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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

What forum are you talking about. All of Mastadon? Doesn't each instance have its own rules?

> As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today ...

> The New Left has become unrecognizable to me

That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

When people are young, they challenge the corrupt system. As those changes are enacted, those young people grow older and become the system. Then a new generation sees that 'progress' of your youth as the old, corrupt, scelerotic system; they have nothing invested in your achievements; they see the system's flaws and push to change them.

The formerly-young-challengers, now old-system-members, say 'that's crazy, outlandish, outrageous, etc.' - exactly what was said to them when they were young.

Oh yes, I know, 'this time it's different'. 'These kids really are outrageous.' Those words are also exactly the same as before.

If you want to be progressive, you need to keep seeing the flaws, not accepting them, and keep pushing for change. The moment you stop, say 'far enough we've done a good job', you cease being progressive.

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> What forum are you talking about. All of Mastadon? Doesn't each instance have its own rules?

It's one of the larger instances but the top heaviest constitute the majority by far and they all enshrine these policies.

I don't think you're really answering my criticism. You're lumping my "retrograde" progressiveness in with the well-worn wheel of timely revolts against the corruption of the past. I'm saying that both sides of the political aisle have become hives of extremism and that the left, particularly, has become the thing it once hated, an instrument of control in the service of the few.

One could also argue that the left has widened from being at the service of white male workers to a much broader range of minorities. That is, it is at the service of more people, but white males have lost the exclusive control of it.

There seems to be no middle ground anymore for white males that exclusively want to address labor issues. Perhaps it is true that to push for progress in labor, the root problem of the power dynamics must be addressed (i.e. you can't be colorblind here).

well if there's no way to spin anything without getting entagled in some sort of intersectional original sin, then it's devolved in Jacobin Terreur.

You have made your decision, then.

Can you elaborate? I’m suspecting you mean “If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem” which is unfortunately the level of narrow minded zealotry that’s so damaging

"You're Not Part of the Solution" is enough.

Imagine this is a conversation in a novel or a movie.

> You have made your decision, then.

Is this something the hero says? To me, it looks like something the villain says.

> it's devolved in Jacobin Terreur

Can you give examples of that happening? I don't see any at all. I mean actual violence and terror.

These wild claims are becoming comical. The other day, it was the Cambodian genocide. Are we just picking catastrophes and arbitrarily saying they are happening? What's next? The Fall or Rome? The 10 Plagues from the Bible?

No mean to insult, but this is a bit of an “in the spectrum” reply. I’m not claiming guillotines are being erected on public squares, of course it’s not the case. On the other hand, the aggressive nitpick and overzealous strawmanning of anyone not carefully following te political doctrine is quite similar. Is it too difficult to see or are you also acting in bad faith?

But what is "The Left"? People arguing about politics on Mastodon? "Instrument(s) of control in the service of the few," seriously? What control do such people even have, outside of a Mastodon instance that people can just...not use? It's such grandiose language for such a petty complaint.

If you want to talk about instruments of control in the service of the few, how about we talk about the forces that keep healthcare expensive and poorly distributed in the U.S.? Or are working to ban books and art performances in Florida (and elsewhere)? How about the instruments of control that have been invading Ukraine for over a year? These seem much more tangible and consequential than moderation decisions on a website no one has to use. Perspective is very important, lest we fall into the false equivalency trap.

The instruments of control are distributed in a very lopsided manner, to my eyes. "The Left is CONTROLLING PEOPLE on Mastodon" doesn't really cut it. If you don't the policies of one instance, join a different one. Or make your own, and you can make your own policies. You can decide what level of control you want on the social media you choose to interact with. And if some instances have rules you don't like? My advice would be, ignore those instances and don't worry about their rules. They only affect you if you allow them to.

"This, this and this are bad so the topic we are discussing doesn't really matter. Just deal with being excluded and demonized" It's disturbing that people excuse this toxic pattern of online disenfranchisement that repeats itself over and over again.

