Comment by lprd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lprd | Hacker News Reader

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What boggles my mind is when visiting sites like Reddit, you will be ridiculed and titled a 'Russian actor' or a 'GOP Trumper' if even questioning anything pertaining to this war. Regardless of where you stand, its clearly evident that the propaganda machine running strong.

That said, our budget for this war seems to have no cap and that does concern me (especially just after a pandemic). Responsible spending isn't usually a trait shared by either political party (or any government body, for that matter) so I really don't have much room to complain. There's always some angle or piece that's missing from the whole picture - and that's usually by design. The older I get, the more convinced I am that our government doesn't really like or care for its own people, and that its primary focus will always be outside our own borders. Call me a cynic, but I think America peaked awhile ago and we've been on a downward spiral that was turbo charged by 9/11.

Maybe I'm just tired. Either way, I wish George Carlin was still around.

> What boggles my mind is when visiting sites like Reddit

Does it really boggle your mind though? Reddit operates as a left-leaning hivemind. The groupthink on that site has been strong for more than a decade at this point.

I wonder though. If all of the big social media sites appear to be "left leaning", maybe what you are really seeing is the center, and your calibration is off.

I'm of the opinion that that spectrum has been artificially shifted quite a bit in the last 5 to 10 years. This push has led to a lot of political unrest and has resulted in drastic polarization.

I think wokism has been taken way to far to the point it tries to subvert freedom of speech, critical thinking, and reality. Almost half the country is NOT far left and no amount of guilt tripping in the media is going to change that, and I say that as a very left person. We have to compromise and be civil and the people in the middle need to go vote despite the fact that both parties seem to want to be polar opposites.

> If all of the big social media sites appear to be "left leaning"

> [...] your calibration is off

Big social media moderation is systemically biased, for instance, Twitter is/was staffed overwhelmingly (at times almost exclusively) by people who support Democrats [1].

[1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...

Yes, the reason those people support Democrats is that they are educated and live on the coast. Tell me where you live and what your level of education is and I am happy to place a very large bet on your political choices.

So you're admitting that basically this entire sector of the economy is a monoculture, but downplaying that there's any negative systemic bias cause that's somehow just a deterministic function of geography.

I am stating as a simple fact that education leads to a tendency to have a particular political affiliation given the current stances of the two major parties. This has nothing to do with a particular economic sector: college-educated truck drivers and college-educated lumberjacks would be the same. Reality has a well-known liberal bias so it turns out that this education-influenced tendency is more of a positive systemic bias than a negative one.

> Reality has a well-known liberal bias

That's a big claim in the middle of a totally different argument.

> education-influenced tendency is more of a positive systemic bias than a negative one

If anything, there's evidence that education has a negative influence in ways you may not expect. I seem to recall Germany being the birthplace of the modern university, "Humboldt's Ideal," and we all know how they ended up. In fact, doctors in Germany were 7x more likely than the average citizen to join the Nazi party. [1]

And the issue is more about disposition, the educated seem to have an extreme blind-spot because, as your argument evidences, they tend to think so highly of themselves. They also have the mental machinery capable of producing very enticing & sophisticated, but ultimately wrong justifications for horrible things. And in combination with a self-righteous moral self-concept, you're playing with some real fire.

Read C.S. Lewis's God in the Dock, I'll quote:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

> that they are educated

Maybe it's useful to point out what you're not saying: That there is any sort of virtue in being "educated" (whatever that means).

Perhaps more to your point, most state run institutions seem to also lean left. This effectively turns your argument to "Educated people think like us and therefore we can trust them with the right choice for us."

That's because the college educate tech crowd tends to be democrats, with some libertarian and conservative hold outs. It's not because twitter is "left leaning" it's just a fact of the employment market.

If an organization is overwhelmingly of one political orientation, that's just inevitably systemically biased right? Unconscious bias happens for everyone, I don't care how sophisticated someone supposes they are.

