions was one of his least color-blind ones: worker quotas.
The mainstream media\media monopoly has two deeply engrained habits; one, the belief in distributing free news, two, in sensationalizing every story to maximize ad revenue.
Technology reduces cost, ergo, when costs reductions meet these two habitations, the net result is training the audience to accept sensationalisation itself as a brand and if they do so, you tend to polarize an audience in unpredictable ways as a consequence of operating your media empire.
Think about it this way. The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising, and to the advertisers, we are products the MSM is selling to them. What do you do with products once you are done with them? You throw them in the garbage. Once we're used up we become trashed.
It's the belief that sensationalism itself is trustworthy that creates this trashing, and I would encourage anyone to learn to detect sensationalism as the psychological baseline for stimulation has risen to such an extreme these days.
In this instance, the moment we refer to any kind of warfare operation as "whack a mole" is when you begin rolling your eyes as the author is not treating people with respect.
Good, accurate information is expensive. If you need proof of that, talk to a historian.
I'm pretty skeptical about that. The major media outlets have significant influence over the political ideas that circulate through the electorate. In a democracy, that means having a lot of influence over which candidates are viable in elections, which, given how powerful governments are, is worth quite a lot more than ad revenue.
Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue?
Stuff like this doesn't help the optics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGRnhBmHYN0
Nor does Zuckerberg spending $500 million on ballot harvesting initiatives and skirting the law where he could. The one thing this last election prooved is that when rich and powerful people feel threatened with losing power or fortune, they often decide to use whatever power they have and spend whatever fortune they've got to maintain what they have. We'll find out, as the forensic investigations drag on, exactly how compromised this election was. Suffice to say, an awful lot of people on the left are acting like they have nothing to lose which is a strong signal indictments and convictions are on the road ahead.
Look at the MSM's SEC 8k and 10k filings. https://investors.newscorp.com/node/10126/html
Free news is done to sell advertising, which also finds its way into their subscription businesses and even if you pay for WSJ, the articles are often paid for or done as political favors.
Certainly there are considerable numbers of people in this country that totally distrust the major media sources (for very good reason, in my opinion), but they still have considerable viewerships and therefore considerable influence over the thoughts and therefore votes of many.
Again, do you think Bezos was looking for the ad revenue? Or was he looking for political influence?
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Cognitive dissonance. Populations doesn't know what to think anymore if they think at all.
I respect the fact that people can think these are good things, but pretending it's business as usual is just laughable.
https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...
I'm more worried about the multitudes of heavily-armed radicals who believe in the election Big Lie or QAnon.
"Antifaschistische Aktion...was a militant anti-fascist organisation in the Weimar Republic started by members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that existed from 1932 to 1933." [1]
"In the United States, antifa of the early 21st-century has drawn its aesthetics and some of its tactics from Antifaschistische Aktion." [1]
The link between Antifaschistische Aktion and Antifa was drawn within a detailed article [2] published in Jacobin, who is "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture" [3].
Given that "insurgent" is defined as "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government" [4], and CHAZ/CHOP were revolts against civil authority, Antifa is clearly a left-wing insurgency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion
[2] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hit...
Deleting someone's account doesn't remove them from society, and doesn't change their views, and doesn't prevent them from using other websites, talking to people offline, organizing groups, et c.
In whac-a-mole, you boop it and it goes down/away, you having scored a point.
What do people want to do when online extremism is detected, and why do they think that will be an effective technique for their goals?
"Whac", in this context, is to delete or block an account. That doesn't remove the person, just as in the literal game whacking a mole just drives it below the playing surface. The whole point of calling it Whac-A-Mole is that blocking people or suspending accounts doesn't actually change anything or remove the people, it just temporarily drives them back underground. They'll pop up again soon enough.
The GOP is literally playing with the fire of stochastic & headless terrorism, driven by a sophisticated & well-documented misinformation campaign that has convinced many millions of people that the election was stolen and that donald trump(of all people) is anointed by god to root out a global satanic, pedophilistic cabal that is responsible for all of the world's woes. A lot of these people think the world is ending and it's now or never.
These same people showed up at the nation's capital with every intention of taking hostages & holding show trials.
But you know what the real problem is? Groups of young, ineffectual leftists who don't even show up to vote let alone participate in government.
Is that the current description? What happened to "attempted coup"? Oh wait, maybe five armed people out of 150 who entered the Capitol != coup attempt by any level of common sense, so I guess now the above is the description du jour. Never mind the preposterousness of such a group also "taking hostages & holding show trials". Perhaps in another few months the MSM consensus will finally get to what was and is obvious to anyone who isn't histrionic: 150 idiots (the vast majority unarmed) who illegally trespassed into a government building. They can and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law ... As far as "illegal trespass into a government building" can go, at least.
(And no, the Capitol police officer who died wasn't "killed by a fire extinguisher" wielded by said idiots. He died at home from unknown causes and apparently wasn't assaulted by anyone https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-charg... .)
It appears that these terms have lost meaning and are fair game to throw around regularly in articles about Trump supporters or conservatives.