There are tons of social media websites out there that would exclude and demonize me. But I don't visit them, and I don't waste my energy complaining about them. Why would I? It isn't healthy to obsess over people who would exclude and demonize you. It is, in fact, itself a "toxic pattern", as you put it. I don't want to expend my finite mental resources worrying about, I dunno, Truth Social or Stormfront or other such places. It isn't some grand injustice that they exist and exclude different people and points of view, it's just how the decentralized nature of the WWW (and people, generally) works.

> It's one of the larger instances but the top heaviest constitute the majority by far and they all enshrine these policies.

So can you provide any evidence? Name this instance?

> both sides of the political aisle have become hives of extremism

It's laughable. Look at the people in power. What progressive is in any major office: Look at the President, the Minority Leader of the House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, Democratic Governors, etc. etc. All are mainstream Dems, hardly a progressive to be seen. Meanwhile, a majority of the GOP in Washington voted to overturn democracy and as sided with the rioters who attempted a coup.

> the left, particularly, has become the thing it once hated, an instrument of control in the service of the few

What has the left controlled? The right wing has used governmet power to ban books, educational topics, political freedom for teachers, criminalized gender choices, protests, etc. etc. Even in colleges, the right has shut down dissent, including among faculty (e.g., at UNC, in Florida, Harvard, Yale, etc.). The right is trying to eliminate tenure and academic freedom.

The left is trying to break the control of a few. Whether you like their tactics or not, they are trying to give power to minorities and other vulnerable people.

> So can you provide any evidence? Name this instance?

I've already shared the specifics I'm comfortable sharing. I have zero desire to start a witch hunt.

> What has the left controlled? The right wing has used governmet power to ban books, educational topics, political freedom for teachers, criminalized gender choices, protests, etc. etc. Even in colleges, the right has shut down dissent, including among faculty (e.g., at UNC, in Florida, Harvard, Yale, etc.). The right is trying to eliminate tenure and academic freedom.

You're perfectly demonstrating exactly the behavior I intended to point out. "Other-ing" the opposition into the Sith is not productive and the Left is as guilty of this as the Right.

> The left is trying to break the control of a few. Whether you like their tactics or not, they are trying to give power to minorities and other vulnerable people.

Through race essentialism? Or by what means are you specifically referring to? The common platform of the new left is that all white people are guilty of the original sin of their skin color. A platform based on enforced shame is not a platform for collaboration.

None of that is happening. Those are substantive criticisms. You are not immune from criticism, and complaining about it is a way to avoid addressing the merits.

Instead of meta-analysis of what you think I'm doing, please kindly respond to the content of my argument. "None of that is happening" is neither specific or substantive.

Weird excuse for rampant racism the "new" progressives are pushing.

> What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

That's really not what's been happening here, though, and the extremely online activists are not simply people who are ahead of the curve on pushing to fix society's flaws. For example, take trans rights, the main weapon currently used to demand people get in line - in reality it was the boring, normie mainstream liberals who dragged the online activists into supporting that in the first place, not the other way around. Until just a few years ago they supported anti-trans viewpoints that were way out of kilter with mainstream society and demanded trans women shut up about harassment campaigns that went just as much against mainstream norms and values as the harassment that the online left is apologists for today. There's a good chance this changed through younger people with different views coming in, but they had those views in the first place because society as a whole had already shifted.

The difference really, genuinely, and consistently is just toxicity, extremism, and a refusal to accept that anyone who deviates even an inch from their views is a decent person. Those are the things that have stayed constant even as the arguments and the targets have shifted. The culture shifts easily from expecting trans women to shut up about TERF harassment campaigns to justifying harassment of streamers who play a game based on a franchise by someone who liked tweets containing TERF views because the cruelty is the point. While the views go beyond what mainstream society is willing to accept, the direction is extremely questionable. (For example, there have been multiple ugly Mastodon disputes involving server operators trying to shut people up about the long trail of rape allegations that follow one specific trans woman around, pretty much all from other trans women. Paying attention to them is supposedly hateful and an attack on trans women. Again, this is one specific person who's allegedly doing it, the same one every single time - not trans women as a whole.)

