Comment by hellotheretoday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellotheretoday | Hacker News Reader

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hellotheretoday

Well for brevity I did trivialize it but I will expand:

The left side got people fired. This is objectively not as bad as getting people disappeared. You can get a new fucking job. You can’t get freedom from detention and you cannot easily return to the country (if at all)

Additionally there is the motivational factor behind both sides:

The lefts argument in policing language was to reduce harm to marginalized groups. You may not agree with it, but that is the rational.

The rights argument is to erase those marginalized groups.

These are extremely different in motivation. Asking you to respect a persons gender identity in professional contexts is far different than forcing someone to not be able to express it on federal documentation.

One side of this was “we want to create inclusive spaces that make people comfortable and if you don’t want to participate in that there is the door”. The other side is “we did not want to participate in that so go fuck yourself and we will do whatever we can to deny your right to express your identity”

“Any attempt to control speech” is an absolutist statement that is absurd in its fallacy. So I can say I can murder you? I can say you’re planning a terrorist attack? I can say you want to kill the president? Of course not. Speech is limited contextually and by law

You're still trivializing. The cancel culture would often follow the people it wanted to cancel to make it hard for them to get another job again.

Also, I'll add that the "there is the door" comment is entirely wrong. There are countless stories of open source maintainers being harassed to make language changes to their code base, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist. The harassers never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing. These were people matching into someone else's "safe space" to police their private language.

The government disappearing people and dismantling the country is very bad, and nothing good can be said about it. What I'm talking about are the individuals on both sides not formally in power, and their equal efforts to stifle what they see as "bad speech". It's that mentality, on both sides, that led us to where we are.

Harassment is bad. Extraordinary rendition is bad. One of them is significantly worse than the other. And the side complaining about A whilst celebrating B is significantly more hypocritical.

What about the side that complains about A and complains about B, and complains that constant polarizing rhetoric has been ratcheting up to get us from the less bad A to the very bad B?

Ah yes, it is the left's fault the right is spiraling the country into despotism. Feeling a lot of "Why do you make them hit you?" energy in this thread.

It is everyone who kept on the path instead of saying 'I don't care what you say I'll defend your right to say it'. If you can't allow someone else to say things you don't like you are at fault - it doesn't matter how good hou think you are.

So because a vocal minority 'cancelled' speech in private spheres for a few years, it's the fault of (all?) progressives that the right wildly overreacted and installed facism and government enforced censorship?

By this logic if one member of my family makes you feel unwelcome then its my own fault that you got the cops to beat me up?

There are a lot of people on the "right" who are horrified about how Trump is doing anything and have no clue what they can do about it.

There are evil people on both sides, always have been, always will be. It always looks like the other side is more evil than your side because you have a human bias to assume people who agree with your are not evil with a few small exceptions. Because of this bias it is always wrong to try to paint the other side worse than yours.

The important take away: power shifts, it always has and always will. Next time your side is in power how will you recognize where they are doing evil and oppose them. The first is at least something you can partially train yourself to do with great effort - I have no clue what you can usefully do about it though.

The left is loud about the hypocrisy and faults of its own. Whether that's drone striking US citizens, trading on insider info, or taking literal bribes. The left has prosecuted its own far more often than the right.

My whole point is both sides deserve the rebutes and criticism they have earned, and at this moment one side is objectively far, far worse. Which doesn't excuse faults on the left. But it certainly is not the left who has embraced facism and kleptocracy, nor has anyone except the Republican party and their voters caused this.

> There are a lot of people on the "right" who are horrified about how Trump is doing anything

Citation needed

Because it actually is, in no small part, the illiberal left's fault for going all out to emphasize identity instead of unity, dividing and polarizing the U.S. population.

The illiberal left must be held accountable for their role in the Democratic defeats of 2024, expelled and publicly repudiated, and then the Democratic Party can work on rebuilding trust with voters.

1) Plenty of "Polarizing rhetoric" has come from the side of the current administration. 2) "Polarizing rhetoric" is not remotely a valid justification of disappearing people.

i think that puts you in case A, harassing people for their speech, in this case, the "polarizing rhetoric" is the speech to be protected

You’re the one trivializing things by putting job loss and prison on the same footing.

> never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing.

I mean if you've worked much in open source, that is pretty much how nearly every feature request and bug report goes unfortunately.

I renamed my codebase's primary branch to main because someone complained.

versus

I was abducted by ICE agents and shipped to a supermax prison in El Salvador without due process.

Generally i think harvey weinstein should be unemployable in any position of power. if people hear about what he's done and still want to hire him, sure, they can go for it, but they'd probably appreciate knowing about him before doing that.

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