Comment by derektank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derektank | Hacker News Reader

>There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago

I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.

There's a causal relationship there, often expressed in some form of the idea "the pendulum swings". Heresy-hunting inevitably produces the backlash. It's fun during the upswing to push harder to punish the heretics more and harder, but the result is that the next phase of whiplash is even worse. As well as the inevitable attempt to hold on even harder and with more righteous fury as the grasp on power fades.

Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.

I'm not sure that's quite right, the pendulum has swung to a degree, for sure, but I find it evident to argue that the place the pendulum was at was in the benefit of liberal elites, and rather than reversing, I can see how the opposition to those liberal elites do have more freedom now, but the circles adjacent to the liberal elites have enormous leeway right now, I'm not sure there's even anything verboten.

You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.

Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.

I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.

We're still in the early phases of the pendulum swinging back. We haven't even gotten to the part where the real power has shifted. I expect HN in general doesn't want to hear that but psychohistory is what it is.

"A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised."

We got that in a previous swing, more or less. It's not exactly a renowned Harvard academic, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov... I leave it to the reader to decide if some of the reception from various media and opinion outlets of the time are simply covering themselves with calling it crazy while expressing their true opinions in the positive coverage they give of it, or if this is a case where the search for "balance" leaves them giving more credence to an idea they consider crazy than they intended. Enough postmodern cynicism and you can read anything into anything, sometimes.

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