I find this version of the story very odd. I'm in my mid-20s and figured out that I was trans about 10 years ago. The main reason I didn't get swept up in the anti-SJW craze of the time was because "SJWs" were firmly supportive of trans and non-binary people, while many of their opponents were either indifferent or comparing us to attack helicopters. Are you talking about more than ten years ago?

Ten years ago is actually pretty much spot on for the time period I'm talking about - this was after the point at which trans people were just outright not welcome full stop (which is still surprisingly recent) and in fact one of the big ways the activists justified their views was by finding young trans people much like yourself with no existing ties to trans communities or activism, welcoming them in so long as they went along with the activists' existing views (including support for those who still wanted trans people not to be welcome), and pointing to them as proof their viewpoints totally weren't anti-trans. A lot of the prominent trans voices from that era were just a few years older than you and burned out hard once their worldview and contacts expanded beyond that of the narrow activist community and they discovered the activists wouldn't listen anymore if it brought their moral superiority into question.

The word "TERF" to describe the people and worldview that wanted to exclude trans people and trans rights from social justice activism wasn't even recorded as existing until 15 years ago, not because those views didn't exist - they're traceable in basically their modern form all the way back to like the seventies and are oddly pervasive - but because they succeeded well enough that even discussing the idea that this was a bad thing didn't start to become a part of activist discussion until then. This whole shift in viewpoint to that becoming unacceptable is incredibly recent.

Also, in general ordinary non-terminally-online people were much, much less anti-trans than both the "attack helecopter" anti-SJW side and the anti-trans campaigners that social justice activists were meant to sympathise with, though that may not have been obvious since one of the big things that was unacceptable was actually talking about what anti-trans people on the same side were doing and the real-world consequences (including stuff like laws they lobbied for). Admittedly, I'm from the UK so my experiences may not be representative of the US and other countries, but we are supposedly "TERF island" so that cuts both ways.

I would consider myself left leaning and still wish to see a lot of progress and change but I disagree with quite a few talking points of what might be considered the current “zeitgeist” of the far left. Would I consider misgendendering a _violent_ hate crime? No. Am I for more inclusion and free choice of gender identity? Yes. Do I think that pure socialism will save humanity? No. Do I think it’s bad we have people on the planet with more money than multiple countries combined? Yes.

I would even argue most progressives are seeing flaws and don’t accept them and push for change but you don’t need to be “radical”(as in further from the status quo) in your views to do that and it doesn’t make you less of a progressive - you are just trying to push to a different spot on the manifold.

If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions. The right wing is large and has lots of factions, with the only thing uniting them being resistance to the left's attempts to reform the system.

The big divide isn't over specific beliefs and policies as much as whether you believe the current system tends to favour you or not.

> The big divide isn't over specific beliefs and policies as much as whether you believe the current system tends to favour you or not.

I'm not sure about that. I know some conservatives (which I'd consider myself as well, though leaning libertarian) who are very well off but didn't start that way, and their political ideas remained constant. I know others who aren't particularly wealthy, but hold the same ideas.

Fundamentally, I believe it's more about "what will work?", in essence "if we organized our society along these lines, would it still function, or would it fall apart", and progressives and conservatives have vastly different opinions on that.

For a single issue: conservatives generally believe that "if you pay people to do nothing, that's exactly what they'll do" and thus are opposed to high welfare (because people will stop working, and without people working, nothing gets produced), while progressives believe that people will be freed by not worrying about their income and will voluntarily work and become very productive, which is why they're very much in favor of high welfare (e.g. UBI). It's one side saying "don't change this, you'll break everything" and the other side saying "no, we need to change this, it'll get better".