It's a private company, they're allowed to be biased, while you can call that out, you can't really call it "wrong" as there is nothing starting you from stopping your own company and a few are out there now for those people who enjoy right->alt-right->nazi topics [gab, truth, mastodon, parler]. I posit you won't make much money as it'll be hard to find advertisers for said spaces (and obviously mastodon can just ban you from servers easily) My point is the tech crowd is highly center->left leaning, and you can't ask someone "please take this political spectrum questionnaire" 90% of them will get up and walk out when you are hiring.

> you can't really call it "wrong"

I can call censorship wrong whether private or public, thank you very much. And I can agree and actually support their rights to do it as a private company. There's no contradiction there.

> you can't ask someone "please take this political spectrum questionnaire"

I'm not saying they should, I'm saying that it is an extreme hypocrisy that the pro-diversity, anti-systemic bias crowd seems to be completely mum about their own glaring systemic bias. There is a very high value in having viewpoint diversity where there are people in your organization capable of offering insights where the majority has a complete blind-spot. Instead viewpoint diversity is squashed and people who don't toe the party line are vilified.

Genuine disagreement should be embraced in organizations but all too often people are not afforded the dignity of their own sense of judgement.

Wouldn't the political orientation of the moderation teams be relevant here?

If the moderators of all of these organizations were reflective of the general population, then maybe, but are they?

> social media sites appear to be "left leaning"

The actual users always appear to be pretty evenly split - it's the moderation policies that are inevitably biased.

The internet is still a place if the young. High schoolers, college kids, and people without children all have more free time and very much lean left.

Reddit hard leans to a younger crowd. There are plenty conservative hold outs there, but don't expect a tech-centric, very young, mostly college educated crowd to support conservative positions in the popular subs, it's just not ever going to happen. I'm pretty moderate and get yelled at all the time when I talk about the merits of capitalism over collectivism and communism, even though I support stuff like public education and state sponsored health care as a right. Most of reddit seems to think the government can make everything better, and I've lived long enough to know that's simply not true.

What I've seen said about it is that we're getting the golden opportunity to cripple a top adversary by never even putting American boots on the ground. We're paying 5% of the already-designated military spending budget to do it, and we're giving that 5% to American companies to send arms to Ukraine to let Russia run itself into the ground.

Is that not the case? Seems like a win/win if it is.

It's definitely a win for the US if it doesn't provoke Russia into attacking the US with nukes now or 10 years from now. (10 years from now Russia's security establishment will still probably be quite bitter about the US's assistance to Ukraine; that bitterness combined with contemporaneous US actions might provoke an attack.)

Russia's high-level security bureaucrats don't perceive the causes of the war in Ukraine to be what most of in the US perceive them to be.

If we no longer operate on MAD and instead cower to every threat of use of nuclear force, then do we simply let Russia take whatever they want?

There will always be pacifists and isolationists. It's a tough position to defend given what happened in WW2 when the Allies didn't act immediately to invasion and genocide. We won't make that mistake again and I don't think it's hard to convince people of that who aren't idealistic pacifists and isolationists. People get emotional for a reason. There are lots of connection still to things like the Holocaust. Russians, and Putin, for sure need to be held at bay. It's too bad that people won't be more civil about discussions, but don't be expect to be treated as a savior.

> There will always be pacifists and isolationists. It's a tough position to defend given what happened in WW2 when the Allies didn't act immediately to invasion and genocide.

The war in Vietnam and the wars in the Middle East are tough to defend.

I agree. The only middle east action I supported was hunting down bin Laden and freeing Kuwait. I had a couple of friends die unnecessarily and begged my brother not to join the armed forces and paid for his college tuition instead because I knew the same could happen to him. I don't think we should have been in Vietnam either. So we have something to agree with there. I do think we either pay now or pay a LOT MORE later when Russia beats Ukraine into submission if we stop supporting them (as NATO) by sheer size and resource superiority. That will include more Americans dying, because taking Ukraine will only encourage Russian land war ambitions in Europe. Ukraine has the will and inspiration, let's help them with all they need.

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