But it's not about your current status in the system. My political convictions haven't changed much since when I was pretty much poor vs now that I'm doing very well (though they've become calmer, but I'd attribute that mostly to age).

UBI or basic welfare is supported by many right-winger opinion leaders, eg Friedman and Hayek.

I don't think Neoliberalism maps onto left/right that well, but is generally favored by people who believe in markets. It's not particularly conservative or right-wing though.

> If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions. The right wing is large and has lots of factions, with the only thing uniting them being resistance to the left's attempts to reform the system.

Which is by and large the entire problem. The right is rarely interested in solving problems.

So I could find minor points of agreement -- there's certainly people out there who are a tad too radical for my taste. The problem is that in general though I'm very much in favor of change, and the right isn't.

> Which is by and large the entire problem. The right is rarely interested in solving problems.

The right are very interested in solving problems; but they are defined by identifying the plans of the left as the biggest problem. That is basically why they pick up the label "conservative", the right only exists as a political unit to resist threats from the left. Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies). And every faction generally keeps busy dealing with their own perceived problems.

> The right are very interested in solving problems; but they are defined by identifying the plans of the left as the biggest problem.

That's not so much problem solving as just obstructionism. Surely there are things to be done that don't depend at all on what the competition is doing.

> Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies).

No, the right favors non-government approaches because they want to pick and choose. They for instance heavily endorse personal charity because you get to pick who you help.

I on the other hand think there should be a floor in society below which nobody is allowed to fall, and that it ideally should be implemented in a fully blind and dispassionate manner, eg, UBI. Everyone gets it automatically no questions asked, without needing to be liked by the local community.

> That's not so much problem solving as just obstructionism. Surely there are things to be done that don't depend at all on what the competition is doing.

My government have made it very difficult for me to take my own health, retirement savings, home improvement and often financial decisions into my own hands. Typically the way his happens is that some leftist will be responsible although in the case of the financial stuff it tends to be nonpartisan corruption. If I am too effective at savings then there will also be attempts to gain control of the savings and funnel them into causes I usually think are poorly chosen. Ignoring the left is not really an option; they'll identify resources and come for them to fund their own plans. Otherwise the awkward truth is that controlling government wouldn't be such a big deal.

> My government have made it very difficult for me to take my own health, retirement savings, home improvement and often financial decisions into my own hands.

> ...

> If I am too effective at savings then there will also be attempts to gain control of the savings and funnel them into causes I usually think are poorly chosen

Right, that's exactly what I was talking about. We can agree on the surface about some things, but underlying priorities and views aren't really compatible even when things happen to align by accident.

Eg, my desire for having guaranteed social minimums isn't really compatible with your desire to personally control what your tax money gets spent on.

Three posts ago you were pointing out obstructionism, now you're saying we have fundamental incompatibilities that can only be resolved by putting money into a pot and having it spent the way you want it to be.

I put it to you that it isn't 'obstructionism', it is plain old disagreement. Or if you prefer, the left is being just as obstructionist in blocking the right from making their own decisions. The only difference is where the obstructions are happening.

> Three posts ago you were pointing out obstructionism, now you're saying we have fundamental incompatibilities that can only be resolved by putting money into a pot and having it spent the way you want it to be.

There's different things being discussed. I started answering the "If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions" bit.

My answer to that is that there are genuine underlying incompatibilities, and so even if there's a superficial agreement on something once in a while (eg, we both agree some policy goes a tad too far), it still makes no sense for me to switch camps.

The obstructionism is a tangential side point: that the right seems to have no policy other than being anti-left, and so far you've done nothing to convince me otherwise.

Global warming will be by far the biggest challenge going forward. As long as parties on "the right" don't believe in it, or take it seriously or don't address it appropriately there is no way in hell for me to ever consider voting for anything on that spectrum. I can deal with a little over the top wokeness. I cannot deal with the destruction of the planet.

But the catastrophising of climate change is also harmful, and results in people proposing 'solutions' that seem likely to bring about an even faster collapse of civilisation.

One 2019 UK report (https://www.icax.co.uk/pdf/Absolute_Zero_Report.pdf) proposes a timeline that's been circulating on Twitter, involving the closure of all airports and shutting down all international shipping by 2050, while pricing 40% of traffic off the roads and banning beef+lamb. That (along with many more less-drastic but still significant restrictions) is what it would take to reach 'net zero' with current technology.

And that was written in 2019, when people were generally a lot more reasonable than they are in the post-Covid world.

(Do they even realise what they're proposing by 'no international shipping'... Amongst many other things, that means zero microchips for the UK, let alone complete technology products such as phones, TVs, or EVs)

Meanwhile in the real world (here in the UK), we've got a massive cost-of-living crisis, a collapsing healthcare system, a disaster of a property market, and a rising population that we're failing to build infrastructure to cope with. We have a a terribly incompetent government, and an opposition that seems no better. And we're living with the threat of WW3, the tail end of the pandemic, and now a banking crisis too.

Even a glance at your own link shows you are misinterpreting it.

> We currently have no non-emitting freight ships, so there is an urgent need for exploration of means to electrify ship power

It seems like you are the one "catastrophising".

> catastrophising of climate change is also harmful

What if it is a catastrophe? Should we pretend otherwise?

The word 'catastrophize' implies that the speaker is creating the catastrophe. Climate change sure seems like one to me, whether anyone says it or not.

Hypothetical history books could one day read "and in 2023 the Russians nuked New York". Probably in some African script since they'd be talking about the end of civilisation in the northern hemisphere.

While I don't want to try and defend every right wing policy, the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020. The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.

All the evidence I see is I'm more likely to die in a fire caused by soldiers than power plants.

> the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020

That's why it will be very difficult for us to find any common ground. Even though I am very much a free market guy and definitely don't agree with every policy on the left. The right down plays, ignores or ridicules global warming. How one can read the IPCC report and doesn't feel any sense of urgency is beyond me. This shouldn't even be a left or right issue.

It's because the right benefits in two ways by politicizing it:

1. Attacking the left brings them support

2. Their carbon industry supporters.

> the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020

Your argument is assumptions - that climate change isn't the biggest challenge, that others are bigger.

> The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.

What is "official reporting"?

China and Russia feature quite largely in the news. It's hard to imagine them getting more coverage.

Ok- but what if the planet isn't destroyed after all?

What makes you believe we have any control over the climate?

What makes you believe that in the sham democracy, your vote makes any difference?

> What makes you believe we have any control over the climate?

CO2 has two vibrational modes that are IR active. We release carbon as CO2 into the atmosphere that was previously bound inside the earth's crust. Humans increased the CO2 concentration from 280ppm to 420ppm (pre-industrial -> today). The science is settled. Whether you believe in it or not: Global warming is happening and humans are causing it. I understand that it is something you don't want to be true (and trust me, I would also love if it turned out to be wrong). But physics doesn't care if you want it to be true or not.

> The science is settled.

Well, we'll see. There are predictions of global devastation within the next decade.

> But physics doesn't care if you want it to be true or not.

It's not about that. Rather it's about the law of slow-moving disasters.

For example, what if I told you there was a train coming down the tracks that is about to flatten you. Would you be scared? What if I told you it was coming at you at 1cm/year. Would you be scared then?

This is the law of slow-moving disasters. We tend not to notice them in practice. If the weather changes year to year on the time-scale of decades or centuries, the rate of change is so low that buildings will simply be replaced over time. In extreme cases, populations will migrate.

Ancient humans have lived in climates both much warmer, and much cooler than those we currently experience.

> trust me, I would also love if it turned out to be wrong

I think I trust you. You seem like a stand-up guy, but understand that there is a huge amount of power to be distilled out of this. So there are a great number of people who are heavily incentivised to look the other way if there are any unanswered questions.

For a parallel example, see the refusal to acknowledge side effects including mycardiatus from COVID vaccinations.

> So there are a great number of people who are heavily incentivised to look the other way if there are any unanswered questions.

I never really got this argument: There are even more powerful and even richer people that have incentives that nothing changes: ExxonMobile, Koch Industries, BP, Volkswagen, BMW, GM, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.

> Well, we'll see. There are predictions of global devastation within the next decade.

We've already 'seen'. The science is, of course, based on an enormous amount of empirical evidence. We can always just say, 'we'll see what happens next', but it's a bizarre argument - on that basis you never act.

>I understand that it is something you don't want to be true...

Speaking this way breaks the conversation.

I would say that the downfall of climate change will be that the parties "on the left" don't believe in it, not really.

Who is calling for pure socialism? The only people I hear mention it are reactionary anti-progressives.

I think what OP is describing is the modern let's turn away from liberalism and in some cases embracing race essentialism

It's too bad that the word "liberal" got intertwined with "left politics" since mainstream Democrats and Republicans are both "Liberals", or at least subscribe to the "liberal intellectual system". It's about how knowledge is created and validated through public criticism and checks. No one and no ideal is above this system. It's about skepticism in that NO ONE get the the final say on anything and NO ONE has personal authority. A claim to knowledge can only be made if it is falsifiable and can be debunked.

This is where modern Progressives (or wokes) diverge from Liberalism. It is a politics of radical egalitarianism and fundamentalism. The idea that certain people have access to certain knowledge and "other ways of knowing" that makes them the authority on a subject and them and only them should be listened to. And of course, using unfalsifiable methods to achieve this as evidenced in their most popular literature that states "All white people are racist and denial of this is evidence of their fragility, which is racist". This language trick is used over and over. And of course, creating a grievance hierarchy that intends to flip Liberalism on its head since clearly the Liberal intellectual tradition was created by and for white men to maintain their power over everyone else. Of course ignoring that all of the so-called "progress" we've made (women's right, gay rights, civil rights, etc) are from the Liberal tradition.

Some people are bigots. But many people that are labeled bigots are simply skeptical liberals, which are often called fascists now.

This is true to a point, but it completely disregards the historical phenomenon of the "witch hunt". McCarthyism seemed to originate in a "good place" at first, to most Americans (patriotism and anti-communism). It went so far off the rails that it did great social harm. The same phenomenon of becoming so strident in your position that you persecute "the other" (whatever "other" currently happens to be) is the same phenomenon that leads to things like the Holocaust and burning people at the stake at the extreme end. These extreme social moments in time originate from places of apparent good intentions at many moments in History. These pop up amongst the regular rolling generation gap phenomenon whenever polarization gets too extreme.

Wise people should fear times when people on the ends of the political spectrum do not talk _to_ each other, but only _about_ each other. It should be VERY apparent that we seem to be getting to such a social time (exacerbated by technology driven bubbles), and anyone who dreads the next Burning Times is a wise person.

>That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

I think it would have been worth it to give this more than a moments thought. A quick glance at 20th century events shows fascism and communist dictatorships being seen as more fashionable and modern than flaky Weimar republics and crumbling empires. The next 50-80 years nevertheless showed history bending haphazaradly away from these trends. In the least, taking for granted that what follows is inevitably more progressive seems a tad rash.

What's far more interesting is examining the thoughts and actions of the inglorious bastards, both young and old, who at the time recognized early on that This Was Not The Way, and with what critera they did so.

Fascism is explicitly and deliberately regressive. Its incarnations have all focused on building up the image and importance of both traditional values and a legendary heritage (often Rome or a Roman offshoot) which people are supposed to aspire to returning to and continue into the future.

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